A simple truth

Voting for Santorum Equals Electing Obama in November!

There is a reason that the United Automobile Workers and its troops are urging its Michigan members to vote Tuesday in the crossover Michigan primary, and to cast their vote not for Barack Obama, but for Rick Santorum. They understand, as evidently many conservatives and Republicans do not comprehend, that Santorum as the Republican nominee would be nothing but a wonderful gift for the Democratic Party.

In an election year in which by all measurable standards Barack Obama should be toast, and when his major policy “achievement” of ObamaCare is detested by the public in all the polls, he is ahead in the same polls when pitted against any of the current crop of Republican candidates and gaining strength with every passing day. And even with rising gas prices — which of course will fall by November — and high unemployment, it is more than likely that the current occupant of the White House will indeed have a second term in office. If Rick Santorum is the nominee, it is a certainty that Obama will win.

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New addition to the library

HMS Electra, by Lt. Cmdr. T.J. Cain.

I'm turning my research on the Battle of the Java Sea up a notch.

The Iranian regime is not rational

Yet our leaders refuse to accept that simple fact:

It was little surprise when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff panned a potential strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities by Israel. The Obama administration has been squishy on its relationship with Israel from the start, and fears an Israeli strike devolving into a crisis for which the White House is even less prepared than the current drama.
It was jarring, though, to see Gen. Martin Dempsey give far too much credit to the ability of this Iranian regime to be an equal negotiating partner.
In an interview aired Sunday on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, Dempsey was asked by the host if he viewed Iran’s behavior as “highly irrational” and “sort of unpredictable,” or whether they are “fairly calculating.”
“I’ll tell you that I’ve been confronting that question since I commanded Central Command in 2008,” Dempsey said. “And we are of the opinion that the Iranian regime is a rational actor. And it’s for that reason, I think, that we think the current path we’re on is the most prudent path at this point.” That’s the path of sanctions and “open-hand” negotiation that has proven fruitless thus far, and brushing aside talk of the option of military action while claiming that all options are still on the table.
Any country that has made “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” chants part of their repertoire since 1979, that held three young American hikers on laughable charges for two years after plucking them off the Kurdish border, that operates off an apocalyptic view that “the Jews should be fought against and forced to surrender to prepare the way for the coming of the Hidden Imam” (Ayatollah Hussein Nuri Hamdani, 2005) is not operating rationally. The degree of calculation by which they buy time for their nuclear program walks hand-in-hand with, not in conflict with, Tehran’s irrationality and unpredictability.
So why the insistence that Iran is, somewhere deep inside, willing to play by the rules toward America’s preferred resolution? Not just from Dempsey, but take White House spokesman Jay Carney at today’s press briefing: “We feel as I’ve said and others have said, as, most importantly, the president has said, that there is time and space for diplomacy to work, for the effective sanctions to result in a change in Iranian behavior, an agreement by Iran to live up to its obligations, to engage in negotiations and resolve this matter peacefully.”

The Iranian mullahs have no intention of resolving this peacefully, except on their terms. They want nuclear weapons and they plan to use them.

Arguing anything else is idiocy.

Where in the world

are Iran's warships?

Did they dock in Syria, or didn’t they? Last week, two Iranian war ships, a destroyer and a supply ship, passed through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean. According to Iran’s government, they docked in the Syrian port of Tartus. According to the U.S. government, they did no such thing.
More specifically, on Saturday Iran’s state-owned PressTV reported that the two Iranian vessels had docked in the Syrian port of Tartus. On Tuesday, a Pentagon spokesman, George Little, told the press, “We have absolutely no indication whatsoever the Iranian ships ever docked in Syrian ports.”
What’s going on here? One day there are two Iranian ships docking in Syria. Three days later, it seems that, like the Flying Dutchman, they never made port. Whatever they did during their swing through the eastern Mediterranean, they are now reported as having left the area, heading back through the Suez Canal.

These are not phantoms, or flyspecks invisible to the hi-tech eye. These are ships, substantial objects, which the U.S. certainly has the ability to track. I can’t claim to know what actually happened, and, alas, I have no inside sources here. So this is pure speculation. But it sounds as if the Iranian ships were indeed heading for Tartus,  and then ran into some reason to back off — leaving the Iranian government to  bluster that the ships had docked, rather than admit they’d chickened out.

Well, what happened? Read the whole thing and join the speculation.

Rick Santorrible

I am not the only one who is noticing how horrible a Rick Santorum nomination would be for the GOP because of his social conservatism.  The always-readable Jennifer Rubin had a talk with an unidentified conservative scholar complaining about Santorum on big government and, my pet peeve, social issues:

I had lunch with a conservative scholar and writer on Friday. Remarking on the rise of Rick Santorum, he exclaimed sarcastically, “Oh, swell, the Republicans have found a guy who’s a big spender AND an extremist on social issues!”
On one level it was a funny remark, symptomatic of the notion among many conservative curmudgeons that if there is a way to screw up an election the GOP will find it. On the other, it was an interesting statement that suggests that the Republicans, after winning a House majority in 2010 by stressing limited government and focusing much less on social issues, may undo their success by choosing a candidate with positions unpopular with a substantial majority of Americans — big government and excessive meddling in personal lives (having nothing to do with abortion, on which the GOP is virtually united and public opinion in general is at least evenly divided.)

[...]

These outside-the-mainstream views apply to areas such as working women, women in combat, contraception and gays in the military. On this last point, the AP notes, “A CBS News poll gave a 48-41 edge to supporters of gays serving openly in the military. Republicans who felt strongly about the issue were twice as likely to support gays in the military than to oppose them, however.” Moreover, Santorum insists on reinstating the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which even those who opposed dropping it may find ludicrously impractical.

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Your right to know supercedes your right to exist.

As this story makes apparent:

The full details of recent experiments that made a deadly flu virus more contagious will be published, probably within a few months, despite recommendations by the United States that some information be kept secret for fear that terrorists could use it to start epidemics.

The announcement, made on Friday by the World Health Organization, follows two months of heated debate about the flu research. The recommendation to publish the work in full came from a meeting of 22 experts in flu and public health from various countries who met on Thursday and Friday in Geneva at the organization’s headquarters to discuss “urgent issues” raised by the research.

Most of the group felt that any theoretical risk of the virus’s being used by terrorists was far outweighed by the “real and present danger” of similar flu viruses in the wild, and by the need to study them and freely share information that could help identify the exact changes that might signal that a virus is developing the ability to cause a pandemic, said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who represented the United States at the meeting.

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Conservatives don't like seeing more skin at CPAC (or "A Defense of Tina Korbe")

Though I am a conservative when it comes to security issues, lately I have been ranting about the evils of another branch of conservatism, social conservatism.  Despite my opposition to things like illegal immigration and quotas and preferences based on race or gender, I actually consider myself a social liberal because, in general, I do not believe the government has the ability or the responsibilility to protect people from themselves; and I resent the determination of many on both sides of the political spectrum to force everyone into and make us conform to "boxes," whether political, cultural, racial, gender, ethnic, religious or whatnot.  As anyone who knows me personally can tell you, I don't fit into any box; hence the name of this blog. 

Specifically, I believe that drug use and prostitution by themselves are victimless crimes and should be legalized and taxed; the legal drinking age should be removed; I don't like abortion but I don't believe it's nearly the moral absolute that both sides think it is; I support legal protections for gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered; I believe that birth control is moral and should be legal.  Yes, I am a proud ROMAN Catholic and, yes, I think the Church is flat-out wrong on birth control; their position is not, I believe, rooted in Scripture so much as it is rooted in a leadership consisting of only celibate men who seem to believe there is no reason for sex outside procreation.  I don't believe that just because a type of  conduct is "immoral,"
based on a typicaly subjective definition, that it follows such conduct should be illegal.  The only objective interest of government is to make sure such conduct does not hurt others.  Beyond that, shut up.

The theme I have been hitting is the town in the movie Footloose, Bomont (though who really remembers the name?), where dancing and music were banned because of some warped morality.  It's fictional and extreme, to be sure, but it's an analogy that is readily understandable.  The town in Footloose sucked.  It was a boring, suffocating place where one preacher's definition of "morality" was imposed on the whole town.  Moviegoers would not have wanted to live there. 
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