Jay Reding.com

John Kerry proves why we should all be grateful he’s not President with his latest shameful comments slandering our troops in Iraq. John McCain has a statement which utterly nails Kerry:

Senator Kerry owes an apology to the many thousands of Americans serving in Iraq, who answered their country’s call because they are patriots and not because of any deficiencies in their education. Americans from all backgrounds, well off and less fortunate, with high school diplomas and graduate degrees, take seriously their duty to our country, and risk their lives today to defend the rest of us in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. They all deserve our respect and deepest gratitude for their service. The suggestion that only the least educated Americans would agree to serve in the military and fight in Iraq, is an insult to every soldier serving in combat, and should deeply offend any American with an ounce of appreciation for what they suffer and risk so that the rest of us can sleep more comfortably at night. Without them, we wouldn’t live in a country where people securely possess all their God-given rights, including the right to express insensitive, ill-considered and uninformed remarks.

Kerry is completely, utterly, and absolutely tone deaf. He’s stuck in 1971 and continues to slander his own comrades-in-arms. Senator McCain is correct - Kerry’s comments were absolutely disgraceful and inexcusable. Sadly, they’re representative of the way the Democratic Party views the military — as a bunch of rubes who have been hoodwinked into fighting foreign wars rather than trained and professional warriors.

This is exactly the sort of attitude that should remind the American voters why the Democratic Party simply can’t be trusted to provide the leadership we need at this critical juncture in history.

UPDATE: Hot Air is following the story closely, with video. Kerry may have just cost the Democrats the election - he couldn’t have said anything dumber at a less opportune time. Especially with Sen. McCain leading the charge, Kerry’s idiotic response has only made things worse for him and the Democrats.

Couldn’t have happened to a nice bunch of people…

UPDATE: The American Legion has called on Kerry to apologize. As the nation’s largest veterans organization, that statement carries a great deal of weight with veterans. I have a feeling that Kerry’s idiotic statement and his even more idiotic refusal to back down from it will have profound effects on Democratic chances in a week… this is the sort of thing that doesn’t just blow over.

The Economist has an interesting piece on the deep pessimism that has settled over France and what it means for the upcoming 2007 elections. France’s economy, societal, and political system have all become unsettled in recent years as the system of privilege and power that keeps them afloat has chafed against the will of the people. The rejection of the EU Constitution, the protest votes for Le Pen, all of these things are symptoms of the profound disconnect between the French state and the French people.

The Economist notes the parallels between today’s France, and the Britain of the 1970s:

Just as Britain battled through its winter of discontent in 1978-79, when rubbish went uncollected, school gates unopened and ambulances undriven, France has fought its way through a series of social upheavals in the past 18 months. First, its electorate revolted over the European Union in May 2005, rejecting a new constitution for the European project that its own countrymen co-founded. Next, its multi-ethnic underclass revolted against exclusion, with 20 consecutive nights of rioting in nearly 300 banlieues across the country, forcing the government to declare a state of emergency. Most recently, its students and unions revolted against insecurity, holding countrywide strikes, university sit-ins and protest marches to contest a plan to make it easier to hire and fire the under-26s.

France’s “social model” just doesn’t work. The French want to argue that they’re concerned with the social welfare of all — but apparently that doesn’t apply to the ghettoized banlieues that surround Paris and other major French cities. The French economy is mixed at best — the corporations that exist in an incestuous relationships with their patrons in the state are doing fine — the small businesses that could lift many of those rioters out of poverty and into society are failing.

Making things worse, the French are following the path that many failing societies do: blaming someone else for their problems:

Even so, politicians have consistently failed to explain to the citizens why the country cannot afford to go on as before. This is the third source of French electoral dissatisfaction. Instead of making the case for change, successive politicians have preferred to blame, and thus to discredit, outside forces—usually Europe, America or globalisation. “The French political class has constructed a wall of lies against the globalised world,” comments Nicolas Baverez, author of “France in Freefall”. No wonder there is no consensus for reform.

The French need shock therapy: they need to face the reality that their system of economics and politics are not working. They need to realize that their “social model” isn’t producing the opportunities that could lift their growing and increasingly violent underclass out of poverty. They need someone who is wiling to stand up for reform. They need someone who doesn’t come from the bureaucratic womb of the École National d’Administration where the elites of France are inculcated in the old ways of doing things.

In short, they need a Thatcher.

The problem is that the French are more likely to elect a socialist like Ségolène Royal that someone who will make the hard choices necessary to keep France from falling further. The French clearly know that they’re in trouble — the French popular press makes the American press look almost sunny in comparison. The big question is whether they’ll do anything about it, or whether they’ll retreat into their own fantasy where their “exception culturelle” means that they’re right and the rest of the world is wrong.

France provides a lesson in what happens when governments go too far down the road to socialism — and the rest of the world should take a long look at what is happening there and take it as a valuable warning about why dynamism is preferable to status.

Glenn Reynolds notes that Americans are still (rightly skeptical) of government, but wonders whether it’s a good thing for the Republicans or a bad thing. I’d argue that in the short term, it’s probably not a good thing, but in the long view, it’s good for both the Republican Party and the nation as a whole.

The GOP got into power on the basis of being the party that would limit the size of government. On that account, the GOP has utterly failed. The size and scope of government continues to grow, and not just in terms of national defense. Legislation like the PATRIOT Act gets all the press, but the constricting web of myriad regulations continues to bind average Americans more and more. Small business owners often become the hardest hit, while big multinational corporations have no problem hiring enough lawyers and lobbyists to get around the rules. The American people should be skeptical of government power, because it doesn’t “level the playing field” as most liberals would claim.

For the GOP to win, they have to rediscover the values that make this party what it is. The biggest criticism I have of President Bush is that he’s not a conservative in most respects. He puts far too much faith in the power of government, and that’s ultimately a dangerous thing. Bush is called a “conservative ideologue” but the reality is that he’s a “Third Way” centrist cloaked in conservative garb. “Compassionate conservatism” is a nice buzzword, and there is an interesting argument behind it, but it just doesn’t work. Compassion is not measured by state power, but by the power of the individual. You can’t produce a bureaucracy to create compassion any more than you can legislate virtue. When the state becomes the primary agent of compassion, it’s not a sign of national greatness, but a culture in which individual effort, initiative, and true compassion are sorely lacking.

Many Republicans are wondering why the Republicans should regain their majority in Congress. To be frank, if it were for the execrable nature of the opposition, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to give the GOP a good spanking. It is certainly not undeserved.

The GOP got into power by being a party that would reduce the size of government. They failed. Part of it is due to governmental momentum, but the majority of fault lies with a party that has lost sight of its own values. The American people still share the Reaganesque optimism in America as a nation and the Reaganesque skepticism of government power — in fact, that’s one of the hallmarks of American society, and it has been since the very beginning of the Republic. Those parties who go against that strain tend not to do well, and it’s sad that right now neither party is really in tune with that bedrock ideology.

Michael Barone has an excellent piece on the way that polling works (or doesn’t) in the 21st Century. It’s looking increasingly like the old techniques of political polling aren’t coping well with technological change. Voters are less likely to have landline phones, and less likely to have time to bother with answering a pollster’s questions. Barone casts some doubt on the results of many of the polls that have come out for this election cycle:

If you could go back in history and conduct polls, I don’t think you’d find any, and certainly not many, two-year periods when the balance in party identification shifted from even to having one party 12 percent ahead of the other.

At this stage of the campaign, pollsters try to screen their respondents and report only those who answer a series of questions in ways that suggest they are actually going to vote. Many polls find that a higher proportion of Democrats than Republicans pass the screen. Others find similar proportions do. But pollsters of both parties will admit that polls do a poor job at projecting turnout.

I don’t buy for a second that the Democrats have shifted partisan ID by twelve points in two years. If that were true, the Democrats would be ahead in nearly every race by huge margins. However, the balance of power in Congress remains close — even if the Democrats win, it seems unlikely to be by more than a handful of seats.

It could be that the problems with polling is due to methodologies not keeping up with the times. It could be due to unconscious bias. It could be unconscious bias. Whatever it may be, the polls seem to be diverging more and more from the actual face of the electorate. When we’re talking about a potential 12 point bias towards the Democrats in an election that is already looking to be quite tight, it’s entirely possible that Election Night could be quite surprising…

John Manchester has an interesting piece on jihadi propaganda videos on YouTube. The same technological empowerment that allows anyone to become an internet video star allows terrorist groups like al-Qaeda to disseminate their message as well.

What makes this more disturbing is that we’re not keeping up in the 21st Century field of information combat. The Internet has become a virtual battlefield, and victories achieved in the minds of the masses can be as important as victories achieved in the real battlefield. Al-Qaeda is merely taking the strategies of General Giap in the Vietnam War and applying them to the digital age. Unless we have the means to combat this, we’re essentially ceding the battlefield to the enemy.

We’re in an information age, and we need to realize that if we’re not getting our side out, we’re going to lose this war. We’re a very long way from the days of Ernie Pyle when the media was objectively on our side. One of the biggest reasons we’re in danger of losing this war is because our military doesn’t yet seem to know how to get the message out about what we’re doing in Iraq. The only thing the public sees is exactly what the enemy wants them to see — and so long as that is the only picture that people get, the terrorists will continue to shape the narrative of this war.

UPDATE: StrategyPage shows that the military is learning from their mistakes. The big question is whether something like this is enough to shift the balance of power…