Now that Congress has repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” a few questions arise:

Will universities that opposed the law begin reinstating ROTC programs and allowing military recruiters on campus? I predict they will not. DADT was a convenient rationale for being anti-military, but they will quickly find others. Their means of opposing DADT was fundamentally dishonest. It was, after all, not the “military’s policy” (as it was universally labeled) but the result of legislation enacted by a Democratic Congress and signed by Bill Clinton. They should have banned members of Congress from campus rather than the military. But the point was always about opposing the military rather than DADT. The military will continue doing things our academic class opposes (i.e. doing what militaries do), and the military will remain unwelcome on campus.

Will recruitment and retention become more difficult? I’m sure a number of heterosexual men will opt out of military service, although I expect that number will be small. I also doubt there will be a sudden influx of homosexual recruits. The impetus of repealing DADT, however, is again more about dismantling the military culture than it is about individual rights, and open homosexuality in the ranks will change that culture. The ultimate question concerns what happens if recruitment goals can’t be met. Will the liberals support a restoration of the draft? We all know the answer to that question.

Will the privacy of military personnel be compromised? Under DADT, homosexual personnel were allowed to serve and given a measure of privacy. (Sex, as you may recall, used to be a private matter.) Men could serve faithfully and still have a private life. That was the “Don’t Ask” component of the prior law. What will replace “Don’t Ask”?

Finally, will this be good for the military and for our national defense? Of course not, but the people pushing this social experiment don’t care.

Naked breasts have been suggested as a means to curb immigration of Islamic fundamentalist into Demmark.  Some doubt their value as a deterrence.

Paco has found a more effective answer to militant Islam.

Once you’re funny, there’s no going back.  Steve Martin had the bad taste to answer the interviewer’s questions, and the interviewer had the temerity to ask Martin about his latest book An Object of Beauty.  The audience went nuts, wanting Martin to be funny, sending messages to the interviewer to ask different questions, and then demanding refunds.

As a former Army bandsman, I am not just a casual observer of Walter Pincus’s column in the Washington Post suggesting that we don’t need military bands.  His argument, if it can be dignified as that, mostly boils down to there being too many of them.

And so this comment on the Post’s site seems particularly appropriate:

Let’s get rid of all of the over-paid, undereducated, and untalented columnists. How many does the Post need anyway? There are bloggers out there with far more talent and insight than this person. Heck, who needs the Post at all? It doesn’t serve any purpose that can’t be replaced by some other entity. Who needs all of these writers and papers? Why would a state need more than one? Ridiculous. We should just cut them and give the saved money to day care!

Excellent idea! 

As much as I might like to write a thorough rebuttal of Pincus, I don’t have to.  Josh DiStefano has done it for me, and it’s worth the read.

People on the left have often attacked the NRA for taking extreme, uncompromising positions on gun control. But, according to Redstate, the NRA is about to put that argument to rest once and for all.

By endorsing Harry Reid:

Reid has a lifetime rating of “F” from Gun Owners of America (who Ron Paul once called “the only no-compromise gun lobby in Washington”). GOA is actively supporting the 100% pro-gun Republican nominee, Sharron Angle, in her campaign to unseat Harry Reid.

But money talks:

Well, I thought perhaps the NRA carveout in the DISCLOSE Act might be the answer. But, there is more. It turns out, Reid secured a $61 million earmark for a gun range in Clark County, Nevada.

So let’s not hear any more talk about the NRA being unbending on the issue of gun control.  It apparently responds to handouts and earmarks just like any other special interest group.  First the money, then the principle.

The Easy Charge of Hypocrisy. Michael Gerson explains why conservatives don’t survive sex scandals.

Yet moral liberals have something to learn as well. The failure of human beings to meet their own ideals does not disprove or discredit those ideals. The fact that some are cowards does not make courage a myth. The fact that some are faithless does not make fidelity a joke. All moral standards create the possibility of hypocrisy. But I would rather live among those who recognize standards and fail to meet them than among those who mock all standards as lies. In the end, hypocrisy is preferable to decadence.

The Headline Says It All.

Transgender Men Go Topless at Delaware Beach – and Police Can’t Do a Thing

Why Do People Think Classical Music Is Always Soothing? Mozart’s music will be played at a German sewage treatment plant in an effort to speed up the microbes.

It is hoped that the Austrian’s soothing symphonies and operas will drive down energy costs at the waste-treatment facility in Treuenbrietzen, southwest of Berlin.

Don Giovanni is soo soooothing, I’m afraid it will put those microbes to sleep.

Daniel in the Lion’s Den vs. Solomon Who? It takes a certain fortitude to carry an Israeli flag through the middle of a pro-Palestinian demonstration. The video is worth watching for that lesson, but you have to go all the way to the end for the punch line.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Krauthammer sums it up pretty well:

Israel can’t have a forward defense – a buffer zone – but must trade land for peace. The land was traded, and there was no peace. Israel can’t have an active defense – disrupting the terrorists – but must stop provoking its neighbors. Israel stopped, and the neighbors became even less neighborly. Now Israel cannot have passive defense – a blockade – because it stops the free flow of rockets into Gaza.

The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, six million — that number again — hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized, and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists — Iranian in particular — openly prepare a more final solution.

Today they are coming for the Jews. As for tomorrow, remember that people vilified Ronald Reagan for proposing ways to prevent incoming nuclear missiles from landing on our cities. They delegitimized defense, and that irrational mindset is now the driving force in our foreign policy.

Spengler notes that the readings from the Torah this past week included the story of the 12 spies sent by Moses to scout out the Promised Land.  Joshua and Caleb argued that an invasion by the Israelites would succeed.  The other ten outvoted them, which resulted in another 40 years of wandering in the desert.

Whether such cowardice infects Israel’s current leadership, its timidity in handling events leading up to the flotilla raid certainly made matters worse.

If Israel had denounced the matter as a provocation and withdrawn its ambassador from Turkey, warning that the object of the exercise was to provoke violence and open the way for weapons deliveries to Hamas, the outcome might have been quite different.

But Israel seems to have been confused. Its denunciation of the attempt to deliver weapons to Gaza under the guise of humanitarian aid lacked teeth. Gaza is a launching pad for missiles aimed at Israeli citizens. It does not need humanitarian aid according to the United Nations Middle East envoy.

Israel then apparently downplayed the threat, sending too few troops insufficiently armed to intercept the flotilla.

In short, the Gaza flotilla caper was the invention of an organization with deep ties to terrorist financing of Hamas to ameliorate a humanitarian problem that doesn’t exist while refusing an Israeli offer to deliver its aid to Gaza. We know the outcome: Israeli naval commandos carrying paintball guns encountered armed resistance and suffered injuries, and ultimately used their weapons to defend themselves. Israeli authorities say nine were killed, while activist groups said 19 were unaccounted for.

The absence of decisive action resulted in incremental escalation – a phenomenon that repeats itself with boring regularity.

The Islamist government of Turkey is now firmly allied with Iran. Europe is engaged in its customary anti-Israel rhetoric, and Obama’s America has noisily forsworn any notion of using force. Israel has few options remaining:

Whether Israel has the wherewithal to set back Iran’s nuclear ambitions for a number of years is a matter of debate; it almost certain could do so with tactical nuclear weapons launched from its submarines now in the Persian Gulf. It would have to combine an air attack on Iran with a ground assault on Hezbollah’s forces in southern Lebanon. In the best of cases a decisive victory against Hezbollah might cost the lives of perhaps 3,000 infantrymen, not to mention the lives of civilians caught in a rocket bombardment. It would have to have sufficient resources to frighten Syria away from intervening, or, if necessary, to reduce Syria’s armed forces. If the war plan went awry, casualties might be far greater.

As America abandons allies and retreats into the sophistry that the world can be made safer by softer rhetoric and a lack of resolve, others more ruthless are sure to fill the void. And someone, if not everyone, is going to pay a terrible price.

Carolyn Glick adds a useful analysis of the information war being fought against Israel.

In view of all of this, it is clear that the information strategy for contending with the flotilla was ill-conceived. Rather than attack Turkey for its facilitation of terrorism, and openly prepare charge sheets against the flotilla’s organizers, crew and passengers for their facilitation of terrorism in breach of both domestic law and international law, the information efforts were largely concentrated on irrelevancies. Officials detailed all the humanitarian assistance Israel has provided Hamas-controlled Gaza. They spoke of the navy’s commitment to use nonlethal force to take over the ships.

And now, in the aftermath of the lethal takeover of the flotilla, Israel’s leaders stammer. Rather than demand an apology from the Turkish government for its support for these terrorists, Defense Minister Ehud Barak called his Turkish counterpart to talk over what happened. Rather than demand restitution for the terrorist assault against IDF troops, Israel has defended its troops’ training in nonviolent crowd control.

Bonnie and Clyde died in a hail of gunfire on this date 76 years ago on a rural Louisiana road. Each received about 50 bullet wounds. Clyde was 24 years old; Bonnie was 23.

I passed by that site recently and had a conversation with the son of Ted Hinton.  Ted was a Dallas County Sheriff’s deputy assigned to track down Bonnie and Clyde. He set up the ambush. The son, “Boots” Hinton, comes straight from central casting, exactly who you would expect to find behind the desk at the small “Ambush Museum” in Gibsland, Louisiana. He has lots of opinions and all the time in the world to express them.

Ted Hinton’s book “Ambush” is atrociously written (despite the aid of a journalist) but interesting nonetheless.  The 1967 Arthur Penn movie took some liberties with the facts, and Hinton’s book gives a clearer picture of the two-year crime spree. The couple really had no goal, and no achievement, other than survival for a time. Their robberies rarely netted anything of significance. They suffered injuries: Bonnie was badly burned when their car careened off a river bank, rolled over on her, and caught fire. Both suffered bullet wounds in some of the shootouts.

Their lives are interesting only for the incredible waste, loss, and desperation. Bonnie is described as much prettier than her pictures, smart, literate, and good natured when Hinton knew her as a waitress.

The 14 men they murdered were almost all law enforcement officers killed in the pair’s efforts to avoid capture. Many of those officers encountered them unaware of who they were. On Easter Sunday 1934, for example, two motorcycle officers saw their car on the side of the road in Grapevine, Texas and went to offer aid. Even when the officers devised a plan, as in Joplin and Platte City, it proved disastrously inadequate. Clyde, of course, was usually better armed than the police (perhaps due to an absence of adequate gun control laws?).

Bonnie and Clyde continuously returned to Dallas to visit family, aided by a network of friends in Dallas’s dismal west side. Hinton grew up in the same neighborhood, knew Bonnie and Clyde and their families, and he tells of regular encounters with the parents. They are sympathetic accounts. Everyone knew how it would eventually end. The constant returning to West Dallas seems inordinately reckless and accounted for virtually all of Hinton’s various encounters with Bonnie and Clyde and near misses.

Hinton did not write his book until he was the sole surviving member of the ambush team, approximately ten years after the 1967 movie. Until then, they had permitted, or more accurately invited, the fictional notion that the police were led to Bonnie and Clyde by the father of gang member Henry Methvin. The movie repeated this widely held notion. But, in fact, Hinton benefitted only from reasonable deductions and some luck. A few days before the ambush, Methvin had been ordering food to go at a Shreveport cafe while Bonnie and Clyde waited in the car, and when police spotted them, they escaped separately. Hinton figured that Clyde would have to reconnect through Methvin’s father. Hinton and his partner, the local sheriff and his deputy, and two officers from the Texas prison system staked out a road leading to the elder Methvin’s farm. After they had spent two nights and a full day crouched in a wooded area beside the road, Methvin’s father drove by. He was stopped and handcuffed to a tree for several hours. The police parked Methvin’s truck on the road, jacked it up, and removed a tire in the hopes that Clyde would at least slow down. Only when they were about to give up did Clyde finally drive by. Had Methvin complained of being kidnapped, the officers would have faced charges, but Methvin saw that it might help his son if people thought he had cooperated.

Was the violation of Methvin’s civil rights justified? Was it reasonable to fire hundreds of rounds into the car? Hinton claims that they gave an audible command for Clyde to halt before opening fire, but Clyde’s reaction was exactly what was expected. The police were still mostly without radios and their actions were uncoordinated. Information traveled slowly. And Bonnie and Clyde continued to kill. Attempts to take them alive had resulted in officers being killed and civilians put at risk. One could reasonably expect that failure to stop them on that road, that day, would result in more lives lost.

Had Clyde come along 30 minutes later, after the ambush team left, Methvin would surely have told a different story. Under today’s standards, imagine the result: lawyers for Methvin, disciplinary boards, press hysteria, handwringing, a major setback in efforts to capture the outlaws, and almost without doubt, additional victims. But we are now much more sensitive to protecting our civil liberties, aren’t we?

Those of us who have had the pleasure of watching Johnny Depp (heavily influenced by Keith Richards) play Captain Jack Sparrow in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies (not to mention Errol Flynn in “Captain Blood”) know that pirating is at its roots an art. 

But plying one’s art takes practice, and everybody is looking for a shortcut these days.  Like many of our societal institutions, pirating has slipped in the 21st century.  Pirates operating off the coast of Africa (consisting almost entirely of skiffs full of crack-crazed clowns brandishing rusty AK-47s) have on many recent occasions attacked fully armed naval warships capable of annihilating their entire home towns with one percent of their armament.  Others have tried to “negotiate” with U.S. Navy Seals armed with sniper rifles capable of shooting the eyeball out of a bucking bronco at 300 meters – which, at 50 meters from the fantail of a destroyer, is like falling off a log. 

One of the lessons in piracy is no doubt being brought home to Somali pirates this week – the lesson coming home in lieu of the pirates themselves.  The lesson is simple: avoid the Russians.

Unhindered by a squeamish Congress and judiciary, the Russians “captured and released” ten Somali pirates like so many sport fish (mercifully) and report that the pirates “all died while being repatriated” to their homeland.  Pity.  Such are the risks of piracy: dehydration, artistic misunderstanding, and sudden and acute lead poisoning.  As the Joker told Batman in the original movie, “I make art until somebody dies.”  The Russians are artists of death . . . to pirates . . . an exchange that can only be understood between fellow artists, may God bless and keep them.

Strafer is reloading . . .

I keep hearing that the Republicans don’t have a plan on health care. That charge is demonstrably false, but it persists. Just yesterday, a friend of mine posted a snide comment on Facebook, asking whether anybody really thought the Republicans would “start over” and do something about health care. The unspoken assumption is that health care is in terrible shape and anything would be better than what we have now.

The Democrats have a sweeping plan for radical change, and the Republicans don’t. Never mind the polls showing that people mostly like what we have now.

I readily concede that the Democrats have a plan. Custer had a plan, too. It was a bad plan based on a false assumption that Indians would never congregate in such large numbers. Therefore he believed he could send half of his troops to attack one end of their encampment while he led the rest around to the other end. No one was able later to ask Custer just how far away he thought the other end was or how many Indians he expected to encounter along the way.

So while the Democrats prove their willingness to go charging into the situation with no concern for the consequences, with no idea where they might come out on the other end, I find myself siding with Major Reno, who led the initial charge into the Indian camp while Custer set off to implement his grand envelopment. Reno recognized a disaster in the making and went into a defensive position, holding on until saner commanders arrived on the scene.