Jay Reding.com

Already some Democrats are saying that we need to surrender in Afghanistan as well.

Of course, the Democrats will say that they’re really for the war, that Afghanistan was the “right” war, etc. Then again, that’s precisely what they said about Iraq as well.

The enemy knows we’re weak, and if they can force our hand in Iraq, they’ll put the same pressure on us in Afghanistan. The Democrats have taken the anti-war side, and that side is based fundamentally on a revulsion with any use of American military power. The second Afghanistan dominates the headlines like Iraq does now, the political momentum will start to shift there as well. Al-Qaeda knows that a significant fraction of the American people don’t have the guts to fight this war.

Al-Qaeda, sadly, knows us better than we do. They cannot defeat the American military on the battlefield, but they can get America to defeat itself.

Author Dan Simmons has one of the smartest pieces on the current situation in Iraq I’ve seen in some time. He looks at the options the United States — outright surrender, “outsourcing” the war to private contractors, giving Iraq over to the Iranians, and actually fighting this war. By the time he gets to the last one, it’s clear why its the preferable alternative.

He outlines four things that need to happen before we can win in Iraq:

An American president has to be elected who can reunite the country, acknowledge the mistakes and blunders of our adventure in Iraq to this point, and who can forge a new consensus of American policy and actions there that can be supported by a majority of the American people and by the majority of our traditional allies in Europe and the Mideast.

Here’s where the Democrats could have a chance. Is there such a Democrat out there? Short of Senator Lieberman, no. (Had Hillary Clinton stuck to her guns, she might have come close.) The Democrats have hitched their wagons to failure, and that’s why they’ve abrogated their responsibilities to the war. The Republicans, on the other hand, are trying to get out from under the collapse of the Bush presidency, which has now become an irrelevancy as well as an albatross around the neck of every Republican.

Could Rudy Giuliani pull this off? Fred Thompson? Mitt Romney? John McCain? I’m not sure yet, but it needs to happen.

The current use of Iraq to promote short-term partisan, political goals has to stop. This is deadly serious business and members of both political parties have to begin behaving – if not like statesmen — then at least as grown-ups who put America’s interests above their parties’ immediate interests and gains.

Both parties need to grow the f*ck up. On that, there’s no doubt. The choices we make now will decide what the future of our world will look like, and right now it’s looking like the next generation will be raising their kids under the specter of an Iranian empire with nuclear weapons. We need a responsible political class to deal forthrightly with the challenges we face.

Our political and chattering classes are the weakpoint of our society — and al-Qaeda is expertly using that weakness against us. Until we have a political class more interested in winning the war than in bashing the heads of the opposition in, we will lose regarldess of who wins in Washington.

The American people themselves have to start educating themselves on Iraq and the larger war-on-terrorism issues. To do this, they’ll have to get smarter fast. One way is to quit getting one’s news from Leno and Letterman and Bill Maher and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. There should be a wide, serious, and sustained dialogue among Americans on Iraq and visions of the post-Iraq world and this dialogue must go beyond politics and polls. All informed opinion should be welcomed. We are past the point where the constant deluge of uninformed opinion can be tolerated.

That is absolutely right. The American people are profoundly ignorant on Iraq, and get their information from a news media that’s not only ignorant, but stridently ignorant.

As 5 random people on the street to point to Baghdad on a map, tell why Sunnis and Shi’ites are different, or name the Prime Minister of Iraq and you’re almost certain to get 5 people with blank stares. For all the talk about “intelligence failures” the biggest one is the one here at home — people aren’t making informed opinions, they’re being blindly loyal to one side or the other. (See the blockquote above.)

Iraq is not “Bush’s” war, it’s not some abstraction, it is something that effects each and every one of us, and given that the American public remains ignorant and the American media is unwilling to give them the information needed to form a rational opinion without bias and filtering, the situation isn’t getting any better.

Thank heavens that the blogosphere exists as a source of in-depth analysis, but blogging still can’t make up for a media that’s more willing to cover the foibles of celebrities like Paris Hilton than how Iran is killing American troops.

The U.S. military has learned much in Iraq. The troops who have fought there have shown not just amazing courage and incredible professionalism, but the ability to learn quickly so as to survive. U.S. soldiers, Marines, and reservists returning for their third, fourth, and fifth tours in Iraq are much wiser than the troops who went their as “liberators” in 2003 and who could not understand why people there were trying to kill them, much less how to beat them. Now it’s time for the American political establishment and the American people to learn from Iraq. The first lesson is obvious – humility. Humility in our strategic goals, humility in our assessment of our place in the world, humility in our approach to other nations in Europe, the Mideast, and elsewhere, and humility in our national and personal understanding of the limits of power.

There is a lesson in there. The Bush Administration pursued the right course after the September 11 attacks. The United States is threatened by the confluence of terror-sponsoring states and weapons of mass destruction. The Hussein regime was in flagrant violation of the cease-fire agreement and the removal of that regime was the right choice.

At the same time, the Bush Administration took a bull-in-the-china-shop approach. The failures of public diplomacy and political communication from the Administration are legion. The Bush Administration squandered their political capital by failing to keep every party on the same page. The President’s rhetoric is right, but the follow-through is lacking. President Bush, who led so well in the early years of this war, has failed to lead so many times in the last few years that he’s destroyed his own legacy. Even when he’s right, he’s too compromised to make much of it.

We cannot afford to lose this war, and we can prevail in it — but only if we have a political class that puts country before party, a media that puts the truth above ideology, and a populace that puts the real world over the fantasy world of Hollywood. If we fail, the temptation will be to blame it all on the Iraqis (which is already happening). But make no mistake, if we fail in Iraq, it won’t be because the Iraqis failed, or the President failed, or the Democrats failed, it will be because we all failed, and we will reap the bloody harvest of that failure for decades to come.

The Supreme Court just issued an opinion in the case of FEC v. Wisconsin Right To Life, a case testing whether the prohibitions against political advertisements under §203 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act was constitutional as applied to political ads sponsored by Wisconsin Right to Life during the 2004 elections. The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, ruled that §203 of the BCRA was unconstitutional as applied to the facts of the current case. The majority held:

In drawing that line, the First Amendment requires us to err on the side of protecting political speech rather than suppressing it. We conclude that the speech at issue in this as-applied challenge is not the “functional equivalent” of express campaign speech. We further conclude that the interests held to justify restricting corporate campaign speech or its functional equivalent do not justify restricting issue advocacy, and accordingly we hold that BCRA §203 is unconstitutional as applied to the advertisements at issue in these cases.

This is a somewhat narrow holding, as McConnell v. Federal Election Comm’n, 540 U.S. 93 (2003) had already ruled that the provision of the BCRA at issue here was not facially invalid. McConnell did not foreclose as-applied challenges such as the one here. Three of the five members of the majority (Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy) argued that the McConnell should be overruled. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the opinion of the Court with Justice Alito separately concurring.

More to come as I wade through the rather lengthy opinion this afternoon…

UPDATE: Loyola Law School Professor Rick Hasen has some more on the Wisconsin Right to Life case. I think he’s right — Alito hinted that he might go for a full facial challenge later on down the pike, but Roberts and Alito are playing it safe for the moment.

The left wing is all in a tizzy that four years after Air America, left-wing talk radio still hasn’t caught on. What is the answer to this terribly vexing problem of having dissenting voices providing a counterbalance to the almost monolithically liberal world of network television and newspapers.

Oh, that’s right, calls for government intrusion into the radio marketplace. Or more plainly, government mandated censorship in the guise of “fairness.”

Fortunately, radio guru Mitch Berg tears those arguments to shreds. The “Fairness Doctrine” apparently only applies to speech that the left dislikes — I’ve yet to see them policing their own.

So, in the spirit of “fairness” how about applying the concept to the rest of the media?

For example, the editorial pages of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune are only right-wing if you compare them to Granma — and even that’s questionable most of the time. So, in order to be “fair” that liberal content simply must be balanced with an equal number of column inches of conservative content. Therefore, each time that the Star Tribune runs an editorial explaining why we have to raise taxes, they should be forced by the government to run an article by Neal Boortz on why we need a flat tax.

After all, the left-wing has used liberal newspapers for years to pump up the EMOTION of left-wingers, because that’s what gets left-wingers to the polls and left-wing New York Times readers vote…

The same tactics are continued on the major broadcast networks throughout the country. It is quite simply the most formidably dangerous weapon the Democrats have to wield against Republicans come election time. National liberal hosts like Dan Rather or Katie Couric gain trust with listeners to great affect. It hurts Republicans at the polls.

Therefore, under the new “Fairness Doctrine” this content must be balanced with equal time given to the opposite viewpoint. For instance, the next time CBS uses a crudely-forged memo that implicates a Republican, another crudely-forged memo should be used that implicates a Democrat. Sure, that hand-written recipe for aborted fetus slurpies isn’t remotely in Hillary Clinton’s handwriting, it’s written in crayon, and several letters are written backwards, but I’m sure that CBS can find a few document experts that would testify that it was written by a period typewriter — and if they can’t, the government will ensure that they do.

Cable, thankfully, is more balanced. However, to make it more “fair” Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly must be placed in a steel cage and forced to fight to the death for the nation’s amusement. Two blowhards enter, and only one leaves. Preferably neither of them do.

Fine, so that last one is less to do with pressing needs for government regulation and more to do with personal preference…

In all seriousness, as Mitch Berg explains, there’s a good reason why conservative talk radio has dominated their airwaves for nearly two decades now. It’s not because of some sinister cabal of evil conservative radio networks conspiring, it’s because more people like conservative talk radio than like liberal talk radio. Nor is radio as a whole unbalanced — NPR is everywhere, and they certainly don’t swing to the right by any reasonable standard. 90% of people listen to radio, but that sure doesn’t mean that 90% of Americans listen to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity. The fact that the left is moaning that talk radio leans conservative is a sign about just how insecure they are about their ideas — apparently having failed in the competitive marketplace, the next step is to force the hand of government to make people listen.

That isn’t “fairness” — that’s a betrayal of the First Amendment. Liberal talk radio failed not because of some external factor, it failed because it was painfully amateurish, difficult to listen to, and the people who might form enough of an audience for it already get what they want with NPR — and at least NPR has decent production values. Conservative radio succeeded because conservative hosts like Rush Limbaugh understood the medium and realized that the rest of the media had left a natural opening for dissenting points of view.

Free speech is free speech, and the radio spectrum is not government property — it is licensed to those who want to use it. At the end of the day, stations have to serve the needs of their listeners, and it’s already been well-established that people don’t listen to left-wing talk radio in anywhere near the numbers that they listen to right-wing talk radio. To force stations to broadcast material that few listen to is just committing economic waste and showing the kind of silly partisan rent-seeking that nearly destroyed AM radio before Rush Limbaugh personally salvaged it. There’s nothing fair about enacting forced government censorship of speech, and the fact that the left so warmly embraces it tells one a lot about where their inclinations lie.

E.J. Dionne makes the argument that the center in American politics is drifting to the left. There’s some merit to that analysis, but in context, it comes after years in which the American center has drifted to the right.

I don’t think that the American people’s ideological makeup has changed at all — it rarely does. What has changed is the political outlook. The Republicans had years of complete control and failed to deliver on their key values. However, the country has had nearly 30 years of center-right governance. Reagan was an unabashedly conservative President with a liberal Congress, but managed to take the country out of the malaise of the Carter years and transform the American economy — and he was instrumental in defusing the Cold War, which only 20 years prior had threatened the destruction of the nation. He was followed by the center-right George H. Bush who was less effective, but still continued his policies. His successor, Bill Clinton, ran as a “New Democrat” and his key initiatives ended up being center-right ones: welfare reform, NAFTA, a massive capital gains tax cut, founding the WTO, and law enforcement. Clinton may have been a liberal, but his Presidency gave little for liberals to win. It was his initial attempts to govern from the left that helped the Gingrich Revolution — the voters soundly rejected HillaryCare, were angered at the social experimentation of gays in the military, and found Clinton’s 1993 tax hike unpalatable.

The collapse of the Republican Revolution last year wasn’t because people were sick and tird of conservatism, it’s because the Republicans lost their moorings. They became part of the Washington establishment that they had initially run against, and they got punished for it. Sadly, they’re only barely learning the lessons of those failures.

Dionne points to healthcare, inequality, and Iraq as signs of a leftward drift. However, where is the policy consensus? Some states are experimenting with universal health care plans, but these experiments won’t work any better than previous experiments have. Even if such a plan were passed on a national level, it would collapse within a matter of years — if that long. The American people are used to completely open access to healthcare. The second stories of months-long waiting lists for routine medical procedures — common in Canada — start happening, the system will lose all popularity. The reason HillaryCare collapsed is because consumers realized that their freedom of choice would be gone — HMOs are already bad enough, but having the government serve as the HMO from hell is hardly a better alternative.

Gov. Romney’s Massachusetts experiment was less about government control and more about making insurance portable from employer to employer — which is what a well-designed system should do. The Massachusetts plan isn’t perfect, but it’s not the sort of Canadian-style socialized medicine that the left really wants.

Not to mention that now that Michael Moore, the Castro-suckling propagandist, is making an issue of health care, having Democratic plans associated with Castro’s Cuba is not likely to make them much more popular.

As for inequality, the reality is that it has never been the sort of issue that the Democrats would like it to be — mainly because it only exists on paper. The United States has a vibrant middle class — something that doesn’t exist in Europe. If “inequality” were such a potent issue, John Edwards wouldn’t be sinking. The reality is that an economy is not a zero-sum game. The fact that Steve Jobs is filthy rich doesn’t mean that John Smith is forever limited to making $30,000. The “two Americas” schtick isn’t taking, because it doesn’t match the reality of life for the vast majority of the American people.

People are annoyed with the exorbitant CEO benefit packages, but that doesn’t mean that they’re prepared to pay higher taxes themselves for some harebrained Democratic social engineering scheme. Again, the American people aren’t going to take back the progress of the last 30 years and return to the days of “stagflation”, gas lines, and 28% APR home loans.

As for Iraq, it is like Vietnam in many ways — the Democrats will to see defeat at all costs will continue to tag them as the party of weakness. Especially when Americans see the costs that such ignominious defeat would bring. Fortunately, I don’t think it will happen. The Democrats can’t force a withdrawal, and we finally have the right strategy. This is a case where even if the political consequences are ruinous — which, for the GOP, they are — doing what’s politically correct would be national suicide. We cannot afford a loss in Iraq, and if we win, we’ll have a peace dividend that will be crucial to this war.

What if Dionne is right? What if the nation really is trending left?

Leftism and reality don’t mix well. Even if there is a leftward turn in this country, it won’t last long because at the most basic level, left-wing policies simply don’t work. Protectionism would cost millions of Americans their jobs. Higher taxes would dramatically slow down the economy, and again cause massive job losses. Socialized medicine would lead to waiting times and lack of access to lifesaving procedures. A surrender in Iraq would make a large-scale terrorist attack inevitable — and it would likely lead to a death toll far greater than the attacks of September 11.

The problem is that all of those things would be greatly injurious to our nation, including costing thousands of lives. It would once again discredit leftism in this country, but the price would be far higher than we should bear.

Fortunately, I don’t see that happening. The reality is that the Democrats won not on the strength of their ideas, but on the weakness of the competition. The Republicans are embracing the center, but at the same time rediscovering their core values. (If far too slowly.) There’s a far greater chance of a tax-cutting, spending-reducing, strong-on-defense conservative being elected in 2008 than there is on a closet socialist whose monogram is HRC — or any of her liberal ilk. The reality is that nearly 30 years of center-right rule in this country has led to nearly unprecedented peace and prosperity, and even if there is a jag to the left, this country is not going to return to the failed policies of the 1970s in which liberalism was ascendant.

Mark Tapscott takes a look at the incredibly low ratings given to all branches of government and sees a crisis in public confidence in the political class. The recent Gallup poll reveals that the American people only have 14% confidence in Congress and their approval rating is only 24%. Every government institution except the military has been given a vote of no-confidence by the American public. Tapscott has a theory as to why:

The opposition to the Bush/Kennedy/McCain immigration reform appears to be hardening, too, as indicated by this UPI/Zogby International survey that finds only three percent - three percent! - of those surveyed approve of the way Congress is handling the issue. Bush gets only a nine percent approval rating on the issue in the survey, which has a 1.1 percent margin of error.

This is why there is no evidence of increasing public support for the GOP in recent weeks despite the failling ratings of the Democratic majority in Congress. The root problem is a bipartisan inability - or refusal - to adopt policies supported by clear majorities of the American people.

Those policies for the most part involve a significantly lower level of government activism, whereas the political class for the most part seeks only a higher level because it benefits, financially and otherwise, from the higher taxes, greater federal spending and heightened importance of public institutions.

I think that analysis is right. The crisis in confidence in government isn’t a partisan issue — Democrats want to frame it as being opposition to the war, Republicans want to frame it as opposition to Democrats, but the reality is that it is opposition to a political system that has gone off the rails. The Democrats in Congress have taken the abysmal ratings of the Republicans and managed to lower them, while the Republicans have yet to offer anything resembling a coherent alternative. This is a bipartisan failure, and the same old partisan solutions just aren’t going to cut it.

The question is how this may effect American politics. John Podhoretz suggests that it could signal more frequent changes in political control. That’s certainly not to be discounted, but it would be something we’ve never really seen in American politics. Nor am I certain such an outcome would be good — that might erase partisan lines, but I doubt that it would do much to change the sort of back-room dealmaking that’s the longstanding tradition of Washington politics.

What I hope this will do is spring the country into a reformist mindset. Our problem is that we have a government that grows and grows and grows and demands more and more power. Even the left is taking the anti-government side (which would certainly change if a Democrat were elected in 2008) — there is a wide cross-partisan belief that government is too big, too greedy, and too powerful.

The problems with American democracy are structural — politicians are doing what politicians always do, and that is do whatever it takes to get elected — even if it means skirting the law. The only fix for this problem is to limit the size and scope of government so that there are fewer cookie jars for politicians to get their grubby little mitts into. Libertarians and conservatives don’t have much problem with that, but the liberals generally want more and more government. It’s hard to reconcile a general distrust of government with a party that wants to centralize healthcare into another government agency.

As a conservative, this mistrust of government is welcome news. The problem is that as a Republican, it isn’t. The way forward for the GOP is to regain their core convictions and stand with the American people against an ever-growing government. However, the current GOP leadership doesn’t seem at all interested in doing this.

If the GOP could get their values back, 2008 could be a bloodbath for the Democrats in the way that 2006 was for the Republicans. People are sick and tired of a dysfunctional government, and they want something better. The Republicans have to show them that big government isn’t the only way to go, but that requires a commitment to less spending, less government, and an end to the comfortable culture of entrenched power that ended the Gingrich revolution after 12 years.

American government stands at a crossroads — and partisan bickering won’t solve the nation’s problems. The American people are rightly sick and tired of it all, and if the GOP can’t provide an acceptable alternative, someone else will.

The Christian Science Monitor notes that al-Qaeda’s media-based asymmetrical warfare strategy is paying them big dividends:

In the aftermath of the war, fewer US correspondents were embedded with US military units, and the story took a different direction. The focus was on attempts to build a democratic political system and repair an infrastructure both neglected by Hussein and then damaged even more during the fighting. Then came more negative stories of US mistakes and the Pentagon’s unpreparedness for the enormity of problems in the postwar occupation. Finally, Iraq lapsed into violence, with car bombings and assassinations and hostage-taking providing a daily litany of horror. The occupying US soldiers began to take ever more casualties as did US and other foreign civilian workers and journalists, whose fatalities soon numbered more than in any other war.

They included brave Iraqi journalists and cameramen working for the Americans at great peril.

Critics in the Bush administration charged that images of chaos and violence were overshadowing stories of a more positive nature: of schools that were being opened, hospitals that were being rebuilt, and Iraqis who were coming forward to be policemen.

Now some US military officers, too, charge that a clever enemy media campaign is gaining traction and that the US is losing the war in information about battlefield operations.

I don’t think there’s much question that the United States is losing the media war. As independent journalists like Michael Yon have noted the US military has not been friendly to the media which only exacerbates the natural bias the media has against the military. At a time when winning the media war is as crucial as military success on the battlefield, the lack of a coherent military strategy on the part of the United States is one of the greatest weapons that al-Qaeda has.

The military needs to revive the embeds program and ensure that the full story from Iraq is told. The media rarely leaves the Green Zone and relies mainly on terrorist-affiliated stringers to bring them the news from the rest of Iraq. As one officer notes in the article, why build a propaganda outlet when you can subvert the nation’s media to do the work for you?

This situation was largely preventable, had the US taken the initiative after the end of the first phase of combat. Rather than letting the media fend for themselves, the military should have expanded the embed program to ensure that the media got the full story and not just what the enemy wanted them to see.

The American people need to get the full picture so that they can make informed opinions about this war. Right now, they are only getting one side of the story, and that is the side of the story that the enemy wants them to get. The media is not being a “watchdog” when they uncritically report what they’re given — but it doesn’t help that the other story is a lot harder to get than the propaganda of the enemy. Part of winning in Iraq requires our leadership to understand that this war isn’t like the wars we’ve seen previously — it is being fought through the media as much as it is on the battlefield.

If we want to win, and we must, we cannot allow the enemy to shape the media battlefield. We have to fight back, and that means that we have to be far more proactive in getting the full story out there. If we don’t, we will continue to lose at home at the same time our soldiers make great sacrifices trying to win in Iraq.