Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leaders sees that in the midst of all the other news out there a noteworthy passing has been missed (rightfully given the gravity of newsworthy events).

Don Ho has slipped from this mortal coil. He was 76. According to a news release:

For more than 40 years, Ho shows were the musical equivalent of Diamond Head: unique, awesome and something that had to be seen to be believed. From behind a console desk, seated comfortably in a rattan chair, the latter-day Ho could go about his business with an ease that might be mistaken for a man phoning it in, except for the fact that Ho made outgoing calls with his onstage phone.

“I’m a kinda guy, I like to work seven days a week, all day if I have to, because where I grew up, it kept you out of trouble,” Ho said on National Public Radio in 2006.

Aloha Don. Aloha.

Carry on.

I’m an alum of Virginia Tech. Undergrad class of 1991, and I returned for Grad school. Left Blacksburg in 1998 with a PhD in engineering.

Years ago I took a class in Dynamics from Dr. Librescu, and now he’s dead, one of the victims of the shooting. During my time in Blacksburg, I had many classes in Norris hall.

Words completely fail in this case, so I won’t even try.

My thoughts and prayers are in Blacksburg today.

For those of you with a religious bent.

Christian dogma is a difficult thing. You can give thanks for survival and pray for recovery.

But not hating? It is quite hard.

Your humble Smallholder is a ball of rage right about now. I’m being quite the hypocrite - praying and seething at the same time. If a bit of distance lets you pray with a glad heart, please do so.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has been quite busy over the past few days. It was good to see that the Smallholder and Air Marshal posted a little last week. Your Maximum Leader spent some time yesterday writing some blog posts, but in light of what is happening at Virginia Tech right now, he doesn’t really want to post much.

Of course, the Villainschloss was running on emergency power until just a little while ago… So that wasn’t much fun either…

Carry on.

The Little River Trading Company has some wonderful Confederate Flag bumper stickers.

I think these two go particularly well together:

Question 1: is the war winnable?

What a silly question. Weren’t you paying attention to George Bush on May 1, 2003? Mission Accomplished!

At this point I’d say it’s completely unwinable from any point of view. The absurdist view that our government had in 2003 prior to the invasion was completely unrealistic from the start. It’s one thing to believe that Iraqi’s would welcome us as liberators. That’s only mildly absurd. But to believe that we can go in, impose a stable democratic government, and leave is almost criminal.

Democracy has to be wanted, and it has to be earned largley through blood. Did we take the time to understand who the Iraqi’s are? Did the administration consider the impact that a Muslim culture would have on the ability to Democritize a population? Did the administration consider the complex interactions of all the ethinc groups that comprise Iraq?

Now, we need to ask ourselves if our presence in Iraq is accomplishing anything? Maybe it is. Maybe our presence there is preventing, or at least delaying, the degeneration of Iraq into violent anarchy. Is this what our soldiers are dying for? Is this worth our soldiers dying for?

I think the administration has many things to answer for regarding its prosecution of this war. The role of contractors in military roles leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. The administration is using a war as a vehicle for the Vice Presidents old company to generate revenue. The lack of sufficient troops, and poorly supplying the troops stationed in Iraq is another thing that the Bush administration has botched. These so called patriots in office say all the right things, and then treat the military with an offhanded disregard that to me is about as far from patriotic as one can get.

“Mission Accomplished” in the spring of 2003? It’s 4 years later, troops are still dying, suicide bombers are still slaughering civilians. And the terrorists have started to use chemical weapons in Iraq, blowing up trucks full of Chlorine.

But I’m just an engineer. I didn’t major in politics or history. I don’t have the broad knowledge of those areas that Smallholder and MaxLeader do. I am, however, a pissed off engineer, a voter, and someone who loves my country.

This administration didn’t take Bin Laden and Al Quaeda seriously as a threat until after 9/11 despite considerable inteligence to the contrary. For a few brief days in September of 2001, the president actually looked like a leader, but that faded quickly. We appropriately took out the Taliban, and then gave up aggressively chasing the perpretrators of 9/11 so that Bush/Cheney et al. could prosecute their vision of the Middle East. A vision routed in profound naivete and hubris. If one had the audacity to express an opinion contrary to the party line, well then you were slandered as unpatriotic, or maybe they’d let Ann Coulter out of her cage to call you a Faggot.

To quote Daniel J. Boorstein “The great obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” What’s scary is that the administration actually thinks it knows what it’s doing.

Worst president ever? At least the worst in my lifetime in my humble opinion.

Via Llama Butchers: Russian Wargaming.

I think we can all agree that anyone who dresses up in World War Two clothing and runs around with guns is a big nerd. The next thing you know, people will be doing pirate reenactments.

Just sayin’.

Months ago, your humble Smallholder became despondent. I was beginning to sniff a change in the wind. Conservatives - politicians, talking heads, and bloggers - were tacitly beginning to give up on the war. Not that they would admit it. But you began seeing an attempt to shift the blame for a failure onto the MSM, liberals, and a lilly-livered American public. They blame-shifters are now in full throttle and I am coming across the image below captioned with: “The only thing that will make Democrats happy.”

http://www.nevada.edu/~manis/blog/saigon.jpg

The Maximum Leader and the Foreign Minister will back up my claim that I saw this coming some time ago.

I call bullshit.

It may be psychologically pleasurable to denounce the folks on the other side of the aisle, but it is intellectually dishonest.

Lest you think that “look at all sides of an issue” Smallholder has lost his squishiness, I call bullshit on the Democrats too.

If they truly believe the war is lost, they ought to use the power of the purse to bring people home now. Congressional Democrats want to extricate America while avoiding the blame that Republicans are so desperately trying to toss their way. If the war is lost, it is immoral to ask boys to sacrifice their lives to preserve the viability of the 2008 Democratic nominee.

An intellectually honest debate wouldn’t play the blame game.

Question 1: Is the war winnable?

When we are discussing that question, we need to define what “winning” means. The stated goal of the administration has shifted many times. Creating a democratic government to infect the rest of the Middle East with the bacillus of democracy is no longer possible - the adminitration has abandoned that definition of victory and is now advocating leaving a stable government - we’ll stand down as they stand up (where have I heard that before?).

So the question we need to ask is: Is it possible to create a stable, self-sufficient government in Iraq?

At this stage, arguing about the consequences of failure is meaningless. We all know failure is bad. But arguing that we can win because losing is bad isn’t helpful and just distracts from the real issue. In April 1945, the Japanese high command unanimously thought that losing was very, very, very bad and came to the conclusion that national suicide was the best course of action. The bad consequences of losing didn’t change the fact that they were no longer capable of defeating the United States (as if they had ever been capable of toppling an awakened giant).

I have heard way to many people make this argument. Smart people ought to know better. Arguing that cancer is bad doesn’t mean you don’t have it. If you have cancer, the next question is how you deal with it.

We now reach a fork in the conversation we ought to be having.

If the war is winnable, we need to outline the strategy designed to achieve the goal of a stable government. When we are discussing this, we ought not to retreat into fantasy. Fantasizing about killing all the Iraqis and letting God sort them out is stupid. The American public won’t tolerate genocide. Our troops would refuse to do it. And hell, it wouldn’t even achieve our goal of a stable government.

We ought to set aside “if only we could fight to win…” Explain what you mean. What are we not doing that we ought to be doing? And remember that last paragraph. Machinegunning every male between the ages of 15 and 50 just isn’t possible. We should also be realistic. Complaining that the MSM isn’t relentlessly optimistic has nothing to do with stopping the actual suicide bombers. Issuing happy press releases about a new clinic for poor Iraqi children and supressing stories about the carnage doesn’t change the course of the war. If our strategy was working, there wouldn’t be any bad news for the MSM to report. Enough with the “it’s the MSM’s fault meme.” Wars are won on the ground, not in newsrooms.

If you have concluded that the war is not winnable, then the real question to discuss is how to minimize/contain the damage of the loss. If we have cancer, is the best treatment a lumpectomy or chemotherapy. Both suck. Which will suck less?

Glance up at the picture of the Saigon embassy airlift. If we have to get out, how do we minimize the damage?

When discussing how to get out the first thing to consider is the impact on our global strategy. We ought to also consider the lives of the troops. This is a hard call. It might be morally correct to sacrifice some kids in a rearguard action in order to get a few licks in on terrorists who want to follow us home, but I certainly don’t want to write a letter home saying “Dear Mrs. Snuffy, your boy died for his country and helped to minimize the damged caused by out last war.”

Thirdly, whether we win or lose, we need to discuss how to avoid this situation in the future. We can’ stick our heads in the sands and be isolationist. We also can’t keep turning “six week” conflicts into half-decade insurgencies.

Those are the important questions. Assessing blame in order to score political points shouldn’t be a priority. If the current administration was running for re-election, a discussion of past blunders would be appropriate so that the public could make an informed choice about whether to change horses in midstream. But since no one in this administration is likely to be around after January 2009, it just doesn’t matter. For now, the only way the current administration’s past handling of the war affects us is by giving us insight into how to sell a new strategy to the decider. ‘Cause we can all agree the current strategy ain’t workin’.

In my previous post, I quoted retired four star Marine Jack Sheehan.

In all fairness to the administration, it is possible to posit that Sheehan doesn’t really think what he has publicly stated. Perhaps he is reluctant to return to public life but his lifetime of public service (35 years in uniform) makes it hard for him to do so. So perhaps he was grasping a straws to justify remaining in public life. After all, being an executive at Bechtel probably pays more than the civil service.

Balanced against this “I don’t want to admit that it is all about the Benjamins” theory is the very fact of that service. He has been a dedicated soldier. Once a marine, always a marine. Semper Fi and all that. I suspect that my father would shoulder an M-1 and head to Fallujah if he thought a 71 year old Korean War infantryman could turn the tide.

Or perhaps he smells a scapegoat position being created. That seems to be a running theme with liberal commentators over at the Washington Post. If Bush understands that the war is lost* and is simply keeping the war going for political reasons, appointing a war czar might provide some cover when the inevitable happens, one can understand all three officers’ relucatance to sign on. Of course, that also is concurrent with the hypothesis that the officers don’t think the war is winnable.

* I don’t believe this. Even though I believe that many of Bush’s decisions have been unwise, I don’t think that he is a dark sith lord. Heck, my buddy the Maximum Leader usually has his head firmly planted in his posterior, but that doesn’t make him evil. He’s a nice guy. Unfortunatelty, in what passes for public debate today, it is not enough to question a person’s ideas. You have to impugn his character. I’ve yet to see any evidence that Bush and Cheney are secretly the pawns of Haliburton. I wish the left could just argue the merits of positions rather than scream “Bushitler!”

Heck, if wishes are being granted, I want a pony too.

And maybe Halle Berry, Evangeline Lilly, and Alyssa Milano. I’m not greedy.

Supporters of the continuation of the War in Iraq loudly and vociferously proclaim that we can win the war (if only those traitorous Dhimmi-crats weren’t trying to make us lose on purpose).

The Washington Post broke the bad news yesterday that the administration is having a very hard time filling a new position designed to win the war. At least one of the three people asked to be the new “war czar” turned down the job because he believes the administration is not capable of winning the war:

“The very fundamental issue is, they don’t know where the hell they’re going,” said retired Marine Gen. John J. “Jack” Sheehan, a former top NATO commander who was among those rejecting the job. Sheehan said he believes that Vice President Cheney and his hawkish allies remain more powerful within the administration than pragmatists looking for a way out of Iraq. “So rather than go over there, develop an ulcer and eventually leave, I said, ‘No, thanks,’ ” he said.

The others haven’t publicly commented in a clear way, but my impression is that they aren’t optimistic either.

I can see two possibilities here.

If the administration is serious about winning the war, they are going to offer the job to the very best officer they can find. If they were pursuing excellence, the demurrals are bad news for the “carry on the war” crowd: The best and brightest generals don’t think the war can be one.

The other possibility is that the administraton was offering the position to politically reliable officers - “good Bushies” to use the DOJ’s term. We have seen political litmus test for war management before - people being hired to manage the Iraqi reconstruction were asked about their views on abortion. In an amazing appearance on the Daily Show, John Bolton argued (in a very Andy Jackson kind of way) that appointees’ competence was irrelevent - the job of appointees is to carry out presidential directives, not offer advice or expertise. Perhaps these three generals were not approached because of their expertise but because they are politically reliable. Of course, the fact that they managed to rise to the rank of O10 says they must understand something about military capabilities. But let’s assume that the “carry on the war” crowd is right and the tapped officers are wrong. This is still bad news for Bush - even “good Bushies” don’t want to be associated with the impending (existing?) train wreck.

As Tom Lehrer said of the American people and the Vietnam War:

“We’re like a Christian scientist with appendicitis.” Something bad is happening, but aside from prayer, we don’t know what to do about it.

Micheal Dorf has more sobering thoughts:

More broadly still, even if the creation of a war czar were a sensible reaction to an organizational problem, the whole premise that our problems in Iraq (and Afghanistan) are structural/tactical is deeply flawed. To be sure, this new premise represents a kind of progress in that by seeking to adopt a new structure the administration tacitly admits that the existing structure doesn’t work. It is, in other words, an admission of incompetence in managing the occupation. Such an admission will no doubt play well with the Thomas Friedmans and Hillary Clintons of the world—people who supported the war but have criticized the administration’s bungling of the job. But if, as tougher critics warned from the very beginning, the underlying problem is the impossibility of bringing democracy by force of arms to a fractious, resentful people, then even the most clear-eyed shakeup of the management team and its tactics will only delay the inevitable day of reckoning.

Man, I’ve got a bellyache.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader can sleep better at night now that he knows that Larry Birkhead is the father of the late Anna Nicole Smith’s baby.

No…

Really… It was keeping him up at night…

Yes… Restless sleeping at best for the past few weeks…

Really… You know your Maximum Leader was a huge Anna Nicole fan…

(Cue Stewie Griffin voice) Oh yeah…

Big fan…

Big, big fan…

Really big fan…

(Cue Ed Sullivan voice) Rilly beig fan… Rilly beig…

Boy… This is exciting…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader was looking over the news wire and noticed this little tidbit from the Reuters news wire: Religious bias colors doctors’ views: survey.

That seems, to your Maximum Leader, to be a rather stupid headline. The very premise of it is quite silly in fact. This has always been a peeve of your Maximum Leader. One would think that anyone who is serious about their religion would have biases that are informed and shaped by their religious experience. If religion predisposes a person towards a particular set of moral beliefs - and one would certainly think it would; then one can’t help but act according to their religion in the performance of their daily routine.

An interesting portion of the article:

They [the researchers] found that 85 percent of those surveyed believe religion or spirituality is generally positive, but only 6 percent say it often changes “hard” medical outcomes, reflecting some sort of miraculous healing.

About three quarters of those surveyed say spirituality helps patients cope and believe it gives them a positive state of mind. About 7 percent, however, said it often causes negative emotions such as guilt and anxiety and some 4 percent think patients use spirituality to avoid taking responsibility for their health.

Your Maximum Leader found that last line interesting. 4% using religion to avoid taking respoinsibility for their health. Your Maximum Leader knows some people like that. Indeed, if one queries your Maximum Leader’s good friend the Smallholder, he (Smallholder that is) would possibly weave a story for you about your Maximum Leader’s fatalistic streak concerning organ transplants and such. (Your Maximum Leader, while an organ donor himself, feels that he would not likely accept an organ donation in the event that he should need one. Now there are many extenuating circumstances that could affect this completely hypothetical situation, but the broad statement is correct. Additionally, your Maximum Leader would not accept genetic treatments that would allow him to live a longer and healthier life. Perhaps this is a subject for another post…)

But your Maximum Leader digresses…

It seems odd to your Maximum Leader that people would assume that some sort of professional, like a doctor, would not allow his religious beliefs to affect his work. Of course, no conversation on this topic would be complete without discussing that most inane subset of politicians. You know the ones who are “Catholic” but support abortion rights. It seems to your Maximum Leader that such political types should go either one of two ways. The first is to admit that they are not a particularly good Catholic because they disagree with the Church’s moral teachings on this matter. The second is to say that they are against abortion and would act accordingly insofar as the office they hold and influence such things.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has a quick moment to spare and figured he’d share with you a little historical tidbit.

You probably know that today is the day (that would be April 9th) that Robert E Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S Grant at Appomattox Court House, VA. For some reason this year your Maximum Leader can’t seem to get away from this little factoid. It is on the radio, the TV, it seems everywhere. An acquaintance of your Maximum Leader’s even came up to him today and asked if he knew what significant historical event happened on this day. Your Maximum Leader answered it was the day of Lee’s Surrender. The acquaintance was disappointed that it wasn’t a stumper. Then your Maximum Leader asked if the person knew another interesting event that happened on this day… The answer is…

On this day in 1963, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was named an honorary citizen of the United States of America by a joint act of the Congress of the same.

Also on this day, in 1806, was born Isambard Kingdom Brunel. One of your Maximum Leader’s favourite Victorians, but one that few people seem to know anymore…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has for many years loved the Cowboy Junkies. Thanks to the joys of You Tube he will share them with you…

Angel Mine:

Open:

And the song that put them on the map, a cover of Sweet Jane:

It is too bad that your Maximum Leader can’t find more of their stuff out there. Angel Mine, and Open are not among their best songs.

And allow your Maximum Leader to go on record saying that Margo Timmins is one of the most beautiful women in the history of the world. She is positively radiant in person (your Maximum Leader - playing the groupie - has met her twice).

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader had a wonderful day yesterday with Villainette #1 and her fellow 4th Graders on a class field trip to Jamestown, VA. If you’ve not ever been and are in the area, your Maximum Leader heartilly recommends a visit.

Your Maximum Leader, as he alluded earlier in the week, has lots on his plate. He may (or more likely) may not post again until next week. In the mean while…

A belated Happy Blogoversary to the Crack Young Staff of The Hatemonger’s Quarterly. As you know, your Maximum Leader sometimes guest-weblogs over on THQ. It is the best gig in all the interwebs frankly. Many happy returns. (NB to “Chip:” if you happen to make a video of the “Ethical Sluthood” seminar, please forward a copy to your Maximum Leader. He needs it for “reference” purposes.

An undisturbed Roman-era tomb in Greece was just discovered. Your Maximum Leader can’t wait for pictures of the gold, adornments, and other sundries the archeologists have unearthed.

Remains found at Rouen, France are not those of Saint Joan of Arc. They were in fact those of a mummified human and cat from Egypt.

And lastly… A veteran was really harmed by the Veterans Administration. Headline says it all. VA patient has wrong testicle removed.

May you all have a safe and peaceful remainder of Holy Week and Easter.

Carry on.