Violence is the Spice of Life or The Condiments Strike Back

At Loved Ones Day on Wednesday (the girls' school's politically correct version of Parents Day), Lori and I were sitting with Emelie going through a little packet of Thanksgiving games the teacher prepared. There were miscellaneous word searches and math exercises, all having to do with the holiday. On one page, there were about 20 scrambled words that each corresponded to some sort of food item or utensil involved with the Thanksgiving feast. As we worked from the top down, Emelie was pretty self-sufficient in figuring out the answers. Forks, plates, spoons, gravy. You get the point.

The last two words stumped her a bit. With a little prodding, she deciphered "pepper". The final, four-letter word froze her. ALTS. She looked at it, cocked her a bit, and glanced up at us for help. "What goes with pepper, honey?" we offered. No response. We prompted, "On the table, there's pepper aaaannnddd...?"

To which she tentatively replied, "Spray?" Lori and I cracked up.

Leaves me wondering if the words were reversed and I asked "What goes with a salt, sweetie?" if she'd say, "Battery?"

Yeah, I've become THAT guy

On Sunday, while chatting on the phone and looking casually out a window along the front of our house, I spied four little neighborhood kids playing beside our front yard. Not IN the front yard, per se, but on the sidewalk that borders it. They had a dodge ball and were playing something like cricket with their hands. Four out of five balls they struck wound up rolling up into our grass and one of them would gleefully run up to retrieve it, getting more and more excited each time it went further into the lawn.

Such a happy little scene. I decided it was time to put an end to that shit.

I strolled out to the front patio and watched them nonchalantly, with the phone still to my ear. The smallest girl (probably 5) eyed me nervously as I stood there quietly. The oldest boy (I'm guessing he's 11 or 12) continued to take pitches from his presumed sister. The two of them are loud little bohemians. I can't say they're particularly malicious or rude little kids, but good God they're loud! Our next-door neighbors and we comment on how loud the kids are. They're Chinese and, frankly, the entire family is friggin' loud. They stand two feet from each other and just shriek. I'm sorry, but there's nothing intriguing, subtle or romantic about that language. It sounds like cats being put through a metal press to me.

So, the kids hit two or three more balls up into the yard. I spoke out to them with a "Hey." Not a shouting reprimand, just trying to get their attention. A fourth kid who was playing with them, a scrawny Indian boy of probably 7 or 8, stood to attention. The two little Chinese kids kept playing, seemingly oblivious.

After the next hit, I made eye contact with the hyper boy as he circled up through the newer portion of the lawn. Adding volume, I informed him "I really don't want you guys playing in my lawn. It's new grass and I don't want you tearing it up." Which is only half true. It IS new grass, but we've passed the danger point when you can't walk on it. I didn't need to tell them that. Our position on the corner of the intersection seems to invite people to think that our front lawn is common area. The neighborhood landscapers frequently short cut across it, leaving big tire imprints in my manicured cutting pattern with their mowers. I've seen people let their dogs nose around in the lawn. I'm not about to have these deafening rugrats lay claim to my yard.

Acknowledging my instruction, the boy bellows and gestures wildly "OKAY, LET'S MOVE BACK UP THE SIDEWALK AND BLAH BLAH BLAH." The thing is, he lives across the street. Moving 10 feet up the sidewalk will undoubtedly result in them meandering back into my grass. So I say, "What's wrong with YOUR yard?" To their credit, they took the hint quickly. They scrambled across the street to go molest the ears and landscaping of the families over there.

As I walked back into the house, I realized that I was just a few words shy of being the "Hey you kids, get off my lawn!" guy. But, you know what? I've got no problem with that.

Going for the Gold

Ever since we moved into this house, we've been masterminding the adoption of a dog. It's been more than 12 years since we've had a pooch in the family, and I've been extremely anxious to afford the girls the joy of having a dog while they're still young. Living in the condo for all of those years precluded us from making it happen.

A dedicated dog yard was always planned. Now that the landscaping is done, all canine systems are go.

Our eyes have been set on a Golden Retriever since Day One and we've been not-so-subtle about our indoctrination of the girls. The dog is aligned to be Sydney's (as the cat is Emelie's), and we've plied her with Golden Retriever books and wall calendars.

Last week, we filed our application with the Golden Retriever Rescue of Greater Los Angeles. It was a 45-question form that was very thorough in its examination. I was looking for the field that asked me to upload a urine sample. A day after filing the application, we were scheduled for our home visit. That took place this past Sunday. It gives a volunteer from the organization the opportunity to see your home, meet the family, and determine your overall worthiness to adopt. I found myself strangely anxious about the interview. I felt compelled to shave my usual weekend scruff off and wear a collared shirt.

The visit included a 10-year old rescued Golden who was brought along to test the girls reaction. And our cat's. All performed admirably and resulted in us being approved to adopt. The morning of our interview, the site listing all the dogs available for adoption unexpectedly added five nine-week old puppies who are absolutely gorgeous. You can see them here (although I imagine this link will be gone shortly, along with the dogs.)

After furious and persistent emailing to the foster home, we find ourselves in an apparent adoption war. Our home-visiting volunteer has reached out on our behalf, but apparently the woman caring for the dogs has been inundated with 100 applications. The email has gone disturbingly quiet and I fear there are back door dealings going on for the favors of the puppies and their adoptive mother. Who knows? Now that we saw those little butterball faces, we're itching to bring one home as soon as possible. We've jumped through all the hoops we can for the moment. Now we just have to sit and stay.

The End is near

Over the past few months of economic and electoral failures, I've let myself oscillate between cautiously optimistic, tentatively concerned, and full bore doom and gloom -- with the median sentiment being something close to stunned, silent and superstitious.

Tonight, I'm giving into terror. Witness...

30 reasons for Great Depression 2 by 2011
New-New Deal, bailouts, trillions in debt, antitax mindset spell disaster
By Paul B. Farrell
MarketWatch
7:19 p.m. EST Nov. 17, 2008

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- By 2011? No recovery? No new bull? "Hey Paul, why do you keep talking about a bigger crash coming by 2011?" Readers ask that often. So here's a sequel to my predictions of 2000 and 2004, with a look three years ahead:

First. Dot-com crash
We pinpointed the dot-com crash at its peak, in a March 20, 2000 column: "Next crash? Sorry, you won't see it coming." Bulls-eye: The dot-com bubble popped. The economy went into a 30-month recession. The stock market lost $8 trillion. And today, over eight years later, the market is still roughly 40% below its 2000 peak.

Factor in inflation and the average stock has lost well over 50% of its value. Stocks have proven to be a very big loser, a bad investment for Americans, thanks to Wall Street's selfish greed, plus the complicity and naiveté of politicians, press and public.

Second. Subprime meltdown
We reported on warnings of another crash coming as early as 2004, wrote a sequel, also titled "Next crash? Sorry, you won't see it coming." Yes, we were early, but in good company. We wrote many more warning columns. Few listened.

Subsequent events, notably former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's admission of his failures in congressional testimony, prove that if he and other Reaganomic ideologues weren't so myopic and intransigent about proving their free-market deregulation theories, they could have acted earlier and prevented today's colossal mess. Instead, their ideology kept the bubble blowing, delayed the pop, making matters worse.

So once again, as history proves over and over, ideology trumps common sense, reality and the facts. Greed drives ideologues to blow bubbles. They pop. Crashes happen. The public is collateral damage.

Third. Megabubble cycles
We also detailed the broader, accelerating macroeconomic sweep of cycles last summer in columns like "20 reasons new megabubble pops in 2011." We summarized a long list of major warnings from financial periodicals -- Forbes, Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Economist -- and from the voices of Warren Buffett, Bill Gross, a sitting Fed governor and a former Commerce secretary. Multiple warnings "hiding in plain sight," beginning with a Fed governor warning Greenspan in 2000 about subprime risk.

But the big shocker came from the new Treasury secretary two years before the meltdown: Bloomberg News reports that shortly after leaving Wall Street as Goldman Sachs' CEO, Henry Paulson was at Camp David warning the president and his staff of "over-the-counter derivatives as an example of financial innovation that could, under certain circumstances, blow up in Wall Street's face and affect the whole economy."

Yes, they knew. And still both Paulson, a Wall Street insider, and Greenspan's successor, Ben Bernanke, a Princeton scholar of the Great Depression, stayed trapped in denial and kept happy-talking the public for months after the meltdown began in mid-2007. Get it? While they could have put the brakes on this meltdown years ago, our leaders were prisoners of their distorted, inflexible views of conservative Reaganomics ideology.

As a result, once again the "best and the brightest" failed America and now they and their buddies in Washington and Corporate America are setting up the Crash of 2011.

Now it's time for my 2008 update, a look into the future where things will get far worse during the next presidential term. And given human behavior, especially in the deep recesses of Wall Street's "greed is good" DNA, it seems inevitable that no matter how well-intentioned the new president may be Wall Street and Washington's 41,000 special-interest lobbyists will drive America into the Great Depression 2.

30 'leading edge' indicators of the coming Great Depression 2
Every day there is more breaking news, proof Wall Street's greed is already back to "business as usual" and in denial, grabbing more and more from the new "Bailouts-R-Us" bonanza of free taxpayer cash and credits, like two-year-olds in a toy store at Christmas -- anything to boost earnings, profits and stock prices, and keep those bonuses and salaries flowing, anything to blow a new bubble.

Scan these 30 "leading indicators." Each problem has one or more possible solutions, but lacks unified political support. Time's running out. We're already at the edge. Add up the trillions in debt: Any collective solution will only compound our problems, because the cumulative debt will overwhelm us, make matters worse:

1. America's credit rating may soon be downgraded below AAA
2. Fed refusal to disclose $2 trillion loans, now the new "shadow banking system"
3. Congress has no oversight of $700 billion, and Paulson's Wall Street Trojan Horse
4. King Henry Paulson flip-flops on plan to buy toxic bank assets, confusing markets
5. Goldman, Morgan lost tens of billions, but planning over $13 billion in bonuses this year
6. AIG bails big banks out of $150 billion in credit swaps, protects shareholders before taxpayers
7. American Express joins Goldman, Morgan as bank holding firms, looking for Fed money
8. Treasury sneaks corporate tax credits into bailout giveaway, shifts costs to states
9. State revenues down, taxes and debt up; hiring, spending, borrowing add even more debt
10. State, municipal, corporate pensions lost hundreds of billions on derivative swaps
11. Hedge funds: 610 in 1990, almost 10,000 now. Returns down 15%, liquidations up
12. Consumer debt way up, now at $2.5 trillion; next area for credit meltdowns
13. Fed also plans to provide billions to $3.6 trillion money-market fund industry
14. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are bleeding cash, want to tap taxpayer dollars
15. Washington manipulating data: War not $600 billion but estimates actually $3 trillion
16. Hidden costs of $700 billion bailout are likely $5 trillion; plus $1 trillion Street write-offs
17. Commodities down, resource exporters and currencies dropping, triggering a global meltdown
18. Big three automakers near bankruptcy; unions, workers, retirees will suffer
19. Corporate bond market, both junk and top-rated, slumps more than 25%
20. Retailers bankrupt: Circuit City, Sharper Image, Mervyns; mall sales in free fall
21. Unemployment heading toward 8% plus; more 1930's photos of soup lines
22. Government policy is dictated by 42,000 myopic, highly paid, greedy lobbyists
23. China's sees GDP growth drop, crates $586 billion stimulus; deflation is now global, hitting even Dubai
24. Despite global recession, U.S. trade deficit continues, now at $650 billion
25. The 800-pound gorillas: Social Security, Medicare with $60 trillion in unfunded liabilities
26. Now 46 million uninsured as medical, drug costs explode
27. New-New Deal: U.S. planning billions for infrastructure, adding to unsustainable debt
28. Outgoing leaders handicapping new administration with huge liabilities
29. The "antitaxes" message is a new bubble, a new version of the American dream offering a free lunch, no sacrifices, exposing us to more false promises

Will the next meltdown, the third of the 21st Century, trigger a second Great Depression? Or will the 2007-08 crisis simply morph into a painful extension of today's mess to 2011 and beyond, with no new bull market, no economic recovery as our new president hopes?

Perhaps some of the first 29 problems may be solved separately, but collectively, after building on a failed ideology, they spell disaster. So listen closely to "leading indicator" No. 30:

At a recent Reuters Global Finance Summit former Goldman Sachs chairman John Whitehead was interviewed. He was also Ronald Reagan's Deputy Secretary of State and a former chairman of the N.Y. Fed. He says America's problems will take years and will burn trillions.

He sees "nothing but large increases in the deficit ... I think it would be worse than the depression. ... Before I go to sleep at night, I wonder if tomorrow is the day Moody's and S&P will announce a downgrade of U.S. government bonds." It'll get worse because "the public is not prepared to increase taxes. Both parties were for reducing taxes, reducing income to government, and both parties favored a number of new programs, all very costly and all done by the government."

Reuters concludes: "Whitehead said he is speaking out on this topic because he is concerned no lawmakers are against these new spending programs and none will stand up and call for higher taxes. 'I just want to get people thinking about this, and to realize this is a road to disaster,' said Whitehead. 'I've always been a positive person and optimistic, but I don't see a solution here.'"

We see the Great Depression 2. Why? Wall Street's self-interested greed. They are their own worst enemy ... and America's too.

And just to let the fear fully course through my system, I'll admit my recent viewings of shows on the fall of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages and the coincidental prophecies that December 21, 2012 marks the end of the world have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.



Unprecedented times, my friends. Be smart. Be safe. Be scared.

Then let's get back to work...

A smoking blog?

Lori told me tonight that she is only half joking when she says she fears I'll be investigated because of my last blog entry in connection with the Santa Barbara fires that claimed Oprah's and Rob Lowe's homes.

Alas, if only my pen was mightier than the spark...

Burn, Hollywood, burn!

In the simmering days and weeks before the election, after the umpteenth evening of watching the liberal media and their surrogate celebriwhores fawn all over the Obamassiah, I hatched a plan. Not so much a plan as a commitment.

The OCMehls are putting a household embargo on Hollywood. Like most trade embargoes, a few blockade runners will make it through, but Lori and I have pretty much unplugged the home from network TV. We've gone cold turkey from many of the shows we watched faithfully. And it's solely out of our contempt for Hollywood and its corrupt, deluded views of the world. We've had it.

On nearly every night since the election, I come home and the ladies are nose-deep in books. I eat a quick dinner and join them on the couch for quiet reading. And, amazingly enough, there aren't any withdrawal symptoms. With a slow IV drip of Fox News, the History Channel, and an occasional indulgence in The Office, we're sustained. The kids are even shaking their SpongeBob habit, if that's physically possible.

We dropped our Netflix subscription, too.

It's pretty invigorating. I'd like to see NBC, in particular, thrown on the blazing trash heap of death-spiraling companies (hell, GE's taking them down with them.) Then, unlike the crazies in Washington (left and right) who think we need to bail out the myriad failing banks, insurance companies and automakers, my laissez-faire leaning says to let them burn. My Adam Smith-favoring philosophy inspires me to hope the free market will punish the networks for their egregious bias.

This invisible hand just hit the Off button.

Paying last respects

I'm about to leave work. I've been occasionally monitoring news sites for the evening's evolving election results with the same grimacing hesitancy that one would display when checking under their car tire after hearing a silent thud along the freeway, knowing that furry blur with the saucer eyes of doom didn't stand a chance.

While it's not officially over at this hour, it effectively is. It's Barackalypse Now.

I refuse to go home and watch the throngs of misinformed, delusional Obamatons jumping around some Chicago park with the mindless, howling jubilation of a Taliban beheading party.

I refuse to go home and drown myself in the numbing pain of watching America lose control of the White House and Congress like I did watching the jets plow into the Twin Towers over and over again.

I will go home and enjoy my family. I'll mentally prepare for another day of work and ready defense of my little piece of the world from the liberal maniacs. And I'll hope for the best. (How's that for audacity?)

But, at this moment, I will pay my respect to Obama. (It will most likely be my last.) He ran a great campaign. As a cultivator of brands myself, I respect the consistent, resonating message he tenaciously stuck to for months. Though vacant of credence and devoid of substance, it's what his people wanted to hear. Of course, as is often the case with many product brands, there are several fatal engineering flaws just beneath the surface that threaten a recall.

But, for tonight, I won't go into those. For tonight, I'll let half the country rejoice in its fantasies. I'll join the other half in licking its wounds.

And I'll say...gulp...good job, Obama. Anyone who sits at the helm of the greatest country that has ever graced the face of the Earth deserves our support and best wishes.

And any conservative who can unseat him and his cronies two and four years from now deserve even more.

Here's a little lighthearted reprieve to all the stress of the last year. Enjoy...

An exceptional article on American Exceptionalism

This one really cuts to the fundamental chase, in my opinion. The left has lost all faith in this country and that's what scares me. That and the fact that Bill Maher still draws breath...

Evil Under the Sun
Barack Obama and American exceptionalism.
by Noemie Emery
11/03/2008, Volume 014, Issue 08

"Does evil exist?" the Reverend Rick Warren asked John McCain and Barack Obama at the Saddleback Forum on August 16. "If so, should we ignore it, negotiate with it, contain it, or defeat it?"

"Defeat it," McCain said. "Not long ago in Baghdad, al Qaeda took two young women who were mentally disabled and put suicide vests on them, sent them into a market place, and by remote control detonated those suicide vests. If that isn't evil, you have to tell me what is." Obama took a more philosophical turn: "Evil does exist," he said. "We see evil all the time. We see evil in Darfur. We see evil, sadly, on the streets of our cities. We see evil in parents who viciously abuse their children...We are not going to, as individuals, be able to erase evil, ... [but] we can confront it. ... One thing I think is very important is for us to have some humility.... A lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil. ... Just because we think our intentions are good doesn't mean that we're going to be doing good." The Bible tells us there is evil everywhere under the sun (as does Agatha Christie), but the two men's ideas of it could not be more different.

To McCain, evil is something specific and vivid, a deliberate decision made by others--sometimes by movements and governments--to do harm: Auschwitz, the Gulag, the planned starvation by Stalin in the 1930s of millions of Ukrainians, beheadings and torture by militant radicals, bombs planted in soccer fields, planes flown into buildings. To Obama, evil is something that happens by accident, and quite often happens at home. To McCain, evil itself cannot be defeated, as it appears over time in differing guises, but each face--fascism, communism, radical terrorism--can be and ought to be beaten. Obama thinks evil should be confronted, but the concept of beating it seems out of the question. Efforts to do so suggest moral arrogance and may make things even worse.

There is merit of course in each of these visions, as evil exits in different dimensions and grades: There is the evil that exists in even "good" states and people, which must be accepted and worked with, and evil that crosses the line and must be dealt with forcibly. Knowing the difference between them is the prime task of statesmen, who must never use force when other methods will suffice, but not shy from doing so when only force can prevail. Cold War presidents such as Truman, Kennedy, and Reagan avoided military strikes at the Soviet Union while making it clear they were ready and willing to use them if necessary, while Franklin Roosevelt and (the half-American) Winston S. Churchill earned their chops and their place in American hearts by their early assessment of Hitler as evil, and their relentless desire to bring him to heel. For better or worse, from the very beginning, Americans have warmed to those who have promised to fight against evil--and ranked them on the side of the (relative) good.

The idea of America as a force for morality predates the founding of the nation. The first European settlers saw America as a noble experiment, a do-over for the corrupt and compromised cultures of Europe, and a chance in an unspoiled terrain of endless abundance to start the world anew. The Puritans saw themselves as the Children of Israel in a new iteration, delivered from bondage (in Egypt and England), escaped by the way of a perilous voyage (through the Red Sea, and over the ocean), and settled at last in their own land of promise, where their work for the Lord could begin. The Puritans built a religious community that they believed would serve to the world as a model of piety, under the terms of a covenant detailed by John Winthrop in 1630 that served as a template for the next 300-plus years of American history: "He hath taken us to be His, after a most strict and peculiar manner, which will make Him the more jealous of our love and obedience. ... For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us."

Over time, the goal would change from sectarian piety to political freedom, but the religious dimension remained. Though "the collective salvation of the community was transformed into a form of government that would protect the rights of all citizens," as law professor Steven G. Calabresi was to put it, "the idea of America as a special place with a special people called to a special mission was never to go away." As a result, the United States was formed as the first country to be built on the idea of itself as a prime moral actor, on behalf of itself, and the world. "Americans are utopian moralists who press hard to institutionalize virtue, to destroy evil people, and eliminate wicked institutions and practices," wrote Seymour Martin Lipset in his book on the subject. "As Samuel Huntington has noted, Americans give to their nation and its creed 'many of the attributes and functions of a church.' "

As much as the first settlers of the Massachusetts Bay colony, the fathers of the Revolution and then of the new federal government took it as a matter of course that they were acting not just for themselves but on behalf of humanity, and that if they fell short of their mission, they would be forever and justly disgraced. Benjamin Franklin said a failure would be "a reproach and a byword down to future ages," John Adams that it would "merit ... the indignation of heaven." In 1790, when President George Washington addressed the congregation of the synagogue at Newport, Rhode Island, and embraced them as fellow parishioners of the faith of the union, it was a sign that the creed of American nationhood had transcended the limits of sectarian difference, and was accessible as a civil religion to people of all faiths and none. As the American saga progressed on its way, its unique parallels with religious tradition--the flight of the chosen from bondage to freedom; the handing down of the law (the Constitution, and the Ten Commandments); the Original Sin of slavery and the bloody passion of the Civil War, ending in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln on, of all days, Good Friday--only deepened the sense of a singular destiny. And so it goes on to this day.

The great wars of our history--the Revolution, the Civil War, the World Wars, and the Cold War--the ones by which the country defined itself, involved the defense and expansion of liberty, which became as one with the nation itself. Typically, the men we remember are those who express this, and we love most those who expressed it best. Abraham Lincoln conflated the fate of the Union with the hopes of men everywhere. Elihu Root called the American soldier "different from all other soldiers of all other countries. ... He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace." This was the feeling of his friend Theodore Roosevelt. In a similar utterance, Woodrow Wilson, the son of a minister, said World War I gave his country the "infinite privilege of fulfilling her destiny and saving the world." Franklin Roosevelt, who coined the phrase "rendez-vous with destiny" in regard to his country, said after Pearl Harbor that American force would be directed "toward ultimate good as well as against immediate evil," and declared in his last inaugural address that "[God] has given to our country a faith which has become the hope of all peoples in an anguished world." Crusade in Europe was the title Dwight David Eisenhower gave to his wartime memoir. Even in the one place in which America failed, it was the genius of Martin Luther King Jr. to cast his appeal for racial equality in this aspirational context, as the step that would certify the country's greatness, by erasing its one mortal flaw. His dream was, he said, "the American dream, that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed--we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal"--a promissory note handed down from the Founders, to which Americans of all races were heirs.

The two signature texts of American exceptionalism since World War II are John F. Kennedy's inaugural address in 1961 and a speech given by Ronald Reagan before he was president, at the first Conservative Political Action Conference, with a young and recently released POW named John McCain in the audience, on January 25, 1974. The two strike themes that go back to Winthrop, with the same notes of aspiration, inheritance, obligation, and destiny. "Kennedy's speech makes all the Puritan exceptionalist claims," said Calabresi, citing "rights flowing to man from God, the unique commitment of Americans to liberty," the torch being passed, which will light the whole universe, and "an apocalyptic battle between good and evil" with "God's work" being done here on earth. Reagan said the same things, only differently, and at a little more length. "I have always believed that there was some divine plan that placed this continent between two oceans to be sought out by those who were possessed of an abiding love of freedom," he said, following Winthrop, who stated, "God had chosen this country to plant his people in." As he concluded,

We cannot escape our destiny, nor should we try to do so. The leadership of the free world was thrust on us two centuries ago in that little hall in Philadelphia. In the days following World War II, when the economic strength and power of America was all that stood between the world and the return to the Dark Ages, Pope Pius XII said, "The American people have a great genius for splendid and unselfish actions. Into the hands of America God has placed the destinies of an afflicted mankind." We are indeed, and we are today, the last best hope of man on earth.

For most of our history, American exceptionalism has run in the veins of both parties, with the Democratic presidents of the first two-thirds of the 20th century being among its most noted proponents, vigorously asserting American power in the name of transcendent ideals. Franklin Roosevelt was quick to define the Axis powers as evil, and to declare, the day after Pearl Harbor, that "the American people in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory," and succeeding Democrats, such as Truman and Kennedy, would carry through on his values.

But after Vietnam, something broke in the Democrats, who took that costly miscalculation as a paradigm for crusading done anywhere, and came to believe that power was dangerous, that assertion was folly, and that patriotic displays were signs of a slavish obedience, simplistic thinking, unwarranted arrogance, and extremely bad taste. Hubert Humphrey, a Cold War liberal who ran and lost narrowly in the 1968 presidential contest, was perhaps the last nominee of his party to be wholly at home with the World War II language of righteousness and victory. In 1972, Democrats nominated George McGovern, a World War II hero who had evolved into a born-again pacifist and believed the United States had "blood on its hands." From then on, presidential elections tended to be conducted between a Republican who was an American exceptionalist and a Democrat who seemed to be less so, with the three elections in which the contrasts were least striking--1976, 1992, and 1996--being the three that the Democrats won. In 2000, though, the year of the tie, Al Gore, seen as a defense expert and hawk, was pitted against George W. Bush, who talked of a foreign policy that was "humble but strong." But by 2004, Bush had become Woodrow Wilson with bells on, and defeated John Kerry, who championed "nuance" in foreign relations and deference to international bodies and European elites.

Kerry had once served as lieutenant governor under Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, who in 1988 had run against George Bush's father in a classic campaign derided by critics as simple-minded but was based on a series of symbols relating to the concepts of evil, of force used against evil, and of America's mission and role in the world. One symbol the Bush campaign seized on was Dukakis's veto of a bill requiring teachers to lead students in public schools in the Pledge of Allegiance, which Dukakis saw as protecting a right of dissent, but others saw as a tacit endorsement of the belief that the country did not deserve having allegiance pledged to it. Another issue was crime, symbolized by a program Dukakis defended in which convicts ostensibly serving life sentences without parole were allowed out on unsupervised furloughs, in the course of which one murderer had raped a young woman and stabbed and beaten her fiancé--Dukakis refused to apologize or talk to the victims, though he had met often with prisoners and their families, leaving the impression he had a hard time telling the difference between predators and prey. He compounded this impression in the second presidential debate when, asked if he would support the death penalty if his wife should be murdered, he replied calmly, "I've opposed the death penalty ... I don't see any evidence that it's a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime." In the words of Roger Ailes, then the communications director for the Bush operation, "He became the defense attorney for the murderer and rapist of his wife." The public decided it preferred a prosecutor. Obama's meandering response to the question of evil at the Saddleback Forum seemed in some ways a Dukakis answer, unwilling to commit to the use of force in the containment of evil, and unsure of where moral lines lie.

John McCain betrays no similar doubts. "I know of no other country in the world with the generosity of spirit and the concern for fellow human beings as the United States of America, and I think that goes back to the very beginnings," he told a public service forum at Columbia University on September 11, 2008. "We are the only nation in the world that really is deeply concerned about adhering to the principle that all of us are created equal and endowed by our creator with certain rights. And those we have tried to bring to the world." But McCain was no longer speaking for all the Americans, as a candidate uttering those beliefs would once have been. The pollster Scott Rasmussen in the course of the 2004 election discovered a deep partisan divide on the issue of American exceptionalism. "Bush voters agree, by an 83-to-7 percent margin, that America is generally fair and decent," Michael Barone summarized Rasmussen's findings. "Kerry voters also agree but only by 46 to 37 percent. Fully 81 percent of Bush voters believe that the world would be a better place if other countries were more like the United States. Only 48 percent of Kerry voters agree. Almost all Republican voters believe in American exceptionalism. Only about half of Democratic voters do."

This explains the campaign of John Kerry, who tried to run both as the heroic vet and as the protester who had called out his country for sinister actions. When criticized for the latter, he complained (as had Dukakis) that Republicans were questioning his patriotism, which was not really the case. Anyone running for president must love his country, in that he wishes the best for it, and wants it to prosper. The question is whether Kerry and Dukakis were American exceptionalists, who believed in the civil religion of greatness and mission. And there is reason to think they were not.

Is Obama a patriot, like Dukakis and Kerry, in that he wishes the best for his country, and would do his best for it? Certainly, yes--the doubts about him involve his qualifications and his ideas, not his intentions. Is he an American exceptionalist, in the tradition of the Roosevelts, Reagan, and Kennedy? Probably not. On much of the evidence, he seems to share the beliefs of that half of his party who define the country in terms of its flaws and shortcomings, see force as a problem, and are embarrassed by patriotic displays. His wife has called the country a "mean" one, and said it had done nothing to give her pride in it until her husband had started to rise in the polls. He sees the country's tale less as a glorious effort to fulfill a great destiny than as a catch-up effort to atone for failures, which have always been numerous: "What makes America great has never been its perfection, but the belief that it can be made better," he has said, never quite saying it is good in this moment, or good when compared with what others were doing, or that it ever can be quite good enough.

At times, Obama has tried to reframe exceptionalism in his own image, or a kinder, gentler form of it, in which the country's achievements are largely domestic, and come about mostly through talking, and hope. In 2005, Clinton speechwriter David Kusnet waxed ecstatic over a speech that Obama gave at Knox College in Illinois, in which he reclaimed American exceptionalism for the progressive movement, as Kusnet put it, "telling the stories of how successive American generations abolished slavery, addressed the injustices of the industrial age, defeated economic depression and fought fascism," finding heroism not as Reagan did in wars or in private endeavors, but in "collective action to solve social problems here at home."

Two things should be noted about this new iteration: Little is said, and only in passing, of the American role in saving civilized Europe from being overrun by aggressive tyrannies, a prime source of pride for McCain, as well as the Reagans and Kennedys; and in the progressive rendition, "soft power" tends to reign unopposed. Here is Obama himself on how progress is made in the world and this country:

Nothing worthwhile in this country has ever happened except somebody somewhere was willing to hope ... a group of patriots declaring independence ... slaves and abolitionists resist[ing] that wicked system. ... That is how the greatest generation ... defeated fascism and lifted itself up out of the Great Depression. That's how pioneers traveled west.

In fact, the pioneers' road to a "better life" in the West was marked by the slaughter and/or displacement of Native Americans; the Committees of Correspondence were all very well, but independence was won over eight years of battles; fascism was finally defeated by the force of arms; and while abolitionists and brave slaves did their part in laying the predicate, slavery itself was put to the sword by the Union Army, in a war that killed 660,000 Americans, and whose first three years were marked by mistakes, misjudgments, and missed opportunities that make the war in Iraq seem well-run by comparison. The armed forces themselves seem to loom small in the mind of Obama, perhaps the reason why, earlier this year, when exhorting the young to public service endeavors, he did not mention a career in them as a valued alternative. In his world, which seems to resemble the Peaceable Kingdom, intentions and words do all the heavy lifting.

Obama's notorious speech in Berlin reinforces these elements: Hope can solve anything, values are relative, and power has nothing to do with the ultimate end. Berlin was saved, he says, because "Germans and Americans learned to work together and trust each other less than three years after facing each other on the field of battle." In fact, the Germans had little chance to do otherwise: They tried to conquer the world, were bombed into rubble, were occupied, and then faced being overrun by the Soviet Army. Good and evil are relative: "The two superpowers that faced each other across the wall of this city came too close too often to destroying all we have built and all that we love." But it was only one superpower that caused all the problems, that "liberated" the countries conquered by Hitler by conquering them in turn; that tried to starve Berlin, and force the West into submission, that put up the Wall, put up the barbed wire, and shot those who tried to escape. And, of course, hope conquers all: "People of the world--look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one."

In fact the world has never stood "as one," so it has never faced a challenge of any description, and has never done a thing for its suffering people, in Berlin or anyplace else. During the Cold War, the world was as two (or sometimes it seemed at sixes and sevens) and Berlin was saved only when one side beat the other, after more than four decades of testing and tension, by the threat and the pressure of force. Berlin was saved because Truman sent in the Air Force, because Kennedy was willing to risk war over Cuba, and because Reagan went ahead with his defense buildup and missile deployment, while liberals screamed every step of the way. Hope can do wonders, but the American military has been a more reliable agent of human deliverance. "Conflict-resolution theory posits there are no villains, only misunderstandings," writes Victor Davis Hanson, but military history suggests otherwise. The Berlin speech was marked by "reoccurring utopian assumptions about cause and effect--namely, that bad things happen almost as if by accident, and are to be addressed by faceless, universal forces of good will." This has not been the view of America's heroes, who have always believed that evil exists, and the United States exists to confront it. How will America--and the world--fare with a president who rejects this tradition? We may be about to find out.

Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.

Elandscapism

Goofy title, I know.

While I try and toil away at the new version of OCMehls, I thought I'd slake the thirst of those craving photos of our recently completed landscaping. Here is a before/after animation of the front as well as a few stills of the bigger side yard.

CLICK HERE TO SEE A FEW PICS

Mark Steynbeck

If you haven't read syndicated columnist Mark Steyn, check out a particularly good article below. This Libertarian's editorial style is literary in its precision and eloquence. This was in today's OC Register, among other places:

Saturday, November 1, 2008
Obama's a better symbol than president
On Tuesday many Americans will vote for the two-dimensional Obama - the image, the idea.

In Tokyo last week, over 1,000 people signed a new petition asking the Japanese government to permit marriages between human beings and cartoon characters. "I am no longer interested in three dimensions. I would even like to become a resident of the two-dimensional world," explained Taichi Takashita. "Therefore, at the very least, would it be possible to legally authorize marriage with a two-dimensional character?"

Get back to me on that Tuesday night. We'll know by then whether an entire constitutional republic has decided to contract marriage with a two-dimensional character and to attempt to take up residence in the two-dimensional world. For many of his supporters, Barack Obama is an idea. He offers "hope, not fear." "Hope" of what? "Hope" of "change." OK, but "change" to what? Ah, well, there you go again, getting all hung up on three-dimensional reality, when we've moved way beyond that. I don't know which cartoon character Taichi Takashita is eyeing as his betrothed, but up in the sky Obamaman is flying high, fighting for Hope, Change and a kind of Post-Modern American Way.

The two-dimensional idea of President Obama is seductive: To elect a young black man of Kenyan extraction and Indonesian upbringing offers redemption both for America's original sin (slavery) and for the more recent perceived sins of President Bush – his supposed enthusiasm for sticking it to foreigners generally, and the Muslim world in particular. And no, I'm not saying he's Muslim. It's worse than that: He's a pasty-faced European – at least in his view of state power, welfare and taxation.

But, in a sense, he's not anything in particular, so much as everything in general. The media dispatched legions of reporters to hoot and jeer at Sarah Palin's Wasilla without ever wondering: Where would we go to do this to Obama? Where's his "hometown"? Bill Clinton was famously (if not entirely accurately) from "a place called Hope." Barack Obama is from an idea called hope. What's the area code? 1-800-HOPE4CHANGE. The 1-800 candidate offers the hope of electing a younger Morgan Freeman, the cool, reserved, dignified black man who, when he's not literally God walking among us (as in "Bruce Almighty"), is always the conscience of the movie.

You can understand the appeal of such an idea. Even if you're not hung up on white liberal guilt or Bush loathing, there's an urge to get it over with, to say, well, America should have a black president, and the sooner the better – i.e., the sooner we do it, the better it speaks of us. They have a point. I look at the roll call of the dead on 9/11: Arestegui, Bolourchi, Carstanjen, Droz, Elseth, Foti, Gronlund, Hannafin, Iskyan, Kuge, Laychak, Mojica, Nguyen, Ong, Pappalardo, Quigley, Retic, Shuyin, Tarrou, Vamsikrishna, Warchola, Yuguang, Zarba. Black, white, Scandinavian, Balkan, Arab, Asian – in a word, American. The presidential pantheon has a narrower ring: Clinton, Reagan, Nixon, Johnson. Obama has a tedious shtick about how his name sounds odd and he doesn't look like "all those other presidents on the dollar bills". He's not just picking out the drapes for the Oval Office, he's ordering up the new currency and booking the sculptors for Mount Rushmore.

And why not? Obama in the White House, Obama on the dollar bill, Obama on Rushmore would symbolize the possibilities of America more than that narrow list of white-bread protestant presidents to date.

The problem is we're not electing a symbol, a logo, a two-dimensional image. Long before he emerged on the national stage as Barack the Hope-Giver and Bringer of Change, there was a three-dimensional Barack Obama, a real man who lives in the real world. And that's where the problem lies.

The senator and his doting Obots in the media have gone to great lengths to obscure what Barack Obama does when he's not being a symbol: his voting record, his friends, his patrons, his life outside the soft-focus memoirs is deemed nonrelevant to the general hopey-changey vibe. But occasionally we get a glimpse. The offhand aside to Joe the Plumber about "spreading the wealth around" was revealing because it suggests a crude redistributive view of "social justice". Yet the nimble Hope-a-Dope sidestepper brushed it aside, telling a crowd in Raleigh that next John McCain will be "accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in kindergarten."

But that too is revealing. As John Hood pointed out at National Review, communism is not "sharing." In a free society, the citizen chooses whether to share his Lego, trade it for some Thomas the Tank Engine train tracks, or keep it to himself. From that freedom of action grow mighty Playmobile cities. Communism is compulsion. It's the government confiscating your Elmo to "share" it with someone of its choice. Joe the Plumber is free to spread his own wealth around – hiring employees, buying supplies from local businesses, enjoying surf 'n' turf night at his favorite eatery. But, in Obama's world view, that's not good enough: the state is the best judge of how to spread Joe the Plumber's wealth around.

The Senator is a wealthy man, mainly on the strength of two bestselling books offering his biography in lieu of policy and accomplishments. Many lively members of his Kenyan family occur as supporting characters in his story and provide the vivid color in it. But they too are not merely two-dimensional cartoons. His Aunt Zeituni, a memorable figure in Obama's writing, turned up for real last week, when the dogged James Bone of the London Times tracked her down. She lives in a rundown housing project in Boston.

In his Wednesday night infomercial, Obama declared that his "fundamental belief" was that "I am my brother's keeper." Back in Kenya, his brother lives in a shack on 12 bucks a year. If Barack is his brother's keeper, why couldn't he send him a $10 bill and nearly double the guy's income? The reality is that Barack Obama assumes the government should be his brother's keeper, and his aunt's keeper. Why be surprised by that? For 20 years in Illinois, Obama has marinated in the swamps of the Chicago political machine and the campus radicalism of William Ayers and Rashid Khalidi. In such a world, the redistributive urge is more or less a minimum entry qualification.

The government as wealth-spreader-in-chief was not a slip of the tongue but consistent with Obama's life, friends and votes. The Obamacons – that's to say, conservatives hot for Barack – justify their decision to support a big-spending big-government Democrat with the most liberal voting record in the Senate by "hoping" that he doesn't mean it, by "hoping" that he'll "change" in office. "I sure hope Obama is more open, centrist, sensible," declared reformed conservative Ken Adelman, "than his liberal record indicates."

He's "hoping" that Obama will buck not just Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank and the rest of the gang but also his voting record, his personal address book and his entire adult life. Good luck betting the future on that. The "change" we'll get isn't hard to discern: An expansion of government, an increase in taxes, a greater annexation of the dynamic part of the economy by the sclerotic bureaucracy, a reduction in economic liberty …oh, and a lot more Chicago machine politics.

On Tuesday many Americans will vote for the two-dimensional Obama - the image, the idea, the "hope." But it will be the three-dimensional Obama – the real man with the real record – that America will have to live with.

©MARK STEYN