Dishonest terminology

As I was sitting in a Starbucks this morning and noticing that "tall" is the smallest size they offer, and "grande" (which means "large") is really their medium size, it occurs to me that people seem afraid to use honest terminology. (Of course, Starbucks' competititors do use "small, medium, and large," so not everyone is afraid to be honest. But Starbucks is by far the biggest in the business.)

Nobody is "pro-legalized-abortion" or even "anti-legalized-abortion"; they are "pro-life" or "pro-choice." As if the only thing alive is a fetus; "pro-life," after all, could mean "anti-euthanasia" or "anti-death penalty," of course. And as if the only choice anyone makes in life is whether or not to abort an unwanted fetus; "pro-choice" could mean "anti-affirmative action," "anti-union-shop," or "anti-compulsory-anything," for Heaven's sake!

Recently pro-labor-union Congressmen introduced something called "the Employee Fair Choice Act." What it really meant was to make it easier for labor unions to intimidate workers into voting for a union, by depriving them of a secret vote in labor representation elections. But obviously, to them a choice to unionize is fair, while a choice not to unionize is unfair!

Obviously, I could multiply cases of dishonesty in terminology, but these examples make it clear that nobody has a monopoly on such dishonesty.

Names!

Seems like there is a New York Times blog called "The Opinionator." Just discovered it today. Well, just to keep things straight, I have nothing to do with The Times. (As though you couldn't tell, given the great divergence in our positions!)

The other candidates

I have already indicated that my favorite among the candidates for the 2008 Presidential election is Rudy Giuliani. But what about the others?

John McCain seemed at first to be the likely GOP nominee. But he's fallen victim to the problem that he had been all things to all people. He had a lot of support from independents and Democrats who had mistakenly thought he was less conservative than the typical Republican -- not being familiar with his record. And when he became more hawkish than even President Bush, that lost him most of the support he had from those independents and Democrats. Meanwhile, his positions on campaign financing and immigration kept him from getting support from the Republican right wing. So he had neither the left nor the right, and his campaign seems to be spent. In a sense, that's a shame; I like a lot about McCain, but really, one fewer serious rival to Giuliani is probably good for my own wishes.

Mitt Romney, like Giuliani, has going for him the fact that he can win in liberal areas, a good thing for a Republican candidate. But unlike Giuliani, he seems to feel he has to recapture the right and thus disavow all his previous positions where they are not sufficiently right-wing for them. Giuliani has not reversed himself on anything; he just has felt it necessary to show where he is truly conservative, and has made these issues salient. I think that (unlike his father, who I eagerly supported for President several election cycles ago) Mitt Romney is someone who can't totally be trusted politically. I'll support him if he gets nominated to run against Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, but without a lot of enthusiasm.

None of the other Republicans has a chance. Fred Thompson seems to be the current choice of the Religious Right, which makes me doubt him, but he doesn't really have all that much support (and, while he has more experience than Barack Obama, it isn't very much!) Ron Paul brings a lot of libertarian fresh air to the House of Representatives, but he's too dogmatically extreme in his libertarianism to be President, and I think most Republicans know this. Brownback, Tancredo, Hunter, and the like are not names most people recognize, and that even the extreme religious Right has abandoned Brownback (one of their own!) for Thompson makes it clear that none of them has a chance.

On the Democratic side, there are two serious candidates, Obama and Hillary Clinton. Both try to talk like centrists, but their votes have been extremely left-wing in the Senate. No way I could support either of them. And none of the other Democrats has any more chance of getting the Democratic nomination than Tom Tancredo on the Republican side, so there's no sense even discussing them.

I suppose I should make it official

Some time ago I discussed the possibilities of nominating Rudy Giuliani and Condoleezza Rice, and at that time I thought that either of them would be a favorite choice; but Rice didn't want it and Giuliani's chances of nomination seemed minimal because the religious Right had so much influence in the GOP. Well, things have worked out differently than I expected, and Giuliani seems to be in good shape for the nomination. So I might as well make it official: this blog is supporting Giuliani for the nomination.

He doesn't agree with me on everything, but he is closer to me on all the major issues than any other announced candidate of either party, so I'm happy to declare my support.

Why I am a Republican

Last night I was at a meeting of an organization I belong to, and afterwards another regular mentioned to me that he had wondered why I was a Republican. There were a lot of others there and I didn't want to spend a lot of time discussing the matter because I knew that others might break in and the nature of the group meant I'd probably be so grossly outnumbered that it would be an unpleasant experience, so all I did was repeat a line I'd put into a letter to the editor of a local newspaper; "...the Republicans are the party of freedom, and the Democrats are the party of 'socialism light.'" This led to further arguments afout "Star Wars" and President Clinton, as I feared, and I never got to say much more on the "why" question.

But it seems to me that there are two parts to the answer: why I became a Republican, and why I remain one. The first is so easy: I grew up when New York City, my birthplace, was dominated by the Democrats and under the thumb of a corrupt Democratic machine (popularly called Tammany Hall) while both the President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the Governor, Nelson A. Rockefeller, were in my mind doing a good job of running their respective governments. Comparing the two parties' records left me a clear decision to make, and I joined the Republican Party in my mind well before I could in fact -- you had to be 21 to register and vote then, so I could not officially join the party till I was 21, but I've been a Republican in fact since I was in my early teens.

Now, I find myself in agreement with Republicans on some issues and with Democrats on others. (For a good summary of my beliefs, see my first post on this blog, back in February 2006!) But it seems to me that on the issues I consider most important, I'm with the GOP, and that is why I am still a Republican.

A view on Iraq

Right now the most divisive issue in the country seems to be the Iraq war. It is becoming another Vietnam, and unfortunately people derived the wrong lessons from Vietnam. The biggest lesson we should have learned from Vietnam is that if the people do not back the U. S. military effort, we will lose.

In Vietnam, we were winning. The Tet offensive was a desperation move by the other side, and all military people who have evaluated the situation in retrospect agree that it was a major defeat for the North Vietnamese. But because Communist sympathizers in the U. S., as well as pacifists who saw no reason to maintain the struggle against world Communism, prevailed upon the Congress to withdraw support for our military efforts, we gave up, and today Vietnam is one of four countries in the world (the others being China, Cuba, and North Korea) still under Communist domination, even after Communism has been erased in the country where it first took power (Russia) and everywhere else where it had taken over except for those four.

We did one thing very right in Iraq -- removed the genocidal dictator, Saddam Hussein, from power. We did one thing very wrong there -- refused to accept that Iraq is an artificially-united country, which should have gone the way of Yugoslavia, divided into a number of smaller, more homogeneous nations. A Kurdish state in the north, a Sunni Arab state in the center, and a Shi'ite state in the south would make more sense than a united Iraq. But once we got in there, it is imperative that we not give al-Qaeda the satisfaction of knowing they could drive us out. They would certainly impose a Taliban-style theocratic dictatorship there, where even most Sunnis could not feel at home.

What we need to do now is to try to establish some sort of order in Iraq, while building up the pro-democracy forces in all three communities. I do not know how we can back out of our support for a single united Iraq, though we need to find a way to do so. A multi-ethnic federal state can only work if all parties want it to: Switzerland is a successful example; Yugoslavia an unsuccessful one; Belgium is a question right now.

But withdrawing now, or even promising to withdraw by some specified date, is simply a recipe for insuring a Vietnam-style failure. If we say we will withdraw by some specified date, al-Qaeda's leaders only have to sit tight till one day after that date. This is not the way to go.

Cindy Sheehan's delusions of grandeur

Cindy Sheehan must really think she's something really big. Now she says that if Nancy Pelosi doesn't file an impeachment motion against President Bush, Mrs. Sheehan will run as an independent against Mrs. Pelosi in the 2008 Congressional election. Does she really think she can unseat her?

I have no great love for Nancy Pelosi -- in fact she's probably, of all major politicians in this country, the most antithetical to everything I'm for -- but in her San Francisco district, she is extremely popular. And as Speaker of the House, a position that an independent Cindy Sheehan could never hope to get, she brings an importance to that district that probably would gain her some votes that go beyond her personal popularity.

Just what does Cindy Sheehan think she can accomplish by this threat?

Reviving this blog!

It's been about a year since I last posted on this blog. I guess it's hard to keep up the enthusiasm when there's no sign that anyone's been looking at the blog. But I'm going to try to revive the blog now, and post more frequently. If anyone is looking at the blog, I hope they'll comment on a post!

The Pledge of Allegiance controversy

One of the most internal-conflict-generating issues to me is the controversy on the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. On the one hand, I have no problem saying the Pledge with those words. They do not conflict in any way with my own religious beliefs. On the other hand, it certainly seems that the atheists' fight to avoid saying the words is the same as my fight in the 7th grade to avoid singing Christmas carols, with their explicitly Christian words, and thus my instinct is to support them.

But the atheists' position in many of their legal fights has been grossly intolerant of those who, like myself, firmly do believe in a God, including some ideas that might actually be loosely subsumed under the heading "intelligent design." So I find it uncomfortable to be allied with them. And when we look at the most recent Pledge fight, in which an atheist father sued on behalf of a daughter who did not share his beliefs, it seems to me that the atheists on their part are equally coercive as their religious counterparts, and I cannot accept that.

Is there some way to civilly and rationally discuss this issue? Even more importantly, is there some way of settling this issue that will respect the rights of all people involved?

The stem cell veto

While I'm ordinarily favorably inclined toward Pres. George W. Bush, his alignment with the religious right causes me problems. He seems actually to believe in their positions, so one cannot consider it "kowtowing to the religious right," but it is unfortunate that a President who has been so good on a lot of issues has to be so bad on this one.

Certainly the stem cell veto has nothing to do with "conservatism" vs. "liberalism": Nancy Reagan, certainly one of the most conservative people in recent politics (it is she who turned Ronald Reagan into a conservative, after all! He'd been a pro-FDR union leader in the forties, if you don't know it), supported the bill strongly, as she was aware of the technological gains that could derive from stem cell research. No, what it does have to do with is the religious right's attempt to conform all of us to their ideas of what is moral and what isn't. And that is the way of the Taliban.

If you go back to the very first post on this blog, I said I believed that "[n]o person has a right to have his own beliefs on religious, moral, political, or other controversial issues imposed on others who do not share those beliefs." And I believe this firmly. One thing that needs to be done is to reclaim the Republican Party from the religious right. It can't be done by voting for Democrats, who have their own agenda which is even more harmful to the nation. But it needs to be done by moving within the Republican Party to support those who are willing to take on the religious right.

More on Intelligent Design vs. Creationism

One of the earliest posts on this blog had to do with people confounding creationism and intelligent design. It is certainly true that creationists must believe in ID, but not vice versa.

So it is nice to see that a book was recently published by David DeWolf, John West, Casey Luskin, and Jonathan Witt which discusses the difference between the two. I haven't yet read the book, but I've read an interview given by one of the authors in a local Washington, D. C. paper, and it looks like something worth reading.

Giuliani for President?

Recently in a campaign appearance for Robert Ehrlich, running for reelection as Governor of Maryland, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani said he was "considering" running for President in 2008. And Ehrlich made some remarks that almost sounded like an endorsement.

I've already said what I think about Giuliani -- he'd make a great President, but I doubt he can get the GOP nomination. I still think the same, though it is beginning to look as if he's becoming a serious candidate. This blog is not ready to endorse him as candidate for the nomination, but if he's nominated, I'd be happy to endorse him for election, and if Condi Rice (or someone else I like equally) doesn't turn into a competing candidate for the nomination, I will endorse him for the nomination.

John Podhoretz and Rudy Giuliani

Yesterday I saw a book by John Podhoretz, the main thrust of which was that Hillary Clinton needs to be prevented from becoming President, and there are certainly a lot of things that the book says with which I agree. But I’m not going to go into what he says about Hillary here. I noted, however, that the book’s cover mentions that in the book Podhoretz makes a surprising endorsement for the nominee to run against her, and I looked inside to see who it was. It turned out that he supports a person who’s been mentioned favorably by me in this blog: former mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York.

But as I read the chapter in question, it became clear that Podhoretz does not understand what makes Giuliani the person he is. Podhoretz makes the mistake that a lot of dogmatic conservatives (and, in mirror image, a lot of dogmatic liberals) do: he assumes that a person who shares many of his ideas with the conservative (or liberal) dogma agrees with all of that point of view. And thus, Podhoretz thinks that Giuliani’s ideas on such topics as abortion and gay rights are not what he has stated, but are in fact the conservative ideas that Podhoretz would like them to be. He seems to think that Giuliani only proclaimed himself on the so-called “liberal” side of those issues to get elected in liberal New York City. And Podhoretz is wrong.

If Giuliani were to take a position opposed to his real beliefs on any issue for the sake of election, it would be on an economic issue, not a social one. New York City is dominated by organized labor, and Giuliani’s real courage was shown by his taking on the city’s unions. That he was willing to do so shows that he really has the courage of his convictions. I think that part of Podhoretz’s error is in his thinking that, because Giuliani took on an “anti-Catholic” exhibit by the Brooklyn Museum, his loyal Catholicism would not permit him to take a position opposed to that of the Catholic Church on those issues just mentioned. And a Giuliani who is willing to fight the labor unions in New York City is certainly strong enough to have his own opinions on social issues, even when they run counter to Catholic doctrine.

Certainly, it is the opinion of this blogger that Giuliani would make a good President. But Podhoretz’s book misstates the case for him.

One thing to cheer about, anyway...

The al-Qaida leader in Iraq, Al-Zarqawi, has been killed. Not quite Osama bin Laden, but actually at the present, he was in a position to cause more trouble than bin Laden.

Never thought I'd agree with her, but...

Senator Dianne Feinstein was quoted as saying, in regard to the "gay marriage ban" vote in the Senate:

"Why is it when Republicans are all for reducing the federal government's impact on people's lives until it comes to these stinging litmus test issues, whether gay marriage or end of life, they suddenly want the federal government to intervene?"

One must give credit where credit is due; Sen. Feinstein is absolutely right here. But if she is accusing the Republicans of a sort of hypocrisy in their action on this sort of issues, let's look at her own Democratic Party. The Democrats are all for helping the poor, so they say, but if making things more affordable, so that the poor can afford them, means hurting their organized-labor constituency, then suddenly the Democrats can't bring themselves to do what would help poor people immensely. Each party has its own acts of hypocrisy. The Republicans sometimes kowtow to religious bigots, and the Democrats kowtow to labor barons who can control the economy to a greater extent than any corporate baron ever did.

Fallacies of the “Pro-Life” Position

Recently I was reading an article on the Roe v. Wade issue in the “National Review,” a conservative (and Catholic-sympathetic) magazine, and it made me think about the topic.

People opposed to abortions call themselves “pro-life,” and their position seems to rest on a number of fallacies. I think some of these need to be made explicit.

First, one point they continuously make is that “life begins at conception.” Actually, it doesn’t. A sperm cell and an egg cell are “alive,” no less than is a fertilized egg. Biology points out that life comes only from life, and spontaneous generation was disproved many decades ago, even centuries ago.

But even if life began at conception, is it always improper to take a life? We eat meat, which comes from killed animals, and even vegetarians eat food which was produced by killing plants (which are certainly “alive” in any sense of the word)! So the question boils down to whether the taking of a human life is involved. And then the question arises as to what is a human being.

I have seen it claimed that what is created at conception is an “independent genotype.” And certainly it is true that the fertilized egg is different, genetically, from either sperm or egg, and also different, genetically, from either father or mother. But if what makes a separate person is an “independent genotype,” you are denying the personhood of an identical twin! This would mean that killing one of a pair of identical twins is no worse than amputating a leg. I cannot see any argument based on genotypic identity that would differentiate the two. So there is no way that this basis for characterizing personhood can fly.

It is to me quite obvious that the only way to define “a new human being” is to ask if it is capable of surviving without being connected to the mother’s body through a placenta. This is the “viability criterion,” and no other definition makes sense. So let the anti-abortion group assert that the fetus can be delivered and survive, and if this is so, it would be unethical to abort it.

The argument has been made that “what modern medicine can keep alive” continually changes. I do not deny this. But just as we do not try to keep alive someone who is incurably ill when he has passed a certain point, and this point changes as modern medicine improves, the point at which abortion is foreclosed by viability can change with time. This is not inconsistent.

Some people wish to impose their beliefs on others. Whether these are Catholics who want others to deny abortions based on Catholic definitions of “a human life” or others who want Catholic doctors to abort when it violates their scruples, this is wrong. But let the individuals involved make the decisions.

Why a libertarian might favor gun control

I hold opinions, as I've expressed here, that are generally quite libertarian. But I believe in very strict gun control, probably stricter than most who do not share my libertarianism would have. How do I justify this?

The libertarian credo is that everything should be legal unless it harms another person. Guns have no purpose except to kill, and so I cannot see any reason that a normal person could have a use for a gun. I would restrict gun ownership to two groups of people: the police and the military. Both of these have a need to be able to kill as part of their official duty, and so they need guns.

Some people say, "When guns are illegal, only outlaws will have guns." Of course; by definition, because those with guns will be outlaws, and mere possession could be an excuse for their arrest and confiscation of the guns. So criminals could be deprived of their guns before they could use them to do anything harmful. Why would an honest person have anything to fear?

Again, some people say, "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." Certainly true -- I've never seen a gun go off and kill someone without someone touching it. But guns make it easier for people to kill people. If you have to use your own personal strength, or at least a knife, and you have to get to a position of physical contact with a victim, you'll have a harder time accomplishing this deed.

So this is my case for gun control, no matter how much of a libertarian I am.

Candidates for 2008

Some people have been touting Condoleezza Rice or Rudy Giuliani for President in 2008. Both would be great choices, but unfortunately the Republican Party is not going to nominate either. The Religious Right is not going to tolerate someone who won't jam down their ideas about abortion down people's throats (Giuliani) and too many of the Southerners who joined the party around the time that Strom Thurmond did will block an African-American woman (even if she stands for everything that I think is good about the Republican Party) from the nomination.

Too bad. I think either one would make a better candidate than the ones likely to be nominated. I'd once had a healthy respect for Bill Frist, a heart surgeon, not a lawyer, and definitely a person with some intelligence that even the Democrats (who have thought Eisenhower, Reagan, and the current president were dunces) could not denigrate -- but he lost all my respect in the Terri Schiavo episode. For him to go counter to everything that medical evidence dictates really showed that he'd become such a pure politician that he'd do something idiotic just to gain the votes of the right wing of the GOP. And McCain is trying to take up the left flank of the GOP, partnering with Teddy Kennedy on immigration reform as he did with Russ Feingold on campaign reform, even though his actual background is rather conservative. There aren't enough people on the left in the GOP to nominate him, as he should have realized from 2004. Only in states where non-Republicans could vote in GOP primaries did he do well. And this is a small part of the 50 states that will elect delegates to the convention.

Besides Frist and McCain, nobody else seems to even be considered as a GOP candidate for 2008. Perhaps it'll be someone nobody's talking about, the way Jimmy Carter did it on the Democratic side?

The immigration controversy

Why do people seem to act as if the only choices in dealing with illegal aliens are amnesty or deporting everyone? It seems as if requiring them to pay any penalties and to learn enough English and civics to become a citizen would not really be amnesty, which to me means forgetting all their crimes, and yet this is a minimal requirement in my mind. Some people remark about the US being a nation of immigrants, but there is a big difference between immigrants who arrived and obeyed our laws about entry (on the one hand) and people sneaking across the border, in violation of US law (on the other).

But this seems to be as impossible an issue to compromise on as abortion. Heaven knows why.

Feingold's censure motion

Looks as if Feingold is doing his Don Quixote thing again. He probably is the furthest from the mainstream of all 100 of the Senators. Censuring the President for taking a strong security position, at a time when others in Congress are faulting him for insufficient attention to security in the Dubai Ports episode, can only build the President's esteem in the eyes of most citizens. But it might help Feingold in Democratic presidential primaries in 2008, as we see what kind of primary voters the Democrats seem to have from our recollections of 2004.