The Strident Centrist Blog

“Fabius Maximus”, who posts frequently at Defense in the National Interest, has some insightful observations on what’s behind the recent riots in the ethnic suburbs of Paris and other French Cities:

What caused the riots?

The French Government abandoned the great ring cities around Paris — funding their inhabitants but ceding effective control over their lives to community groups such as gangs and mosques. Police and social workers seldom go there, so the inhabitants developed their own polity. This is the critical factor. The government is not facing insurgents attempting to wrest control of their people from France. The local gangs and mosques represent the established powers. The government is attempting to regain what it has surrendered.

Therefore the riots are to some extent a geographically based phenomenon, hence the diversity of religions and ethnicities in the rioters – an important and overlooked aspect. Having been abandoned once, these communities – largely second and third generation immigrants – seem unlikely to easily give their loyalty to the State. That opportunity was lost with their parents and grandparents.

Here we see the Decline of the State in tangible form.

I find it troubling that FM and other such commentators, including William Lind and John Robb, seem to accept that the decline of the state is inevitable. If that is so, the alternative brings to mind the legend on the edges of ancient maps: There Be Dragons. Churchill once said that democracy is the worst form of government; except for all the others. Similarly, if one reads the history of Europe up through the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War, one could say that the state is the worst way to politically organize society, except for its alternatives. Perhaps we humans should put more thought and effort into restoring our faith in the state.

This YouTube video clip was taken in conjunction with the recent Democratic Presidential Candidate Debate held in Las Vegas, and features interviews with candidates Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Sen. Joe Biden as well as Howard Dean, the chair of the Democratic National Committee. The fascinating part, however is at the end when Kucinich’s wife, Elizabeth, is asked whether or not her husband would ever consider running on a ticket with Rep. Ron Paul, the hard-core libertarian seeking the GOP nomination. The interviewer asked the question in a jocular manner, never expecting her to offer a serious response, but respond she did. She praised Paul as a truth-teller like her husband and definitely did not rule such an alternative out.

If I recall correctly, Paul has already made it explicit that he will have a hard time supporting any of the other likely Republican nominees. Furthermore, I also recall reading that Elizabeth Kucinich is deeply involved in her husband’s campaign strategy, which if true suggests that her obvious eagerness to respond as she did was in no way a slip of the tongue. Indeed, might the question have been planted suggested?

This raises the possibility that we may see what could be called a “broad-spectrum” third party presidential ticket. Of course, this would be far from a marriage made in heaven. Aside from their general agreement on the urgent need for the restoration of full Constitutional government at home and for a greatly reduced and more benign military and economic footprint abroad, progressive Democrat Kucinich and libertarian Republican Paul are at opposite poles on virtually all other policy issues. Thus the tugging will begin with who gets the top line on the ticket and go on from there. If it comes to pass, though, a Kucinich/Paul (or Paul/Kucinich) ticket would be a genuine black swan in the 2008 election cycle.

Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake passes along some follow-up questions “real reporters” might have asked, but didn’t, in response to Dana Perino’s soft shoe around her predecessor as White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s assertion in his forthcoming book that he was given lies to spout on the Bush-Cheney administration’s behalf.

– Dana, that was a well-parsed dodge of an answer. Did the President stand by and allow others in the Administration to ask his spokesperson to pass on false information?

– Did the President knowingly allow members of the administration to feed false information to his spokesperson so that it would be passed to the public? And, a quick follow-up, if not, is the president always so unaware of what members of his staff are doing?

– Was the false information passed on by Karl Rove? And, if so, when did the President ascertain that Mr. Rove was passing on outright lies to the American public through the presidential spokesperson? What affirmative steps did the president take to be certain that the lies were corrected publicly, if any? Why did Mr. Rove then continue to work for the Bush Administration for _______ months — that whole “we’re going to restore character to the White House” thing was really just a slogan, wasn’t it, Dana?

Unfortunately this story is too off-the-wall for The Onion. Or should I say too true. Instead it’s from KDKA, Pittsburgh, one of the oldest broadcast franchises in the nation:

The U.S. Military is demanding that thousands of wounded service personnel give back signing bonuses because they are unable to serve out their commitments.

To get people to sign up, the military gives enlistment bonuses up to $30,000 in some cases.

Now men and women who have lost arms, legs, eyesight, hearing and can no longer serve are being ordered to pay some of that money back.

One of them is Jordan Fox, a young soldier from the South Hills.

That’s right! If you can’t serve out the full term of your enlistment because you got a leg or two blown off or an eye permanently damaged, the DoD demands a prorated part of your signing bonus back.

If the future Joseph Heller of the Iraq war put this in his manuscript it would never clear the first cut at the publisher. (h/t to TPMmuckraker)

You may remember this famous picture taken by Luis Sinco, who was embedded with the Marines during the Battle of Fallujah three years ago this month. Although he didn’t even know the name of the Marine at the time, Mr. Sinco has since become former Lance Corporal Blake Miller’s most stalwart support as he deals with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Here’s the story in Luis Sinco’s own words in the Guardian Online. It’s futile to try to excerpt anything from this story and do it justice. Read the whole moving thing. (h/t to Abu Muqawama)

An art teacher who was the only veteran on staff at her school was asked to discuss the significance of Veterans Day with the government classes. The Feral Scholar posts her moving essay about the experience. (I’m at a loss to select, or even think of, a category in which this truly fits, so I’ll click “National Security” and leave it at that.)

It would appear that Victor Davis Hanson, a sometime military historian cum neo-conservative propaganda flack periodically found perching at places like the National Review Online, poked his stick into the wrong hornets’ nest, namely that of Lt. Col. Robert Bateman, a regular at Small Wars Journal, an academic military historian and, of course, a serving officer in the U.S. Army. Here’s Bateman:

Hanson’s dismissals of those who would correct the record he distorted are based upon two biases: “Campus liberals” would engage in culture wars, and “non-military historians” don’t know about military history and are thus unqualified to speak on the topic at hand. Sometimes he combines the two techniques when attacking those with the temerity to critique him. One typical Hanson response to a critic who did not identify their political party will suffice to illustrate. Said Hanson to the reader, “Unfortunately you know nothing of history and so like most on the Left think that your age, your circumstances, your views are always unique and transcend some 231 years of our America past. Do you know anything about the winter of 1776? Or the summer of 1864, or Spring 1917? Or the Pacific in 1944, or the Bulge, or November 1950? There an “incompetent group of people” did not manage a war that lost 3,000, but almost 100,000 dead and wounded alone in 2 months in the Ardennes, or 50,000 casualties in 6 weeks on Okinawa.”

Well Mr. Hanson, it so happens that I do, in fact, know a wee bit about the Winter of ’76, the Summer of 1864, and the Spring of 1917. (Though why you would cite the Spring of 1917 is curious in itself as a stand-alone statement. That Spring, you see, there were no Americans in ground combat yet. Indeed we were not yet at war until that Spring was halfway over. So why you didn’t mention the much more appropriate Spring of 1918, when the German’s Plan Michael/Spring Offensive created a crisis for the Allies and the first American ground combat forces were thrown into the line to stem the tide is beyond me. It does, however, seem to suggest that you don’t know what you are talking about.) I also know about the Pacific in 1944, and the Ardennes Campaign of December 44/January 45, and I assure you that I know about not just November, but all of 1950.

I know all of these things, and because I am a military historian and believe that your personal technique of torturing the facts until they conform to your thesis is hurting America, and that your personal signal work, Carnage and Culture, is a pile of poorly constructed, deliberately misleading, intellectually dishonest feces. I believe it is my personal obligation to try and correct the record and demonstrate for as many people as possible, why they should not believe you when you try to cite history in support of any of your personal shiny little pet rocks.

Start the popcorn popper. This should be fun!

It’s almost completely absent from the mainstream media, and addressed in only a few blogs, including UMM biology prof P.Z. Myers and science writer Chris Mooney’s. But Cyclone Sidr is expected to come ashore in Bangladesh tomorrow. Sidr is now a strong category 4 storm (sustained winds near 150 MPH) and so far has not weakened as predicted as it approaches landfall. There are tens of millions of people in its target area where the Ganges flows into the Indian Ocean, one of the lowest deltas on Earth. Loss of life will almost certainly dwarf that of Katrina and in the worst case could approach or even exceed the 200K plus of the Indian Ocean tsunami of December, 2004.

Here’s Why. The link shows maps and scatter plots of vote distributions between the two major parties in each state for three population groups sorted by income: poor, middle-income, and rich. The data are based on the 2004 contest between Bush an Kerry.

Considering the fact that the poor substantially outnumber the rich, and assuming that the non-voting poor in each state would vote in the same proportions as the voting poor, if the “poor turnout” were equal in percentage to the middle income turnout I suspect it’s likely that the resultant map would tilt toward the blue.

Several interesting facts are noted in the comments:

The maps don’t include Alaska and Hawaii, although the scatter plots do

Except for Texas, the only red states on the “poor” map are in the northern and central planes and mountain states, which means they are over-represented in the electoral college because of the smaller populations.

On the “middle income” map, the states are also weighted toward over-representation in the EC, except for Florida and Texas.

The data are not based on actual votes in 2004, but on polls, both pre- and post-election.

Writing in the December issue of Vanity Fair, the Nobel Prize-winning economist has this to say about the damage done to the US economy by Bush and Cheney:

After almost seven years of this president, the United States is less prepared than ever to face the future. We have not been educating enough engineers and scientists, people with the skills we will need to compete with China and India. We have not been investing in the kinds of basic research that made us the technological powerhouse of the late 20th century. And although the president now understands—or so he says—that we must begin to wean ourselves from oil and coal, we have on his watch become more deeply dependent on both.

Up to now, the conventional wisdom has been that Herbert Hoover, whose policies aggravated the Great Depression, is the odds-on claimant for the mantle “worst president” when it comes to stewardship of the American economy. Once Franklin Roosevelt assumed office and reversed Hoover’s policies, the country began to recover. The economic effects of Bush’s presidency are more insidious than those of Hoover, harder to reverse, and likely to be longer-lasting. There is no threat of America’s being displaced from its position as the world’s richest economy. But our grandchildren will still be living with, and struggling with, the economic consequences of Mr. Bush.

And that’s not the half of it.