Free Republic

TSA: Touching Sensitive Areas -- My Two Cents on Terrorizing Travelers By David J. Aland /// 19 November 2010 In the classic joke, the mother tells the teacher: “If my son acts up, don’t punish him. He’s sensitive; punish the kid next to him and he’ll get the message.” Apparently, the folks at TSA think the same way – to dissuade terrorists, terrorize passengers and the bad guys will get the message. Janet Napolitano went for the “Obama Defense” the other day when faced with mounting outrage over the growing intrusiveness of airline passenger screening: people would understand that this...

Juan Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: My Two Cents on Amateur Professionalism By David J. Aland /// 22 October 2010 Juan Williams, a journalist of well-established liberal reputation, was in the habit of frequenting the opposition at Fox News, and was just fired from his post at National Public Radio for “violating journalistic standards.” Ironically, the firing says a lot about the sad state of journalistic standards at NPR, or the lack thereof: it never pays to preen about professionalism while behaving amateurishly. A frequent visitor to “The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox News, an outlet routinely derided by some as...

Falling Behind: My Two Cents on Missing the Boat By David J. Aland /// 22 October 2010 America has fallen behind the times. Thank God – it may be the only thing that saves us. For many years, the United States has been a world leader on many fronts. From Blues to blue jeans, McNuggets to military hardware, America has been the pace-setter for a long time except for one: the values-neutral culture of dependency that has pervaded Europe the last three decades. Arguably, the EU might not have ever existed were it not for the defensive umbrella of American...

The Audacity of Hoopla: My Two Cents on Impoverished Political Ploys By David J. Aland /// 15 October 2010 As Dewey and Truman once learned, the American voting public is unpredictable, whimsical and fickle. A good politician plans for this. A poor politician counts on it. Sadly, the Democrats this year appear to have made it the mainstay of their mid-term election strategy, and no one is fooled. The ever-glib Joe Biden put it best recently, when he pointed out that Democrats can’t boast about achievements in Congress this year, because the policy issues are “too complicated” for voters to...

The Audacity of Hoopla: My Two Cents on Impoverished Political Ploys By David J. Aland /// 15 October 2010 As Dewey and Truman once learned, the American voting public is unpredictable, whimsical and fickle. A good politician plans for this. A poor politician counts on it. Sadly, the Democrats this year appear to have made it the mainstay of their mid-term election strategy, and no one is fooled. The ever-glib Joe Biden put it best recently, when he pointed out that Democrats can’t boast about achievements in Congress this year, because the policy issues are “too complicated” for voters to...

Taking Issue: My Two Cents On Oily Assurances By David J. Aland /// 16 June 2010 The head of a Gulf oyster company recently put it thus: “This oil spill isn’t an ‘issue’, it’s a [freaking] disaster!” Plainly put, but it is increasingly obvious that the President doesn’t see it that way, and his Oval Office address on Tuesday merely reinforced that impression. Instead of showing a trademark steely-eyed resolve, this President’s trademark tin ear was predominantly in evidence. Apologists grouse that blaming the President for the Deepwater Horizon disaster is unfair, but it was the President himself who made...

Closing the Gate: My Two Cents On Cleaning Up By David J. Aland /// 28 May 2010 The Washington Post online columnist, Chris Cillizza, discussing the continuing fallout of what some insiders are now calling “Jobs-Gate”, got it both right and wrong. Quoting an unnamed Party official, he asks: “How do you make something out of nothing? By acting guilty…” His point was that the White House had allowed the allegations that Congressman Sestak was offered an Obama Administration job to needlessly blow up into a full-grown scandal, when there was really nothing of substance – but that the clumsy...

Getting Back in the Saddle: My Two Cents On Resetting the Reset Button By David J. Aland /// 22 May 2010 Osama bin Laden, the man whose dream is the ultimate destruction of the “Great Satan” United States, once noted that nations and people follow the “strong horse.” Setting aside his Charlie Manson intellect, let us consider his premise – is America a strong horse these days? Once, the displeasure of the United States was enough to deter rogue states and keep wacky heads of state in line. The threat of US retaliation kept North Korea in check, the Soviet...

[NOTE: This essay is a sequel to "Borderline Insanity: My Two Cents on the Illegal Immigration Debate", posted on Free Republic 19 May.] Borderline Insanity (Part Dos): Another Two Cents On Illegal Immigration By David J. Aland / 21 May 2010 When crazy tin-pot dictators stand up in the United Nations and denounce the US, folks mostly yawn – that kind of primal scream therapy is pretty much what the UN has become. But it’s something else entirely when foreign heads of state are allowed to denounce the US from the White House or the floor of Congress, but that’s...

Borderline Insanity: My Two Cents On The Illegal Immigration Debate By David J. Aland 19 May 2010 This is not a discussion of Immigration. Immigration is a regulated activity in which nations screen and permit persons to enter and become citizens. It is a concept codified by law, enshrined in the American psyche, and immortalized on our Statue of Liberty. It is not the topic of this essay. Every nation has requirements for the legal immigration of foreign persons and their assimilation into citizenship. Some countries base their policies on ethnicity, some base them on wealth or education, and still...

Reality Check: My Two Cents On The Loss of Consensus By David J. Aland 19 May 2010 The author Joseph Conrad once noted that reality only holds up by consensus. In places like the Indian Ocean, he said, where there aren’t enough people around to agree, reality tends to break down. (For those of us who have sailed there, you won’t find any disagreement!) But what he never counted on was a place like Washington DC, where reality breaks down not because there aren’t enough people around, but because there is no such thing as consensus. Lately, it seems that...

Tonight, the sword of LCDR Roy Boehm, the first Navy SEAL, was presented to the Army-Navy Club in DC. ADM Olsen, Commander Special Operations Command was there, as was ADM "Ace" Lyons, the godfather of the Navy's special operations program. Few people remember LCDR Boehm. Look him up. He's worth remembering. DJA

Rote Rage: My Two Cents On Tempering the Debate By David J. Aland 28 March 2010 You know the scenario – a driver does something stupid on the road and you honk your horn, only to get half peace sign in return. In most cases, that’s the best case, as some drivers feel that being called out entitles them to retaliate. In some cases, even guns are drawn. We call it “road rage” and the fact that few of us actually are outraged by road rage is a sign that we have somehow accepted it as yet another manifestation of...

Fly By Wire: My Two Cents On Heading to a Crash By David J. Aland 19 March 2010 Much has been made lately about the sudden accelerations of Toyota vehicles. The automaker has offered every possible explanation – floor mats, driver error, sticky pedals – but failed to make it stop happening, and firmly resisted the idea that the computerized “fly by wire” system in the newer models somehow has a “glitch” that leads to these inexplicable events. As the happy owner of two Toyotas, I have experienced this “ghost in the machine” when one of my vehicles, for the...

Condescension: My Two Cents On Liberal Angst By David J. Aland 10 February 2010 The Washington Post, of all papers, ran an interesting piece last weekend: “Why are Liberals so Condescending?” While the essay focused largely on how the changing fortunes of the Democratic Party hardly warranted the level of smugness demonstrated by Reid, Pelosi, Gibbs, and Obama, it raised a valid question: What is it about Democrats that breeds arrogance and condescension? Arrogance is not an excessive way of characterizing the mood of liberals lately. The President’s State of the Union address confirmed this, when he said, in effect:...

Perfect Storm: My Two Cents On Convergences By David J. Aland 10 February 2010 This last weekend, a perfect storm was brewing over the East Coast as well as at a Nashville conference center. Refugees from a Defense conference, stranded by flights cancelled in anticipation of the blizzard shared the hotel complex with a conference of feminist bloggers as well as the national Tea Party convention. Talk about a perfect storm. Merely imagining the varieties of friction that could occur along the seams between the groups sharing those facilities was mind-boggling. Worse yet, what if members of these disparate groups...

I Told You So: My Two Cents On My Own Two Cents By David J. Aland 31 December 2009 Last November, disappointed by the election of an inexperienced liberal as President, I wrote that I would “reserve the right” to judge the merit of Obama’s performance. As I wrote then, “we generally expect that the job of President is, in itself, transformational…” but has the job actually transformed the man? As the last year of what Charles Krauthammer has called “The Year of Living Fecklessly” has shown, the answers to the questions I raised a year ago are not promising....

…But I Play One On TV…: My Two Cents on Squandering Presidential Prestige By David J. Aland 2 October 2009 The facts are grim: thousands of Americans killed since 2003, trapped in a scenario of corrupt government and failing infrastructure. Local chieftains enrich themselves with misdirected American dollars, and one in forty civilians die violently. Elections tainted, streets deadly – sectarian warfare goes unchecked, and nepotism abounds. The local commander has called on the President for help. It could be the script of an episode of “West Wing”, but it’s all too true. Chicago really is in bad shape, these...

UN-Doing America: My Two Cents on Faith-Based Diplomacy By David J. Aland 25 September 2009 It has been said that diplomacy is the art of letting someone have it your way, or, as Will Rogers put it, “the art of saying ‘nice doggie’ until you can find a rock.” Americans have long been accused of having little diplomatic sophistication, but, as a European friend once put it: “It’s part of the charm.” Lately, it appears our President is trying to foist charm off as sophistication, and it’s failing. President Obama’s speech this week to the General Assembly of the United...

Reductio ad Absurdum: My Two Cents on Civility, Dissent, and Racism By David J. Aland 18 September 2009 Mike Godwin once observed that online debate has a natural tendency towards hyperbole. Godwin’s Law states that the longer a debate continues, the probability of someone making a comparison to the Nazis approaches 1. While there certainly appears to be no reduction in Nazi references since the “BusHitler” days, racism now appears to be the new Godwin’s Law. While debating Joe Wilson’s punishment for blurting “You lie!” during President Obama’s speech, Rep. Hank Johnson declared that a failure to censure Wilson would...