http://thefinman.blogspot.com/2006/04/finman-exclusive-project-ugly-exposed.html

Awesome

What you're advocating- in respect to what opinion writers ought to do- sounds eerily like China's efforts to get its newspapers to promote the "harmonious society" above all else.

I'd actually say that the fact that journalists can criticize and challenge our administration's management of the war is healthier for the so-called "long war" than any concerted effort to get them to flex their patriotic muscles.

An interesting essay and dead on. However, I don't recall us being all that united during the cold war. More united than today, yes.

In the 50's there were a few voices of dissent, but as we entered the 60's, the united front began to unravel at home. Cuba was a disaster. Vietnam was a major catalyst. By the mid-seventies, we were on the defensive and socialism was on the march around the globe. And that was just fine with many here.

It took Reagan in the early 80's and his policies to arm, to confront the soviets and not appease them, that finally in the end prevailed. This was not done without massive oppostion.

Reagan's policies were in no small part aided by the fact that the Soviets had run their economy into the ground and could not possibly hope to outrun us in an arms race or even sustain a decent standard of living for their own people.

The Vietnam anti-war movement didn't just die, it morphed into anti-Americanism that has opposed all of our military efforts. El Salvador was vigorously opposed. Nicaragua's Sandanistas had and have many friends here. Their is no inisgnificant sentiment to abandon Taiwan and Israel to the wolves.

I think what is different now is that many here actively advocate for our defeat at the hands of the terrorists. Remember Michael Moore's statement that the Iraqi 'insurgents' "are today's minutemen, and they will win." Or the proffesor who wished a "million Moghadishus(sp?) on the US."
This coupled with a relentlessly hostile press.

But most worrisome of all, today we have an opposition party that has no alternative policy, but that simply reflexively opposes any move this administration makes and cravenly exploits this war for partisan political purposes in a manner that would have been unthinkable 40 years ago. A party that has sold out to its lunatic fringe and lost, in its desperation to regain power, any sense of pulling together to overcome a common foe. They don't even admit to the full extent of the danger of today's situation. On a sinking ship, their only concern would be going down first class.

I wish we had an opposition party that we could take seriously and I think that this will hurt us in the long run.

Almost as damning is this administration's failure to articulate its positions. Steyn and Hitchens and others have done far more to articulate the nature of the enemy we face.

I agree that the media will have a critical role in a long-term ideological struggle. But you need to look in much more detail at what power each segment of the media wields, and how that power can be used to help the West or its enemies. For example, does the news media or Hollywood have the most power to shape perceptions? If an ideological struggle is a struggle of narratives, fiction may be as influential as fact. What is the role of bloggers, and can citizen media be more powerful than traditional media? And so on...

You're on to something important, but you really need to look at the fine detail. Saying that "the media" may be the arm of decision is like saying that airpower was the arm of decision in WWII. It may be true, but it's not very helpful. You need to know what role each type of airpower - fighters, heavy bombers, etc. - played and how they had to be used in order to be decisive.

On Jill Carroll:

Nah, I think her release is a sign of weakness.

Looking back, the ability to cut off a living human being’s head with a knife that takes about 10 strokes, video tape the struggle and the victim screaming while you and your henchmen yell “God is great”, and hold up the severed head by the hair for the camera can only be done people that have a souls that bubbled up from the depths of hell.

Well my friends, we have sent many of those souls back down to where they belong. I’m not saying today’s terrorists are softer and can thus be reasoned with. All I’m saying is, “WE ARE WINNING!”

Last week NYTimes ran an AP piece on Carroll that said "it is unclear why the kidnappers released her." I wrote them, pointing out that it is obvious why they released her: her family didn't simply assert that killing her would not serve their cause, the took active steps to make sure that her death would hurt their cause.

We need to start calling a spade a spade.

Or grab them by their short hairs to get their attention.

This essay explains the reasons why so many Americans seem bent on the destruction of their nation (to those of us who still believe in the Lockean, individualist tradition that underlies classical liberalism and the U.S. Constitution).

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260#comments

Stephan,
For a major expansion on your spot on thinking here, check out the following two essays.
Well, they are less media oriented than your post, but certainly info the media and your readers should be aware of.
Mike

http://www.policyreview.org/000/corn.html

http://www.policyreview.org/000/mazarr.html

Stephen - in your essay you listed a number of things that we need in order to win a long ideological war. In the process of enumerating those needs, you would follow up with suggestions basically saying that "they don't."

Unfortunately, those descriptions aren't quite accurate.

Where it comes to the primary schools teaching patriotism, it's not that they don't - the problem is that they won't. Not just do not, WILL not.

Same with the public thinkers and the need to defend laws and our way of life - they WON'T.

Ditto the entertainers.

As to the politicians showing some amount of backbone amounting to WSC, I believe the more accurate definition is that they CAN'T - because doing so would so peg them as being "extremist" or racisthomophobebigotsexistblahblahblah that they could never get a fair shake in the media. The sine qua non of politics these days is compromise, and anyone who indicates that they are not willing to compromise on an issue that tickles the public fancy instantly becomes a nail sticking up, requiring a largish hammer to strike down.

I believe that media has indeed taken sides in this conflict.

I also believe their declining market share (and relavence) is directly proportional to their consumers' recognizing what side they are on.

Pals have been blowing up Israelis for five decades. The Islamists widened their target set beginning in 1979 and had a good long run to get used to "gestures" from Western countries in response. They killed my friends beginning in 1983 and lately in 2002 and 05.

The Coalition has been in existence for going on five years. It's participants have contributed what they could, based on their national interests and political climates. The western powers on the outside of the active conflict - france & most of continental Europe - are watching the demographic and economic countdown to the time when they will be outnumbered in their own countries and too broke to pay further jizra. Our media sees Bush as a long standing affront to be corrected, and relegates the Islamist threat to at best a background noise in their news cycles, at worst as a tool to be used toward their own ends.

Stephen, I too fear the "what they might do" that will finally get us into the fight we should be fighting already. Given the political realities on the home ground and the insanity that passes for strategic thinking on the part of the enemy, I think it is more "when", not "if" the moment will come.

The Islamists desperately need their own incarnation of Martin Luther. We can always find another Lemay. We will, too.

I think you meant U of SSR

I am old enough to remember the early years of the Cold War. There was plenty of dissent in those days. And much of it was surrenderist. The slogan, "Better Red Than Dead," caused many to question the Mutually Assured Destruction policy. Unilateral Disarmers, under the "Ban the Bomb" banner, compelled conservatives to advance a populist movement in defense of MAD. The lead intellectual of the movement was: Gerhart Niemeyer.
Download this PDF file for insight:
www.mmisi.org/ir/33_01/henry.pdf
Respectfully, I cannot support any revival of MAD where the other party is Islamofascists. As Denis Prager recently said, the current enemy is much more vile than were Nazism, Japanese Militarism and Communism. I advise everyone to support application of the Bush-Doctrine of Pre-emption, in whatever form that takes. I only recently discovered the depth of perversity of the enemy. I will never waver in my belief in the need for resolution and finality in face of the current proliferation crisis. The future is in the balance.

Respectfully, I cannot support any revival of MAD where the other party is Islamofascists.

I concur. MAD was a 20th-C way to destroy large, centralized enemies in known locations.

I do not think it is going to be useful against our current adversary, which is small, decentralized, and operates covertly.

We need to develop new strategies. Unfortunately, the Democrats seem to have gone reactionary, insisting that the old strategies will be effective against the new adversary.

On the sad state of the opposition party:

There were plenty of Americans who were against getting into the Iraq war in the first place. Well, right or wrong, now we're here, and some of us (initially anti-war) folks would really like to get over our initial opposition and deal with current reality. I would be willing to back a practical set of solutions to the situation we've done a fair amount to create in Iraq, and I'm not tied to a political party enough to care who offers it. I'm looking for a way to move forward, instead of looking back at the haphazard way we entered the war.

Problem is, no one is articulating that clear set of solutions. Not liberal academia, which is still stuck on "we shouldn't have gone there in the first place." Not Hollywood, which is stuck on storytelling and muckraking. Not K-12, which is stuck with "No Child Left Behind" and patriotism isn't on any standardized tests. Not the Republicans, who are still covering their asses from the deceptions it took to get us into the war.

And not the Democrats, not yet. They're too busy rehashing the recent past to articulate any strong ideas about how to move Iraq into the future. There are a lot of reasons the current political majority often look like idiots when it comes to the war. But it would be really, really nice--and much more effective--to stop finger-pointing and start problem-solving.

Let's have a talk about how many soldiers it would take at this point to quash the insurgency. Let's talk about private industries and what it would take to invest in Iraq's infrastructure. Let's get some people who know the history of the bloody Shiite-Sunni conflicts in the region to talk about what we can do to prevent civil war.

Not hearing those conversations from any prominent leaders, even though I'm searching for them.

Well, if you are in for a long fight, its best to have a set of goals in mind and a way to get to them. And since no party has offered that up, I decided to do them a favor and help out.

To help achieve the goal of making Transnational Terrorism hard to sustain, you need something to combat it. As military power, law enforcement, statecraft and everything else the Executive can muster isn't up to the task, that leaves the fight up to Congress with its powers. Heaven help us as the spineless, gelatinous, wooly masses of the Congress don't have any courage to do so. Too afraid of their Power to unleash the American People. Might let the People realize that we can be very effective. Can't have that in the Zero Party State, now, can we?

Now, as for the Muddle East, anything is better than Totalitarian States hooking up with Transnational Terrorists. And I do mean anything, even absolute chaos.

Next up is education. Since 1958 Johnny Can't Read and now, in 2005, he still can't at about the same rate as 1958. All the money poured into helping education has not helped one bit. Time to scrap a system that tried to address a problem and, instead institutionalized the problem itself. Yes, I offer up something for that, too. Remove the establishment, block grant the funds, set up the goals of education to be met and pay proportionately based on performance without regard to institution. That said, the Federal funds can *only* be used for education. Let the State and local folks handle it, for it is their problem.

So, before I go pointing a finger in blame or expecting some politico to save me, I first have to see what there might be that would actually be 'effective' in saving me. Because, if I am drowning, someone handing me a brick is not something I need. But a helping hand is always appreciated.

And if this post is a more or less duplicate, forgive me as there seems to be a problem with such here and I needed to retype it.

If my solutions have been presented before, it is because the same questions have been asked before.

...and the jacksonian's questions have indeed been asked here and elsewhere many times, usually answered with the same basic approach to the problems stated.

And. Nothing. Gets. Done.

Blogfaddah has it about correct - if anyone of any national credence picks up those ideas and runs with them, then we will absolutely see President Clinton Part Deux come 2009, because that will split the GOP in the South and the Intermoutain West sufficiently enough for a 40% popular vote to carry the day - IOW, Perot redux.

If the GOP had stayed with the Contract With America rather than betting on Pork Futures, they'd be in a whole lot better shape right now.

One other thing: The Russkies didn't want to die in the cold war. In the long war, these nutjobs want to die so they can get their virgins.

Why they think they have to die to get virgins I don't know. I'm going to the San Diego Comic Con this summer, there will be plenty of virgins there.

The problem with the Left is that they are about moral relativism, not American and Western exceptionalism. They don't believe that what we have to offer is any better than what someone else has to offer, just "different", which results in a lack of morals and not understanding right from wrong. When you lose that, you lose the backbone to act in defense of yourself, or your country.
Unfortunately, the media, the public schools, the libraries are all stacked with Lefties.

"the libraries are all stacked with Lefties."

Is this a pun?

JD - That is sad, but true.

Bringing accountability via Treaty and trade relations is difficult, and the Executive can only go so far.

Terrorism lives on money from wealthy countries with an interest in destabilizing the Nation State for their own reasons. The job of Congress is to ensure regularization of trade, safety of such trade and ensuring that trade does not go to help the avowed enemies of the United States.

They took an Oath on that.

This President has exercised powers only a bit less than Lincoln, FDR, Eisenhower and JFK and is castigated for doing so. By not naming the problem properly early on and putting Congress on notice that Terrorism in all its forms that destroy the integrity of Nation states and the relations between them is destroying the foundation of this country and the entire conception of State to State relations.

When each and every member of the Executive branch testifies before Congress and in response as to how the war on Terrorism goes, comes up with: 'Well, we are doing everything we can, but it is not enough', one would think that Congress would figure out that there is a SECOND branch of Government that gets War powers.

Perhaps they don't read the document they Swear to uphold.

Perhaps they have memory problems.

Perhaps they fear using their powers as it would leave them accountable.

And, perhaps, they fear putting the American people's courage and ingenuity to the test of bringing down global Terrorist organizations.

535 Members of Royalty upon the Hill.

I will not vote for any of these Congresscritters ever again for anything.

For if they cannot defend the very *concept* of this Nation, then they are, through inaction, working to bring it down.