Excused Lame

Another old Red bites the dust:

Milton Wolff, the last commander of the American volunteers who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War and the longtime commander of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, died Monday in Berkeley, Calif. He was 92.

At first a young Communist rabble-rouser on soapboxes in New York City, Mr. Wolff was wielding a machine gun in Spain by the time he was 21. By 22, he was the ninth commander of what is commonly called the Lincoln Brigade; four of his predecessors had been killed, four wounded; none now survive, the archives confirm…

While Mr. Wolff was in Spain, he became a friend of Ernest Hemingway, who served him his first glass of Scotch; Hemingway was in Spain as a reporter and wrote fiction about the conflict as well. Later, in a pamphlet issued when sculptures of the fighters were unveiled, he called Mr. Wolff “as brave and as good a soldier as any that commanded battalions at Gettysburg.”…

Mr. Wolff never stopped defying authority. He helped lead the fight against United States support of Franco’s government and battled fiercely for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. He even offered the services of the aging veterans of the Lincoln Brigade to the North Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, who declined them…

Mr. Wolff always said he first met Hemingway after stealing his mistress, something he told Salon in 1999 that Hemingway did not mind. Hemingway minded more when he found out that Mr. Wolff had no idea who he was. For his part, Mr. Wolff resented Hemingway’s description of villagers loyal to the Republic as having murdered fascists in “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

Mr. Wolff said he was turned down for combat duty in World War II because of concerns about his leftist politics. He later fought successfully against the “subversive” label pinned on the Lincoln veterans for decades. He personally delivered 20 ambulances to the Nicaraguan government when the Reagan administration was supporting rebels against it.

Not subversive perhaps, brave perhaps, but a fool for all that. Stand on the wrong side of the 20th century’s biggest questions and you’ll be assured of a respectful send-off in the Times. 

The dust-up between Revolutionary Guard speedboats and U.S. naval vessels in the Strait of Hormuz is worrying for what it might be a harbinger of:

There is a reason American military officers express grim concern over the tactics used by Iranian sailors last weekend: a classified, $250 million war game in which small, agile speedboats swarmed a naval convoy to inflict devastating damage on more powerful warships.

There is a reason American military officers express grim concern over the tactics used by Iranian sailors last weekend: a classified, $250 million war game in which small, agile speedboats swarmed a naval convoy to inflict devastating damage on more powerful warships.

In the days since the encounter with five Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz, American officers have acknowledged that they have been studying anew the lessons from a startling simulation conducted in August 2002.

In that war game, the Blue Team navy, representing the United States, lost 16 major warships — an aircraft carrier, cruisers and amphibious vessels — when they were sunk to the bottom of the Persian Gulf in an attack that included swarming tactics by enemy speedboats.

“The sheer numbers involved overloaded their ability, both mentally and electronically, to handle the attack,” said Lt. Gen. Paul K. Van Riper, a retired Marine Corps officer who served in the war game as commander of a Red Team force representing an unnamed Persian Gulf military. “The whole thing was over in 5, maybe 10 minutes.”

General Van Riper said he complained at the time that important lessons of his simulated victory were not adequately acknowledged across the military. But other senior officers say the war game and subsequent analysis and exercises helped to focus attention on the threat posed by Iran’s small, fast boats, and helped to prepare commanders for last weekend’s encounter.

“It’s clear, strategically, where the Iranian military has gone,” Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters on Friday. “For the years that this strategic shift toward their small, fast boats has taken place, we’ve been very focused on that.”

In the simulation, General Van Riper sent wave after wave of relatively inexpensive speedboats to charge at the costlier, more advanced fleet approaching the Persian Gulf. His force of small boats attacked with machine guns and rockets, reinforced with missiles launched from land and air. Some of the small boats were loaded with explosives to detonate alongside American warships in suicide attacks. That core tactic of swarming played out in real life last weekend, though on a much more limited scale and without any shots fired…

That was not the case in the simulation, sponsored by the military’s Joint Forces Command. The victory of the force modeled after a Persian Gulf state — a composite of Iran and Iraq — astounded sponsors of what was then the largest joint war-fighting exercise ever held, involving 13,500 military members and civilians battling in nine live exercise ranges in the United States, and double that many computer simulations to replicate a number of different battles.

General Van Riper’s attack was much more complex and sophisticated than anything that could have involved the Iranian boats last weekend. The broad outline of the 2002 war game was reported at the time, but in interviews since last weekend’s episode, General Van Riper and other officers have provided new details about the simulation.

In the war game, scores of adversary speedboats and larger naval vessels had been shadowing and hectoring the Blue Team fleet for days. The Blue Team defenses also faced cruise missiles fired simultaneously from land and from warplanes, as well as the swarm of speedboats firing heavy machine guns and rockets — and pulling longside to detonate explosives on board.

When the Red Team sank much of the Blue navy despite the Blue navy’s firing of guns and missiles, it illustrated a cheap way to beat a very expensive fleet. After the Blue force was sunk, the game was ordered to begin again, with the Blue Team eventually declared the victor.

In a telephone interview, General Van Riper recalled that his idea of a swarming attack grew from Marine Corps studies of the natural world, where insects and animals — from tiny ant colonies to wolf packs — move in groups to overwhelm larger prey.

“It is not a matter of size or of individual capability, but whether you have the numbers and come from multiple directions in a short period of time,” he said.

Let’s never forget that while the United States is a powerful and resourceful nation, our enemies should never be underestimated nor should we think they’ll operate in a rational way. We seem to have forgotten that in World War II suicide planes sank many ships during the Okinawa campaign and placed enormous strain on the sailors of the U.S. fleet. Let’s never again blunder into another Pearl Harbor or Battle of the Bulge or 9/11 through complacency.

The Dallas Cowboys (The Greatest Team that Absolutely Ever Was, Is, or Will Be) has lost to the New York Giants 21-17.

In losing, Dallas has gone 12 years without winning a post-season game. If they went through the next 120 years without winning any game it wouldn’t be enough for me.

It looks like the campaign of Ron Paul (or Dr. Paul his supporters insist) is now in serious trouble with the revelation that racist and homophobic columns appeared in a newsletter with his name on the banner. Who knows who actually wrote them? But, Paul (sorry, Dr. Paul) is the responsible officer of his own publiction. Saying, “Sorry, I had no idea people were writing this stuff under my name,” pushes libertarianism a little too far.

In my young and foolish days, I had libertarian leanings that eventually I abandoned to become an out-and-out reactionary. One of the problems with libertarianism as a political movement is that there’s a creepy sense of dictatorship underneath all the rhetoric: “Vote for us and everything will be completely different!” It just ain’t gonna happen. Politics is the art of the possible and as Ace says, you’ll never get elected or re-elected:

Let’s take the Department of Education for starters. I assume, without knowing for a fact, Professor Science wishes to abolish it. I’m copacetic with that general notion. I do not consider that to be a “deranged” or “lunatic” idea.

What I do consider deranged is the assertion by Professor Science’s supporters that such a thing is possible. Wake up: It’s not. The Department of Education may be an ineffective, even counterproductive, scam that hurts more than it helps and is indeed an example of the federal government’s growth into areas it shouldn’t venture into.

But the Department of Education is popular. Very popular. Among dopes, yes, who think that if you’re against the Department of Education you’re against education itself and don’t want children to have an education, but those dopes, I have to say, constitute about 75% of the electorate.

This is why those “sell-out RINOs” are forced to accomodate themselves with the reality that the DoE isn’t going anywhere. The best a real, serious, non-fringe candidate can hope to do is to reform this institution so it at least is not harmful to education.

Would abolishing it be preferable? Possibly. Probably, even. I would not be sad at all to see this crap department go. But it is not politically possible. You can either have a Republican who says he supports the DoE and wants it to do its job better or you can have Democrat who says he suppors the DoE and wants it do its job better. What you can’t have is a Republican President who vows to abolish it, because he won’t be elected. Period.

There’s a real place in this country for a serious debate about personal liberties vs. public order, the role of government in our lives, the relationship of states to the federal government and the place of America in the world. None of the major candidates are asking these questions.

The problem with libertarianism as a political movement is that it’s neither broad nor deep. Ron Paul’s about the best you get. Soon afterwards, if not sooner, what kind of people are its proponents? Gold bugs. Truthers. Potheads. Whore-bonkers. Porn-pushers. Jew baiters. Racial supremicists. Survivalists. Drinkers of colloidal silver. Neo-Confederates. Conspiracy theorists. Secessionists. Little America types.

In short, the sort of folks who forty years ago put out badly typed mimeographed newsletters and who now have badly designed websites. Assistant dog warden in Arthur County, Nebraska is about the upper limit of their electoral prospects. Anything higher office and they rapidly become an embarrassment.

The famous Cuban health care system so praised by Michael Moore can’t help a traitor:

Renegade former CIA agent Philip Agee, whose naming of agency operatives helped prompt a U.S. law against exposing government spies, has died in Cuba, his wife said Wednesday. He was 72.

Agee quit the CIA in 1969 after 12 years working mostly in Latin America at a time when leftist movements were gaining prominence and sympathizers. His 1975 book “Inside the Company: CIA Diary,” cited alleged misdeeds against leftists in the region and included a 22-page list of purported agency operatives.

Lest we think of Agee as some martyr to freedom, he proved a true Commie lickspittle:

One of Agee’s last essays was published in Granma International newspaper in 2003 shortly after the Cuban government arrested 75 leading dissidents and political activists.

“To think that the dissidents were creating an independent, free civil society is absurd,” he wrote, “for they were funded and controlled by a hostile foreign power and to that degree, which was total, they were not free or independent in the least.”

Rot at the bottom of the Pit, swine.

Headline: “Canadians would root for Democrats: poll”

Ah, the craven self-abnegation of Columbia University’s professoriat:

An academic delegation of Columbia University professors and deans of faculties plans to visit Tehran to officially apologize to Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. The delegation plans to express regret for the insulting remarks Columbia University President Lee Bollinger directed at Ahmadinejad on September 24 in his introductory speech, the Mehr News Agency correspondent in New York reported.

Since the incident, the deans and professors from the faculties of history, anthropology, Middle Eastern studies, philosophy, and Islamic studies have criticized Bollinger’s behavior toward Ahmadinejad.

A member of the delegation, who requested anonymity, said the main goal of the visit is to meet the Iranian president and officially apologize to him.

“The delegation has also prepared its itinerary,” he noted.

He went on to say that the delegation also plans to visit Iranian universities in various cities and to hold talks with professors and students, and may even sign memoranda of understanding with some universities. He also said the delegation is interested in visiting seminaries and the shrine city of Qom.

One dumb move – the original invitation – deserves another. Once again, Columbia covers itself in shame.

Grace, balance, teamwork. Andreas Helgstrand and Blue Hors Matine in the Freestyle Dressage competition at the 2006 World Equestrian Games. Folks, it don’t get any better than this.

Kerry Howley has a column on the role of husbands in getting their wives elected to office, with focus on the Cattle Baroness. Now, no doubt she’s a capable senator, but, as was once said of the Fat Rich Kid, if her name was Hillary Rodham instead of Hillary Clinton, would you vote for her?

Howley’s column induced me to come up with a list of women who succeeded a family member in Congress (state and Congress follow name):

Elizabeth Andrews (AL), 92nd
Jean Ashbrook (OH), 97th
Irene Baker (TN), 88th
Corrine Boggs (LA), 93rd
Veronica Boland (PA), 77th
Frances Bolton (OH), 76th
Mary Bono (CA), 105th
Vera Buchanan (PA), 82nd
Jocelyn Burdick (ND), 102nd
Sala Burton (CA), 98th
Katharine Byron (MD), 77th
Lois Capps (CA), 105th
Hattie Caraway (AR), 72nd
Jean Carnahan (MO), 107th
Marguerite Church (IL), 82nd
Cardiss Collins (IL), 93rd
Elaine Edwards (LA), 92nd
Jo Ann Emerson (MO), 104th
Willa McCord Blake Esick (TN), 72th
Willa Fulmer (SC), 78th
Elizabeth Gasque (SC), 75th
Florence Gibbs (GA), 76th
Kathryn Granahan (PA), 84th
Winnifred Mason Huck (IL), 67th
Muriel Humphrey (MN), 95th
Florence Kahn (CA), 68th
Elizabeth Kee (WV), 82nd
Rose Long (LA), 74th
Catherine Long (LA), 99th
Doris Matsui (CA), 109th
Clara McMillan (SC), 76th
Susan Molinari (NY), 101st
Lisa Murkowski (AK), 107th
Maurine Neuberger (OR), 86th
Mae Nolan (CA), 67th
Catherine Norrell (AR), 87th
Pearl Oldfield (AR), 70th
Shirley Pettis (CA), 94th
Louise Reese (TN), 87th
Corrine Riley (SC), 87th
Edith Rogers (MA), 69th
Margaret Chase Smith (ME), 76th
Lera Thomas (TX), 89th
Effigene Wingo (AR), 71st

A note: Susan Molinari succeeded her father, Guy Molinari and Lisa Murkowski succeeded her father Frank Murkowski. Elizabeth Kee succeeded her husband, served six full terms and was succeeded by her son.

When Howley says, “The first three women to serve full Senate terms all succeeded their husbands,” it’s not quite accurate. The three women would be Hattie Caraway, Margaret Chase Smith and Maurine Neuberger. However, Smith succeeded her husband to his House seat and was elected to four terms on her own before moving to the Senate in the 81st Congress and serving four full terms there.

While most of the women on the list were seat warmers, just filling out the terms of their husbands, some had distinguished careers on their own. Edith Rogers, who succeeded her husband John Rogers in 1925, was elected sixteen times to Congress, dying in 1960 during the campaign for a seventeenth term. Mary Norton was elected to twelve full terms and became chair of the House Labor Committee.

My lovely bride returns this evening from New Zealand. I am engaged in an orgy of house cleaning. Back tomorrow.

As opposed to the insubstantial jangling below, here’s Sir Colin Davis conducting the Lacrymosa from the Berlioz Requiem:

Persuasive advocates like Sir Colin that expanded our knowledge of the the music of Berlioz. For the Philips label Davis recorded most of the works, including premiere recordings of Benvenuto Cellini and Les Troyens.

This performance is from the 2000 Proms at the Royal Albert Hall. The orchestra and chorus are the combined forces of the Guildhall School of Music and the Paris Conservatoire and look to number some 800. Nothing can compare to a live performance, which I’ve been lucky enough to hear three times.

The Cattle Baroness came in third last night in the Ioway caucuses, a stinging blow to her image of inevitability. Mark Steyn makes a point I’ve long held:

The Clintons’ leadership of the Democratic Party was great for the Clintons, terrible for the Democratic Party: They lost the House, they lost the Senate, they lost state legislatures and governors’ mansions, and in the end Clinton couldn’t even bequeath the White House to his Vice-President in a time of peace and prosperity. Yet his First Lady wound up with a Senate seat. After a decade and a half of his neo-monarchical stewardship, you get a real (if discreetly expressed) sense of frustration from a big chunk of Dems that the first woman candidate should happen to be this particular woman.

If Clinton had been the political genius that a sycophantic press made him out to be, he would have crafted a new political coalition to rival the one put together by FDR. Instead all he did was elect Madame and go down in history as a fin de siècle Warren G. Harding.

The Democrats as a party are only now just recovering from the Clinton years. Why would they want to put before the voters of this great nation a person with all and more of Bill’s ruthlessness but none of his charm? Madame reminds me, as someone once said, of Nixon in a pants suit. It’s going to take more than Hubby and his media suppositories to pull it out for her.

Here’s a couple of classical music’s A-listers, Artur Rubenstein and Eugene Ormandy, unsuccessfully expending their considerable efforts justfying Leith Stevens’ Piano Concerto in C minor in the movie Night Song.

In a review of this film, Bosley Crowther said, “But the music, the prize concerto –  well, that is really the thing which puts Night Song in the spotlight as baldfaced and absolute sham. For this scrappy and meaningless jangle by Leith Stevens is good for nothing more than an excuse for filming the fiddles, the drums and the batteries of horns. And if Mr. Rubinstein and Mr. Ormandy can swallow it, along with their pride, they must have pretty strong stomachs.”

Growing up near Philadelphia, I read the Bulletin, the afternoon newspaper; the reputation of the morning Inquirer at the time was quite low. And why shouldn’t I have? Their motto was “Nearly Everybody Reads the Bulletin.”

By 1970 the Annenberg family sold the Inquirer to Knight-Ridder, who took decisive steps to improve the quality of the paper. By the late ’70’s its circulation outstripped that of the Bulletin and dominated the advertising dollars in the city. Faced with declining circulation, the difficulties faced by most afternoon papers and steadily mounting losses, the Bulletin shut down in 1982.

Now, via Bill Quick, I find – only a few years too late! – that the Bulletin, now “Philadelphia’s Family Newspaper,” is back. Rather like the relationship of the New York Sun to the Times, the Bulletin provides an editorial policy delightfully distinct from the drearily predictable liberalism of the Inquirer; a terrier’s bark to the lumbering old mastiff. May nearly everyone read it again!

Nobel-prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman says:

Taking even a cursory stock of current events, I am driven to the ultimately wise advice of my Columbia mentor, I.I. Rabi, who, in our many corridor bull sessions, urged his students to run for public office and get elected. He insisted that to be an advisor (he was an advisor to Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, later to Eisenhower and to the AEC) was ultimately an exercise in futility and that the power belonged to those who are elected. Then, we thought the old man was bonkers. But today…

I agree with Dr. Lederman that it would be better if more elected officials were scientists. Not to mention artists, musicians, authors, farmers, plumbers, car mechanics, morticians and sanitation workers. And he’s right: to be an advisor is like being a court eunuch.

But here’s the problem. To become an elected official, you actually have to get elected.  You will not, like George Arthur Rose, bolt out of the blue be made some sort of secular pontiff and be given the keys of the kingdom to loose or bind whatsoever on earth.

You’ll have to put together an organization of adherents. Draft positions. Raise money (not from grant proposals). Travel and talk to people who aren’t interested in listening to you but you have to convince to vote for you. Be nice to the rude and indifferent. Listen to inconsequential gripes. Slap backs and eat chicken and peas. To win electoral office, it has to be almost a full-time job.

Once in office, you have to learn about how to make a difference, the nuts and bolts of policy making and how to serve your constituents. And what’s worse is: you don’t have tenure! Your actions have consequences! You can lose your job. Sometimes unfairly!\

You went to college, took a major in one of the sciences. You then went to graduate school, started research with a good professor who could give you a recommendation with the weight needed to get a good position afterwards and scrimped and sacrificed. Afterwards you may have taken one or more postdoctoral positions, honing your skills for little pay or recognition. If you went into industry, you labored mightily to make a contribution to your company. Or you may have gone into academia and labored mightily to get tenure.

Because you were ambitious to be successful in your field, you busted your butt to achieve your goal. Do you presume that those who are ambitious to be successful in politics didn’t bust their butts as well? While you were doing all that, your representative or senator may have gone to law school and went into a practice where they made contacts or served on campaigns, worked as interns or administrative staff, learned the ropes of how to raise money or managing legislation.

It’s the conceit of intellectuals and those with intellectual pretensions to consider those elected to office mental pygmies compared to themselves and that all this political stuff is below them. I was struck in reading Allen Drury’s A Senate Journal (about which more anon) that the most frequent adjective he uses to describe senators and representatives is “shrewd.” Intelligence is necessary to some extent but even more so the ability, in the words of George Washington Plunkett, to “study human nature and act accordin’.”

A few years ago, our Representative at the time came to our research center for a tour and to give us a talk and take questions afterwards. My estimation of the skills that it takes to become a successful politician went up considerably. Not only did he take on a wide variety of questions, in answering them he always was able to make the point he wanted to make.

In short, he was a good salesman for his positions. You, as an intellectual, no doubt look down on your nose at that too, but it’s a skill set you probably lack. In academia, after all, toxic personalities are not only not penalized, they’re permitted to flourish.

Speaking of Congress, David Brinkley wrote:

It was a club whose members had varying degrees of competence, intelligence and honesty. But each had one undeniable achievement worthy of his colleagues’ respect – the ability to win an election. Sam Rayburn, speaker of the House, listened to committee testimony by a State Department official admired for his expertise and eloquence and said, “Yes, he’s pretty smart, but I’d trust him more if he’d ever won an election for sheriff.”

As Dr. Lederman says, it the way to make a real difference. But you have to work at it.