Well, while the Archibishop of Canterbury may be trying to “dumb down” christianity, the Archbishop of Wales seems to be on track:

In his Christmas message, the archbishop said: “Any kind of fundamentalism, be it Biblical, atheistic or Islamic, is dangerous.”

The archbishop said “atheistic fundamentalism” was a new phenomenon.

He said it advocated that religion in general and Christianity in particular have no substance, and that some view the faith as “superstitious nonsense”.

As well as leading to Christmas being called “Winterval,” the archbishop said “virulent, almost irrational” attacks on Christianity led to hospitals removing all Christian symbols from their chapels, and schools refusing to allow children to send Christmas cards with a Christian message.

He also said it led to things like “airlines refusing staff the freedom to wear a cross round their necks” - a reference to the row in which British Airways (BA) suspended an employee who insisted on wearing a cross necklace.

Dr Morgan said: “All of this is what I would call the new “fundamentalism” of our age. It allows no room for disagreement, for doubt, for debate, for discussion.

“It leads to the language of expulsion and exclusivity, of extremism and polarisation, and the claim that, because God is on our side, he is not on yours.”

He said: “God is not exclusive, he is on the side of the whole of humanity with all its variety.”

Dr Morgan said it was “perfectly natural” to have a “coherent and rational debate about the tenets of the Christianity”.

But he said “virulent, almost irrational” attacks on it were “dangerous” because they refused to allow any contrary viewpoint and also affected the public perception of religion.

I think that Dr. Morgan has stumbled in to the Twilight Zone like phenomenon that we in the Colonies call “Political Correctness”.  The difference being that here in the US, the Atheist Fundamentalists are only on the rampage against Christianity, and to a much lesser degree, Judaism.  I see no evidence that they are similarly opposed to Islam - in fact, I think they choose to see Islam as a Race or Ethnicity, rather than a Religion.

From an email I recieved from a friend:

To all my Liberal Democrat friends:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or implicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2008, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily neither greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere. Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishes.

To all my Conservative Republican friends:

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table.

-George Schultz

Sanctions and negotiations can be very ineffective, and indeed foolish, unless the people you are talking with and negotiating with and trying to reach agreements with are people who can be trusted to keep their word.

-Caspar Weinberger

We don’t point a pistol at our own forehead. That is not the way to conduct negotiations.

-Benjamin Netanyahu

The above courtesy of Brainyquote.

The quote I was looking for went something like this:

The Weak do not negotiate - they are dictated to by the Strong. 

Negotiations are only possible in two situations:

Between Equals, or qualitatively/quantitatively matched forces.  On occasion, it is in the interests of a stronger party to grant “equal status” to a negotiating partner. 

Between a smaller/weaker party and a larger/stronger enemy, if the latter has losts its will.

     In the second instance, there are two permutations: 

          1.  The smaller/weaker party is simply using the negotiations to “freeze the field”, and consolidate gains, with the potential of returning to the field in the future.

          2.  The smaller/weaker party is simply using the negotiations as a distraction, while continuing to conflict in other venues, or behind the scenes.

Unfortunately for America, we seem to be stuck in the Second situation, since WWII.  The only real exception has been Iraq and Afghanistan, but the Democrat Party would desperately love to that route on those conflicts as well.

You may notice some Fred 08 ads on the left side of the page.

As always, it seems, my pick for President is not my first choice, but is the lesser of all the other evils.  I have not had a candidate that I whole heartedly supported since Reagan - and I didn’t even support him in his first run; he earned my respect and support during that term.

Of the Republican front runners, I can still see myself supporting Rudy or Romney, though I have reservations about each.  I think that Rudy is finding that being America’s Mayor is not the same thing as being President would be, and I honestly think he is losing the “fire in his belly” for the run.  Don’t get me wrong - I still believe that he could take the race if he wanted it, and do a great job.  I just don’t think that in his heart of hearts he really wants it.  He’d be a tremendous Attorney General or FBI director, though.

I have serious issues about Romney’s flip flops, and looseness with the facts.  While this is not a deal killer, it does prove that he is more of a politician than a leader.

Of the others; I cannot support John McCain.  I am very unhappy with his Senate record, and his constant pandering to the Left.  But I might be able to get over that, if not for one glaring item from his past:  He was held as a POW in North Vietnam for 5 1/2 years.  Now, please don’t misunderstand me on this:  I have unbounded respect for John McCain for his service to this nation, and for the sacrfice that he made for us.  I believe that this nation owes him a a debt we can never repay for his service and the hardships he endured for us.  But I believe that very experience should - no, must - disqualify him from the highest office in the land.  It is inconceivable to me that someone who has been through that kind of hell would be entrusted with the command of our military forces, and the war that we now find ourselves in, for the future of western civilization.  I do not believe that a man who has suffered what John McCain has can make the decisions necessary to fight and win this conflict.  He deserves, and has every right to expect, our respect, admiration, and support.  But he cannot be allowed to be the commander in chief.

I was OK with Mike Huckabee when he was the odd ball dark horse, back there with Ron Paul.  This is a big tent party, and we need people from across the political spectrums.  I have no problem with Huckabee’s religious perspective, anymore than I do with Romney.  My problem with Huckabee is that he is NOT a Conservative.  Take away the Religious component of his persona, and he would be giving Hillary, Obama, and Barbie a run for their money for the Socialist vote.  Of all the people running for President on the GOP side, Huckabee is the most French (in the Welfare State, Big Government, Cradle to Grave, Nanny State meaning of the word).  Huckabee would make GW Bush look like a domestic policy genius.  Couple of links:  here, here, here.

I actually supported Ron Paul in a previous run for the White House, when he had changed to the Libertarian Party.  I was a Libertarian for many years, and still consider myself more Libertarian than anything else.  But I have grown up over the years, and come to realize that the Libertarian Party, like so many others, does not have a firm grasp on the realities of how people tick.  They can see part of the picture, but not the whole gestalt.  They appeal to certain aspects, and get support from those people who the mesaage resonates with.  But they will never be a majority party.  The Libertarians, strangely enough, have the same blind spot that the Democrat party has on Human Nature:  they both believe that if we just leave other nations alone, or are nice to them, they won’t hate us.  This is in full view of all evidence to the contrary (indeed, the Europeans hated us long before GW Bush - and always will.  They will never forgive us for saving them from the Nazi’s…  And the Jihadi’s will hate us until we convert or die, or become dhimmi).  I won’t even bother with Paul’s ties to white supremecists groups.  You can read your fill on that over at LGF.

Fred Thompson is not Reagan.  He is not perfect, and he has made mistakes.  But he is now - and has for years - said the right things, and voted the way he talks in the Senate.  I like the vast majority of his stands on this issues; and he is upfront with those stands, and unwavering.  He has realistic and achievable plans to fight this war; constructionist views on the courts; reform of the tax code; and much more.  Unlike most of his opponents, Fred’s positions are spelled out. 

In the end, the most important thing is that I can personally feel GOOD about voting for Fred.  He isn’t my dream candidate - be he is the best in the race today, and he should have the support of anyone that considers themselves a patriot, a small goverment conservative, or a constitutionalist.

I believe that one reason for my decline in posting over the last few months, besides time constraints due to business, is that so many things that I want to say, have already been said, and far more eloquently, by others.  Case in point is a Two-fer from Big Lizards last week:

“The Courage to Do Nothing”

And here’s a nice round-up of forbidden knowledge from the Republicans in the Senate, led by Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK, 100%), ranking member (and former chairman) of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works (EPW). Inhofe is a national treasure, one of the few Republicans not only willing to stand up against the greedy socialists at the UN (many Republicans do that), but also willing to put in the time to educate himself on the actual science involved.

This makes Inhofe a much more potent danger to the regime of so-called “anthropogenic (man-made) global climate change” than his colleagues. Hardly any other senator or representative, on either side the aisle, is willing to go so far as actually learning something about what he’s talking about.

In the meanwhile, my brother sends me a link to another page of the Senate EPW Republican minority website, in which Inhofe finally nails the climatistas: He catches them confessing the real reason for all the hoopla about globaloney. This is a true “cognition” moment when all the pieces abruptly fall into place:

1. A global tax on carbon dioxide emissions was urged to help save the Earth from catastrophic man-made global warming at the United Nations climate conference. A panel of UN participants on Thursday urged the adoption of a tax that would represent “a global burden sharing system, fair, with solidarity, and legally binding to all nations….”
2. “A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources,” said Emma Brindal, a climate justice campaigner coordinator for Friends of the Earth.

Yes. Now you understand why I have consistently referred to the climatistas as “socialists”: Because they are.

Watermelons.  Green on the outside, Red on the inside.  You will find a wealth of information in this piece on the fraud of man made Global Warming, and political (instead of Scientific) process behind it.

The other piece echos somewhat the Robert Kaplan piece from my previous post:

The Men on the Wall

Since the US military is the only entity capable of policing the world, why shouldn’t Japan totally rely upon them? That is how my online correspondent sees the situation: Japan pays enough to buy its protection, so what are Americans complaining about?

I told Asean that paying others to protect your own country is a sure way to lose face. He shrugged; most Japanese think merely losing respect is a cheap price to pay for never having to fight. Japan suffered so much from the last war — in which Japan was the imperialist aggressor — that many Japanese simply refuse to fight again, ever… no matter what the provocation. They won’t to fight even to protect their own interests, land, or culture; they are content to outsource national defense in a way that Americans cannot even imagine.

Is this a position worthy of a once-proud nation of Samurai warriors? How can they face their ancestors, who would have fought bravely and died rather than surrender?

Aside from the craven and disgusting nature of this attitude, their strategy of self defense by proxy is doomed to fail. It has several problems:

• Refusing to fight does not let you avoid war; rather, it invites war.
• Mercenaries are not loyal to you; they always have their own agenda.
• Americans cannot be everywhere; we’re not omnipotent: It’s impossible for the United States to fully protect Japan even if we wanted.
• Finally, the most likely reason outsourcing national defense will fail is the “men on the wall” syndrome: Just like the hobbits of the Shire, the Japanese have not fought a war for a long, long time. They have forgotten how to fight, and even that there is any need to fight.

Lot’s of good food for thought in both.  And, sadly, a great deal of truth…

Indebted to Younghusband at Coming Anarchy for pointing out this piece by Robert Kaplan in a recent issue of the American Interest:

Cut One:

It is obvious that a military can only fight well on behalf of a society in which it believes, and that a society which believes little is worth fighting for cannot, in the end, field an effective military. Obvious as this is, we seem to have forgotten it.

Cut Two:

When pleasure and convenience become values in and of themselves, false ends displace necessary means. It is as Sun-Tzu and Clausewitz said: While a good society should certainly never want to go to war, it must always be prepared to do so. But a society will not fight for what it believes, if all it believes is that it should never have to fight.

Cut Three:

“Decadence” is the essential condition of “a society which believes it has evolved to the point where it will never have to go to war.” By eliminating war as a possibility, “it has nothing left to fight and sacrifice for, and thus no longer wants to make a difference.”

There is a lot more, and some deep analysis.  Time well spent.

Details from Gateway Pundit:

No: 51%

Si: 49%

One wonders if the phone line from Caracas to Olympia and King County elections were burning last night, as Chavez tried to manufacture an electoral “victory”.

I guess it’s always nice to know that Americans can do something better than our South American cousins. 

Maybe Chavez should hire Queen Christine, Ron Sims, and the gang from King County Elections before his next run for President for Life…

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.

-Winston Churchill

People being people, most things that have happended in history are cyclical, and, within bounds, can be applied to the present and future.

History is full of lessons, that we fail to heed at the price of learning them directly.

From the mouth of the enemy (AP);

Analysis: Clinton calm in hostage crisis

When the hostages had been released and their alleged captor arrested, a regal-looking Hillary Rodham Clinton strolled out of her Washington home, the picture of calm in the face of crisis.

Easy to be poised and calm, when you were hundreds of miles away from the incident.  I mean, c’mon, it’s not like she was office where it nutbar was threatening the lives of people Hillary has probably only met in pasing, if at all.

The image, broadcast just as the network news began, conveyed the message a thousand town hall meetings and campaign commercials strive for — namely, that the Democratic presidential contender can face disorder in a most orderly manner.

“I am very grateful that this difficult day has ended so well,” she declared as she stood alone at the microphone….

It was a vintage example of a candidate taking a negative and turning it into a positive. And coming just six weeks before the presidential voting begins, the timing could hardly have been more beneficial to someone hoping to stave off a loss in the Iowa caucuses and secure a win in the New Hampshire primary.

Okay, that last line is about the only thing is this whole puff piece that could even remotely be considered “objective”…

Aides said Clinton was home Friday afternoon, getting ready to deliver a partisan speech in Virginia to the Democratic National Committee, when she was told three workers in her Rochester, N.H., headquarters had been taken hostage by a man claiming to have a bomb….

The aides said Clinton immediately canceled her trip and began working the phones. She later told reporters she had New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch, a fellow Democrat, on the phone in eight minutes.

Over the ensuing five hours, as a state trooper negotiated with the suspect and hostages were released one-by-one, Clinton continued to call up and down the law enforcement food chain, from local to county to state to federal officials.

“I knew I was bugging a lot of these people, it felt like on a minute-by-minute basis, trying to make sure that I knew everything that was going on so I was in a position to tell the families, to tell my campaign and to be available to do anything that they asked of me,” the New York senator said.

THAT is how she is “Calm in the face of a crisis”?  By pertering the first responders, who were just a tad busy trying to save lives?  But then she quickly recovers:

“They were the professionals, they were in charge of this situation, whatever they asked me or my campaign to do is what we would do,” Clinton said.

But the reporter still has to give the impression that Hillary was in control:

Along with taking charge while giving the professionals free rein, Clinton offered up a third dimension to her crisis character: humanity. She said she felt “grave concern” when she first heard the news of the hostage-taking.

“It affected me not only because they were my staff members and volunteers, but as a mother, it was just a horrible sense of bewilderment, confusion, outrage, frustration, anger, everything at the same time,” Clinton said.

Ah yes, play the mommy card. 

It was a thawing moment for a stoic figure who once snapped that she opted for professional life instead of staying home to bake cookies…

You can just imagine the reporter casting a longing gaze at a freeze frame of Hillary from the news conference as he writes the piece.

And them he implies that Hillary has “schooled” us:

Class dismissed.

It’s too bad that the “class” wasn’t on journalistic ethics and objectivity.

A quick search of “Glen Johnson AP” beings up a number of his pieces for that news service.  From a glance at the first page of results, I see a number of negative pieces on Mitt Romney, and one positive on Rep. Barney Frank (D- GLBT).

From the mouth of the enemy himself, comes this report from Al-Jazeera:

 Hundreds of protesters have marched through the Sudanese capital Khartoum demanding death for a British school teacher convicted of insulting Islam.

The protesters chanted “no one lives who insults the prophet”, a day after Gillian Gibbons was sentenced to 15 days in jail and deportation for allowing her class to named a teddy bear Mohammad.

They waved green Islamic flags, held up ceremonial swords and chanted religious and nationalist slogans as they took to the streets after Friday prayers.

The naming of a toy animal after Islam’s most revered prophet has sparked great controversy in the African nation.

Can we PLEASE now move beyond the rediculous idea that the Islamists (or Salafists, or Wahabbis, or Muslim Fundamentalists, or Islamokazes, or whatever you want to call them) are somehow reasonable people, that we just need to learn to get along with?

Keep in mind, that in another part of Sudan, Muslims are enslaving and killing Christians, becuase their religion (of peace) allows them to.