"...Have read some catbox comments recently... wondering, how is it you know what you know of international politics, esp Russian military intent? "

...I reply that I just read a lot of stuff. All open source, I'm not in the loop for any classified material. The fact that I was a Navy pilot gives me, perhaps, some limited standing, even if only on aviation issues. The rest is just my best guess. So then, the next message:

"...Your comments were perceptive and insightful. You were in military aviation and an officer. That's what I needed to know. You are not some kid who gets his ideas from playing HALO3 or some other quasi mil video game all day."

At THAT I take umbrage, sir or madam.

It's Battlefield 2142, thank you very much.

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Manifesto

The following is the result of an ongoing "political bio" thread on the freedomforum list. If you're not in that group, you should probably look away. Odds are, you'll see things that'll just make you mad, and we don't want that.

Of course, each rational person's political makeup linearly flows from their base values and assumptions. These are like postulates in geometry; they can't be independently derived or proven, they must be assumed.

This is the source of the problem the US has with Europe and the far left: our base assumptions are so different as to constitute different universes. Our worldviews are so radically different that we have almost no basis for communication. This is why we tend to end up talking past each other. Or shouting at each other.

Lefties, at various times, have tried to persuade me that their position flows naturally from some logical process based on some sort of universal principles. But at heart, though, what they really require is that I substitute their values for mine. In this they are no better than any televangelist I see on the tube.

So, here are my base assumptions: I think the government will tend to screw up everything it touches. Its only imperitive is its own self-preservation and aggrandizement. Its expressed mandate always becomes its last priority. For me, this is a relatively greater evil than, say, rampant, laissez faire capitalism. The most rapacious corporation there has ever been has not committed any evil to compare with, for example, Stalin's deliberately induced famine. Corporations may do wrong, and may even be bad, but a really industrial scale, genocidal atrocity requires a government. As it has happened in the last century, this will usually be a government whose stated platform has only the most exquisitely egalitarian motives.

It astonishes me, given the last century, that the left, in the name of compassion, can continue to design leviathan programs for the remediation of some social ill and expect anything but a shambolic result.

That said, of all our government's many responsibilities, the one it is least incompetent at is national security. I'm a big national security guy - I believe we have real, legitimate national security requirements that, by both Constitutional provision and practical experience, only a Federal apparatus can meet.

There are people out there with whom no accomodation is possible. There is no not fighting the islamists, (which, be advised, I distinguish from the greater body of moslems in general) for example. For me this is a binary issue: we can fight them or we can try to appease them, there's no middle position.

I do believe that most of the opposition to the most recent war on what are purported to be legalistic issues surrounding the justification going in are, in fact, camouflage for the basic differences in values and assumptions between left and right.

I submit that had we found a complex the size of Iowa dedicated to nuke/bio/chem weapon manufacture, the left STILL would have opposed the war, the expressed reasons for the opposition would merely have been different. The people who hate Bush would not have hated him less if we'd hit the jackpot on that score.

The left doesn't oppose the war because it thinks Bush lied. Its base values and assumptions require it to oppose the war under ANY circumstances.

Only, in the mean time, these people are trying to kill us. We can fight them in the middle east or we can wait until they come here and, say, enroll in an oddly abbreviated course at Embry-Riddle.

Or so it seems to me. As a member of Freedomforum, though, I'm supposed to believe in freedom. So you're free to disagree.