Presidential address

I got this in e-mail today, and I think it's quite good.

WOULDN'T IT BE GREAT TO TURN ON THE TV AND HEAR ANY U.S. PRESIDENT, DEMOCRAT OR REPUBLICAN GIVE THE FOLLOWING SPEECH? (Oh yes, it would.)

My Fellow Americans: As you all know, the defeat of the Iraq regime has been completed. Since congress does not want to spend any more money on this war, our mission in Iraq is complete.

This morning I gave the order for a complete removal of all American forces from Iraq. This action will be complete within 30 days. It is now time to begin the reckoning.

Before me, I have two lists. One list contains the names of countries which have stood by our side during the Iraq conflict. This list is short. The United Kingdom, Spain, Bulgaria, Australia , and Poland are some of the countries listed there.

The other list contains every one not on the first list. Most of the world's nations are on that list. My press secretary will be distributing copies of both lists later this evening.

Let me start by saying that effective immediately, foreign aid to those nations on List 2 ceases immediately and indefinitely. The money saved during the first year alone will pretty much pay for the costs of the Iraqi war. THEN EVERY YEAR THERE AFTER IT'LL GO TO OUR SOCIAL SECURITY SYSTEM SO IT WON'T GO BROKE IN 20 YEARS.

The American people are no longer going to pour money into third world Hellholes and watch those government leaders grow fat on corruption. Need help with a famine? Wrestling with an epidemic? Call France.

In the future, together with Congress, I will work to redirect this money toward solving the vexing social problems we still have at home. On that note, a word to terrorist organizations. Screw with us and we will hunt you down and eliminate you and all your friends from the face of the earth.

Thirsting for a gutsy country to terrorize? Try France or maybe China.

I am ordering the immediate severing of diplomatic relations with France, Germany , and Russia. Thanks for all your help, comrades. We are retiring from NATO as well. Bonne chance, mez amies.

I have instructed the Mayor of New York City to begin towing the many UN diplomatic vehicles located in Manhattan with more than two unpaid parking tickets to sites where those vehicles will be stripped, shredded and crushed. I don't care about whatever treaty pertains to this. You creeps have tens of thousands of unpaid tickets. Pay those tickets tomorrow or watch your precious Benzes, Beamers and limos be turned over to some of the finest chop shops in the world. I love New York.

A special note to our neighbors. Canada is on List 2. Since we are likely to be seeing a lot more of each other, you folks might want to try not pissing us off for a change. Mexico is also on List 2 its president and his entire corrupt government really need an attitude adjustment. I will have a couple extra thousand tanks and infantry divisions sitting around. Guess where I am going to put'em? Yep, border security.

Oh, by the way, the United States is abrogating the NAFTA treaty - starting now.We are tired of the one-way highway. Immediately, we'll be drilling for oil in Alaska - which will take care of this country's oil needs for decades to come. If you're an environmentalist who opposes this decision, I refer you to List 2 above: pick a country and move there.

It is time for America to focus on its own welfare and its own citizens. Some will accuse us of isolationism. I answer them by saying, "darn tootin."

Nearly a century of trying to help folks live a decent life around the world has only earned us the undying enmity of just about everyone on the planet. It is time to eliminate hunger in America. It is time to eliminate homelessness in America. To the nations on List 1, a final thought. Thank you guys. We owe you and we won't forget. To the nations on List 2, a final thought: You might want to learn to speak Arabic.

God bless America. Thank you and good night.

"Terrifying political correctness"

Here is Vaclav Klaus again, commenting on the responses to his interview:

I am getting a lot of reactions from the U.S. to my Friday interview in "Hospodářské noviny" where I talked about the global warming, among other things. Someone has distributed the interview to many internet servers and I have pleased many American non-Al-Gores by my statements because they feel as a minority that is under the pressure of a terrifying political correctness in the U.S. It is crucial to call things by the right name.

The phrase "terrifying political correctness" has struck a nerve with me, because it is terrifying indeed. How it emasculates people! In all my 27 years of living in the socialist Poland I did not see people as afraid to say what's on their minds as I am witnessing in the United States, a country that seems attached to the idea of "free speech" as no other country in the world. On the one hand, you can of course openly curse and vilify this country not only with impunity, but to the applause of many "progressive" Americans. On the other hand, stating that women may be less genetically predisposed for interest in science than men may spell the end of your career, even if you're a president of Harvard, unless you hurry and apologize profusely. Political correctness is worse than secret police, because it gets internalized, so you always carry it with you - the police at least leave you alone from time to time.

War dividends

I know it is going to sound cynical, because there is a lot of human tragedy underneath all this, but the war in Iraq and the mess in the Middle East have produced a number of benefits for the United States (and for the rest of the world, to some extent). To name just the big ones:

1. Re-igniting the ancient feud between the Shia and the Sunni. As long as they keep duking it out amongst themselves, they will have less energy and resources left to dish it out to the Great Satan. Similarly with the other various factions: Hamas vs. Fatah in Palestine, Hizbollah in Lebabon. The rest of the world is much better off when the murderous attention of muslims is focused inward.


2. With Iran now scaring its Sunni neighbors shiiteless (or should it be "shiiteful"?), they are looking to the US as the only stabilizing force capable of keeping the deranged Iranian leadership in check. The Europeans have proved (yet again) completely helpless, and Bush is sending signal after signal that he's not going to lift a finger against Iran - one can only imagine the sense of vulnerability of countries like Saudi Arabia.


3. The fairly dramatic rise in oil prices apparently had negligible effect on the US economy, which is remarkably strong. While the higher prices were a huge windfall to the oil-producing countries, they also - and more importantly - demonstrated that the global economy is not as vulnerable to disruption coming from the Middle East as it appeared to be in the seventies. If the interest in alternative energy sources is sustained and leads to technological innovation and consumer adoption, this vulnerability will be reduced even further, to the point when (as Spengler points out in his piece), sudden disappearance of the entire Middle East may well go unnoticed.


4. If Abu Ghraib was such a public relations nightmare for the United States, imagine what the relentless carnage unleashed on innocent civilians by assorted islamic fanatics must be doing to their image in the world, including the so-called "Arab street". One would have to be completely brain dead not to feel a profound cognitive and emotional distress upon being relentlessly bombarded by news of muslims slaughtering other muslims by busload, while the "infidels" are emerging relatively unscathed from the bloodbath.


5. The power that the United States now solely wields on the global stage only increased, with many countries - including the enemies of the US - now realizing what mayhem would be unleashed if the only superpower were to disengage from the world. If we withdrew from Iraq next week, the brutal slaughter that would engulf that country would be on par with the Rwandan genocide.

Bush is Hitler and you're not dead yet?

If George W. Bush is Hitler, and the United States is a fascist regime, as so many from the Angry Left assert, how come his enemies are not dropping dead like flies, the way the enemies of Russia's Vladimir Putin have been recently? If Noam Fucking Chomsky - to name just one example - had been directing his venom toward Russia and not the United States, he would have been dead by now. It's funny how these assertions about the evil nature of this country are proven wrong by the very fact that they are uttered openly and with complete impunity: in most countries they would not be tolerated. And that's exactly why the Angry Left says those things - because it feels perfectly safe. It is so cowardly that it will retreat and impose censorship at a mere hint of violence from the Perpetually Offended (i.e. muslims) - under the cover of "sensitivity", of course - but it will beat its chest and spray spittle yelling about its inalienable right to say any vile nonsense about the only country that will go to great lengths to protect that right. Few things are more pathetic.

10 years without America

Abandoning Iraqis to be slaughtered by their fellow muslims sounds heartless and un-American, and it probably is. Yet in all honesty I can't say that I care very much. If history is any guide, our sacrifice will not earn us much gratitute, and whetever little there will be, it will be short-lived. Just consider history as recent as the Kosovo war. If it weren't for the American initiative and leadership, the Europeans would have kept watching the Serbs "ethnically cleanse" Kosovo, until not a single moslem would have been left alive in the province. Did this win us any "brownie points" in the so-called "islamic world"? Don't bet on it. In Europe then? You must be kidding.

One could argue that the sacrifice in Kosovo wasn't that big. We just bombed the Serbs relentlessly for weeks, with almost no risk to the NATO forces, so it was just a matter of paying for the bombs. Well, maybe, but we might have done nothing at all - after all, Kosovo was of no strategic significance to the United States. And what about the II World War, where the sacrifice was enormous? Judging from the anti-Americanism so prevalent in Western Europe these days, someone not very familiar with the XXth century history would likely conclude that the USA must have been the occupier, and not the liberator. The Poles have less hatred toward the Russians, who tried for 200 years to forcibly assimilate a big chunk of Poland, and then, from 1945 till 1989 practically turned the whole country into a "17th Soviet Republic", than the French or the Germans now openly express toward the United States.

I wish we granted that troll Hugo Chavez his wish ("Yankees go home!") and went home, indeed. Let's give the Europeans the chance to defend themselves. (It is going to be quite a funny spectacle to watch them do it. Any tinpot dictator half as arrogant as Yugoslavia's Milosevic will be able to wrap them around his finger. They'll eventually adopt sharia as their law, in the hope that the jihadists will stop sending suicide bombers into European cities.) Let's have the UN continue to deal with the genocide in Sudan in the same brave and decisive way it's been doing so far (i.e. not doing a damn thing). Let's allow North and South Koreans to be finally re-united ander the enlightened leadership of the Great Leader Kim Jong Il.

There was a movie last year in the US entitled "A Day Without a Mexican", showing a fictionalized collapse of most basic services in this country as a result of all the Latino workers (legal and illegal) not being there to perform them. Wouldn't a movie "10 Years Without America" be far more interesting, not to mention scary? It's not hard to imagine the mayhem unleashed, were the United States to disengage from the world's affairs and let the chips fall where they may. That's what many around the world seem to be clamoring for - why not give it to them? Just for ten years. And then come and clean up the smoldering mess. I'm certain of one thing: the anti-American liberals in Europe and elsewhere would not survive such a world. That's "poetic justice" for you.

Wasted opportunity

I have been pretty depressed all day because of the UN spectacle, but then I thought: whatever verbal abuse is directed at Bush, he deserves it, in that he really created those monsters. He wasted an incredible opportunity that was obvious to anybody with half a brain: after 9/11 he could have united the country toward the goal of energy independence. He could have easily put a 50% tax on gasoline when it was still cheap, and use the revenue to promote the development of alternative energy sources and oil exploration in the US. Instead, he allowed those that hate us and want us dead to get rich and more powerful on the windfall of high oil prices. After five years, we would have been far along the road to freeing ourselves from the deadly addiction that feeds our mortal enemies. With their economies collapsing, their people would have a better chance of achieving some degree of freedom themselves, without us wasting enormous amounts of our money and the lives of our magnificent soldiers in the hellhole of Iraq.

The new Troy

After El Loco Chavez got his applause form that dictator's club, otherwise known as the UN, he repeated his stand-up routine at a college somewhere, to a standing ovation... This is the very first time ever that I felt ashamed of being an American. I literally wanted to cry. What other country would allow a third-world imbecile like Chavez or that Iranian psychopath to ridicule and threaten that country on its very soil, and not only without any consequences, but to an applause?? I know it's only the unhinged Left, that would welcome warmly Idi Amin and Pol Pot, any monster, as long as he's capable of spewing hatred toward the United States and their president. But where is the outrage of ordinary, rational Americans, who should right now be storming the UN building and getting the international bums out in wheelbarrows?

What a sad, sad spectacle. Perhaps this civilization does not deserve to be saved, after all, since it has already lost its sense of self-preservation. We're all citizens of Troy, and we are letting not one, but multiple wooden horses be dragged by a mob of dancing fools inside our gates. The only consolation left for us is a twisted one: we will die, but so will the fools.

Muslim chutzpah

The Morning Edition interview with Sayed Badreya and Hesham Issawi reminded me why, after five years, I still can't stand NPR. (I used to be a great fan and member...) The interview went well enough and I listened to it with some interest, until, at the very end, Renee Montagne asked, "What about America's image problem in the Muslim world?". To which Mr. Badreya immediately, almost automatically responded, "Oh, it is terrible! It's horrible! It's just horrible". After that interview I turned the radio off - I was so upset I could not listen to it anymore.
So it always comes down to this, doesn't it: America is the greater evil. At the bottom of every depravity there is America to blame. Muslims are just victims. If Americans were to say that the image of Muslims in this country is terrible, because... - well, do you really want me to count the reasons? - this would be just another evidence of our ignorance and prejudice. Never mind the beheadings, the suicide bombers, the cult of death, the daily carnage perpetrated on Muslims by Muslims in Iraq and elsewhere... Muslims are just victims, we have no right or reason to dislike them, let alone hate them. They, on the other hand, have plenty of reasons to hate us. But if that's the case, at least we have plenty of company: the bombings and thwarted bombing plots suggest that they hate India, too. And Spain. And Canada. And Germany. And the UK. They hate other Muslims, as well. They have so much hate to dish out that there isn't any left for us.
The meek acknowledgment of Mr. Issawi, that there is "still bright side to America", because he was able to make a film here that he would not be able to make in Egypt, only added insult to injury. So this country had welcomed these guys, allowed them to realize their dreams, and yet they feel that the hatred of America in the Muslim world is fully justified.
Thank you NPR, for reminding me why I should continue to be very mistrustful of Muslims and you.

Most livable small town: Midland, MI

My wife and I drove through Midland, MI last Thursday on our way back from vacations on the Upper Peninsula. This was our first visit to this town and I must say that we were very impressed. Among the things that elicited our exclammations of approval:

• Beautifully maintained downtown area (along Main Street): clean, pedestrian-friendly, filled with flowers.


• The skateboarding park. When most towns (including our own, Ann Arbor) merely forbid skateboarding and treat skateboarders as if they were criminals, Midland created a great place for the kids to have fun without bothering anybody.


• Biking trails. Both my wife and I are avid bike riders and we regretted that we didn't take our bikes on this trip. We plan to go back to Midland for a ride sometime soon.


• Free parking in downtown. Wow! In our town finding a parking spot in downtown is nearly impossible, and it costs at least a $1/hour, with many meters limited to 2, 1, or even 0.5 hour...


• Spacious, exceptionally clean riverside park with enclosed areas for dogs to run. Again, rather than prescribe the length of the leash the dogs must be kept on *at all times* (we've seen plenty of examples of local ordinances of this sort), the town's administrators gave dog owners a place to let their pets run free. We, not being dog owners ourselves, find it highly commendable.

Our brief visit, merely few hours, allowed us only a very small glimpse into Midland, but what we saw left us impressed. I can say that it is one of the nicest, most livable small towns I have seen in my extensive travels in the US. Perhaps what was most impressive was the town administration's apparent rational and citizen-friendly approach. Way too many city councils would bring up the issue of legal liability when voting down a proposal to build a skateboarding area or establish a dog park. I'm sure they considered this as well, but decided to err on the side of innovation and making life in town more pleasurable, rather than being protected from any possible legal danger.

Here are a few photos I took in Midland :

• Skateboarding park


• The Tridge


• Courthouse 

Real state secrets

Lawrence Kudlow writes in Real Clear Politics on the economic news you will not find in MSM:

Did you know that just over the past 11 quarters, dating back to the June 2003 Bush tax cuts, America has increased the size of its entire economy by 20 percent? In less than three years, the U.S. economic pie has expanded by $2.2 trillion, an output add-on that is roughly the same size as the total Chinese economy, and much larger than the total economic size of nations like India, Mexico, Ireland, and Belgium.

And why won't you find it in MSM? Because, unlike reporting on secrets anti-terrorism measures, this news might be good for Bush. We can't have that.

That cesspool of crime, Europe

Dymphna in Gates of Vienna looks at crime statistics of the US and of the "Old Europe":

[...] let’s compare the crime rate in lawless New Orleans with the crime rate in, say, the city it was named for: Orléans, France. In New Orleans, the per capita rate is given in the hundred thousands. Thus, according to this report, the 2004 rate for New Orleans, for all crime, was 6,110.3 per 100,000 population.

[...] Everyone knows Europe is more evolved than America, more sophisticated, more law-abiding – they sure have plenty of laws to abide by, don’t they? The European species is more restrained, civilized, blah blah, than the crude Homo americanus vulgaris.

Heh. Orléans’ crime rate is 109.24 per thousand people. In our terms, that translates to 10,100 per hundred thousand. So, extrapolating further, Orléans, France, has roughly sixty seven percent more crime than Mayor Nagin’s soggy fair city.

Germany, France, and the UK have - and have had for a while - significantly higher (and growing) crime rates than the US, where the crime has also been sharply declining for years. Interesting, isn't it?

The American Dream Has Come True

William Langley writes in The First Post:

It is much easier, and far more fashionable, to portray the United States as a dying empire mired in a misbegotten war, outstripped economically by China, and unable to keep even tin-pot states like North Korea in line.

Yet on a recent trip back to Washington DC where I lived for the Clinton years, it was impossible to escape the good news. Almost all of America's important social indicators - the measures of the true health of a nation - are pointing in the right direction.

He follows with a list of those indicators and concludes:

We don't hear much about it, because it doesn't fit our Euro-jaundiced view of what the United States is.

It's good to know that not all Western Eurpoeans buy into the US-bashing from their leftist elites. It's unfortunate, that too many of them do.