Take your pick. I tend to go with Trende’s analysis because he’s a really sharp observer of American politics and what he says agrees with my hopes. Oh, like the rest of you are never guilty of wish-casting…
Geezers will be an increasingly large segment of the population. That is in the nature of things these days – less risks in life, better medical care. One thing I’ve never got is those who seem to want to live forever…don’t smoke, don’t drink, spend hours exercising. I mean, I understand a wise desire to stay healthy…but, you know, eat right, exercise, die anyway. I’d rather, when the time comes, look back on the people and things I’ve enjoyed in life rather than having a long list of desperate efforts I made in the name of health. To each his own, of course, and you’re mileage may vary.
Jackson is to be off the $20 – and Harriet Tubman to replace him. Fine by me that we replace one of the founders of the Democrat party with a gun-toting, Christian Republican. I do wonder if our Progs know those details about Tubman?
Related: Virginia Governor ok’s 200,000 felons voting – Hillary needs all the voters she can get, ya know?
Plusgood words prevent crimethink – How Democrats use words to control the terms of debate.
Obama does what Obama does best – threaten our allies. In this case, warning the Brits that if they dare to leave the EU, the USA won’t be in a hurry to conclude a trade deal with Britain.
New Independence Day trailer – looks pretty cool. Naturally, they’ve got a female President doing her best Hillary Clinton voice impersonation.
Muslim member of Sweden’s Green Party quits politics over the prospect of having to shake a woman’s hand. Have fun with this one, Progs.
Earth Day is celebrated every year on April 22nd, which, coincidentally, is Russian dictator V.I. Lenin’s birthday. Although Lenin was too busy being dead to directly participate in the first Earth Day celebration in 1970, visitors to his tomb that day swear they heard chuckling.
Chelsea Clinton – whom we can’t criticize because she’s A Child – babbles on about how her mother will get rid of guns by appointing a kook leftist to the Supreme Court. Methinks Bernie must still have a shot at it or Team Clinton wouldn’t be taking this line this late in the campaign season.
Hillary Clinton has no regrets about Libya. No, you’re not shocked, at all. In fact, you’re not even angry about it – this is just the way the Clintons are, all the time.
Mark Steyn takes note of an outrageous event in Germany – satirist writes an insulting poem about Turkey’s President, German government decides to prosecute the guy under an obscure law which prohibits insulting heads of State:
…A free society does not threaten a guy with years in gaol for writing a poem. If you don’t know that that’s wrong, you should just cut to the chase and appoint yourself mutasarrıfa of Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman sanjak of Berlin.
What a disgraceful person (Merkel) is, the worst German chancellor since …well, I don’t want to go all Godwin’s this early in the piece. But a few years ago, when Maclean’s and I had our triple-jeopardy difficulties with the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission, the Ontario “Human Rights” Commission and the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal, the response of many of my fellow Canadians to the eventual outcome was along the lines of: “Well, I don’t know what Steyn was making such a fuss about. The process played itself out and he was acquitted. So the system worked.”
Some of these people were genuine innocents who’ve never been caught up in a time-consuming seven-figure legal battle before. But many others were making the argument cynically. They know that, if you can tie up a book or a magazine article in court, then there will be fewer books and magazine articles…
As Steyn says, “the process is the punishment”. Now, in the United States our Founders wrote the First Amendment and so it is vastly more difficult to erect speech-suppressing “human rights laws” as they have in the rest of the Western world…but even here in the United States people self-censor in order to just be sure they won’t be the target of a howling mob of Progressive Social Justice Warriors. Remember, one ill-advised Tweet and you can lose your job – but even if you prevail, who wants to put up with that? Better to just keep silent.
It is time to put a bit of teeth into the First Amendment. I suggest a Free Speech Restoration Act.
1. No employer shall in any way sanction an employee for any act of speech made outside of work time. Religious bodies may terminate an employee for acts of speech which deny any of the clearly expressed dogmas of the religious body.
2. Social media companies which allow the exposure of private phone numbers and addresses without a person’s consent may be held liable for civil damages.
3. Persons who spread false statements about private individuals may be held liable for civil damages. Social media companies must provide relevant information upon court order to identify any person who may have spread false statements about a private individual. Private individuals for the purposes of this law are persons who are not an officer of a corporation, an elected or appointed official of government, an employee of a government agency or the employee of any news media entity.
4. Congress shall appropriate a sum not less than $5 billion per year to provide free legal representation to any citizen who needs such representation in order to recover damages resulting from actions taken by employers, social media companies or persons who in any way sanction or cause sanctions to be applied to a citizen for acts of speech. Private individuals who are accused of spreading false information are also entitled to free legal representation.
That should do it. The most important thing is that you can’t lose your job over what you say outside your job. While at work, you do have to toe your employer’s line and if you don’t like it, you can find other employment…but once you clock out, you can say whatever you please and there is nothing your employer can do about it. This, in and of itself, would cure most of the self-censoring which goes on. The second important thing is to provide economic sinews for those who are victims of mob action for stating unpopular opinions…and the fact that such sinews exist, once a few examples are made, would greatly curb social justice mobs. And by excluding those who are in power from protection under this law, everyone is still free to go after the powerful with gusto.
We on the right have a vested interest in this. On the whole, we don’t engage in activity which seeks to suppress anyone’s speech. The left, of course, makes it their business to shut up everyone they disagree with. If we don’t swiftly find some means of ensuring our right to speak, then soon we won’t be able to speak, at all. And I think such a law could garner popular support – certainly the legal industry won’t be against it! But the basic concept of privacy and not lying about other people will be in line with general American ideas of what is right and just. All we have to do is find a candidate who would be willing to run with it.
Today is the big New York vote. If Trump sweeps it, then he’s got a path to a first ballot majority. If he falls short, then his chances of getting that first ballot majority nearly vanish. Let’s hope the people of New York are wise enough to see that Trump is a disaster in the making.
Brazil, proving itself a wiser nation than the United States, is set to impeach their ultra-Progressive President.
Related: Politico wonders if Trump will be impeached shortly after taking office. I’m with Allahpundit on this – I’m already past that and wondering if we’ll be able to work up a decent primary challenge to President Trump in 2020.
A bit of loan chicanery on the part of Mrs. Sanders?
Related: Whatever you do, don’t buy the “Bernie is My Comrade” T Shirt…his lawyers don’t like it one bit.
A lot of the far left just doesn’t like Hillary. This is the joker in the deck for 2016 and no one is really talking about it. To be sure, against Trump one has to give all advantage to Hillary – but against either Cruz or Trump, we simply don’t know how many people Hillary can drag to the polls in November. Sure, there are still slightly more Democrats than Republicans in the country…but not that much more and the disparity continues to decrease. Beating Hillary might turn out to be just a matter of better GOTV…and in that, I think Cruz has a distinct advantage.
Lots of ISIS fighters come from the West. But, you already knew that.
Trump wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal – at least, I hope he wrote it because if he paid someone to write it for him, then he was robbed. It is mostly just a whine about that mean, dirty, rotten Cruz and how (billionaire insider) Donald Trump will give Power to the People. I’ve had a lot to say about Trump, but now he’s just irritating me.
Additional related: Trump protest in Colorado fizzles.
The lawsuit against gun makers in relation to the Sandy Hook massacre can go forward…as I said, the left will just keep going and going and going with this. Eventually they’ll find a jury to award billions to someone and then gun manufacturers will be out of business. So, do we pass a law immunizing gun makers? We already did. In 2005. But we don’t really have laws anymore – we just have whatever a judge says.
Obamacare continues its complete financial crash. It is a bad law which was stupidly written and bears no relation to reality. Democrats will go to their graves defending it.
Jonah Goldberg notes a bit of liberal silliness on the abortion issue:
The White House is asking for a lot of money to fight the Zika virus. “I think Democrats and Republicans in Congress are interested in making sure that pregnant women and unbor children in this country can be properly protected,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said in February. Unborn children? Yes, both parties want to protect unborn children from disease-carrying mosquitoes. But that bipartisanship falls apart when it comes to Planned Parenthood.
I can’t see how a Democrat can justify a single penny being spent to help an unborn child and then turning around and demanding money be spent to kill an unborn child. Either the unborn child is human – and thus can’t be killed – or it isn’t, in which case no one would give a darn what happens to it. Pick one, liberals.
Related: Liberals are thinking a bill which would prevent sex-selection abortions is racist. Don’t try to follow the logic folks, there isn’t any…its just a general liberal demand that abortion never be restricted in any way, shape or form…
When the United States built the Panama Canal more than 100 years ago – back in the days when we would actually build things, you know? – one of the main things which made our effort a success where the French failed was in eradicating Yellow Fever (along with many other diseases) from Panama. Certainly, 100 years later, Yellow Fever is just gone, right? Wrong. As I wrote some years back – to the complete lack of understanding of liberals – the Age of Science is dead. We are now benighted savages and worship our Earth Mother and must propitiate our goddess with the sacrifice of our Evil Science…you know, like banning DDT and stuff. I do think that some time in the next 20 years tens of millions of people will be wiped out by what should have been an easily containable disease…and they’ll die because we simply refused to apply science to the problem.
Sanders supporters – people who want free stuff, don’t want to pay for it.
Saudi Arabia says it won’t limit oil production unless Iran does. If this goes forward, expect a rapid drop in oil prices soon.
Is Trump done? Not at all. He only needs to secure on the first ballot 482 of the remaining 798 delegates outstanding. That is about 60% of the remainder, though, so he’d have to do much better going forward than he has so far. And that is much more difficult for him to do because there’s only three in the race, now, and Trump has made himself ever more toxic to everyone but his core supporters.
Cruz, meanwhile, has the nearly impossible task of getting about 90% of the remaining delegates to secure a first ballot nomination – anything can happen in politics, but it is almost a certainty that Cruz won’t be able to do that. But that, at any rate, doesn’t seem to be Cruz’ plan right now – the reason he’s working hard at getting his people into the delegations to the Convention is he figures (a) he can’t get a first ballot majority and (b) neither can Trump. Many of Cruz’ people will have to vote Trump on the first ballot but after that, it’s pretty much anything goes…but as these people were selected with massive input from Cruz, it is highly unlikely they’ll go for anyone other than Cruz, unless the convention deadlocks after multiple ballots are taken. Then Cruz backers might start looking around for a non-Trump, non-Establishment alternative. Of course, Cruz also has to worry not just about how Trump does, but how Kasich does…if Trump plus Kasich equals “nominating majority”, then Kasich might well throw his support to Trump, putting him over the top. Whatever amount Trump falls short, it will be vital to Cruz to make sure he falls farther short than whatever Kasich has.
It occurred to me today that as well as securing himself friendly 2nd ballot delegates, Cruz may also be making a play to take over the Party. Remember, regardless of who they are pledged to vote for on the first ballot, Cruz-backing delegates will be voting on the rules for the Convention. If Cruz gets enough of his people in there, then Cruz sets the agenda for the Convention. And given how diligent Cruz has been at this nuts-and-bolts stuff, I’d be shocked if among his selected delegates there aren’t people who have mastered the rules of parliamentary procedure. People who know that stuff can tie things up in knots, and untie them just as swiftly…while those who don’t know the rules won’t know what hit them. Given that Trump has proven himself manifestly ignorant of the nuts-and-bolts of politics, I’d expect the Convention to steamroller Trump…and, also, go a long way towards making sure Establishment types don’t parachute someone else into the nomination.
I have to admit to being ever more impressed with Cruz. I’ve always admired his firm stance on Constitutional government, but he’s also showing rare ability to just work the system – set up, it must be said, by people who despise him and wanted to precisely keep out people like him – to his advantage. He prepares. He studies. He does the mind-numbingly boring stuff it takes to get things done. Of course, he can’t do it alone so he must have hired some really cracker jack people to help him out. Given the towering unpopularity of Hillary and her massively dispirited base, I’m starting to think that Cruz might be able to make mince meat out of her in the fall. We’ll have to see – and, of course, it is not even remotely certain that Cruz will prevail in Cleveland. Lot of politics to go through before we get there.
Bernie is, however, done – he never was other than done, anyway. The Democrat Party has determined that Hillary will be the nominee. Lot of factors probably playing to that. Not least is the fact that the party it honeycombed with Hillary loyalists…but it is more than that. It is her “turn”, you see? Democrats really think like that – not all of them, but enough to grind it out. But it is still remarkable that Hillary has yet to put Sanders down. I suspect it will be end of April, start of May before she manages it…and then only with the sort of chicanery which often gives her as many delegates from a State as Sanders gets, even when he blows her out among the voters.
Make people work as part of the welfare requirement and this happens:
In the first three months after Maine’s work policy went into effect, its caseload of able-bodied adults without dependents plummeted by 80 percent, falling from 13,332 recipients in Dec. 2014 to 2,678 in March 2015.
And that, my friends, is why Big Government liberals are opposed to welfare reform…and it’s not just that people will move off the rolls and become independent, but the additional horror that we’d need fewer bureaucrats…and that, in the end, means lower donations to the Democrat party.
Glenn Reynolds suggests a bit of punishment for Attorney Generals who try to criminalize dissent.
Ok, so a third or so of Wisconsin GOPers won’t vote GOP if Trump is the nominee…that is understandable…but about the same number won’t vote GOP if Cruz is the nominee. That makes no sense even in 100 parallel universes. I get it that Cruz has likeability issues. I get that he’s a bit far right for some even in the GOP. But this concept that “well, I’ll stay home or vote third party which ensures that Hillary is President if Cruz is the nominee” is just, well, absurd. Part of it is, I think, just passion-of-the-moment thing. There are still plenty of Rubio voters who feel betrayed their guy lost, and plenty of Kasich voters who are just officially sticking with their man to the bitter end. The balance would be made up of Trumpsters who simply won’t vote GOP, at all, if Trump isn’t the nominee. Most of the #NeverCruz people will, I think, come home in November.
Cruz does have a very high hurdle to jump – first getting the nomination; then uniting the party; then facing off against Hillary and figuring out a way to poach enough Rare Voters and disaffected blue collar Democrats. I figure his chances of beating Hillary are significantly less than 50/50…but he will have one magnificent asset in the quest: Hillary. She’s just terrible.
So, a Dominican priest walked across a college campus – and the kiddies went into a panic thinking his white Dominican robe was a KKK outfit. College – it just doesn’t make any sense.
The Panama Papers scandal continues to cause a stir. If you ever wonder why rich and powerful people act like the laws don’t apply to them there is a simple reason for this: generally, the laws don’t apply to them. Certainly not like they apply to a poor or middle class person. If you’ve got enough money and enough pull, you can avoid prosecution; get sweet heart deals if prosecution is unavoidable; tie up the law in endless appeals if you can’t get a sweet heart deal; provide donations in return for an executive pardon if all else fails. But, mostly, you don’t even have to worry about that – Hillary isn’t the only easily indictable person out there walking around free, after all. The love of money is the root of all evil and power corrupts…people with lots of money tend to love money (otherwise, in almost all cases, they wouldn’t have made quite so much of it – and by “lots” I mean once you start getting into the billions of dollars of net wealth); people in power are always at risk of being corrupted by it and the longer a person has power, the more chance they’ll be corrupted. I have my solution for these problems – a wealth tax and term limits. Yeah, maybe not the best…but let’s hear yours.
The natural response to a $15 minimum wage. Spoiler alert: those making a minimum wage won’t like it.
State writes a confusing medical marijuana law. Small business owners decide to set up a marijuana dispensary which they believe has obeyed the law. Police disagree. Raid the place. Take everything they own. Charges get dropped. Small business owners still rather out in the cold. The biggest issue here is the asset forfeiture law – Michigan’s appears to be one of the worst, but all around the nation this sort of thing goes on…and one can’t help but feel that some of the incentive for the police to get a bit over-aggressive is the fact that many asset forfeiture laws allow law enforcement to keep the goods even if no conviction ever results. My solution: no seizure of assets until after conviction. And rather, period, end of story. Yep, this does mean some real criminals will be able to hide some of their ill-gotten gains, but that risk is worth it to me in order to ensure that innocent people don’t have their property seized.
Related: Juries should curb out of control prosecutors.
Trump and Cruz square off in Wisconsin tomorrow and if Cruz wins – as is expected via polling – then it will get very difficult for Trump to secure a first-ballot nomination…and that is pretty much the end of the game for Trump because Cruz, who actually understands the process, has been busily securing delegates at State conventions…and even if they have to vote Trump on the first ballot, they will be solid Cruz votes on the second and subsequent ballots.
Trump is, naturally, complaining about this – and that, for me, is the final nail in his political coffin. He didn’t do his homework – running for President is a much more difficult and demanding activity than he suspected and voting, especially in the primaries, is only part of the game. I expect him and a large portion of his backers to get all stompy-foot about it and by doing that they may, indeed, wreck GOP chances in November…but given how toxic Trump has become over his alligator mouth, his getting the nomination probably wouldn’t have worked out any different. Meanwhile, Cruz has at least a chance to unite enough of the party and gain just enough cross-over votes to stop Hillary…it would be a hard fight and the money would have to be bet on Hillary, but at least it would be a chance for the GOP, given how massively unpopular Hillary is. If, however, the GOP Powers That Be – who despise Cruz probably more than they do Trump – lock out both of them and hand the nomination to someone who didn’t even run in the primaries or who was knocked out early, then the GOP is definitely doomed – both Trump and Cruz supporters will justifiably cry foul and stay home.
Over on the Democrat side, Hillary is the Democrat’s Trump – at least in the sense that she simply didn’t prepare for the contest. And this is a terrible indictment of her leadership ability given that she was taught no end of a lesson in 2008. Hillary had all the money and the entire party behind her and she still can’t put Bernie down. I am still pretty certain she’ll be able to muscle her way to the nomination but she’s day by day turning off the most determined and enthusiastic Democrats. Say what you will about Bernie, but he’s an honest man who is actually campaigning on what the Democrat base wants…Hillary is making a belated lurch to the far left trying to stop him, but the reek of hypocrisy is strong and, meanwhile, she’s providing all sorts of ammunition for the eventual GOP nominee to use against her. A lot of people have said that Hillary is smart – sorry, but I don’t see it. I see not the slightest evidence of intelligence in her actions over her public life. She’s just rote recited whatever current Democrat talking points are, has greedily sucked up as much money for herself as she can and cruelly gone after anyone who has got in her way. She might wind up being President, but she’ll be a lousy President that no one but her sycophants has a kind word for.
The President of France – a Socialist much in tune with political correctness, it should be noted – said the Bad Words Islamist Terrorism while Obama was there…and so his people censored them. If a Republican President had done something like this, it would have been front page news for a month…
Manufacturing jobs are going away, but bartending is having a boom year. Obamanomics!
Once upon a time, men were men – and could be warrior poets:
Safety
Dear! of all happy in the hour, most blest
He who has found our hid security,
Assured in the dark tides of the world that rest,
And heard our word, ‘Who is so safe as we?’
We have found safety with all things undying,
The winds, and morning, tears of men and mirth,
The deep night, and birds singing, and clouds flying,
And sleep, and freedom, and the autumnal earth.
We have built a house that is not for Time’s throwing.
We have gained a peace unshaken by pain for ever.
War knows no power. Safe shall be my going,
Secretly armed against all death’s endeavour;
Safe though all safety’s lost; safe where men fall;
And if these poor limbs die, safest of all. – Rupert Brooke
It has been brought up lately, and I’ve been pondering it for quire a while. Here are some thoughts I have on the subject:
Back in ancient days, those who were defeated in war were at the mercy of the conqueror – it was felt that merely enslaving them was to cut them some slack. But putting an entire city to the sword down to the last man, woman and child was not uncommon. Over time, this was modified a bit as some great conquerors (most notably Alexander and Caesar) discovered that clemency was itself a mighty engine of war – letting the defeated off relatively easy tended to make conquests more lasting; and you could get more out of the defeated in continuing tribute than you could in a one-off sacking. But, still, for the longest time it was thought that an enemy who refused terms and was then defeated was without recourse to mercy.
Mostly through the agency of the Catholic Church as it rose to prominence, this idea of mercilessness to the conquered was modified. And the waging of war, itself, was held to require a strict set of rules. That these rules were often ignored is beside the point – there were rules and people would refer to them in judging the wartime actions of a nation. Time went on and war became to be seen as a thing between professional armies, alone, and the non-combatants were to be spared the ravages of war as far as possible. Napoleonic France diverged from this general trend (essentially, Napoleon looted Europe in order to fund his regime and his continuing wars) but the post-Napoleonic reaction was just that much more strong – until, by treaty, nations in the late 19th century started to codify the rules of war.
But it was still held that if one side violated the rules, the other side was justified in following suit. A good example of this was poison gas – banned by treaty prior to World War One, once the Germans started using it then all sides used it to the best of their ability. And then World War Two happened – a war was started by a nation with absolutely no justification and that nation then ran amok murdering and looting on a scale never seen before in war. After the war, trials were held and those judged most guilty of carrying out the crimes were hung or imprisoned for long terms. And it became rather set in stone: there were some things you just couldn’t do in war, ever.
But it still remains a fact that some people depart from the laws of war – most notably the terrorist. Remember, what was most terrible about the Nazi crimes was the way they brutalized people who couldn’t fight back…civilians and disarmed prisoners of war. We look far more in horror at the massacre of Babi Yar where more than 33,000 defenseless Jews were murdered than we do the bombing of Hamburg where more than 42,000 Germans died…this is because the Jews were completely harmless and completely helpless, while the Germans were at least working to support the German war machine and in the Luftwaffe and the Flak units, the Germans at least had a chance at self defense. We feel sadness when, say, an American or Israeli soldier is killed by an enemy but we know that soldiers voluntarily face such risks – and they have a chance to defend themselves. But when a bomb goes off in a shopping mall, it is defenseless, harmless people being murdered. The laws of war require that those shooting and being shot at be clearly identified as people who can do that – anyone who is not so identifiable must not be shot at and must not shoot. But the terrorist is violating both sides of that – they are not identifiable as shooters and they seek to kill people who are most definitely not in a position to shoot back.
What do we do about such a thing? That is the crucial thing we need to be clear in our minds about. The enemy diligently hides his identity. He desperately does not want to be known as a combatant before he starts shooting. He hides among his like, blending in to the best of his ability to confound those who would prevent him from attacking. He browbeats and threatens non-combatants into keeping silence, and supporting his efforts. He then steers clear of any place where he’s likely to be met with armed resistance, and then attacks. Is such a person, if captured, to then he held as if he were a regular soldier, honorably seeking to engage his like in battle? Or is he to be treated as a common criminal and be provided with a defense attorney? Or is he to be fought as he fights? Here is a clip from the movie Breaker Morant – it tells the story of three Australian officers being charged with murder for shooting out of hand what amounted to captured terrorists during the Boer War:
Most of the laws of war we use today were in effect at the time – but there is a difference: the defense the officers used was that they were obeying orders. Here’s the scene where the defense sums up:
And, of course, the standard was created in the post-WWII trials of the Nazis that obeying orders is no defense. Soldiers are to refuse to obey any order of a criminal nature – and, indeed, this has been written into American law and into the Uniform Code of Military Justice. But, still, what to do with an enemy who has departed entirely from the rules of war?
If a terrorist is planning on setting bombs in a series of shopping malls, what rule are we to use in stopping him from doing it? To be sure, if we can just arrest him and send him to jail, that is fine. But suppose we can’t? And even if we can arrest the particular terrorists planning the bomb-setting, what of their masters in a foreign land? And what of the government which allows them to operate in their territory? A further example – a terrorist group is using an active hospital as a base for their operations, what rule of war are we to use in getting after them? Kindly ask them to leave? Bomb the hospital? Suppose we decide in such cases that it is legitimate to bomb a hospital but we, being human, bomb the wrong hospital and kill hundreds of civilians – is that a war crime? Bring up the pilots on charges of murder?
We all know we must not become just like the enemy – but it seems to be that to become like the enemy would be to start hiding our military forces behind civilians and to eschew entirely attacking the enemy but, instead, go in search of family and friends and killing them out of hand. That would be acting like the enemy – but fighting the enemy without let or hindrance even though he is hiding behind civilians would not, in my view, be a crime…and if in the heat and pressure of battle where our troops are in a shooting gallery where who is the enemy and who the noncombatant is unclear, then it still would not be a crime if some of our troops did some things which in cool hindsight were wrong.
We are faced with a ruthless enemy and we have our choice – fight or quit. I don’t think that quitting is an actual option because they are determined to get after us regardless of what we do. But, still, if one wants to believe that if we stop, they’ll stop then that can be tried. On the other hand, however, if we decide to fight then while obeying all the rules of war, we still have to understand that an enemy departing from the rules will have to pay a high price for his actions…and those shielding the enemy while he violates the rules have to know that cooperating, even involuntarily, with the enemy is the worse option than resisting enemy pressure (in other words, the guy allowing his house to be used as a staging area for terrorists must become convinced that it is better to risk the wrath of the terrorists than to risk our wrath should we find out his house is a staging area).
War is a nasty, dirty business and no one comes out of it with completely clean hands. To take a human life is always a terrible thing and we should do our best to find ways to solve our problems without the spilling of blood. But the nature of humanity dictates that there will always come people who desire to obtain things by killing. It doesn’t really matter what particular thing it is they are trying for – the fact that they are willing to kill to get it is all that matters. And each enemy who arises has to be dealt with in the most efficient way possible. If someone wants to raise a conventional army to fight us and is willing to spare, as far as possible, all civilians then that, indeed, is how we should fight them…but if someone is taking to the hidden bomb in a school or the gunmen in an airport, then other means will be necessary to convince such an enemy that fighting is a losing proposition.
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