Iron Blog

Battle Election 2004 - Verdict

2004-11-01T14:58:00.000-08:00

I was harsh on both Combatants, but allow me to thank them once again for their hard work and dedication. To be fair, this debate was probably the best I've seen online about this Topic, and I only wish the media could learn a few things from us.

And now, the Verdict.

Two old friends and old foes squaring off in the first Iron Blog Election Battle. Former IB Republican Rosemary Esmay returns with her trademark snark and vitriol against the 'just the facts' style of undefeated IB Democrat Jay Bullock, the most successful Iron Blogger the site has seen.

Who takes it?

Whose spleen vents supreme?

Iron Blogger Democrat, Jay Bullock

It's the Iron Blogger! Jay Bullock pulls off the most narrow of victories over his rival, 50-47. Let's look at the round-by-round scores:

Opening Arguments goes to Jay, 12-9.
First Rebuttals goes even, 15-15.
Second Rebuttals goes even, 14-14.
Closing Arguments goes even, 9-9.

A draw in every round but the first! A great Battle and an excellent way to close this chapter of Iron Blog.

Judge's Comments

2004-10-31T23:12:00.000-08:00

Yes, just one Judge this week, and that is me. I will give a round by round review of each Combatant's posts without the scores, then post the Verdict. After the Verdict, scores will be revealed.

But first, a few thoughts...

I want to thank Jay and Rose for their participation this week and throughout the history of Iron Blog. Their hard work and dedication makes what is about to follow that much more difficult for me, as I not only have to Judge them but critique their posts as well.

Honestly?

It isn't going to be pretty. So... here we go!

Opening Arguments

Rose: Short and simple, Rosemary lays out her basic premise for why she supports Bush. She gives us little to think about and few links to follow, and those she does aren't exactly strong, but it /is/ her Opening, she /was/ rushed (as she later said) and Openings were never her strongest point. She has a solid flow to her post, the structure is good though it lacks substance and she pretty much misses the opening to score Bonus Points. A so-so start that at least tells us where she's going.

Jay: The exact opposite of Rose's opening, Jay overloads us with substance that quite honestly destroys any real structure to the post. It's mostly a litany of why /not/ Bush, and when he gets to /why/ Kerry, he is - admittedly - rushed. There are some serious and some seriously damaging points in here, but it blows right past because there is just too much all at once. As with Rose, we know where he's going, but it takes him far too long to get there, missing many openings for Bonus Points. The links, many of which are good, are quite honestly /too/ many.

First Rebuttal

Rose: This is generally where Rosemary has always done her best work, and this one post is a perfect capsule of everything that is right and wrong with her style of argument. She simply destroys Jay when she points out that his Opening was more anti-Bush than pro-Kerry, and she scores more points when she picks away at Kerry's insurance plan. Vintage Rosemary. Unfortunately, she tries her best to shoot herself in the foot by first dragging up the Swift Boat story (note to Republicans: SWING VOTERS AND UNDECIDEDS COULD GIVE A SHIT ABOUT THIS. DROP IT.) and her rather vicious attacks at the man in general (also a HUGE turnoff to Indies like me). It is both completely unnecessary and actually detracts from what would have been an damning first rebuttal, costing her Style and Substance points from me as well as a ding in the Facts section of the scorecard. Luckily the rest of the post balances it out.

Jay: Once again, Jay is strong on the data and substance, but once again suffers from a structure and style deficit. There are a number of good rebuttals in here, such as pointing out that Rose simply dismissed the previous laundry list of Bush's weaknesses as 'Bush bashing'. She gave him a huge opening and he connects on that punch. He also points out the lack of 'non-partisanship' in her links, but unfortunately gets /more/ partisan in his own, this time. Jay's biggest difficulty seems to be picking a few key points to hammer away at with precision shots and an air-tight style, opting instead to throw an avalanche and hoping his opponents get buried under it all. Rose dismisses everything in one fell swoop, Jay writes a novel answering every single point.

Second Rebuttal

Rose: Here, Rosemary goes in the wrong direction. Her biggest strength in Iron Blog Battles has been her rebuttal skills, but rather than come back at Jay and rebut him, she spends over half of her post doing what she should have done two posts ago in her Opening: laying out her case for Bush as strong on terror. When she finally does get back to the actual job of rebuttering as it was once called, she lands a few jabs but nothing worth writing home about. This post suffers from what she, perhaps unintentionally, sums up best as 'quickie rubattal time'.

Jay: And Jay gets back addressing every single point Rosemary has ever made since the age of ten. To be fair, he gets in a few good shots here, but some of his rebuttals amount to, "And your guy, too!". Instead of staying on one or two weak spots in Rose's case, he tries to address them all, and in doing so really hurts her on none of them. There's so much here I forgot what he just said as I read the next section.

The links on both sides are starting to suffer from ideology, now.

Closing Arguments

Rose: Making up for the fact that her Opening wasn't, and her Second Rebuttal was actually her Opening, Rosemary turns her Closing into a Second Rebuttal - with raisins! This, quite simply, closes nothing until the very end. It really is a Second Rebuttal, Take Two, and if not for the fact that the rules on bringing in new evidence in Closings were changed after she stepped down as Iron Blogger Republican, I'd auto-zero the entire thing. Since that went into effect after her tenure, I'll let it slide. The closing part of her Closing (the part where she puts an actual Closing Argument) is pretty good. Unfortunately it's only four paragraphs and a handful of one-liners long and only scratches the surface.

Jay: It's all or nothing, isn't it Jay? Three posts of Encyclopedia Bushanica, and we get a closing that amounts to, "Woooo Kerry! He's not Dean, but he's not Bush!" The use of the school imagery was both a plus and a minus: he points out that as a teacher he has /lots/ of kids to worry about, but commenting that he has other things to worry about in addition to them getting blown up didn't come across as well as I think he hoped. In the end it's a wash. The style and structure here is a bit better, perhaps because he finally does focus on just a few key issues. If only he can take that and build on it, he'd find a happy middle ground.

Parting Thoughts

In the end, I think what bothers me about this Battle - though nowhere near the level the press, parties and campaigns do - is that I weep for the death of intellectual honesty. Instead of discussing HOW TO MAKE US SAFER, we're caught up in how big a piece of shrapnel was forty years ago and whether our President was pissing on cars in Alabama at that same point in time. WHO THE FUCK CARES?!

Not me.

I want to know how Bush has made us safer at home other than he's killing terrorists in Iraq. IS he making us safer at home? Has he secured our ports? Our chemical factories? Our borders? Osama Bin Laden just made a cameo yesterday - forgive me if I wonder WHY THE FUCK HE IS STILL ALIVE?

I want to know how Kerry is going to solve Iraq. He's going to have a summit and ask really nicely? He's going to say, what? "Sorry the last guy fucked up. Wanna let me fix it?" It's not that easy, and pretending it is makes me feel like he thinks I'm stupid. HOW WILL YOU CHANGE THINGS?

There are tons of things I want to know, but all we get are spin and rhetoric, spin and rhetoric from /both/ sides.

A plague on both your houses.

Battle Election 2004 - Iron Blogger Democrat - Closing Statement

2004-10-31T18:22:00.000-08:00

So here it is: My last closing for the Iron Blog as it exists now. I guess this is when I'm supposed to peel off the mask and reveal that I'm actually Atrios. Or Sydney Blumenthal. Or something. Sadly, I have no reveal saved up for this moment. It's just me, your humble Iron Blogger Democrat. Thanks again to the Chairman, for putting up with my crap and, I'm sure, following every link. And thanks to the Challenger, Rosemary Esmay, taking time out from her busy pregnancy to try the IB one more time.

I have a lot of respect for parents, even though I am not one and do not plan to be. And I can see how someone would consider herself a "security mom," as I imagine that a parental bond would be stronger than the love I have, for example, for my dog or my rabbit (hi, Maggie and Peter!).

I even have some similar nagging fears of my own, since I work in a school, and have not one or two, but 1500 kids who I know and care about. And I don't think there's a teacher in the country who--like parents--didn't feel personally for the children killed by terrorists in Beslan earlier this year.

But this election, at least in my mind, is about more than terror, about more than just making sure that the 1500 students at my school don't get blown up. I want to make sure that they have access to health care so they can grow up healthy. I want clean air for them to breathe so they can kick the asthma, and clean water for them to drink. I want their civil rights in tact, their schooling to be more than testing and test prep. I want affordable college options for them, and I want there to be jobs for my students when they graduate. I want, in short, John Kerry.

I began the Battle by laying out, as neatly as I could, some specific failures of George W. Bush and his administration. From the economy to the war on terror, I do not feel that we are better off than we were four years ago. While 9/11 changed many things, it did not change enough that we should abdicate our responsibility to our children and their future--not to mention the well-being of all of us right now.

Is John Kerry a perfect man, a perfect candidate? No. That's why I hitched my wagon to Howard Dean way back when. But in this Battle, I have tried to articulate, both in my Opening and throughout my rebuttals, that I believe John Kerry will do a good job of addressing many of the issues that Bush has done less than well.

Even the Challenger admits that she is displeased with much of Bush's agenda. That's not to say she would like Kerry's "liberal spending" any better, but when all is said and done, for purposes of this Battle, the Challenger has conceded pretty much all of the arguments save one, and that's terror.

However, I believe that I demonstrated that Bush's record on terror, in part because of problems in intelligence, but mostly because of Bush's out-dated state-terror world-view, is not all that much to crow about. Yes, Bush stands up straight and declares that he will not yield in his desire to take the fight to the terrorists. But we are not safer. And yes, the Bush administration and campaign try to make us fear what terrorists might do in John Kerry's America, but that is all they have. There is no record of accomplishments, no litany of success, no laurels to rest on. All they have left is to tear down Kerry's character and scare us into thinking we'll all die under his leadership.

I know I haven't changed the Challenger's mind, as I remain unpersuaded by her arguments. I probably haven't changed the minds of any of the other four or five regular readers here, either, nor, I'm guessing, has the Challenger. But I've made my case, and I believe I have done it well.

At the outset, I said that we have reached a moment in history where we will set the course we will follow for decades to come. I said that this election will decide who gets to chart that course. I've seen the course we are on now.

It's time to change course. It's time to elect John Kerry.

Respectfully submitted,
Jay Bullock, Iron Blogger Democrat

Battle Election 2004 - Challenger - Closing Statement

2004-10-31T17:38:00.000-08:00

I want to begin by thanking Jay for a most spirited battle. I especially liked reading his links. It isn't often that I get to read so much frothing leftwing bias without benefit of a rabies shot. Seriously, I haven't seen that much foam since the Latte machine exploded at my local Starbucks. Thanks Jay, it was really fun.

My closing is going to be two parts. The first part will address some things that IB Dem said in his second rebuttal that I disagree with and the second part will rap up my pro-Bush position.

Part I

IB Dem is voting for Kerry because he will not appoint far-right judges.

Far-right judges, oooh how scary. Talk about scare tactics. Bush isn't planning on using a litmus test to appoint judges he will only appoint those that are strict constructionists. That is much better than Kerry will do. This country is neither left nor right. The court needs to be balanced and the judges that will be leaving are conservative. They should not be replaced with far-left liberals. That would throw the court way out of balance. The court should represent the country not one ideology.

IB Dem is voting for Kerry because he will not subjugate science to politics;
ignore civil rights; enact a huge middle-class pay cut; engage in cronyism; and let Teresa get away with paying so little in taxes.

One at a time:

Subjugate science to politics ... ah, the environment. Well, he ain't that much better than Bush on this one. Libertarian Jane Galt answers this one for me:

The Environment: Kerry wins by a hair here, but only a hair, because he supports moronic CAFE standards instead of sensible emissions taxes. He's made idiotic promises about getting to 20% of our energy from alternative fuels, a promise which is made as predictibly as the rising of the sun by presidential candidates, to little effect. Bush is better on nuclear energy, but not much. Kerry gets the bonus here because he cares more, though not a whole hell of a lot more, about the negative externalities of various economic activities, than does Bush. Warning to Dems, though: you almost lost this over his grovelling to the coal industry.

Ignore Civil Rights...Kos must've blown a load clear across the room when he reported this one, eh? Talk about assault weapons...

The gist of this charge is that Congress didn't act fast enough on voting so Bush is to blame. NCLB didn't address unequal education enough. Perhaps if the Dems hadn't been beholden to the Teacher's Unions then vouchers for the poorest of the poor, which a majority of African Americans support, would have had a chance. Bad Bush.

NOW is charging the Bush administration with cronyism? Hahhahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahhaah

Middle Class Pay cut. Well if Nancy Pelosi says so ...
Seriously, I'd prefer a more non-partisan source rather than spin.

Racial profiling of visitors from Arab or Middle Eastern countries at airports and borders is bad. I know it isn't very PC but exactly how many 80-year-old Scottish grannies are trying to kill us again? Bad Bush for recognizing that a majority of terrorists happen to be Middle-Eastern or Arabic. You want him to catch them all before they enter the U.S. and kill us but we ain't allowed to look at them? How? Using psychics?

John Kerry won't let Teresa get away with paying little taxes? Yeah, okay. He had a chance to show us what it means to step up and he proved himself by paying the lower rate in Massachusetts. Taxpayers are offered a choice in his state between the higher and lower bracket. He chose the lower one for himself. Do as I say not as I do must be his motto.

IB Dem also characterized me by saying that I am disgusted with Bush's domestic policy. Not true. I am disgusted with his spending on certain things but I know in my gut that Kerry will spend more and make things worse.

Things I like about Bush's domestic policy. I love NCLB. I love it especially because the Teacher's Unions hate it, so I know it's on the right track. I love his Faith-Based Initiative. I love his idea for Social Security reform and it is a hell of a lot better than Kerry's more of the same bullshit approach. I love the Tax Cut and since I personally benefited from it, it really helped my family a lot and I'm far from being rich. It's a good thing. The tax cuts not only stimulated the economy but also helped all of us when we needed it.

Weak on Terror
IB Dem claims that Iran endorsed Bush. Actually, some politician made a statement and that is turned into an endorsement of a country. The leader of Iran made no such claim, unlike the leader of the PLO did for Kerry and just the other day Osama Bin Laden did as well quoting parts of Michael Moore's ficumentary Fahrenheit 9/11. His video taped appearance read like DNC talking points. My favorite part was when Osama referred to Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter... Okay, he didn't but that's the only thing he left out.

If Osama wants Kerry that speaks volumes and it doesn't suggest that Kerry will be a strong leader on Terror.

Part II

Our nation's security depends on strong, steadfast leadership. We need someone that will make a decision, stick to it and do what needs to be done. Bush is that man. In this time, in our life we need someone that isn't afraid to make hard choices. We don't need someone that change's his mind like a weathervane changes direction in a windstorm. That is Kerry. Kerry makes decisions based on what is good for his career. Bush makes choices based on what is good for all of us. Not some of us, all of us.

In WWII, we waited. If we had acted in 1937 to stop Hitler how many lives would have been saved. If FDR knew what was to come he would've acted sooner. We know what will come if we don't take the fight to them and we can't afford to just wait any longer. Waiting to be attacked is not a position that makes me feel safe.

The terrorists want to kill us. That is all they care about. They hate our freedom and us. They hate that I don't wear a burka and that I walk with husband not 10 paces behind him. There is no negotiating with them. WE die or THEY do and I damn well ain't prepared to die because we waited. Waiting may make Kerry and the pacifists feel better but not me. No more. I don't want his sympathy on my loss or yours. I want someone that will fight to prevent attacks. I don't want to wait for the next 9/11. I don't want to find out my son's school was invaded by killers because we didn't profile them.

Do you?

Do you really?

Bush won't wait. He's proven that. He's proven over and over again that his word is his bond. He says what he means and we don't always like what he says but we know where he stands. I don't know where Kerry stands. I know what he says and I know that if he says something I don't like, all I have to do is wait a couple days and he'll change his mind. That isn't good enough for me. I need to KNOW what he will do. We can't afford to hope that he changes his mind to the right position at the right time. He was a staunch backer of Iraq until he was challenged by Howard Dean, then he flipped. Now he says it was the wrong war at the wrong time. He questions the decisions of soldiers in the field. Tommy Franks has called him out and still he persists with the Tora Bora nonsense. The generals fight the war and make the decisions on the ground. That is how it is done. The last time politicians did it was Vietnam and we all know how that turned out.

To paraphrase John Kerry, he is the wrong man at the wrong time.

We need stay the course and win, not cut and run and lose. With Bush we will the first, with Kerry the latter.

That is why I support the re-election of George W. Bush. He is the right man at the right time.

That is what this country needs.

Respectfully Submitted: Rosemary, the Queen of All Evil

Battle Election 2004 - Iron Blogger Democrat - Second Rebuttal

2004-10-30T02:08:00.000-07:00

You're welcome, Rosemary, and I hope you're feeling better. And the change of pace has inspired me, as well. There are some of the things that I hate about Bush, too! So, in fifty words or less, why John Kerry's the better choice:

I'm not a single issue voter. I am voting for Kerry because he will not appoint far-right judges; subjugate science to politics; violate international law; ignore civil rights; enact a huge middle-class pay cut; engage in cronyism; and let Teresa get away with paying so little in taxes.

Of course, none of this matters to the Challenger, not even her own disgust at this administration's domestic policy, because she is a single-issue voter. More on her issue--terror--in just a moment. But first, some quick rejoinders.

Vietnam
We can let sleeping dogs lie (pun intended!) I suppose, but the Navy says Kerry is okay; John O'Neill was Nixon's anti-Kerry hatchet man way back when. You make the call.

Who Lies?
The Challenger caught an incorrect link that slipped by me. The real one is here, though I would understand if the Chairman penalizes me for the SNAFU I should have caught.

Health Care
"Great," the Challenger writes, "so you admit that Kerry's promises are meaningless. That saves me lots of time. Thanks." No, your majesty; what I "admit" is that John Kerry is willing to change his mind when the facts informing his opinions change. Now I know some presidents I could name believe in staying the course resolutely, facts be damned, but that's just not how we do it here in the reality-based community.

The 9/11 Defense
"How many people die in car accidents every year?" the Challenger misdirects us. "How many people die of old age every year? Should we outlaw cars and aging?" Well, the fact is that we do spend a lot of federal money every year to make cars and roads safer. We do have NIH-finded research into prolonging lives. Thinking we should outlaw them is just silly; using the power of the federal government to reduce risk, though, makes sense.

And that's all I'm asking: How come Republicans, who control the legislature and the executive, can't write law one that would effectively insure the uninsured, potentially saving tens of thousands of lives a year? And this isn't an either-or game. Yes, the budget is tight, in part because of things we can't undo (like the war) and some things we can (like the tax cut). But, as I said in my First Rebuttal, the president's budget and tax cut priorities are just plain misplaced.

So why can't we do both-and? Why is the 9/11 defense so prevalent? It's simply that the intricacies of health care policy or other complicated good-government problems lack a certain glamor. Terror, on the other hand, sells. Terror grabs headlines, moves voters, and makes for good speech fodder. In the end, the Bush administration has used "September the eleventh two thousand and one," the Bush Doctrine, and the constant threat of new terror attacks to distract people like the Challenger from its horrible track record.

Barry Glassman had a book out a few years back called The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things, basically arguing that "our fears are grossly exaggerated given the actual frequency of these rare events." Now, I know I will be criticized by some (maybe) for trying to say that terror is not dangerous--it surely is, and I will devote a paragraph or two to that in just a bit. But as Glassner said on CNN two weeks after 9/11,

We have good reason to be much more concerned about terrorism now than we have in the past. At the same time, though, all sorts of rumors and false scares have been spreading in the wake of these horrific events. The last thing we need as individuals or as a country right now are superfluous fears and scares. [. . . T]here's a kind of false reasoning that comes into play in these circumstances, and that is that we assume that if something completely unexpected, like the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, can occur, then all sorts of other unanticipated disasters will also occur. That is like assuming that because lightning struck last week, it will strike this week. We have to ask instead what the real dangers are, and whether there are patterns to those dangers, and how best to respond where there are real dangers.

And yet, the Republicans in this election season have done little but obscure many real dangers--like the danger to the uninsured, or of a flu-shot shortage--to propagate fear in the minds of voters. Much of that responsibility lies at the foot of Dick Cheney, but the campaign as a whole is guilty based on fear-mongering propaganda like that idiotic wolf ad. They have succeeded in scaring the Challenger, at least, into voting for them.

Who is Weak?
The Challenger, buying the Republican fear-mongering, wants you to think that John Kerry will be weak fighting terrorism. She tosses out Arafat's endorsement of the senator, while neglecting to tell you that Axis of Evil member Iran has endorsed Bush: If the terrorist endorsement means weakness, Bush has no advantage. Did a handful of KLA members write Kerry a few checks? Quite possibly. But how many millions of dollars did Halliburton collect while Brown & Root provided "infrastructure support" to the KLA while Dick Cheney was in charge? Challenger, the Bush team isn't looking good by your standards yet.

And this whole Iraq war flip-flop thing! Oh, I could scream! The Challenger cites Boston's conservative (and Bush-endorsing) paper, the Herald, repeating the same BS that Ed Koch mumbles in his quote, about Howard Dean and his effect on Kerry. In this particular Battle, I think it was a big mistake to bring up Howard Dean, because I was one of those "Deaniacs." I signed up with Dean almost two years ago, when most people thought he was just that frozen sausage guy. So I know what Howard Dean said, when he said it, and what he meant by it. Yes, he skewered Kerry for his war vote (as did I, for that matter), and the most maddening thing about the Kerry response was that Kerry would never say that his vote was wrong. Never. I was there--literally, in some cases--for the primary's major events, and Kerry wouldn't frigging budge on his position. Not one inch, no matter how successful Dean got in promoting the anti-war left's hopes. It's also a little irritating to watch this particular Republican smear campaign, because Dean was never the pacifists' candidate--that would have been Kucinich or Mosely Braun. Dean believed, as Kerry does, that we can't walk away from Iraq now that we've upended their government and infrastructure. Does a Dean connection make Kerry weak? No. On the contrary, Kerry's consistency through the primaries shows the opposite.

The Single Issue
The Challenger has Googled up some history of terrorist attacks. Yes, terror existed before, and will likely continue to exist in the future. But she misses my point that 2002 and 2003 featured quantitatively higher incidences of terror than pre-9/11 years did. And yes, terrorists want to kill us just because of who we are and who they are. But, again, the Challenger misses the point: There are more of them because of the Iraq war than there would have been otherwise. If we had taken out Zarqawi when we had the chance, if we had nailed bin Laden at Tora Bora, we could have crippled at least some of the terrorists' networks and charismatic leaders. Bush passed on both of those opportunities.

And I think that's because of that fundamental difference in world-view I keep trying to articulate. Other people are thinking like I do:

[Bush's statement on the new Osama bin Laden video] explains everything we need to know about how Bush judges success in the wars on terror and in Iraq.

He was concerned about bin Laden because "he had taken over a country." Once the Taliban was overthrown, Bush was satisfied that bin Laden was declawed and no longer a threat. The same held true with Saddam. Once he had been driven from his Baghdad palaces into a spider-hole, Bush felt that the mission had been accomplished. In Bush's view, this new threat isn't about the man or those who support his ideals, it's about the governmental structure from which he gains support. Once the bureacracy has been defeated, the threat isn't there.

That's why Bush went on about the "Axis of Evil," the "states that sponsor terror," and the like, and why his prosecution of the war has not brought much success beyond, maybe, flypaper.

The Bush Doctrine
Perhaps one reason why the Challenger feels safer with Bush is his Doctrine. Sadly, though, that Doctrine is pretty much a failure, in large part because the facts on the ground have not supported the rationale for the first war waged under the new Doctrine. Even "non-partisan" George Will knows it when he sees it:

[O]vershadowing the military achievement is the failure--so far--to find, or explain the absence of, weapons of mass destruction that were the necessary and sufficient justification for preemptive war. The doctrine of preemption--the core of the president's foreign policy--is in jeopardy.

To govern is to choose, almost always on the basis of very imperfect information. But preemption presupposes the ability to know things--to know about threats with a degree of certainty not requisite for decisions less momentous than those for waging war.

What does this mean, in practice? It means North Korea, for example, is giving us the finger:

Our "diplomats" were in Beijing, this week, demanding that North Korea submit to a "complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling" of all its "nuclear programs." [. . .] But we are really asking the Koreans to submit to another application of the Bush Doctrine. [. . .]

So what will we do if the North Koreans refuse to allow us to apply the Bush Doctrine to them?

Well, initially, nothing, since we're bluffing. And after the disastrous application of the Bush Doctrine in Iraq, everyone knows it--including China.

Eventually, however, China will rake in all the chips. There'll be a phased withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea and Okinawa, Korean re-unification and a repudiation of the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979.

And that's from a conservative commentator; liberals and moderates are not blushing about how Bush is losing North Korea.

I won't spend a lot of time on it, but the applied-once and probably never again Bush Doctrine almost certainly failed because of intelligence problems. I've complained in other places that we haven't seen heads roll from the Iraq debacle, except maybe Tenet's. (Certainly not Rumsfeld's!) But the problem goes deeper than just Tenet--it goes to the Office of Special Plans and the way Pentagon intelligence analysts read the intel the way they wanted to. They were willing to believe Ahmed Chalabi, for example. Even this week, we found out that al Qa Qaa was on the IAEA's list for US troops to secure,

But when the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command produced their own list of sites that a limited number of U.S. "exploitation teams" should search, priority was given to those identified by exiled Iraqi opposition groups, he said. Al Qaqaa wasn't one of them.

"The top of the list was dominated by nuclear facilities and places where we expected to find chemical and biological weapons," he said. "Iraqi exiles had a very heavy hand in determining which places got looked at first."

You can't twist intelligence to fit what you believe. You can't bend facts to support your ideology. Knowing, from a pretty reliable source, that Bush was talking up an Iraq invasion as a candidate in 1999, on top of how the invasion really has spurred terrorist recruitment and has not prevented sharp increases in the intensity and frequency of terror attacks, you've really got to start questioning Bush's strength, his Doctrine.

Combine the failure of the Bush Doctrine with the Challenger's own admission that Bush's domestic policy is a failure; you can only come to one conclusion: Vote Kerry.

Respectfully submitted,
Jay Bullock, Iron Blogger Democrat

Battle Election 2004 - Challenger - Second Rebuttal

2004-10-29T15:45:00.000-07:00

I would like to start my second rebuttal by thanking IB Dem and the Chairman. I was incredibly ill yesterday and I requested a delay in posting my rebuttal and they both very graciously agreed. Thank you, gentlemen.

I decided after posting my first rebuttal that I would change strategies for my second piece. This may leave some of you boggled but I feel that my second rebuttal should focus more on why Bush rather than why not Kerry. I will touch on some of the IB's rebuttal later but I want to begin with better explaining my support of our current Commander-in-Chief.

Like many of the Democrats that support Bush, I don't agree with much of what has happened here on the domestic side. I have different reasons for that disagreement, because I believe that Bush has been too liberal in much of his domestic policy. I hate the fact that he spent too much money. I hate the fact that he seems to have forgotten that he has veto power. I won't defend his frivolous spending other than to say that I believe that is what he meant when he said he was a compassionate conservative. I think "compassionate" was a keyword for "liberal spender." I don't mean liberal in the political sense, I mean it as in "giving freely or amply". I voted for him despite knowing in my gut that he meant to be a spender, so I won't play the complaining hypocrite now, like many of my fellow conservatives (Hi, Big Dan).

I said in my opening that I am a Security Mom. I wasn't kidding. I am a single issue voter this year and that issue is our nation's security. I need a president who will not cave into political pressure from his opponents. I need to know that my president will be steadfast and put my safety above his career. Former New York Mayor Ed Koch expresses this sentiment beautifully:

"While I don't agree with Bush on a single domestic issue, they are all trumped by the issue of terrorism, where he has enunciated the Bush Doctrine and proven his ability to fight this war," said Koch. "The Democratic Party just doesn't have the stomach to go after terrorists."

"I saw Kerry surrounded by radical politicians like [former President Jimmy] Carter and [Sen. Ted] Kennedy. ... I know Kerry will succumb to their pressure if elected. They are with Kerry not because they like him, but because their true candidate, Howard Dean, couldn't get elected, and they wanted someone who they can have elected and dominate," charged Koch.

"As long as Kennedy and Robert Byrd are considered major leaders of the Democratic Party, and while we're seeing radical candidates like Howard Dean, whose radical-left supporters have been described by the press as 'Deaniacs,' the Democratic Party will be limited in its ability to serve the country well in times of crisis and war like we face now."

Koch has many insights and I hope that you will click the link and read the whole piece.

Now, IBDem makes an interesting point. His point is a prime example of the divide we as a nation feel.

Of all the Middle Eastern states that sponsor terror, Hussein's Iraq was among the least threatening to the US and our allies.

This is a huge area of disagreement. First, the Bush Doctrine says that we will not only go after terrorists but after the states that sponsor them as well. When Bush said terrorists he didn't mean only Al Qaeda, he meant all of them. That is why it's called the War on Terror and not the War on Al Qaeda. Iraq was the least threatening to our allies? Tell that to Israel.

My opponent also made this statement:

In fact, since the invasion of Iraq, non-state terrorists have been getting more aggressive. This is where I think Bush's record as a leader in the War on Terror deserves serious scrutiny. I've already covered--unrebutted, by the way, the fact that bin Laden and other terrorists were pushed to the bottom of the agenda when the Iraq war rolled around.

More aggressive? They have become more aggressive since we decided to take the fight to them? I don't think so. We can't continue to live in a world that doesn't take things like this seriously:

Nov. 4, 1979 Hostages taken at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran
May 1981 Threats from Libya
April 18, 1983 Bombing of U.S. Embassy in Beirut
Oct. 23, 1983 Bombing of Marine barracks in Beirut
Dec. 12, 1983 Bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait
March 16, 1984 CIA Station Chief William Buckley kidnapped
Sept. 20, 1984 Bombing of U.S. Embassy annex northeast of Beirut
Dec. 3, 1984 Hijacking of Kuwait Airways Flight 221
June 14, 1985 Hijacking of TWA Flight 847
October 1985 - January 1986 Hijacking of cruise ship Achille Lauro;
Bombing of Rome, Vienna airports
April 5, 1986 Bombing of La Belle Discotheque
December 21, 1988 Bombing of Pan Am Flight 103

None of that was Al Qaeda, it was terrorism and that is only until 1988. Al Qaeda was responsible for a few more:

Established by Usama Bin Ladin (UBL) circa 1990, Al Qaeda aims to coordinate a transnational mujahideen network; stated goal is to "reestablish the Muslim State" throughout the world via the overthrow of corrupt regimes in the Islamic world and the removal of foreign presence - primarily American and Israeli - from the Middle East. UBL has issued three anti-U.S. fatwas encouraging Muslims to take up arms against Washington's "imperialism." Al Qaeda provides financial, manpower, transportation, and training support to extremists worldwide. In February 1998 bin Ladin issued a statement under the banner of "The World Islamic Front for Jihad Against The Jews and Crusaders," saying it was the duty of all Muslims to kill U.S. citizens, civilian or military, and their allies. Allegedly orchestrated the bombings of the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, on August 7, 1998. Claims to have been involved in the 1993 killing of U.S. servicemen in Somalia and the December 1992 bombings against U.S. troops in Aden, Yemen. Al Qaeda serves as the core of a loose umbrella organization that includes members of many Sunni Islamic extremist groups, including factions of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), the Gama'at al-Islamiyya (IG), and the Harakat ul-Mujahidin (HUM). The group is a prime suspect in the Sept. 11 attacks as well as the U.S.S Cole bombing.

We aren't making them want to kill us more because we have gone on the offensive. They want to kill us NO MATTER WHAT. We have a choice. Sit back and continue our old doctrine of making limp wristed attempts at self-defense or go after them and the countries that support them. I'm sorry if that sounds cold and callous but we are fighting for our lives and I want someone running this country that won't back down. I want someone that has the balls to do what needs to be done. I want someone that will do it with or without our allies.

"Allies" like France and Germany aren't the ones with targets on their backs. So pardon me if I don't give a flying fig what a bunch of cheese eating surrender monkeys think, okay?

I want someone who won't take money from terrorist groups for his presidential campaign. I want someone that isn't calling longtime terrorist Yasser Arafat a statesmen and getting endorsed by him.

Kerry's nuanced plan is flexible and therefore worthless. The only thing consistent about Kerry is his hairstyle. He can tell me till he's blue in the face what he will do, unfortunately, his record of flip flops betrays his sincerity. If the polls don't like his plan, he'll just modify it. That isn't good enough for me and it shouldn't be good enough for you, either.

Okay quickie rebuttal time:

Jay says North Korea was contained and engaged in talks with Clinton. Bush blew it.

Fact: North Korea snookered Clinton. They lied and left Bush to clean up the mess.

American Enterprise Institute is not non-partisan. Fine, I'll concede the point. I made a mistake. Does that mean they made up their figure? Can't be trusted? Aren't honest? I hope not because that would mean that both Jay and I and many of our links are worthless. Partisanship doesn't equal dishonest.

Kerry & Vietnam:
I don't want this to spiral into a pot of ugly but I will repeat that I stated that Kerry was only fighting in Vietnam for 4 months, not 4 years. My point was about time in country not in service. I won't turn this into the battle of the Swiftvets. I am not prepared to call 250+ decorated veterans liars because of statements made by one or two. You can, I won't.

You want to argue what Bush did. Knock yourself out. He served 5 years in the TANG and the Bush haters are trying to find some kind of evil in the mysertious "missing months". My larger point is Bush did not try to get elected because of his service, Kerry did. Questioning qualifications that he, himself, put on the table is legit. At this stage in the election cycle it is also pointless.

Kerry's Healthcare Plan:
Jay said, "Kerry's also not the absolutist Bush is, recognizing that proposals he made in the primaries are now unaffordable under the record Bush deficit, so he has already scaled them back."

Great, so you admit that Kerry's promises are meaningless. That saves me lots of time. Thanks.

9/11 defense:
Jay said:

Because we do not have health insurance coverage for all Americans, people die--83,000 people a year by some estimates, though a more conservative figure would be 18,000 people every year. That's the equivalent of one 9/11 every two months. There is no excuse for that.

How many people die in car accidents every year? How many people die of old age every year? Should we outlaw cars and aging?

There is a difference between people dying because they are sick and dying because they were working at their desks when a giant plane flew into the building. One, illness, is a sad fact of life and the other is TERRORISM.

Who lied worse?
Not that it's a good defense but Bush isn't the one claiming he will never lie to the American people, Kerry is and he has. Bush is smarter than that. Jay said that Bush lied worse but his link was to Cheney's purported lies. So does that mean Jay lied? Or did he make a mistake?

I would like to close by saying VOTE BUSH. He can't say "nuclear" but at least he doesn't get his tan from a can!

Respectfully Submitted: Rosemary, the Queen of All Evil

Battle Election 2004 - Iron Blogger Democrat - First Rebuttal

2004-10-27T19:01:00.000-07:00

Unabashed
The Challenger and I opted for two very different strategies in our Opening Statements; while the Challenger focused on the personal and the narrative, I opted for, you know, facts. I'm surprised she didn't recognize shock and awe when she saw it. I'm not surprised that my recitation of these unpleasant facts was called "Bush-bashing." My previous Challenger had the same reaction when confronted with inconvenient truths, and my current Challenger is falling into the same pattern. Look, I was very careful in my Opening to leave my rancor behind. If you want Bush bashing, I can show you Bush bashingof the first degree, and then some. I didn't do any of that. The fact that the man's record is embarrassing doesn't make my citing it "bashing."

The Challenger also seems confused as to why I would bother mentioning Bush's record at all ("I thought this was Battle Election 2004 not Battle Why Bush Sucks"). It's simple: In any election with an incumbent, the first step in deciding whom to vote for is determining whether the incumbent has done a good job. If I thought Bush had done well (and some poor misguided liberals apparently have), then I wouldn't need to support Kerry. That the Challenger is willing to support Bush irrespective of his record is mind-boggling. But I suppose that conservatives voting Bush (many wise ones--and at least one foolish one--aren't) have to have a pretty close relationship with denial to pull that lever.

And she had to throw that "pregnant woman" thing in my face. She knows I can't have children! She knows I don't have a uterus!

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong
The Challenger's Opening focuses on her two pet issues: terrorism ("I'm a security mom") and Social Security ("I agree with partial privatization of Social Security"). Let me tackle Social Security first, since it will only take three sentences (Big Dan is having an influence). One, there's not really a Social Security crisis that needs solving. Bush's plan to partially privatize the system will cost a trillion dollars or more, creates an immediate problem of diverted funds needed to pay current retirees (with no surplus anymore to take up the slack), and puts money into the pockets of the financial sector that would have gone to future beneficiaries. Finally, economist Brad DeLong gets to the nut of the problem, wondering about the Bush plan's advisability when he reminds us, "You have to ask yourself not just, 'Is this good policy?' but 'Will this still be good policy after Congress does its worst to it?'"

The terrorism thing is more challenging to rebut for two reasons: One, Bush's record is so bad that I need way more than three sentences to describe it; more importantly, though, the Challenger and I don't see eye-to-eye on this issue.

For starters, the Challenger says that "[the popular, undefeated, and certainly victorious this time around Iron Blogger Democrat] and Kerry et al. like to separate Iraq and the WOT but I won't because it's all the same war." She's right that we disagree here; there is growing evidence that yet another ideological divide is forming between the left and the right. Kevin Drum, as he is wont to do, perfectly crystalizes it:

On a substantive level, Bush and his team are too obsessed with a late 20th century view of state-sponsored terrorism as our primary problem. It's not. Non-state terrorism and failed states--along with nuclear proliferation--are the primary problems of the 21st century. Bush's failure to recognize this makes him far more likely to make a disastrous miscalculation than Kerry.

Of all the Middle Eastern states that sponsor terror, Hussein's Iraq was among the least threatening to the US and our allies. Moreover, the tenuous links that Bush and his team want to draw to, for example, al Qaeda, show that conceptualizing terror as a state-on-state issue is wrong. Exhibit A is the case of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Before the US invasion, Zarqawi operated out of Iraq, yes, but it was an area of Iraq fully beyond Saddam's control--there was no argument to be made that Saddam tolerated or harbored Zarqawi's terrorists. Before the invasion of Iraq, the US had the chance to attack Zarqawi's camp, destroying his facilities for sure and possibly even killing the man himself. We did not, because "the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam." This was confirmed by the Wall Street Journal just this week (excerpts here and here). In a world where non-state terror is the primary threat--a world inhabited by myself and Senator Kerry, but not by the Challenger or the man who actually gives the "go" order--Zarqawi would have been eliminated in late 2002, saving countless US lives. Instead, Bush has dragged us into a $200 billion distraction from those non-state terrorists who, despite our relentless offense, as Bush calls it, are still killing people, pledging his allegiance to Osama bin Laden.

In fact, since the invasion of Iraq, non-state terrorists have been getting more aggressive. This is where I think Bush's record as a leader in the War on Terror deserves serious scrutiny. I've already covered--unrebutted, by the way, the fact that bin Laden and other terrorists were pushed to the bottom of the agenda when the Iraq war rolled around. Fact is, in 2002 and 2003, the number of terrorist attacks and terror casualties increased. Looking back,

[d]espite the rout of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, terror attacks, especially against Americans and Europeans, were rising at the end of 2002 and would continue to rise through 2003. Some 400 people worldwide had died in terror attacks in 2000, and some 300 in 2001, apart from the 3,000-plus killed on September 11. In 2002 more than 700 were killed, including 200 when a bomb exploded outside a Bali nightclub in October.

2003 was even worse. If Bush continues to pursue his out-dated anti-terror strategy, we have no reason to expect that terrorist attacks will do anything other than keep increasing as they have been.

It's also clear that our invasion of Iraq is at least an indirect cause of this increase, if not a direct cause. There's been a clear increase in al Qaeda membership since the invasion. Our allies concur; "Australia's spy chief has directly linked the Iraq war to the rising ranks of global terrorists and says it could have inspired new followers of Osama bin Laden," at least in Oz if not everywhere. Even hand-puppet Iyad Allawi is pointing the finger: "Iraq's interim prime minister blamed the U.S.-led coalition for "great negligence" in the ambush that killed about 50 soldiers heading home after graduation from a U.S.-run training course, and warned of an escalation of terrorist attacks." As the Washington Post says, this "offensive" foreign policy is producing diminishing returns.

Contrast Bush's state-attacking mentality with the more nimble and focused Kerry plan, which is more concerned with the actual terrorist networks and their funding mechanisms (remember, Kerry dismantled BCCI), as well as re-taking Afghanistan from the Taliban--that's right, they're back.

You Can't Handle, Well, You Know
The Challenger: "How can we trust anything Kerry says about Iraq anyway? I mean his ~~flips~~ nuances are so many."
The Truth: On the Senate floor, before the Iraq War Resolution vote, Kerry said,

I have said publicly for years that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein pose a real and grave threat to our security and that of our allies in the Persian Gulf region. Saddam Hussein's record bears this out. [. . .]

As much as we decry the way he has treated his people, regime change alone is not a sufficient reason for going to war, as desirable as it is to change the regime. [. . .]

As the President made clear earlier this week, "Approving this resolution does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable." It means "America speaks with one voice."

Let me be clear, the vote I will give to the President is for one reason and one reason only: To disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, if we cannot accomplish that objective through new, tough weapons inspections in joint concert with our allies.

In giving the President this authority, I expect him to fulfill the commitments he has made to the American people in recent days--to work with the United Nations Security Council to adopt a new resolution setting out tough and immediate inspection requirements, and to act with our allies at our side if we have to disarm Saddam Hussein by force. If he fails to do so, I will be among the first to speak out.

If we do wind up going to war with Iraq , it is imperative that we do so with others in the international community, unless there is a showing of a grave, imminent--and I emphasize "imminent"--threat to this country which requires the President to respond in a way that protects our immediate national security needs.

The way Bush supporters talk about Kerry and the Iraq war, you'd think what Kerry says now--that Bush neither proved imminent threat nor acted with our allies--is somehow diametrically opposed to what he said then, or over the course of the campaign. You can make as many movies as you want (and I thought I went long!) with out-of-context quotes, but the fact is that Kerry has, from the beginning, challenged the president in the way he waged this war: one position, constant.

The Challenger: "Yeah, that's the way. Let's show the nutcases of the world that we are serious by disarming ourselves first."
The Truth: Because it worked so well deterring Russia when we kept building up our nuclear stockpiles? North Korea was contained and engaged in diplomatic talks by the end of the Clinton years. "However, the North broke off official contacts with both Seoul and Washington when Bush took office and made known Washington's intention to revert to a tougher line on relations." Bush's tough-guy approach sure worked well, didn't it?

The Challenger: "My opponent wants to skip over Kerry's 'heroic' 4 months in Vietnam."
The Truth: People who believe all the nonsense about Kerry's Vietnam service maybe being less than honorable are in danger two ways: One, we could talk about what Bush was doing at the time--and you don't want that; and two, you'll get hit by a big slab of truth, and, baby, the truth hurts.

The truth is that the Swiftboat vets are a horrible resource to rely on, not only because they do things like lie on national TV, but because they themselves have made dozens of contradictory statements. And four months? Kerry served four honorable years in the Navy.

The Challenger: "Actually, the budget for the Department of Education has grown [. . .]"
The Truth: Ahh, a simple case of Not Reading What I Wrote. I know education spending is up under NCLB. The problem is that funding is not being provided for items mandated by the law--things like teacher training and endless testing. Yippee, we get more Title I money! Sadly, we can't spend that money to pay McGraw-Hill for the tests and test scoring we have to buy.

The Challenger: "[F]igures show the number of Pell Grants awarded the year before Bush took office was 3.9 million. The number grew to 5.1 million for the most recent academic year."
The Truth: You know why more people qualify for Pell grants, right? It's because Pell grants are need-based. There are more people now who can't afford college, thanks to the Bush economy.

The Challenger: "According to the non-partisan American Enterprise Institute"
The Truth: Oh, I almost fell off my chair with that one. AEI is conservative like a koala is adorable. Don't believe me? Read their about page. Or Google: "non-partisan American Enterprise Institute" turns up 129 hits, with the Bush and GOP websites at the top. "Conservative American Enterprise Institute" turns up 3690 hits.

The Challenger: "Kerry's Healthcare Plan: Yawn. More government expansion, more government spending and he'll pay for all of it by raising taxes on the rich."
The Truth: Kerry's funding comes from a variety of sources, including closing gaping loopholes that could bring in $40 billion or more. Kerry's also not the absolutist Bush is, recognizing that proposals he made in the primaries are now unaffordable under the record Bush deficit, so he has already scaled them back.

Beyond that, Kerry's plan isn't the massive government takeover Cassandras like the Challenger want you to believe it is.

And speaking of Cassandras, who's going to pay for all that spending Bush proposed in his acceptance speech?

The Challenger: "We got attacked and preventing everyone from dying at the hands of Islamofacists is a teeny bit more important than making sure we live in a socialist utopia."
The Truth: This is the old "9/11 changed everything" defense. But it's akin to saying we should all grab duct tape and plastic sheeting: We'll be safe from bioterror, but we'll all suffocate. Because we do not have health insurance coverage for all Americans, people die--83,000 people a year by some estimates, though a more conservative figure would be 18,000 people every year. That's the equivalent of one 9/11 every two months. There is no excuse for that.

The Challenger: "[Kerry] pledges to never to lie to the American people and then proceeds to LIE in a national debate to be president."
The Truth: Lie in a debate? Who would do that? Not Dick Cheney or George W. Bush. No . . . not Bush at all. I mean, Bush doesn't lie, does he? Well, yes: "But here's the president's not-so-secret weapon: He is dismayingly willing to say things that are either blatantly false or clearly designed to create a misleading impression." Further, Bush lies worse. Finally, the Challenger and those like her now are trying to paint Kerry as a serial exaggerator--what, are you still running against Al Gore?

The Challenger: "You are going to tell me that selling $50,000 cars don't help the economy?"
The Truth: If, under Bush's tax plan, small businesses buy 100,000 more Hummers, that's good for maybe a few dozen new jobs at the Hummer plant in Indiana. But 100,000 new jobs created from a targeted tax break is 100,000 jobs! The Bush tax cuts were misguided, and focused on the wrong priorities.

Plus the Challenger's FactCheck article is from 2003, and if you read the whole thing, you find this: "On the other hand, the most optimistic private economists see the economy gaining enough jobs between now and the end of Bush's term to leave him with a gain. Ten of the 51 surveyed predicted an average gain of 213,000 jobs per month over the next year." In fact, over that year since FactCheck's article, the economy has averaged less than 160,000 jobs a month--barely more than it takes to keep up with increases in the working age population, let alone make up for jobs lost at the begining of Bush's term. Again--it's not so much that Bush hasn't created jobs in this economy; it's that Bush sacrificed fiscal health of the nation in pursuit of tax cuts that did not result in the jobs he told us they would.

Finally
I would like to thank the Challenger for not engaging in Kerry-bashing, aside from the few paragraphs where she did. However, I am worried about her exclamation point usage, and, in the way the Republicans now controlling the legislative and executive are abutting the debt ceiling, I would strongly encourage some restraint for the second rebuttal lest she go over her quota. Just looking out for you, Rosemary!

Respectfully submitted,
Jay Bullock, Iron Blogger Democrat

Battle Election 2004 - Challenger - First Rebuttal

2004-10-26T18:55:00.000-07:00

Wow, I thought this was Battle Election 2004 not Battle Why Bush Sucks. I'm not too surprised most of Kerry's support comes from Bush bashers. That is a big difference in this election. Most of Bush supporters actually support Bush, most of Kerry's are voting for him because he's not Bush rather than because he's John Kerry. I can't say that I blame them, I mean, seriously who would vote FOR John Kerry. He's Gore without the charm, Dukakis with more height, and Ted Kennedy with a designated driver.

I don't have the time, nor do I think Iron Blog has the bandwidth, to answer Jay point by point on his Bush bash. I will address most of his relevant points, i.e. WOT stuff, briefly but after I dissect Kerry a little more. Picking on Kerry gives me a cheap thrill, so indulge a pregnant woman her few thrills in life, okay?

Kerry's "record":

My opponent wants to skip over Kerry's "heroic" 4 months in Vietnam. I don't blame him. When an officer bails out on his men after 4 months of battle, there isn't a lot to brag about. When that same officer comes home and trashes those same men with false testimony, there isn't a lot to brag about.

I'm glad he decided to talk about Kerry's 20 lackluster years in the Senate. He did 3 major things, according to Jay, in 20 years and you think he'll be more impressive as President? That isn't a record to be smitten with because it is woefully lacking. Just as a Kerry presidency would be...

Moving on to Kerry's plan. Woo hoo!

Kerry's Healthcare Plan:

Yawn. More government expansion, more government spending and he'll pay for all of it by raising taxes on the rich. Yada, yada, yada.
According to the non-partisan American Enterprise Institute

The Kerry Health Care Plan Would Now Cost $1.5 Trillion Over Ten Years. "Over the ten-year period between 2006 and 2015, the Kerry plan would increase federal outlays by about $1.5 trillion. That estimate nets out the savings that could be obtained from several provisions included in the plan."

Ouch. So who is gonna pay for that? Just the tax rollback on the rich? Yeah, right.

Education:

Kerry has some carrot alright. How is Kerry gonna pay for his great plan? Here is a quote using Jay's own link:

The Kerry-Edwards new bargain will invest $30 billion over 10 years in our teachers and children. The new bargain for teachers and children is a part of the Kerry-Edwards commitment to fully fund No Child Left Behind. It is paid for within his Education Trust Fund, a $200 billion commitment to education that is financed by repealing George Bush's tax cuts for families making more than $200,000.

The rich are gonna be poor at this rate...

He's also gonna fix the environment and cut the deficit in half! Impressed? Don't be. He ran out of money somewhere between healthcare and education and now the "rich" are all collecting welfare.

Jobs and the Economy:

My opponent thinks buying a Hummer is somehow a bad thing. Buying a Hummer is bad? It's a $50,000 car and I'm sure GM is really glad they sold one. You are going to tell me that selling $50,000 cars don't help the economy? Interesting, I always thought a booming economy had something to do with companies selling stuff and making money. Companies make money and the people that make the stuff keep their jobs. Interesting that Jay and Kerry don't think so. It's a good thing to know.

Tax cuts don't create jobs? I think that FactCheck.Org has a different take on that spin.

Economists are virtually unanimous in saying that the tax cuts that have taken effect so far have created jobs. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, for example, said in a recent speech: “Economic activity perked up in late spring and then accelerated further this summer as tax cuts provided a substantial boost to the disposable incomes of households.” And when the Blue Chip asked economists why they had failed to predict the size of 126,000-job gain in October, the reason they gave more than any other was underestimating that consumers would spend such a large proportion of “additional after-tax income resulting from tax cuts.”

Comparing the Bush economy to Hoover's Great Depression is just silly, and implying that tax cuts are not contributing to job growth deserves an "F" in Freshman economics.

My opponent then finishes up with the declaration that Kerry's plan adds up. Who added it up? John Kerry. Sorry if I don't trust his math when experts have already disputed that his healthcare plan doesn't add up.

The WOT:

Jay and Kerry et al. like to separate Iraq and the WOT but I won't because it's all the same war. That is part of my problem with Kerry, frankly. So, Jay thinks Kerry has a good plan to bring in NATO. Of course, he must have missed the fact that Bush already did that. There are only a handful of NATO nations that aren't in Iraq as part of the coalition. Of course, Kerry refers to those nations as "bribed and coerced". Perhaps, if he becomes president he can tell them that he thought they were bribed and coerced before he didn't...

His whole plan comes down to sucking up and making friends with France, Germany and Russia. Or as I like to call them Saddam's bitches or the true coalition of the coerced and bribed...

How can we trust anything Kerry says about Iraq anyway? I mean his ~~flips~~ nuances are so many. Here is a documentary about Kerry's many, er, positions. It takes a few minutes but it is worth watching.

Kerry complains that Bush didn't build a grand coalition like his father did. An odd complaint since Kerry voted AGAINST the first Iraq War.

My opponent says that Bush lost nukes in Iraq but his link didn't prove his assertion. Bad link, Jay. Try again.

How does persuing reproliferation undermine us on the WOT? You ponder that and I'll tell you what I think of Kerry's plan, as alluded to in debate number 1. I say alluded because he NEVER actually tells us his plan.

His plan for Iran: Kerry wants to give nuclear fuel to Iran to see if they would use it for peaceful purposes.

WTF???

Why not just pass out grenades so we can shove them up our own asses? That would be quicker.

Kerry on nuclear proliferation.

He's gonna lead "the way" for North Korea, Iran, et al. How Kerry will end it?

By disarming US!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yeah, that's the way. Lets show the nutcases of the world that we are serious by disarming ourselves first. Rather than seeing that as stupid and weak - they'll be inspired by our committment.

You want this guy to fight the WOT ? Perhaps he really thinks that fighting terrorism will be more effective with spitballs after all.

You certainly don't want someone who basically calls Bush a liar, pledges to never to lie to the American people and then proceeds to LIE in a national debate to be president.

Do you?

One more thing on Kerry and the WOT. Yes, it'll be snarky. I can't help it, I'm in a mood.

Kerry gave us a real gem this week:

Democratic presidential nominee and Vietnam War veteran John Kerry tried to burnish his national security credentials on Saturday by vowing to hunt down terrorists with the same energy he used to pursue the Viet Cong. ...

"With the same energy ... I put into going after the Viet Cong and trying to win for our country, I pledge to you I will hunt down and capture or kill the terrorists before they harm us," Kerry said. "And we will wage a war on terror that makes America proud and brings the world to our side."

Okay, if memory serves (...and I'm pretty sure my memory served longer than Kerry did in Vietnam)Kerry fought the Viet Cong for 4 months. Collected 3 purple hearts for some minor wounds and went home. That doesn't reassure me about his WOT committment.

Nope, I'll stick with Bush.

Okay, now on to the anti-Bush circle jerk Jay gave us in his opener. (Hey, you guys wanted snark, didn't you?)

Bush on Healthcare:

Shorter Jay - Bush sucks and we are in a pit of despair. Why didn't he fix it?

Answer: We got attacked and preventing everyone from dying at the hands of Islamofacists is a teeny bit more important than making sure we live in a socialist utopia.

Education:

Shorter Jay - Bush sucks and I know because I'm a teacher.

Answer: FactCheck to the rescue.

Actually, the budget for the Department of Education has grown 58% under Bush, and he's proposing another 5% increase next year, including sizeable increases in spending for children from low-income families and for special education for disabled children. ...Furthermore, Bush is seeking additional increases -- not cuts -- in "key education programs" next year. His budget calls for a 9.8% increase for programs for low-income children, to $15.2 billion, and a 5.9% increase in funding for special education, to $12.1 billion.

About Pell Grants: Jay is right that he didn't increase to the maximum and he broke that promise. But...

Department of Education figures show the number of Pell Grants awarded the year before Bush took office was 3.9 million. The number grew to 5.1 million for the most recent academic year -- an increase of 1.3 million, actually.

Spending for Pell Grants grew from just under $8 billion in the academic year that was underway when Bush took office to nearly $12.7 billion three years later, a jump of nearly 60%. That's some "cut."

Yeah, some cut alright.

In conclusion, I'd like to say vote for Bush because he has a higher IQ than Kerry.

You certainly don't want someone dumber than Bush winning, do you?

Submitted by: Rosemary, The Queen of All Evil

Battle Election 2004 - Iron Blogger Democrat - Opening Statement

2004-10-25T20:31:00.000-07:00

This Iron Blog Battle is the most important Iron Blog Battle of my lifetime!

Okay, that's a little over the top, as most things this election season have been. But I do believe--in fact, said once on national television--that this election actually is the most important of my short life (I was born a few weeks after Nixon resigned). Why? Well, we're at a turning point. The world of today is vastly different from the world of Nixon's time, or a decade ago, or even five years ago. We've reached a crux in history where, as the world's sole superpower, the U.S. will set a course to be followed for decades to come. This election will decide who gets to chart that course, who gets to steer the ship of state, who gets to drive the station wagon we call the United States. And in this election year, we have a clear choice.

It will come as no surprise to anyone here that I, your Iron Blogger Democrat, believe that the best choice is to elect John Forbes Kerry as the 44th President of the United States.

On my own blog, I have not been kind to Bush. (For that matter, I haven't always been kind to Kerry.) This week, though, I will not concentrate on the personal, those things that give me a visceral reaction, make me swear at the radio or throw things at the TV. Instead, I will focus on three things: Bush's dismal record, Kerry's experience, and Kerry's plan (he has one--I don't know if you've heard). I apologize in advance for length, and for the fact that some links require registation.

The Bush Record
In January, 2001, the satirical newspaper The Onion published an article spoofing George W. Bush's impending inaugural speech. "Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Over' " read the fake headline. Now, at that time, I was upset at the way things had turned out, you know, with the whole Florida mess. But I was willing to give the clumsy New Englander-turned-Texan a chance. After all, his platform was not terribly reactionary, and I really liked Colin Powell. But it did not take long before all of the things lampooned in the Onion piece started coming true. It was so deadly accurate, in fact, that some enterprising soul re-printed the thing with links to news articles detailing exactly how Bush has ruined everything, or nearly so. Am I willing to give him a second chance? Should anyone?

Let's look in-depth at five specific important areas, and see what the Bush record really reveals: health care, education, Iraq and the War on Terror, the environment, and jobs and the economy.

Health Care
When George W. Bush took office, there was a health care crisis. Today, four years later, we still have a health care crisis. In fact, it's worse. Since Bush took office, 5.2 million Americans have lost health insurance, meaning we have about 45 million uninsured people in this country. Now, it's not necessarily the president's job to give everyone insurance, but when Bush promised four years ago to "reverse this trend [of insurance loss] by making health insurance affordable for hard-working, low-income families," then we might expect the trend to be, you know, reversed. Instead, it sucks:

In the past four years, Americans have spent an ever-growing portion of their paychecks on health care and for the most part gotten less for their money, forcing millions into the ranks of the uninsured or personal bankruptcy, according to government figures and several independent assessments.

Nationwide, workers' costs for health insurance have risen by 36 percent since 2000, dwarfing the average 12.4 percent increase in earnings since President Bush took office, the liberal consumer group Families USA reports in an analysis scheduled for release today. The number of Americans spending more than a quarter of their income on medical costs climbed from 11.6 million in 2000 to 14.3 million this year, according to the group.

The news comes as many companies are dropping medical coverage entirely or trimming their benefit packages, while taxpayers are subsidizing millions of people below the poverty line who have enrolled in the state-run Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program, a separate survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found. Hardest hit have been low-income working families, Hispanics and people with chronic conditions such as diabetes, asthma or depression.

"The cost of family health insurance is rapidly approaching the gross earnings of a full-time minimum-wage worker," said Drew Altman, president and chief executive of the nonprofit foundation, which compiled the data. "If these trends continue, workers and employers will find it increasingly difficult to pay for family health coverage, and every year the share of Americans who have employer-sponsored health coverage will fall."

This is probably not the first time I will ask this question over the next week: Why, after four years of controlling the executive and the House (not to mention the Senate for two and a half of those years) has there been nothing done? I mean, Bush apparently has a plan, to cite a key phrase from his opponent. Where's the "reformer with results" we were promised four years ago? I do not have the space here to deconstruct that "plan," but suffice it to say that it "seems to fall short."

Beyond the insurance issue, we find that Bush has sided with insurers against patients before the Supreme Court, stopped promising stem-cell research, and lied to congress about the cost of the Medicare bill (a bill which, by the way, lets drug companies jack up prices once seniors are locked into a program). I could go on.

Education
From the way Bush talks about it, his education policy must be his greatest hit. After all, in the third debate this year, "No Child Left Behind" was his answer to off-shoring, unemployment, poverty, and cancer. Well, maybe not cancer. I've written about NCLB often in other places. But I'm not the only one complaining about it.

The components of NCLB written by Republicans, notably John "so what if no one's heard of me" Boehner of Ohio, and as opposed to those written by Democrats, including Ted "I am more liberal than Kerry!" Kennedy, were largely based on the "Texas Miracle." One of the major architects of that "miracle" was Rod "the NEA are terrorists" Paige, who went to Washington with Bush to be his education secretary. The problem is, the whole danged "miracle" was just a lie; it didn't really happen:

What's the point? Both RAND reports agree with all the other independent data that

[Texas standardized test] scores are untrustworthy

In education, which Bush says is the #1 priority in America today, Texas hasn't made any progress relative to the rest of the country (academic proficiency as measured by trusted exams SAT, ACT, NAEP scores) and declined in others (such as the achievement gap, Texas' own TASP scores, etc)

Bush continues to avoid confronting the truth about Texas education progress and continues to promote misleading or untrue statistics on his web site not on some small issue, but on what he considers the most important issue of the campaign

A lack of results and a lack of integrity.

Now all of America is expected to do what Texas really didn't. I'm not saying some states *cough*Wisconsin*cough* can't do better than Texas. Besides being underfunded, NCLB is widely viewed now as a bill that's just plain flawed, using, as one educator put it, "unsound methods" for testing student achievement. More and more states are complaining about the cumbersome requirements of the law, and earlier this year, the administration was forced into a "softening" of the bill to deal with "mounting opposition from states, school districts, and from Bush's own party." Bush's signature issue is nothing to hang his $1000 cowboy hat on.

And what's with Bush's bragging about Pell grants? Because, you know, he broke his campaign pledge to increase the size of Pell grants. He also froze funding for after school programs (.pdf link), potentially eliminating 50,000 children from after-school programs, not to mention cutting training funds for 30,000 teachers required by his own NCLB bill!

Iraq and the War on Terror
I don't want to rehash too much of the ground I covered in my last Battle, so I'll just hit the highlights:

Bush ignored the recommendations of his commanders, such as Eric Shinseki, Anthony Zinni, and Thomas White, that we would need more troops in Iraq than he was politically willing to commit.
Bush ignored pre-war intelligence warning of an insurgency.
Bush went without a plan for peace; it was literally "to be provided."
As a result of these blunders, Iraq has become a mess, and the explosives even now killing Iraqi and coalition forces were left unsecured and stolen.
$120 billion of your tax dollars--and likely billions more--have been diverted from fighting actual terrorists to a war that even George "slam dunk" Tenet agrees was wrong

After all of that, are we safer? Let me just say that it seems to be "up in the air." Bush let the guy who attacked us get away to start preparing for the war in Iraq. Nineteen out of the 22 most wanted terrorists identified after 9/11 are still on the lam. Bush covered up Saudi involvement in 9/11, and even let the Saudis know we were attacking Iraq before he told Colin Powell (so says Woodward's book). This is not a record to run on, which is why, I believe, Bush plays on fear that Kerry might make us less safe, when really it's Bush's strategy that's producing "diminishing returns."

Environment
In this election season, this single most important issue no one is talking about is the environment. In that spirit, I'll be brief here, too. I kind of think I could sum it up with today's L.A. Times headline: "Recasting Wilderness as Open for Business: A Bush administration policy reversal ends decades of shielding the nation's untamed areas."

But the list goes on. Bush

Abandoned the Kyoto Treaty without offering an alternative for reducing greenhouse effect.
Created a voluntary program to reduce emissions of harmful gasses; so far only a tiny fraction of American companies have signed up.
Gutted clean air standards for aging power plants.
Weakened energy efficiency standards.
Limited public challenges to logging projects and increased logging in protected areas, including Alaska's Tongass National Forest.
Opposed legislation that would require greater fuel efficiency for passenger cars.
Reduced inspections, penalties for violations, and prosecution of environmental crimes.

Jobs and the Economy
You know a Republican, tax-cutting, supply-side president is in trouble when even even the rich are losing confidence in the economy!

The micro-economy sucks. Maybe we're doing better in the macro, but on a personal basis, there's a whole litany of problems:

The Dow is down 6.7% this year, the NASDAQ is down 4.5%, and the S&P 500 is down 1.5%. All three are lower than when Bush took office.
Real wages are down, on top of the skyrocketing costs of health care I beat to death above.
For the unemployed lucky enough to find a job, their salary tends to be lower than where they left off.

I've heard the arguments that there's not too much that a president can actually do to affect the economy, and I'm even willing to give him the benefit of the doubt after the bursting of the tech bubble and the attacks of September 11. But in the three years since, his economic policies have really been a disaster. Specifically, the tax cuts of 18 months ago, known as the "Jobs and Growth Plan," have been an utter failure. At the time, Bush promised us 5.5 million jobs by the end of this year. Well, we're about 3 million jobs short. Face it: this economy simply isn't creating jobs at the pace it should be in a normal recession.

Worse, the Bush team bases its economic projections on their over-inflated job protections; it's no wonder we're seeing record budget deficits!

Kerry's Experience
I've already eaten up my 2000 word "soft cap," so this section may get short shrift. In fact, I'll skip over Kerry's heroic Vietnam service, his career as a mob-busting prosecutor, and his time as an acid-rain smiting lieutenant governor, and just jump straight to his two decades in the senate.

Now, my friends on the right may be scratching their heads in wonder at the very thought that I would bring up John Kerry's record in the Senate. As David Mayhew says, "[T]here are three ways for a member of Congress to distinguish himself: as a legislator, as a leader of the public discourse--think Sunday talk regulars like Jesse Helms or Joseph Biden--or as an investigator." Kerry, as you might guess from his prosecuting background, is an investigator.

And he's a good one: Kerry was responsible for bringing down BCCI and exposing the Nicuraguan Contra cocaine scandal in the 1980s, and worked with John McCain to "more than just debunk the myth of living POWs; they opened the door to normalizing relations with Vietnam" in the 1990s. In short, while his name may not be on a lot of fancy legislation, John Kerry's time in the Senate was anything but empty.

Kerry's Plan
There are five specific areas I want to mention wherein I think a John Kerry presidency will surpass what we have seen from Bush and his Republican-controlled Congress: health care, education, Iraq and the War on Terror, the environment, and jobs and the economy (sound familiar? It's only fair to compare apples to apples).

Health Care
Kerry has three key elements to his health care plan, among other components. All three are important and would work to ease the problems of health care access in this country.

If you believe that frivolous malpractice suits are a cause of high health care costs (even though tort reform efforts to date don't succeed in lowering premiums), then it seems like the obvious answer is to discourage frivolous lawsuits. Bush wants to cap the damages on all lawsuits, frivolous or not, which does little to stop the frivolous ones and only hurts those whose lives have already been thrown into turmoil. Right now, medical malpractice is responsible for a quarter million deaths every year. Those families deserve recourse. The Kerry plan, aside from making it more difficult for insurance companies to engage in collusion, requires that lawsuits be certified before they proceed, and puts the onus on unethical attorneys trying to sneak in cases that are truly frivolous to pay court costs incurred in defending against them.

Plus, Kerry's plan to pool catastrophic claims will also save you and me and our bosses on premiums; Kerry's plan to open Congress's insurance plans to everyone to buy into will also ease premiums.

Education
Education is something I know a little bit about. No Child Left Behind, from where I sit in my classroom, is all stick. The Kerry plan has some carrot. We all know, and study after study shows, teacher quality is the most important factor in student achievement. Unlike Bush, who cut teacher training funds at the same time he made "highly qualified teachers" mandatory in the classroom, Kerry's plan actually has positive steps for attracting and retaining quality teachers in the public schools. Kerry's also committed to fully funding NCLB.

Iraq and the War on Terror
I must be honest here: I have almost as little faith in Kerry's ability to extricate us safely from Iraq as I do in Bush. That's primarily because the hole is so deep now. But Kerry does have good ideas, toward internationalizing the occupation, notably by bringing in NATO and such.

What I am more hopeful about, though, is Kerry's instincts and prospects for prosecuting--and I don't use that word lightly--the war on terror. We know that Bush and the Republicans have wasted time they should have spent securing Russia nuclear material; Bush lost Iraq's nukes, too. Plus, Bush is pursuing a policy of reproliferation that seriously threatens our credibility when it comes to WMDs. Kerry wants to change all that. Plus, Kerry's plan to go after the terrorists, rather than chase moustachioed geese around Iraq.

Environment
This is Kerry's milieu. While Dick Cheney's repetition of that old National Journal canard doesn't make it true, it is true that Kerry actually has had a 100% rating from the League of Conservation Voters, and a Senate record deserving of the honor. Kerry's environmental plan starts with undoing the damage Bush has done to air, water, and forest regulations. After that, there's more, from adding environmental protections to trade treaties to his 20% by 2020 alternative energy plan.

Jobs and the Economy
What Bush doesn't seem to understand about tax cuts is that by themselves they don't create jobs. If your tax cuts lets small businesses write off a Hummer, then the small business buys a Hummer. John Kerry believes that if you give a small business a tax credit for creating a job, the small business will create jobs. Simple, isn't it?

Kerry doesn't just want to help small businesses; he's also out to help those of us in the shrinking middle class (described here by Vermont Socialist Bernie Sanders). He'll do it byincreasing the child tax credit, tuition credit, and more.

And yes, Kerry's plans add up:

I’ve made this pledge: We’ve got to be fiscally responsible, we’ve got to cut the deficit.

I am going to put pay-as-you-go back in place, folks; that’s the beginning rule. That said, my health care plan is entirely paid for, and my funding of education, special needs and No Child Left Behind is paid for. And my manufacturing tax credit (and) my college credit are paid for.

And I show where they come from. I get over $860 billion from the roll-back of the tax over the $200,000.

John McCain and I identified about $60 billion (from) our commission on corporate welfare that we think is just pork and lobbyist-driven throw-away. I’m going to close the loopholes.

If George Bush had just not given the top 1% (income bracket) what they got, we’d have saved Social Security until the year 2075. That’s the difference.

A Brief Conclusion
I'm sorry I'm light on the snark tonight. I'm sure that when I scroll down to the Challenger's post, I'll get my RDA of snark. Beyond that, I believe that the number of undecideds dropping by Blogger Stadium this week will be small, almost nil. If you are undecided, I hope to sway you. I don't expect to change the minds of Bush voters, though you are welcome to flip-flop if you wish. At any rate, I do hope that you all keep your minds open and the comments civil. Most of all, enjoy the fireworks.

Respectfully submitted,
Jay Bullock, Iron Blogger Democrat

Battle Election 2004 - Challenger - Opening Statement

2004-10-25T20:05:00.000-07:00

Why vote for George W. Bush?

Everyone has his own reasons for who he plans to vote for, and often it is as simple as blind ideology. Is this my reason? No, not this time. When I voted for Dukakis in 1988, that was blind ideology. That was also my first election, and I grew up in a union household so I thought that I was a Democrat. I was also only 20 years old and idealistic. I didn't know what the real world was all about.

By 1992, I stopped voting blindly. I voted after carefully considering all the positions and voted with my head. I voted for Bill Clinton. I didn't agree with all of his positions. I was still young but I found him more appealing and hopeful than the alternative, George H.W. Bush. I felt that after 12 years of a Republican Executive Branch it was time for a change. Times were different back then. I didn't harbor any ill will towards Bush the Elder, I just felt that we needed a new direction.

As I aged, my positions shifted further toward reality and the Democrats went further and further to the left. I liked Clinton because he seemed comfortable in the center, and I disliked Gore because he did not. In that same spirit, I voted for George W. Bush in 2000.

So here we are in an election battle the likes of which I've never seen. We all knew that it would be this way though, didn't we? After the 2000 election the country was divided. It was unavoidable. George Bush didn't cause it even though the left likes to blame him. The 2000 election caused this division, and if Al Gore had won, it would be the same. Neither man would have a happy electorate right now. That is a sad fact of life.

Back to my reasons for voting for Bush: Is he a great right-wing Republican? No, not at all. He spent too much money, he expanded Medicare and that is a "right wing" no-no. He supports amending the constitution to "protect marriage". I disagree with that vehemently. Fortunately for Mr. Bush, that isn't my primary concern. Even more fortunate for the President, I know damn well that John Kerry will bleed me like an old-fashioned doctor using leeches to cure me with his spending. In any case, domestic policy is not my number one priority and it shouldn't be yours either.

My number one concern is the War on Terror. I am a Security Mom, and national security supercedes everything else for me this election. The Wisconsin State Journal endorsed President Bush for precisely this reason and the editors said all that I could say about this. The money quote:

President Bush tells people what he will do. Sen. John Kerry tells people what they want to hear. Bush is confident in action even when mistaken. Kerry is comfortable in passivity even at high cost.

I will let them explain it to you:

Kerry has a surprisingly low-profile Senate career over 20 years. He voted against the Persian Gulf War, betraying his comfort with passivity, and he believes too faithfully in the power of talk through diplomacy and government process to solve all problems. But Kim Jong Il doesn't parley, he only threatens; terrorists don't engage in talks, they just kidnap people and kill them.

Through chat, Kerry hopes to reduce terror to a "nuisance," an unseemly and ill-chosen term that suggests the grisly beheadings of a few Americans now and then is an acceptable and unavoidable consequence of our envied position of privilege in the world.

And, of course, there is the nagging bugaboo of Kerry contradictions: So he votes to go to war but not to pay for it? And does he want to be seen as a war hero or an antiwar hero? No matter: Whether he touts four months in Vietnam or a few years on the antiwar barricades, neither experience qualifies him to lead the country.

At least Bush offers clarity in intent, which is as important to relations with allies as in sending messages to enemies. In a second term, Bush will not shrink from challenge or shirk his responsibility to act in the nation's best interest, even when that path takes his administration into a political minefield. Kerry, despite his oratorical flourishes calibrated to "strength" and "resolve," will walk more meekly in the face of growing dangers.

Bush has presided steadfastly over extraordinarily consequential times. He rose to the unprecedented challenge posed by the attacks on America of Sept. 11, 2001. He has effectively overseen a transformation of government from deliverer of largesse to provider of security. He promotes a positive, and yes, idealistic view of the power of democracy. Should we expect anything less from the leader of the free world?

No president performs flawlessly. Yet in the end, strong reservations about Kerry's overall suitability for the presidency outweigh our sharp disappointment with Bush's prosecution of the war in Iraq.

That my friends is why I will be voting for George W. Bush.

On the lesser important side: I agree with partial privatization of Social Security, I don't believe that we can solve all the woes in our country by bludgeoning the pocketbooks of people that make over $200,000 a year. To do so is punishing success and that is just unAmerican.

Is it fair that "the rich" received a bigger tax cut than the poor?

Hell yes, it is. They pay more, so naturally any cut in their tax bracket will net them a larger cut. It's their damn money and they earned it.

Tax Cut Example for Dummies™ :

Let us say that a store had a sale. Everything was 20% off. I bought a sweater for $50 and received my discount of $10 that sounds right, right? You decide to buy a big screen T.V for $2000 and you received a discount of $400. That sounds fair, right? Do I have a right to complain that I didn't get a $400 discount? No, that is stupid right? I paid $40 bucks for a sweater and if I started screaming for a $400 check because you got one, you'd think me insane. Wouldn't you? It's the same with taxes.

Yes, I know but the poor are squeezed by payroll taxes and that isn't fair. Is that what you are thinking? You are wrong. It is fair. The poor want to collect Social Security, they are depending on it being there for them. If they want it they must invest in it just like everyone else. Our society should offer helping hands not hand outs.

Taxing the rich isn't going to punish the super rich, it's going to punish the "working" rich. You know what the difference is? The super rich have their money hidden, they inherited it, they pay taxes on dividends not real income so like Teresa Heinz Kerry they are only paying 13% rates on their "income". The working rich are people like doctors, lawyers, bankers, small business owners. People that work 60+ hours a week to make their money and they pay through the nose for it. The only way to make things more fair is to fix the tax code not bleed hard working people because they are successful, so we can bring others up out of poverty. It didn't work well in the Soviet Union and it won't work well now either.

Unfortunately, John Kerry hasn't learned that lesson, and ~~living off of wealthy women~~ being "rich" hasn't helped him reach that conclusion yet.

Vote Bush!

Not So Humbly Submitted By: Rosemary Esmay, The Queen of All Evil
(You Missed Me, Didn't You?)

Fourteenth Battle

2004-10-24T01:57:00.000-07:00

In what may be the last Iron Blog Battle - certainly the last in its current form and state - I am pleased to announce the return of a very special lady. She has agreed to step out of retirement to make the ultimate Challenge, and I eagerly await the sparks that will undoubtedly fly.

Our Challenger this week is the former and first Iron Blogger Republican, the Queen of All Evil, Rosemary Esmay!

Iron Blogger Democrat Jay Bullock, your undefeated reign as the most successful Iron Blogger is about to see its toughest Challenge, yet. I summon you to the battlefield of ideology to clash wits with your long-time nemesis.

If memory serves me right, there is simply no Topic this week that weighs heavier than the one I have chosen for this Battle Royal. Therefore, the Topic of the Battle is this:

Election 2004

Bush v. Kerry

Which man, which ticket is best for America? Ultimately the voters will decide, but as we read your arguments bear this in mind: I, creator, founder and Chairman of Iron Blog, will be the one and only Judge of this Battle.

Allez debate!

(Attention readers and commentors: I will be exceptionally harsh and quick to strip and ban abusive or trollish comments this Battle. I want the comments civil, well thought, well written and polite. If you cannot debate constructively you will be removed. Leave the snark to the Combatants.)

State Of The Blog Address

2004-09-30T22:25:00.000-07:00

Dear Iron Bloggers, Judges, Challengers and Loyal Readers,

Tonight I come before you to announce that what I set out to do with Iron Blog - to find out if I could create a place where people of different ideologies and parties could come together and discuss the day's issues without flaming - has been answered. My question at the core of this grand socio-political experiment was to see if gaps could be bridged and meaningful discourse could be had. Can we come from very different walks of life and civilly agree to disagree?

The answer, gentle reader, is yes.

More than the spectacle, more than the game and the winning and losing, /that/ is what I have always maintained this place was about. That we - you and everyone else who has come here and participated on any level - have succeeded is the greatest accomplishment we could ever have hoped for. True bipartisanship can happen, even during a disgustingly partisan election.

I have seen friendships formed here that simply never would have before - Chris and Robin, Jay and Thief, Rosemary and Pineapple Girl. People on polar opposites coming together and disagreeing, but still appreciating each other as human beings.

If only our elected officials could spend a week at Iron Blog, eh?

So no matter what happens next, what is to come or where we go, we will know what we did here, and we will be proud of it. I will forever be honored to have known you and watched these friendships grow.

Where is Iron Blog going? For now, into a holding pattern. There will be no more Battles for the near future - we just can't get them together right now. As a free, unpaid service the Judges, Iron Bloggers, Challengers and myself simply cannot get the time and numbers together to keep up the pace of the summer. All is not lost, however.

Starting next week I intend to start approaching major media sites - newspapers, blogs, online forums and the like, and I intend to seek sponsorship for Iron Blog as a commercial and professional endeavor. I envision an Iron Blog where we are free of Blogspot and Blogger, where our Judges get paid for their time, our Combatants get paid for their effort and I get paid for making the whole mad dance keep the rhythm. In this new environment I believe there could be a huge change in the response to what we need and what we do. Having committed, dedicated followers and supporters like yourselves working for free is a priceless gift, but Iron Blog just can't continue as is. We either need to shut it down or move it to the next level.

What can you do? Talk to people. Ask Kos, Instapundit, Charles and Atrios to take time from the partisan war and /SUPPORT FREE SPEECH/ and /TRUE PROGRESS/ in the blogosphere. The Daily Kos, Little Green Footballs, partisan bickering and party fundraisers are not what the blogosphere can truly be. The beauty of blogs is what /you/ have done, here, bringing people together to discuss the issues and find the answers. But only /you/ can bring it to the world at large. Help write emails to them, explaining how we are so much more than a parody of a cheesy cooking show, get them to voice their support. In going to the sponsors, having names like Markos Moulistas and Glenn Reynolds will /open doors/ that otherwise will remain locked. Tell them this site, this project deserves the simple effort of writing a statement in support of Iron Blog and its mission. Send them a link to this very post. Demand they do more than fight for their pet causes. We must fight for ALL VOICES to be heard.

Together we can move forward and prepare for the aftermath of this election. Someone is going to lose and someone is going to win and it may get ugly. There will be no better forum to bring people together to heal by meeting the minds than we have here, and there will be no better time to do it.

Thank you all for your dedication, donations, hard work and support so far. Words can never express my gratitude.

Sincerely,

Larime Taylor
The Chairman

Blitz Battle: First Debate

2004-09-30T17:58:00.000-07:00

While we wait for whatever needs to be sorted out to be sorted out from last week, here's something to keep you awake.

Who won? What were the best lines? Who scored what points when? Is it just me or is Jim Lehrer dreamy?

Battle on!

Respectfully submitted,
Jay Bullock, Iron Blogger Democrat

A Note From The Chairman

2004-09-29T06:54:00.000-07:00

Houston, we have a problem.

I have one Judge's scorecard.

One.

I can't do Judges' Comments, because it would be Judge's Comment.

I can't do a Verdict. Even throwing in my scorecard, I'd have only 2.

I can't now /ask/ for any of you to Judge, because you all have likely chosen the winner in your mind by now and therefore cannot Judge it clean, with that 'take it as they come' mentality a Judge uses to score one round at a time. There's a bigger picture in mind, now.

To top it off, we're losing another IB, have only 1 new Challenger in /months/ and our slim pool of Judges just went from slim to almost none.

People are just too busy to be doing this, and that's life. It happens.

If I'm going to keep this alive, we /NEED/ more Judges and Challengers, and not just return Challengers who Battle again.

Thoughts?

Battle Victory Iraq - Iron Blogger Democrat - Closing Statement

2004-09-27T07:13:00.000-07:00

Well, Iron Blog has certainly barreled back this week. The Thirteenth Battle will prove unlucky for one of this week's combatants, but it seems that the readers have gotten lucky with this fine show. Thanks to you, readers, as well as the judges and the Chairman, for sticking around through the Blitz Battles and seeing what went down this week. And I would also like to thank Jimmie Bise, Jr., this week's Challenger, for coming back for another drubbing, and doing it in fine form and with good humor.

I have greatly enjoyed this Battle, though I have found it difficult to keep up as news kept pouring in all week, starting with John Kerry's speech Monday through yesterday's pundit-class yap-fest. But I think the Challenger and I, even if we were not always on top of the latest news, have covered the issues involved thoroughly and very well. Yet, on balance, I can't walk away from this Battle feeling any better about our involvement in Iraq over the last year or so than I did this time last week. It's not that I've convinced myself that things are worse than I thought; but, over the course of this Battle, the Challenger has failed to point to anything substantive, other than the one-sided rout of the Iraqi forces a year and a half ago, to show that victory in Iraq is on the way.

Let's take the Chairman's questions, and sum up what we've got so far:

I. Are we winning the war?
We are not. The Challenger has failed to offer either a metric or solid evidence that what we're doing is winning. (I do not count killing more of them than they kill of us "winning.") The claims of Official U.S. Sock Puppet Iyad Allawi are belied by the facts on the ground. Even the Kurds, our most likely allies, are turning against us.

But I think the most damning evidence is simply that things are getting worse for our soldiers and the people of Iraq. Those people, united once in their hatred of Saddam, are now uniting again in hatred of us. I encourage you to look around the web today--the rules prevent me from linking to new sources, but more news of just how dangerous Iraq really is seems to break by the hour.

The Challenger opened with a maudlin reminiscence of the day the US military's PSYOPS staged the literal fall of Saddam, and went on to claim that what was going on now is a "new" war. He did not address the Constitutional objection to this "new" war I raised in my First Rebuttal, and just plowed ahead with that same line of thought in his Second Rebuttal. I don't know what he has said in his Closing, but, please, even if you choose to believe the Challenger that our present troubles are not "the Iraq war," there is something going on over there. There are battles, there are fighters, there are casualties. And it is not going well for our side.

II. Can we win it at all?
Yes, we can. I am on record all over the internet for having opposed this war in the first place. I wish to everything sacred that we could go back to October 2002, or at least February or March 2003, and change what has happened. Short of someone inventing a way-back machine, that can't happen.

But I am also on record all over the internet for believing that we cannot abandon Iraq now. President Bush wants to talk about the "Ownership Society," I hear. Well, we own Iraq. We needed to listen to Eric Shinseki, Anthony Zinni, and Thomas White when they said we'd need 400,000 troops to ensure that an insurgency doesn't tear Iraq apart. Maybe we didn't have that kind of manpower ourselves, in which case we should have worked actively to build a true multilateral force rather than barrel ahead with an inadequate and shrinking coalition. (Just over the course of the Battle this week, our coalition has lost another member!)

At any rate, in my Opening Statement, I laid out the three paths that seem to be open to us: staying the course, cutting and running, or significantly increasing troop levels to pacify resistance without more strikes on civilians. The Challenger, complacent in his claim that the Iraq War ended on April 9, 2003, must think staying the course, with its certain death and misery, is the way to go; at least, he hasn't offered a single alternative. As for me, I'll listen to the experts, thank you very much.

III. Have the President's policies steered us towards victory or disaster?
I am not one to question the Chairman (since it usually works the other way around!), but this is the spanner in the works, here. I'm afraid that my serious--and it was serious--address of this question in my Opening Statement and Rebuttals has been dismissed outright as a "partisan screed." But it was not; every argument I made against Bush and his team was backed up by solid facts and hard news stories, not opinion pieces or partisan hacks. I stand by the assertion I made in my opening, that the first step toward truly winning the peace is changing leaders.

The Challenger never touched, not even in passing, some of the most important points I made by dismissing them as mere ad hominem. Even after I called him on it directly, he declared that he made "pretty good paraphrases" and didn't actually address anything.

First there's the whole shifting rationale for war thing. I haven't returned to it, mostly for space reasons and because the Challenger left it, like so many other elements of my Opening, unchallenged. But it's still there. I tried to explain some reasons why I felt we were not succeeding in Iraq, and I pointed out how the confusing rationale for the war made it hard both to sustain popularity here at home and to tell when we've won. The Challenger dismissed all of this by paraphrasing it as "Bush lied." That's not the point. I don't appreciate having been lied to, of course. And the Challenger did not do anything to suggest that the Bush team had not lied when I said they did. But beyond that, there has never been a clear goal put forward by the administration, nor has there been a coherent, reasonable plan. Just because things happened doesn't mean they were planned for; just because things happened doesn't mean they were our objectives. This administration hoped it would work out. Hope is not a plan.

I keep coming back to the lack of planning for what would happen once Saddam fell, or, at the very least, the deliberate ignorance of what our military commanders thought we needed and intimidation on our commanders in the field so they are afraid to ask the civilians in the Pentagon for what they need. This is poor leadership at its worst; this is government at its most dangerous.

Such poor planning is perfectly in line with what we've seen from the Bush team, though. Yes, it was a small point in my Opening Statement, but it went unrefuted and sits as yet another piece of the puzzle that is the Bush team's inability to lead. That point? The Bush team couldn't close the deal in Afghanistan, in a war that was truly popular and that should have been prosecuted to the fullest extent. So how can we trust them to win Iraq?

Finally, one of the most frightening aspects of this administration, again ignored by the Challenger because he thinks, I suppose, that it's ad hominem, is the way no one ever admits or takes responsibility for mistakes. No one ever thinks to say, "Things aren't going so well, so we're going to try something new." No one ever gets fired for screwing up. The course doesn't change even when we're going the wrong way.

Again, I'm not going to change your mind about the upcoming election. (I mean, I hope I will, but I doubt it.) I'm not going to change the Challenger's mind. That's not my task here. I was asked to answer whether or not we're winning, whether the president's policies had anything to do with it, and whether we could win it at all. This past week, I fought every partisan urge in my body to paint as negative a picture as I could about Iraq because I do have hope. But my hope is not my plan.

It shouldn't be yours, either.

Respectfully submitted,
Jay Bullock, Iron Blogger Democrat

Battle Victory Iraq - Challenger - Closing Argument

2004-09-27T06:54:00.000-07:00

first want to thank The Chairman for inviting me back for my second
Iron Blog Battle. I have enjoyed this debate immensely and appreciate
the confidence he's had in me to give a good and informed fight. I
trust that I've repaid tht confidence and the hard work he's put out
(in some very trying circumstances) with a good debate here this week.
I also want to thank my opponent, the estimable Jay Bullock. I know he
has had to spend a good amount of time at the computer when it might
have been a lot more comfortable for him to be resting elsewhere. I
appreciate the time he's spent in crafting his arguments and in
forcing me to work very hard indeed to rebut them. I hope that I've
given him a battle worthy of the work he's invested. Lastly I want to
thank all of you. None of us debate simply because we want to hear the
sounds of our own voices. We want what we say to be heard, considered,
and weighed. I appreciate greatly that you all have taken the time to
read what I've had to say. Whether in the end you agree with me or
not, I know that you have at least given me the respect of considering
what I've written. I consider that valuable and am grateful to all of
you for it.

Now to the question: Are we winning in Iraq?

Well, of course we are. By any reasonable metric - several of which I
demonstrated to you in my First Rebuttal, we are defeating the
disaffected Baathists, the paid mercenaries from Syria and Iran, and
the al-Zarqawi terrorists who seek every day to convince us that we
are not. We kill them in almost unbelieveable numbers, we have largely
driven them from their places of sanctuary into smaller and smaller
areas where Coalition military encircles them while the Iraqi
government erodes their support inside the country with newly-found
political acumen. National election planning continues apace as Iraq
builds polling places and prepares for a January election - the first
free election in the country in over three decades.

You had only to watch the leader of Iraq - the man who heads a
government given unanimous legitimacy by the UN Security Council -
address a joint session of Congress to see a tangible sign of how we
are winning in Iraq.

Yet the war we fight is not won.

My opponent would have you believe that because we face setbacks -
some serious - that we are losing. He would quote opinion pieces from
news magazines and anti-war bloggers living in Iraq to bolster his
opinions. He points you to a National Intelligence Estimate that he
says he tends to believe aftre he's already told you how he's doubted
its veracity. He says the President had no plan but quotes the
analysis of a man who tells you that not only was there a plan but
also that the plan has changed to fit the rapidly-changing reality of
the situation.

I've chosen largely not to use the opinions of others because I
beleive we've already heard far too many of them. Blogs far and wide
are chocked-full of people who are all too willing to give their own
opinions on someone else's opinions until it's nearly impossible to
tell what the original opinion was. I don't believe that is how we
ought to debate this issue. In my arguments, I've tried very hard to
give you news articles, statistical abstracts, and the words of the
people with their hands under the hood, so to speak, so that you can
decide for yourselves. I've shown you, using the words of the Iraqi
Prime Minister himself, that there is a plan and that it's being
implemented. I've shown you who the enemies are in Iraq and how we're
beating them tactically and for the minds of the Iraqi people. I've
demonstrated that we've won the first war and are winning the second
(which, I ought to note commenced the moment that the first shot from
the assorted rabble rang out against our troops and our soldiers, in
defense of themselves and the innocents around them, fired back.
Constitutional approval for our troops to defend themselves against
terrorists and assorted rabble? You don't need me to demostrate that
to you, do you?).

Much of my opponent's response to my arguments have been, "Oh yeah?
Well this critic disagrees with you!". And of course they do. Critics
disagree with people. That's the one and only thing in their job
description. Amd Jay's critics excel in their jobs. Their criticisms
flow like a river from the Internet and right into his arguments. But
they're not facts. They're opinions - no more valid than yours and
mine. But that's what he has.

I'm not saying that our fight in Iraq right now has been perfect. I'd
be foolish to do so. But I'm also not willing to equate a difficult
fight to losing which is exactly what Jay has done during this debate.
Because our soldiers are being killed, we are losing. Because parts of
Iraq are not secured, we are losing. Because we are spending a lot of
money to rebuild Iraq, we are losing. Because the whole of Iraq did
not erupt into Times Square on New Year's Eve, we are losing. What he
has not considered - what he can not consider is that we are
losing soldiers because there is a concerted effort from two other
nations to ensure that the Iraqi government fails, that reviving the
spirit of a nation made insensate by decades of abuse and cruelty
takes more than a year, that convincing those who want back the
uncontested power they once had takes time and stubborn determination,
and that putting back together a country that has been ruined and
despoiled by a man who chose to enrich himself while children starved
and died can not be done cheaply. He can not consider these things
because if he does - if any of us do - we have to admit that just
perhaps what the President has been doing in Iraq for over a year may
make some sense. If he considers these things, he may find that he
will have to give the President some credit for the good things that
have happened in Iraq. My friends, I assure you that you will see the
sun moving backwards in the sky or John Kerry taking only one position
on an issue before you see that happen.

In early 2003, US forces, "unilaterally" accompanied by soldiers of
several other nations stormed back into Iraq with the goal of
defeating the Iraqi Army and deposing Saddam Hussein. We accomplished
that without question. Then we marshalled more allies to rebuild a
broken but hopeful Iraq and were saddened when some who had promised
to help us in this just cause decided to forego their promises. But we
continued on. It didn't take long, though, before others came to Iraq.
Bearing weapons given them by hostile neighbors and with pockets
bulging with money to buy anything they wanted, foreign fighters -
some who carried the names of Hezbollah and Hamas but some who merely
wanted their chance to shoot and kill Great Satans - found those
remnants of the prior regime intent on halting this new government and
taking back the power they once held. Soon, they found others who were
more than eager to help - terrorists who had operated with Saddam
Hussein's support under a man named al-Zarqawi. They wished to bring
their own war to Iraq, and so they have.

And so here we are. The question The first question The Chairman asked
was "are we winning the war?". I believe I've shown you that we've
already won one war and, in ways that matter a great deal, we are
winning the second.

My opponent would show you otherwise, but I believe he has failed. You
have not been deceived.

And still, we are winning.

Thank you,
-Jimmie Bise, Jr., Challenger.

Battle Victory Iraq - Iron Blogger Democrat - Second Rebuttal

2004-09-25T16:31:00.000-07:00

I can't tell you how excited I am the the Challenger finally took off the gloves and abandoned the brevity strategy. And, yes, I laughed. I must give props for the pantful of lead. Puts the Olympics in a much funnier light.

But he's still wrong on so many fronts--I don't know where to start. So I'll just start at the end of his Rebuttal, with Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. It'll all make sense. Trust me.

No, Minister
The Challenger quotes extensively from Prime Minister Allawi to make his case, and I have to say that I must give him credit (the Challenger, not Allawi) for keeping extremely current. This has been a tricky Battle, given the way new evidence for both sides keeps popping up this week. But I think it's time to talk a little bit about who Iyad Allawi is.

I did not collude with my friend and neighbor Scott about this, but he provides exactly the nice, tight, concise summary I need on Allawi. I normally hate to lift others' words quite so wholesale, but Scott writes,

Just who is this interim Prime Minister of Iraq, Iyad Allawi?

In a nutshell, he's a former Baathist, and former ally of Saddam Hussein. He has spent much of his life in the UK where he studied medicine, and he retains British citizenship to this day. While in London, he built a relationship with British security forces. In the early 90s, he formed the exile group Iraqi National Accord with the support of the CIA and MI6.

When President Bush criticized John Kerry for his comments about Allawi, he acted as if Allawi was a leader who enjoys the elected support of the people of Iraq. On the contrary, as his biography indicates, he's a longtime friend of American and British intelligence who in turn got him the position of interim PM. He's already declared martial law, and even Defense Secretary Rumsfeld is scaling back on expectations for the elections.

Is it just me or is this situation starting to look more like when the CIA and MI6 installed the Shah of Iran back in 1953?

While I'm not sure our selection of Allawi will necessarily end as badly as the whole Shah fiasco did (and Scott was being kind compared to some this week), I think it is very important to recognize that the man was hand-picked by the Bush team (admittedly not our first choice), was brought here this week by the Bush team, had his whole schedule set by the Bush team, entirely for the purpose of bolstering the Bush team's flagging image on Iraq. It's been so transparent that some pundits are wondering if Allawi will be replacing Cheney on the ticket.

Worse, Allawi's origins make him not so much the real voice of Iraqis right now. So says Time Magazine, for example.

Whether or not American voters choose to believe the President--or to accept John Kerry's charge that Allawi is simply reading from the administration's script and distorting the reality--in the eyes of Iraqis and most of the international community Allawi does not personify the democratic will of a free people. That's because Allawi owes his appointment last June not to the Iraqi electorate, but to outgoing U.S. administrator J. Paul Bremer. And his authority in Baghdad rests primarily on the backing of some 130,000 U.S. troops that remain in the country, and whose presence is viewed by many Iraqis as a sign that despite Bremer's departure, they remain under occupation.

So, also, says River, perhaps the internet's most famous Iraqi, who writes, "I can't seem to decide what is worse--when Bush speaks in the name of Iraqi people, or when Allawi does."

So what does that mean? I think it means we have to take what Allawi says with a certain amount of salt. And, in fact, that is what is happening around the press this week. Though I agree with the Challenger that Allawi does deserve some leeway and time to make things work, we still have to hold him accountable for a certain level of honesty.

If this is winning, I'd hate to see losing
Allawi says we're winning. So is that honest? Let's hear what the LA Times has to say (my emphasis):

Large swaths of Iraq remain outside the control of the interim government, major highways are fraught with attackers, and interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi--along with the U.S. Embassy and much of the international community--must conduct business in fortified compounds guarded by tanks, blast walls and barbed wire.

In Washington, Allawi gave Congress an upbeat assessment Thursday, but the situation in Iraq is more complicated. [. . .]

Widespread anxiety engulfed much of Iraq this month as a wave of car bombings, kidnappings and gun battles killed scores of American soldiers, Iraqi civilians and hostages.

The continuing violence has overshadowed signs of progress and put a damper on the prospect of democratic elections.

"How can we hold elections when they will bomb every polling booth?" asked Husham Mahdi, a 29-year-old communications engineer in Baghdad, echoing a common sentiment. [. . .]

Allawi said it was "a fact" that elections could be held in 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces "tomorrow." But few experts would agree. The consensus among poll-watchers is that holding nationwide elections by January, as scheduled, will be difficult.

Apart from the widespread violence, the provinces lack electoral infrastructure--which some view as a greater challenge than security.

And critics say it is hard to argue that security is a problem in only three provinces of a nation where suicide bombers have struck from Basra in the south to Irbil in the north.

(Oh, and I would never condone any unethical methods of logging into the LA Times without registering.)

Yes, yes, there are two sides to every story, and the Cassandras among us can't help but focus on the big gray clouds rather than the sliver lining. But Allawi's story this week--and the argument from the Challenger--is that Iraq is a success story. It simply is not.

The very invocation of the name Kos will send some of the conservatives reading here into a mouth-foaming frenzy, but yesterday Kos cited the United States Agency for International Development's memo to non-governmental organizations in Iraq telling them of all the "events of interest" across the country for Thursday (the day Allawi addressed Congress). Here's a small sampling of what is going on in Iraq even as Allawi claims "Iraq is made out of 18 provinces. Out of these 18 provinces, 14 to 15 are completely safe; there are no problems."

There are unofficial reports of criminal gangs in Baghdad conducting activity with a view to kidnapping ex-pats for the bounty offered by terrorist organizations. Currently the threat of kidnapping is extremely high.

Historically, MNF activity in Sadr City has generated reprisal or indirect fire attacks into the International Zone and personnel are warned of an increased likelihood of such attacks in the near future.

The threat of abduction from within the International Zone remains and personnel should check their personal, individual security arrangements accordingly.
0115 hrs Small arms fire attack on an Iraqi Police patrol in Ur District.

0110 hrs IED attack on a convoy in the area of the 14 Ramadan street/Route 10 intersection (Routes FORCE and CARDINALS).

0200 hrs Six IEDs found and cleared in Sadr City.

0808 hrs.Indirect fire attack on MNF facilities in the northern area of the airport.

0937 hrs. IED attack on a patrol on Route PREDATORS.

1132 hrs. Indirect fire attack (mortar) on an MNF base in the Shawra Wa Um Jidir District.

1220 hrs. RPG attack on a patrol on Haifa Street.

The report goes on to detail the problems all across Iraq, not just in three provinces. Time also notes that Allawi "might want to check in with the British troops in the 'tranquil' south he described, because they tell the BBC that last month alone one base at Amarrah suffered 853 separate attacks, the most frequent combat experienced by a British army unit since the Korean war."

Plenty of people question the possibility of elections, both in Iraq ("The elections are already a standard joke") and not ("Allawi appears determined to hold promised national elections on schedule on 31 January, despite an ongoing insurgency that threatens to make polling impossible in pockets of the country"). Even the Bush team can't get its stories straight on elections. Time, again, challenges Allawi's assertions about the Iraq military, too:

More importantly, Allawi emphasized, Iraqis are determined to fight the insurgents, and take over from American troops. Some 100,000 have already been trained, and more are on the way. Again, this analysis is quite congruent with the picture painted by the Bush administration, but others, such as the widely respected strategic analyst Anthony Cordesman, who bases his work mostly on conversations with U.S. commanders on the ground, suggest that when it comes to effective combat units that can be deployed alongside U.S. forces, only two or three battalions of Iraqis pass muster--i.e. no more than 2,500 troops.

The Challenger caught the typo from my drug-addled fingers citing Iraqi civilian casualties, but facts remain facts. Right now US and allied troops are killing more Iraqi civilians than insurgents. In this Knight-Ridder piece from the front pages of newspapers all across the country today, the reporter notes that "Iraqi officials said the statistics proved that U.S. airstrikes intended for insurgents also were killing large numbers of innocent civilians. Some say these casualties are undermining popular acceptance of the American-backed interim government." And this doesn't count the deaths from "the deteriorating safety of water and food in Iraq."

You say tomato
"I have made it clear," the Challenger writes, "that we were involved in one war, that we won that one handily, and are now engaged in a second war." In the end, my disagreement with him may be nothing more than semantics. As I said in my First Rebuttal, his way of framing this particular portion of the debate leaves many unresolved problems. One, it allows him to smugly keep declaring victory, while US troops remain in harm's way and the cost of our war(s) keeps mounting in lives and taxpayer dollars.

Two, there are some serious Constitutional questions, here. Article I makes it clear that only Congress can declare war. If what we are facing now is brand-new, then somebody has some 'splainin to do, Lucy. If, instead, we're just trying to wrap-up the loose ends following a single war, then the Challenger has to admit that, at best, our victory is still TBD. I admit there is good happening; what the Challenger doesn't admit is that, as whole hosts of my links have shown to this point, is that our "victory" is not so pat as he wants to say it is.

The Challenger began by playing with language, and in his Second Rebuttal, he keeps playing with language. This is the sort of thing I though only the Bush team actually did. He starts with our old friend Webster to try to say that what we're fighting in Iraq is not insurgency. I'll just use the language that our own State Department uses. If "insurgency" is good enough for Dick Armitage, it's good enough for me.

Which is why I tend to trust the much-maligned National Intelligence Estimate. Aside from the fact that the NIE is backed up by European intel, the only two people who seem not to trust it are George W. (just guessing!) Bush and the Challenger. What motive does the CIA have for lying now? And in that direction?

We can keep tomaytoing and tomahtoing about whether the Iraqi celebrations were real or staged (likely answer--some of each) and about whether the rebuilding of a country we didn't need to invade meets a cost-benefit analysis. But one thing we can't argue about--because the Challenger has not introduced sufficient evidence to do so--is the post-invasion planning. In his Second Rebuttal, he says, "Allawi and his government didn't just spring into being thanks to Magic Government Fairies. They exist because the Bush administration planned for them to be there then implemented the plan in June and again in August."

But I like Kevin Drum's analysis better:

In the beginning, administration ideologues were convinced we'd be welcomed with flowers. Within a few months we'd install Ahmed Chalabi as president of a liberated Iraq, draw down the occupation force to about 30,000 troops, and declare victory.

That really was fantasy, but when that plan almost immediately fell apart there was no Plan B on the shelf. So the administration ginned one up posthaste: disband the Iraqi army and stay around for a while. Jay Garner objected, so he was fired and Jerry Bremer was called in to be our new proconsul.

But that plan didn't work out too well either. By November scattered attacks had grown into a full-blown insurgency and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, apparently tired of Bremer's strongman act, insisted on quick elections. After some panicky discussions back home and a call to the UN, Plan C was unveiled: we would turn over power on June 30 and hold elections seven months after that.

But that still didn't work. The turnover proceeded on schedule, but security didn't get any better. Fallujah and Najaf became rebel strongholds, hamhanded planning turned Muqtada al-Sadr into a Shiite hero, and a dangerous insurgency became a full-blown guerrilla war.

So now we're on Plan D, a feebly disguised version of Plan C: the elections will proceed as scheduled and that will fix everything. It's unlikely that anyone below the level of cabinet secretary actually believes this, but it's impossible to say so because there's an election coming up. An American election, that is.

(skippy the bush kangaroo has an interesting take on our plan, too.)

So: Just because things happen does not mean that they were planned, well, in advance. Look, since 1999, US commanders have been clear that routing Saddam would be the cakewalk it turned out to be and that the real struggle--the one that would take 400,000 US troops--would be holding Iraq after the fall of Saddam. This administration has steadfastly refused to accept the realities of what this war would take. This is what I meant when I said the administration had delusions. This is what I meant when I said they didn't plan.

Shock the Vote
The Challenger and I are not going to vote for the same ticket in November. And I am not so delusional (heh) to believe that I will change his or most anyone else's minds about that.

And I also know that we do not have the time or the space--and we were not asked by the Chairman--to get into the whys and wherefores of our presence in Iraq in the first place. But I think that we have to examine the conduct of this president and the men and women he has surrounded himself with over the course of this war. Have they made the right decisions? Have they made Iraq safer, the United States safer, the world safer?

Bush doesn't want us to criticize him or our allies. But I think its telling than even our most important allies in the region are criticizing us. Pakistan's President Musharraff told Paula Zahn, "[the world] is more dangerous. It's not safer, certainly not [. . .] because [the war] has aroused actions of the Muslims more. It's aroused certain sentiments of the Muslim world, and then the responses, the latest phenomena of explosives, more frequent for bombs and suicide bombings. This phenomenon is extremely dangerous."

Maybe it's true that Iraq has acted as "flypaper" for some terrorists in the region. (It hasn't stopped terror elsewhere, though.) More importantly, and more frighteningly, it has galvanized terrorists around the world against us:

Iraq [. . .] has hampered the war on terror--and thus made us less safe--in three ways. First, it diverted resources from the effort against al Qaeda in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and then bogged those resources down in Iraq. Second, contrary to being "flypaper" for terrorists who would all flock to their imminent doom in Baghdad, as conservative apologists claimed ex post facto, in fact the war and the horribly executed occupation (symbolized by the pictures from Abu Ghraib) have served as recruiting devices for al Qaeda cells and other America-haters worldwide. And third, the ham-fisted and ultimately deceitful way in which the Administration tried to strong-arm the rest of the world into backing the war seriously damaged American credibility and further isolated the U.S. in the war on terror.

The Challenger thinks I'm deceiving you when I say that the way the Bush team has waged this war is dangerous for both Iraq and the United States. But I submit that it is he who is deceived--by the Bush team.

Don't fall for it.

Respectfully submitted,
Jay Bullock, Iron Blogger Democrat

Battle Victory Iraq - Challenger - Second Rebuttal

2004-09-24T15:11:00.000-07:00

I want to open this rebuttal by saying that I'm genuinely glad I could make Jay laugh. I know he's been going through some tough times and it makes me happy to know that, even when we bump heads, I can bring him a little bit of relief. I hope you get to feeling much better very soon, Jay.

Now for my rebuttal. My esteemed opponent has accused me of a few things in his First Rebuttal. Well, actually he accused me of a lot of things, but there were three big ones: of being a Bush apologist, of paraphrasing his assertions to make them more palatable, of not answering the questions posed by the Chairman.

I'll address each of those, but I want to make a couple points before I do.

First, I have no problem invoking the name of the President in my argument. I haven't done it to this point because it seemed pretty obvious that since I am not only defending what the President has been doing in Iraq but have credited him with victory in one war and of winning another, I shouldn't have to. What other Commander in Chief could take credit for my plaudits? But to make him happy and to fulfill the Presidential Name Quota for my posts I offer this.

President Bush. President Bush. President Bush. President Bush. President Bush.

Second, I'm not at all confused in my argument. I have made it clear, I believe, that we were involved in one war, that we won that one handily, and are now engaged in a second war. The differences between the first and second could not be more stark. In the first, we engaged an enemy organized into an actual army led by a military hierarchy and wearing uniforms of the nation of Iraq. Our goal in that war (roughly) was to defeat the army and depose the leader. In that war not even my opponent can reasonably deny: "Mission Accomplished". In this second war we are fighting a diverse assembly of groups with varying levels of organization, varying levels of funding, various sources of support, and led by not one man but several. This assembly is not a military organization, has no military hierarchy, and has no certain leader to depose. Our goals in this (again, roughly) are to kill them in detail, to secure the areas where they operate, and to ensure that they find no sure footing from which to operate in the future. In this we can say, based on the points I made in my last rebuttal, our Mission is steadily being Accomplished. Or, to put it in the form that answers one of the Chairman's questions: We are winning. But I think that just maybe I said that before.

Jay gives me all the evidence I need to support my assertion that the fight in which we are engaged now is a different war when he says in no uncertain terms that what we face in Iraq are largely foreign fighters. Well, if you have a different enemy from a different place who are funded and dispatched from different countries, then it sure looks like you're fighting a different war, doesn't it? Unless, that is, that Jay wants to claim that these terrorists were already allied with Iraq and fighting for their cause in the first place. But I really don't think he wants to admit that Iraq had such close ties to terrorist organzations, do you?

But let's narrow that down just a little bit. In his first rebuttal, not long after he helps my case by pointing out the large number of foreign fighters in Iraq, he goes on to call the people we're fighting "insurgents". But the fine folks at Mirriam Webster seem to have a different idea of what an insurgent is than Jay does.

1 : a person who revolts against civil authority or an established government; especially : a rebel not recognized as a belligerent
2 : one who acts contrary to the policies and decisions of one's own political party

These foreign fighters can not be insurgents because: 1) as foreign they aren't revolting against civil authority since the Iraqi government as no authority over them (they're not Iraqi citizens, see), and 2) they're acting in complete agreement with the policies and decisions of their political party - that is, the ruling parties of Iran and Syria.

They're not insurgents. They're an assortment of mercenaries paid either directly or with weaponry whose job is to kill Coalition soldiers, Iraqis, and destabilize the Iraqi government. They are, as I've said before, a completely different foe which is why what's happening now is a different war.

So why did I characterize it as the Unrevealed Phase of the Underpants Gnome Strategy? Well, I admit that was he trying to frame a rebuttal in the terms of Jay's argument. It made my point less clear than it should have been. I tried to rebute a cute argument with another cute argument and it went over like a pole vaulter with a pantfull of lead. Let me be very clear. We are fighting a separate war with a separate enemy and separate goals than the one we won in April, 2003.

I now want to examine Jay's charge that I'm a Bush apologist. How, I wonder, can he actually write a post where he calls me a Bush apologist then castigates me for not actually using the President's name? I know it can be done because I read it. I'm just kind of curious about how he managed to do it without a quarter of his brain leaping out of his ear, running into the kitchen, grabbing a steak mallet, and giving him a good whack across the knuckles with it.

I realize that trying to explain why I'm not a Bush apologist is like answering the question about when I stopped beating my wife (I don't have a wife! Ha!), but let me at least try. I do not agree with every aspect of how the President has fought this current war. There are a few things I very much wish he had done differently. For instance, I wish we had been far more vigorous in cleaning out the vermin who infest Fallujah. But I'm also not so blind to my own ideology that I can't see the successes of his strategy. I can see how, once we handed sovereignty back to the Iraqis and recognized Iyad Allawi as the legitimate leader of that country, we should probably let him actually lead the country and honor their sovereignty. And when he says that he is making things work in Fallujah and elsewhere, we ought to give him the benefit of the doubt. Even if I think we should have flattened the city with a large, Marine-intensive steamroller, I'm inclined to give the Prime Minister the latitude to find a political solution and to believe the results he's telling me. Is that naive? Well, I don't know about all that. I give world leaders the benefit of the doubt all the time. Even the Coalition gave Saddam Hussein 16 UN Resolutions worth of benefit of the doubt for well over a decade before we decided that he needed to be deposed. I'm fairly sure that Jay would not be willing to say in the same breath that the President rushed headlong into war and to say that we should rush headling not to believe the Prime Minister of Iraq, would he? If so, he should let me know first, so I can get that steak mallet safely out of his kitchen. Just in case.

His prime piece of evidence that I'm a Bush apologist is that I "take pride in the idea that we're killing more of them than they are of us, so it's okay". Well, the "idea" tht we're killing more of them is a prety important thing, don't you think? Despite Jay's statements to the contrary, it is an important metric we can use to determine how successful we are in this current war. We do have various means we can examine to see if we're winning or not and I've given not only the one Jay actively disputed, but several others he left largely unmolested. Since this one is the one on which he's seized, I want to stick with it for another paragraph or so.

I have to say that we have fought thus far in Iraq with surprising gentility, announcing our military operations into cities well before we act so that civilians can leave and not act as the human shields our opponents want them for and backing off in hotly-contested areas so that the Iraqi government and others could pursue political solutions. And I mourn the loss of any innocent civilian life, but I also applaud how delicately our military has operated and abhor my opponent's distortion of how many civilian dead there have been in Iraq. If you follow the link he provides to support his "100,000 dead civilians" statement, you'll see that, at most, the counter says that there are less than 15,000 dead because of Coalition military action in Iraq. I should note that those 15,000 people were killed in over a year of military operations are child's play compared Saddam's Hussein's slaughter of the Marsh Arabs (who number 40,000 but used to umber 250,000), or the mass graves he filled with Kurds at a rate of 3000 or 5000 at a time, or the tens of thouseands of people who have just disappeared over the years.

But Jay does have a bit of a point. Those foreign fighters wouldn't be dead, most likely, if we weren't there fighting them. Those poor, innocent terrorists and mercenaries could be spending their time in better ways, I suppose. Maybe they could be building belts full of explosives to blow up school bus stops in Israel. Maybe they could be working for the Iranian mullahs cheering on the hanging of a mentally-retarded 16-year old girl for her "sharp tongue". I don't know about you folks, but I would far rather those hate-filled and evil people try their hand against armed soldiers than against schoolchildren, handicapped teenagers, and restaurant patrons.

Now let's look at my opponents problems with my paraphrasing the things things he believe I chose not to contradict.

The National Intelligence Estimate. Come on, folks. Do I really need to vigorously rebut his use of this as evidence? When he invoked it in his Opening Argument he said,

Yes, I know that this is the same intelligence community that said selling Iraq's WMD to the public would be a "slam dunk," but they are also the same people who said, prophetically, "Bin Laden is determined to attack the United States," which turned out to be true.

If he's already admitted that he's willing to believe its veracity based on the case he wants to support, I'm not sure that we should take it all that seriously as good evidence for his argument.

The cost argument. Yes, I used the Marshall Plan as a point of comparison. Do I believe that the rebuilding of Iraq is the same as the rebuilding of Germany after World War II? Certainly not. But I do believe that rebuilding Iraq involves costs that no one could possibly forsee including upgrading tons of equipment neglected to the point of uselessness by Saddam Hussein and rebuilding hundreds of homes and neighborhoods neglected or just razed by the former regime. That takes a lot of money but it's a necessary expense. My point was that what we are spending on Iraq is much less a chunk of our national income than the last time we did something like this. That we can show success without breaking the national income bank reflects well on the President and the Iraqi people.

His ad hominem attacks on the President. Well, I thik they were pretty good paraphrases but if you don't buy how I did that, let me give you the direct quotes.

"The Bush administration was delusional."
"There was an utter lack of post-war planning..."
"The fact that we were lied to is enough..."

Now let me show you how I paraphrased those statements.

"...1) the President was delusional, 2) the President was grossly unprepared, and 3) the President lied."

Now my opponent says that "He rephrases them (there he goes again!) and uses that to glibly dismiss what is truly the most serious part of my Opening Statement."

I've chosen deliberately not to debate name-calling because, well, Pee Wee Herman said it far better than I ever could. But if those attacks are the most serious points of his Opening Statement, then his argument is in serious trouble.

Iraqi Celebrations. Jay chooses to dismiss the article I posted as "probably Ahmed Chalabi's inner circle". Well, we'll leave that unsupported aluminum foil-cap theory mostly aside and look at a few more articles. Does the child pictured here appear to be part of the Chalabi Conspiracy? How about this article that mentioned street celebrations after the capture of Saddam Hussein? Or the "jubilant crowds" mentioned in this story - are they also on the Chalabi payroll?

Look, I'm not so foolish as to believe that the day we captured Iraq and won the first war the country erupted in celebrations the likes of which we saw in World War II. But there were most definitely celebrations. I've proven that. But let's face it, folks. That we saw celebrations at all is a small wonder. For the records, I did believe that we wouldn't see what some folks in the administration were expecting, but neither did I swallow the propaganda that the Iraqis would decry us as invaders. I chose the prudent middle ground: that we would be welcomed, but warily. The people of Iraq have a long memory and they recall how we left them to die at the hands of a vengeful Saddam Hussein after the UN and our own State Department recommended that we not depose Hussein or actively support the uprising against him after the Gulf War. They would have been foolish and gullible not to be cautious. But in the last year we have won their appreciation, admiration, and support. At least that's what their Prime Minister had told us. They've also had to endure decades of tyranny, torture and murder and we could be just a little understanding about how that might have affected them psychologically. But daily they find ways to heal and to work hard to improve their country and to honor those countries who have sacrificed to liberate them.

The war's unpopularity. Well, Jay did post an interesting assortment of polls, most of which, by the way, show that the majority support our going into Iraq and our being in Iraq right now. Look at the second survey by the Pew Centre or the third by the CNN/USA Today/Gallup or the fourth by the Ananburg Election survey. All those polls' most recent numbers show support for what we're doing in Iraq. He says I glossed over it. You tell me.

No clear goal. Jay says that I "must agree that there's no clear goal anymore". I must? Really?

How about if, instead, I tell you just what the goals are. The first goal is to establish security around the country. That's happening right now. According to Prime Minister Allawi,

Let me explain something which is very important. I have noticed in the media, it have been neglected and omitted several times, in the Western media.

Iraq is made out of 18 provinces. Out of these 18 provinces, 14 to 15 are completely safe; there are no problems. And I can count them for you, starting from Basra, moving into Iraq Kurdistan.

There are three areas, three provinces where there are pockets of insurgents, pockets of terrorists who are acting there and are moving from there to inflict damage elsewhere in the country.

So really few care to look at Iraq properly and go from Basra to Nasiriyah to Kut (ph) to Diala to Najaf to Karbala to Diwina to Samawa (ph) to Kirkuk to Sulaymaniyah to Dahoo (ph) to Irbil there are no problems. It's safe. It's good.

There are problems in Fallujah. Fallujah is part of a province, the province is called Al Anbar. It's vast, very big. It has many other important towns, such as Anna (ph), such as Rawa (ph), such as Ramadi. There's nothing there. In Anna (ph) and Rawa (ph) indeed there is nothing, no problem, except on a small pocket in Fallujah.

So really, I call up on the responsible media throughout the world, not only here, to look at the facts as they are in Iraq and to propagate these facts to the international community.

I am not trying to undermine that there are dangers. There are dangers in Iraq. There are problems and we are facing international terrorist onslaught on Iraq. I personally have received every day a threat. In the last four weeks, they found four conspiracies to kill me. And likewise they are killing people. They are killing officials. They are killing innocent people. But the Iraqis are not deterred and we are not going to be deterred.

I went the next day and saw a recruitment center for the police after they killed, massacred 40, 45 people. I found hundreds of people coming to volunteer to the police and to the army.

I had spoke to them. They are all upbeat. They are resolved to beat terrorism and to defeat the insurgents.

These are facts that one really needs to explain it to you and you need to explain it to the people.

The second goal is to establish an independent, stable, and democratic Iraqi government. Looks like that's happening also since elections are going to happen in January. Or as PM Allawi puts it:

I know that some have speculated, even doubted, whether this date can be met. So let me be absolutely clear: Elections will occur in Iraq on time in January because Iraqis want elections on time.

The third goal is to train an Iraqi security force capable of handling the country once our forces withdraw from active patrolling. That, also, is happening apace (despite the terrorists efforts to kill recruits and discourage Iraqis from joining). Again, PM Allawi says,

The Iraqi government now commands almost 50,000 armed and combat- ready Iraqis.

By January it will be some 145,000. And by the end of next year, some 250,000 Iraqis.

The government has accelerated the development of Iraqi special forces, and the establishment of a counter-terrorist strike force to tackle specific problems caused by insurgencies.

Our intelligence is getting better every day. You have seen that the successful resolution of the Najaf crisis, and then the targeted attacks against insurgents in Fallujah.

These new Iraqi forces are rising to the challenge. They are fighting on behalf of sovereign Iraqi government, and therefore their performance is improving every day. Working closely with the coalition allies, they are striking their enemies wherever they hide, disrupting operations, destroying safe houses and removing terrorist leaders.

These seem to fly in the face of the argument that we've had no post-war planning. Allawi and his government didn't just spring into being thanks to Magic Government Fairies. They exist because the Bush administration planned for them to be there then implemented the plan in June and again in August. Allawi can say that Iraq is mostly secure not because there's are secret terrorist disabling rays keeping the country that way but because we executed a plan for security. Every day the Iraqi people see their lives getting better and their country growing stronger. I again quote Allawi,

Oil pipelines are being repaired. Basic services are being improved. The homes are being rebuilt. Schools and hospitals are being rebuilt. The clinics are open and reopened. There are now over 6 million children at school, many of them attending one of the 2,500 schools that have been renovated since liberation.

Last week, we completed a national polio vaccination campaign, reaching over 90 percent of all Iraqi children.

We’re starting work on 150 new health centers across the country. Millions of dollars in economic aid and humanitarian assistance from this country and others around the world are flowing into Iraq. For this, again, I want to thank you.

Oil pipelines repaired. Children back in new and repaired schools. Vaccinations for children. Homes and hospitals rebuilt.

None of this happened by chance. It happened because the Bush Administration has a plan. In fact, in Allawi's speech before Congress, he mentioned the word "plan" nine times.

Now you may not like the plan. I may not like the plan. But there is a plan.

And when my opponent tells you that there is no plan, he's misleading you - really misleading you unlike the partisan, tinfoil-hat definition of "misleading" that he and his candidate John Kerry projects onto President Bush.

As I have said before and will say again, we're winning.

I'll conclude by quoting the Chairman's questions and answering them explicitly, so that my opponent won't have that to use anymore and can get onto addressing the facts I've brought into play.

"Are we winning the war?" As I've explained, we've won one war and are winning another.

"Can we win it at all?" I can only answer that if I believe that we're not winning. I belive I've proven to this point that we are.

"Have the President's policies steered us towards victory or disaster?" That one ought to be obvious.

My opponent says, "..it is clear to me that this president's unwillingness to admit error or change course when we are so far from true--these are dangerous characteristics. Dangerous for Iraq. Dangerous for the United States." But do not be deceived.

We are winning.

Thank You,
Jimmie Bise, Jr., Challenger

Battle Victory Iraq - Iron Blogger Democrat - First Rebuttal

2004-09-23T16:23:00.000-07:00

I am willing to forgive the Challenger his brevity in his Opening and Rebuttal, both because I understand the extenuating circumstances (earlier today, in fact, I had a six-inch needle poking into my spine!) and because, darn it, he makes me laugh (James Carville is a gnome! Tee hee!).

But in remaining brief, the Challenger commits several blunders: He leaves unanswered both the implicit and explicit questions of the Chairman. He severely undermines the strength of his argument with the blanket dismissal in his Rebuttal that "[t]here are a couple of points my opponent mentioned which I will not address because I don't see them as germane to the topic at hand." He cedes vast swaths of this debate; as they say on "Law and Order," he seems to "stipulate to the facts of the case." While doing so, he perpetuates myths about our "victory" and muddies the issue about the war's being over. He also doesn't seem to understand why I spend the last part of my Opening talking about the election, dismissing it as ad hominem against Bush. In the end, he's gotten himself a whole lot of (funny) nowhere.

I. The Question
The Challenger has a habit of paraphrasing things he doesn't like, twisting the language to suit his own purposes, and he opens by doing that to the Chairman. The Challenger's Opening Statement starts with, "Is the war won? If not, are we winning it? If not, why not and what can we do to win it?" What the Chairman actually asked was this: "Are we winning the war? Can we win it at all? Have the President's policies steered us towards victory or disaster?"

It's subtle, but the Challenger tries to reframe the debate in a way that lets him throw off a few clever lines, declare that we won the war on April 9, 2003, and then predict that I will make the "mistake" of confusing the rebuilding with the war, allowing him to declare "Mission Accomplished" against me, also prematurely. The Chairman seems to think that the war is not over, and I'm inclined to agree, not only because I'm a brown-noser of the first degree, but because US troops are actively engaged in fighting an enemy on foreign soil, enigmatic as that enemy may be. That sounds like war to me.

What's more, if the Challenger (or the president) is calling the current situation in Iraq a "new" or a "different" war, it opens up some constitutional questions. Like, who declared this war? I certainly don't remember Congress declaring, or even passing a resolution giving the president the authority to declare, war on "the terrorists, disaffected Baathists, and foreign mercenaries." Not even John Kerry claiming to have voted for it before voting against it. The invasion cannot be separated from the occupation en route to finally leaving the country, or staying there peacefully. The troops in Germany post-WWII were not occupiers; troops in the DMZ are there are the request of Seoul and occupy nothing. Right now in Iraq we are an occupying force and fighting every day.

The Challenger's own First Rebuttal belies the idea that this is a new war. He writes,

It's the war my opponent would have you believe is question mark-intensive phase of President Bush's Underpants Gnome Strategy. [. . .] The fight to root out the terrorists, disaffected Baathists, and foreign mercenaries and rebuild the country is the second part of the strategy.

That just leaves me confused; which is it--a brand-spanking new war or the second part of the same effort? The accidental question mark after "I didn't buy it" is more telling than he might think.

In rephrasing the Chairman's questions, the Challenger also very cleverly subtracts the agency of George W. Bush from the equation. The Chairman specifically charged us combatants to address the relative success (or potential for success) of the Bush plan. In the end, the Challenger's Opening Statement is a dodge--"We won so don't pay any attention to what's happening now!"--and the Rebuttal is not much better at addressing whether specific Bush administration policies are effective. In fact, he never once mentions Bush in his Opening, and mentions Bush only in referencing my arguments in his Rebuttal. Why, oh Challenger of mine, are you so afraid to talk about Bush's leadership?

II. It is Germane
Let me remind you what the Challenger seems to think is not "germane," and what he chooses not to contradict:

He doesn't deny that Iraq has been infiltrated with foreign fighters and terrorists. And it's considerably more than the "dash" or "dollop" he admits. We're facing resistance on a grand scale--his own numbers prove this. Juan Cole really puts it in perspective--and notes here how, contrary to the Challenger's and Allawi's assertions, chaos reins across Iraq. And, hell, not even the Green Zone is really green anymore!

He explicitly dismisses the newly-declassified National Intelligence Estimate by questioning its credibility. Trouble is, that assessment is seconded and thirded and more by other intelligence agencies around the world.

He as much as admits that we overestimated how we'd be welcomed after the fall of Saddam, even though he has fallen hook, line, and sinker for US military PSYOPS that staged the toppling of Saddam's staute for the media in the hotel across the street. He wants me to look at the photos in his links. I did, and in the five (one photo was repeated in both stories), I count fewer than a dozen celebrating Iraqis. It reminds me how these photos just have the same handful of guys over and over again in them--probably Ahmed Chalabi's inner circle.

Were the Kurds happy? Sure, but remember the reason that the Kurds hated Saddam so much (and thus celebrated as described by this link from the Challenger) is that the US abandoned its commitment to help them in 1991, leaving many of them dead at Republican Guard hands. Besides, they're not so happy now. And, really, for every pro-American Iraqi blogger the Challenger can cite, I can cite at least one, maybe two, Iraqis who oppose this war.

He lets the arguments on occupation-planning just float right by. He must agree that we're short at least 150,000, if not 200,000, troops necessary to get the job done.

He glosses over the argument that this is an unpopular war. I am sure that if Americans in general felt it were necessary and were behind it, things would at least look and feel different to us now. But we don't support this overwhelmingly at all.

He must agree that there's no clear goal anymore. He writes that we've gone "from one objective to many," but he doesn't say what they are. As I said, that's the problem--no one knows what our goals are.

III. The War Isn't Over
Perhaps the Challenger is willing to stipulate to these facts because he's unwilling to admit that the war is not over.

Now we're fighting a new conflict [he writes]. Call it Iraq: Part II. Call it The War on Newly-Minted Terrorists (to borrow my brother's phrase). But know that it's a different war. [. . .] In this new war, we are looking at an entirely different situation. Our opponents are different. We have gone from one objective to several. The time frame for success has lengthened. That's all to be expected.

Well, I'm glad the Challenger expected it, because (as the Challenger stipulates!) the administration certainly did not see it coming, despite the repeated warnings of its own commanders.

But I submit to you that this is not a sequel to anything, and to call it such excuses and condones reckless behavior from this administration. When the Challenger stipulates (by denying it's "germane"!) that the rationale for the invasion and occupation has never been clear and that we have no clear goals anymore, he excuses it by saying that going "from one objective to several" is to be expected. Saying the "time frame for success" is different now, too, is just an excuse for the lack of any clear exit strategy.

I would imagine that the Challenger is less offended by my calling him and apologist for this administration than by my calling him a segregationist in our first go-round, but I don't think that particular position is an enviable one to be in. To be an apologist for this administration, the Challenger has to take pride in the idea that we're killing more of them than they are of us, so it's okay. Some of us aren't so much into killing. And, frankly, I have to wonder why when Saddam killed hundreds or thousands of people who opposed his regime, it was evil, yet when we do it, it's okay? These men and women we are killing--the insurgents, anyway, not the more than 100,000 civilians who have been killed (since it was less than that 500,000 the UN expected, I guess we avoided that humanitarian crisis!)--would not be in Iraq and would not be taking up arms against Americans there or anywhere were it not for our invasion in the first place!

The Challenger tries to fool us by comparing occupied Iraq to Europe under the Marshall Plan. Oh. My. God. This is not even apples to oranges, it's something worse. He wants to compare the costs in Iraq to the costs of rebuilding the whole of Europe after WWII? Give me a break! Aside from the fact that we no longer do things like carpet bomb to destroy whole towns that subsequently need rebuilding, there is no plan for Iraq! I could maybe be convinced that Iraqi reconstruction funds were worth it if there were actually a large-scale plan. But this has been my point all along: We had massive success at part one of the war and now we're stuck in part two which is, as best as I can tell, a question mark!

Finally, we can't call this war over because we have no way of knowing--we have no metric by which to measure success. The Challenger offers one; he writes, "If the number of their casualties compared to ours is a measure of victory, then we're winning." That's a pretty big if--and I don't think casualty counts are what we want to hang our hat on. What about ten million pages of documents?, he asks. Woo. Hoo. That's about, what, 9,000 pages for each dead coalition soldier? I'm really quite surprised he didn't say, "But the schools are open!"

IV. Bush v. Kerry
Finally, I need to clarify for the Challenger why my three stated reasons why we're losing are not mere ad hominem against President Bush. He rephrases them (there he goes again!) and uses that to glibly dismiss what is truly the most serious part of my Opening Statement.

The President of the United States has very few actual duties spelled out in the Constitution, but perhaps the most important of them is to serve as Commander in Chief. It is his responsibility, and his responsibility only, to lead our forces in battle, metaphorically if not physically. The buck must stop with him when it comes to our armed forces. When war goes sour, there must be changes; there must be consequences. George W. Bush and his lieutenants have steadfastly refused to consider the slightest possibility that they were wrong, that things should have been done differently and better.

When a corporation runs into trouble, who takes the fall? The CEO. When schools fall apart, who gets canned? The superintendent. When a baseball team sucks, who gets fired? The manager.

When the Chairman asks, explicitly, "Have the President's policies steered us towards victory or disaster?," I have to address that. And while I am not declaring Iraq a disaster (I freely admit that the world is better off without Saddam, and many good things really are happening in Iraq), it is clear to me that this president's unwillingness to admit error or change course when we are so far from true--these are dangerous characteristics. Dangerous for Iraq. Dangerous for the United States.

Respectfully submitted,
Jay Bullock, Iron Blogger Democrat

Battle Victory Iraq - Challenger - First Rebuttal

2004-09-22T19:38:00.000-07:00

As I was reading the IBDem's opening, I had to stop a few times and ask myself, "Self? Did you slip over to John Kerry's website by accident?". Truly, from beginning to the very end, the only thing that separated his opening from a Kerry campaign ad were the words "I'm John Kerry and I approve of this Opening Argument".

But that's pretty much what I expect on the issue of Iraq. In order for opposition to the President to gain the slightest bit of traction, our efforts in Iraq must be seen as a failure. And certainly, the IBDem has painted a pretty grim picture.

Unfortunately, it's not a picture of what's actually happening in Iraq.

In my opening, I addressed the question, "Have we won the war in Iraq?". The answer, of course, is yes - in stunning fashion. Coalition military forces managed to travel 300 miles into hostile territory in five days while incurring fewer casualties than in any other war in history. They did this without triggering the humanitarian disaster the UN so stridently predicted. They did this while critics and media personalities were likening Iraq to Vietnam not even five days after forces entered the country. But their dire predictions turned out to be utterly false. We won the war in less than a month.

Now we're fighting a new conflict. Call it Iraq: Part II. Call it The War on Newly-Minted Terrorists (to borrow my brother's phrase). But know that it's a different war. It's the war my opponent would have you believe is question mark-intensive phase of President Bush's Underpants Gnome Strategy. I know this because I was actually visited by an Underpants Gnome this afternoon. He tried to convince me of the very same thing the IBDem wants all of us to believe. He wants us to believe that we're fumbling around in the darkness, throwing away the lives of soldiers, and tossing inconceivable amounts of money down a black hole. But I didn't buy it and you shouldn't either?

The fight to root out the terrorists, disaffected Baathists, and foreign mercenaries and rebuild the country is the second part of the strategy - the new war that we have to fight in order for Iraq to emerge a democracy with any hope of stability. In this new war, we are looking at an entirely different situation. Our opponents are different. We have gone from one objective to several. The time frame for success has lengthened. That's all to be expected. As I said in my opening, cleaning out the rabble and helping a country rebuild and start a brand new government is not an overnight operation nor is it cheap. But guess what? We're winning this one, too.

My opponent has given us a series of points to illustrate that we're not winning. Taken at face value, he has pretty telling points. But there are a few things he's not telling you. Let's look at some of his points.

We're incurring increasingly more casualties. Yes, that's true. Can't deny it. Then again, so are they. It is difficult, if not impossible, to get an accurate figure on how many "insurgents" Coalition forces have killed since April 3, 2003. I know because I looked all over the net for a couple hours today. So let's look at a few news stories to see what sort of numbers we can get from them.

In recent action near Tal Afar, Coalition forces killed between 67 and 100 insurgents with few casualties. British forces killed over 100 Mahdi militiamen in August with no casualties. In fact, that same article notes that a casualty toll of 1500-2500 dead militia during August alone "would not be unreasonable" yet Coalition forces lost 75 soldiers in that same amount of time, nationwide. We're killing terrorists at a rate of ten to one or greater in our engagements and you can see that with virtually any news story you choose to read.

If the numbers of their casualties compared to ours is a measure of victory, then we're winning.

Reconstruction costs are "spiraling out of control". The source my opponent quoted puts the figure at 120 billion dollars this year and John Kerry deceptively puts the figure at 200 billion dollars. But is this really an out-of-control spiral?

Well, not exactly. After World War II, the Marshall Plan cost the United States between 2.5 and 5 percent of our national income - a good amount over 200 billion dollars a year. In 2003, our national income was 9707.8 billion dollars (!) and by my quick and dirty math, the 120 billion dollars we spent in one year on Iraq was only 1.2 percent of that. Even if we take the inflated figure of 200 billion dollars, we only come up to 2.1 percent - well under the lowest point of the Marshall Plan. We're spending a smaller percentage of our wealth today than we did to rebuild a new democratic Germany. If spending is a measure of victory, then we're winning.

Our Coalition is shrinking "almost by the day". Well, if "by the day" you mean "over the course of five months" then sure. We had 33 nations in the Coalition in April, 2004. Now we have 31. That's no real cause for alarm since it's far more nations than are currently involved in Afghanistan. If the size of our coalition is a measure of victory, then we're winning.

The populations centers are out of control. Well, unless you happen to ask the Iraqi Interim Prime Minister. He seems to believe that:

"...Najaf now is back to normality, the people are going about doing their own business. People are going to the mosques, to the shrines, to restaurants, hotels, so on. The same applies to Samarra, which was even probably more than Fallujah, problems there. Likewise in Basra. There are -- the vast majority of Iraq is really calm, no problems. Samarra, Diwaniya (ph), Hilla, (UNINTELLIGIBLE), Kut, Basra, Najaf, Karbala, Suleimaniya (ph), Erbil, Tahuk (ph), these are all calm places, and the government is in full control."

If the stability of the country, as voiced by the leader of that country, is a measure of victory, then we're winning.

There are a couple of points my opponent mentioned which I will not address because I don't see them as germane to the topic at hand, though they may be germane to other discussions (having terrorists operating against soldiers with guns as oppposed to unarmed civilians, or the specific reliability of the National Intelligence Estimate).

My opponent also says that our losing is an "inescapable conclusion". Well, that conclusion seems to have broken free and is now climbing the Empire State Bulding. I expect him to dispatch the biplanes to shoot it down, so let's see if I can wrap this up by clipping the wings of the IBDem's Air Force.

My opponent says that not only are we losing in Iraq but also that we can never win as long as President Bush stays in office. He stakes that argument on three reasons, which I will boil down into a nice tomato-ey reduction for you: 1) the President was delusional, 2) the President was grossly unprepared, and 3) the President lied. Well, how can I possibly argue with those? I'm going to need something just as classy and with every bit as much factual information as I can muster.

How about this? I know you are but what am I?

Really, I can't seriously respond to an argument that purports to be intellectual, but in reality is the same old ad hominem attack we've heard about George W. Bush since he ran for Governor of Texas. And I suspect that it'll prove every bit as effective as it has in the past. Don't believe me? Ask Ann Richards or Al Gore.

But still, one point does need rebutting. It's common anti-Bush mythology that people weren't celebrating in the streets and giving us a ticker-tape parade as we liberated their country. Well, go back and read the two articles I posted about the Coalition taking of Baghdad. Note the opening of one article: "As jubilant crowds danced and cheered in the streets of Baghdad...". Look at the photos on the sidebar. Check out the headline of one of those stories, "U.S. Troops Cheered in Baghdad" and look at the photo. Or read this article. Or you could read the words of Iraqis themselves, like these, or him or him. It seems that even for a people "skeptical of all authority and wary of the Americans' insistence that they were liberators" they were pretty willing to whoop it up now that they could without ending up in a shallow mass grave. We'll have to forgive them for learning how to live a torture-free life before they planned our Liberation Shindig.

As for the lack of a ticker-tape parade, well, he's got me there. On the other hand, I'm sure we'd settle for the archving of the ten million documents we've taken from Hussein's governmental strongholds or the documents we're using to uncover his bribery program undertaken under the watchful eye of the UN. It ain't ticker tape but it'll do just fine I think.

I'm not sure it needs to be said, but I'll say it anyway. If uncovering tens of millions of documents outlining the depravity of an ousted dictator and his long efforts to bribe the world into complacence is a measure of victory, then we're winning.

To conclude, I'd have to say that we're winning this new war in Iraq as well. It's not an easy victory as was the first, but it's happening. We have a long way to go before it's won, but we get a little closer every day. A lot of people, my opponent included, would have you believe otherwise - often for the most crass political reasons. But don't be fooled.

We are winning.

-Jimmie Bise, Jr., Challenger

Battle Victory Iraq - Iron Blogger Democrat - Opening Statement

2004-09-22T08:06:00.000-07:00

Man oh man. Victory Iraq? Victory Iraq?

Well, we're not winning at the moment. Period. Careful now--put down that flag and newly-legal AK-47 . . . Look, I don't hate America, I don't hate the troops, and I don't hate freedom. But, really, we're losing.

The rate of American casualties is increasing Since the handover, more American troops (let alone American civilians) are dying than before.

The costs of reconstruction are spiraling out of control. And that aid money already allocated is going unspent.

Our "coalition of the willing" is shrinking, almost by the day. (Yes, even Britain is pulling back.) The American share of the cost, both in money and in lives, grows ever larger.

Iraq, which, contrary to some people's belief, was not a hotbed of anti-American terrorist activity, is now swarming with foreign fighters itching for a shot at us and happy to have this chaos as a base of operations.

Virtually every single population center is totally out of control, which really puts a crimp in any plans for meaningful national elections anytime soon.

The very best intelligence available on the ground suggests that we're losing badly, as the recent National Intelligence Estimate did. (Yes, I know that this is the same intelligence community that said selling Iraq's WMD to the public would be a "slam dunk," but they are also the same people who said, prophetically, "Bin Laden is determined to attack the United States," which turned out to be true.)

These things all add up to one inescapable conclusion: We're not winning. "Victory Iraq" is not close at hand or even on the distant horizon.

Why aren't we winning, though? There are three simple reasons:

The Bush administration was delusional. When we went into Iraq, everyone was convinced that we would be "greeted as liberators" and be strewn with "flowers and dancing in the streets." That just didn't happen. It could be because, as Army General John Keane said, no one "predicted how passive Iraq's people would be after 35 years of political repression, and how that would make them skeptical of all authority and wary of the Americans' insistence that they were liberators." It could just be because the US went into the war (as we did in Vietnam) without a thorough grounding in the region's history and a misunderstanding of the Iraqi (and Arab) culture. At any rate, those expecting ticker-tape parades were fooling themselves and signing death warrants for our sons and daughters.

There was an utter lack of post-war planning--and a complete ignorance of thoughtful recommendations--before combat began. General Eric Shinseki was fired for daring to suggest that we'd need "several thousand" troops to keep the peace in post-war Iraq. Army Secretary Thomas White got the boot for the same reason. We should probably have had more troops for the beginning--and even now--but the administration's insistence that it knew what it was doing with so few troops has made it hard for commanders to ask for what they need.

Most disturbing is Anthony Zinni's story:
Four years ago, those who devised an Iraq war game called "Desert Crossing" concluded that a large force would be needed to subdue the country. "We were concerned about the ability to get in there right away, to flood the towns and villages," says retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, who was commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and the surrounding region when he supervised "Desert Crossing." "We knew the initial problem would be security."

The 1999 exercise recommended a force of 400,000 troops to invade and stabilize Iraq. But at the insistence of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, ground forces in the March invasion were held to less than half that: about 130,000 U.S. combat troops and some 30,000 British troops.
It got so bad, in fact, that we saw damning headlines last summer like "Pentagon had no plans for post-war Iraq." Well, maybe they did have a plan--something like the Underpants Gnomes plan made famous here by ex-Iron Blogger Republican, Rosemary Esmay. I see it like this:
1. Utterly destroy an enemy we vastly outnumber
2. ?????????
3. Leave a stable, democratic Iraq behind

We have a lack of enthusiastic support for the war here at home. This is in part because we were misled into the war. Whether purposely or inadvertently, virtually every single pre-war assertion about Iraq from this administration has proven false, from WMD claims to the delusions of post-war utopia. We can point fingers of blame (in fact, I'd appreciate it if the Bush administration finally admitted that mistakes were made and allowed some heads to roll, but they can't seem to admit error--ever), but it doesn't matter whose shoulders those misleading statements rest on. The fact that we were lied to is enough; it is the little pebble in our shoe, the hair in our soup that makes us want to send it back.

It doesn't help homeland morale, either, that this war seems unconnected to us. Right up until the RNC last month (you know, when Bush finally started to see his polling numbers climb--hmmmm), we were facing almost weekly terror alerts. Iraq had not wronged us (despite what Fox News viewers think) or an ally the way it had in 1991 when support for the Gulf War never waned.

What makes declaring victory in Iraq even harder is that there is not a clear goal line, in part, again, because the administration has been cagey and inconsistent about its reasons for taking us to war there in the first place. Are we there to simply get a bad guy and liberate a people? Are we there to establish a base of operations for staging attacks against the terrorist who actually are a threat to the US? Are we there to knock over the first domino on the table that will become Middle-Eastern Democracy? Any of these would be clear, easily defined goals for our foray into Iraq (their morality or expediency could still be debated here), but since none of these has been clearly identified as our mission, there will be no way to tell when we have achieved success. Worse, an unclear goal--or this series of sometimes-conflicting sought-after outcomes--leaves our military and intelligence community confused as to what to do next, what's most important.

The Chairman's middle question, "Can we win it at all?," is the most dispiriting of the three he asks. I simply don't know. The closest I come to any kind of military leadership training is the several years I was embarrassingly addicted to the game Diplomacy in high school. I have to figure that people like Anthony Zinni, Thomas White, and Eric Shinseki are right; they all make it clear now (and, frankly, made it clear pre-invasion) that the paltry force we have in place is not enough to secure the peace.

This will not appease any of my bring-the-boys-home-now fans, but, let's be realistic here: We have three real choices: One, keep doing what we're doing which, as I have clearly proven, is not sufficient. Two, bring in enough troops (US or allied) to stabilize the situation--but not to brutalize the citizens!--so that an Iraqi military and police force can take over. Three, cut and run, leaving utter entropy in the middle of a region that does not deserve and cannot handle much more chaos (though Bob Novak may be floating that trial balloon for the administration). I have to choose number two, and, to the great disappointment of the right half of the room here, I have to say that such a change in strategy has to begin with a change in leadership. That's right: I firmly believe, given Bush's reticence to admit mistakes and the administration's tendency to bungle military planning, step one in "Victory Iraq" is electing John Kerry.

Yes, yes, I know that it seems improper and even crass to politicize Iraq, and I also know that John Kerry's speech this week outlining his proposals for winning Iraq are neither concrete nor so clearly distinct from the status quo. But this administration--this president in particular--has demonstrated a serious problem when it comes to endgame, not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan, where the peace was not fully won, either.

I'm looking forward to this Battle, not only because I get to beat this Challenger a second time (and this time I'll try to do it without calling him a segregationist (: ), but because this is exactly the debate we should be having on a national scale right now. Bush's invasion of Iraq is seen by many of his supporters as evidence of his tough stance on terrorism, despite the deceptive way the war was sold and Iraq's lack of connection to anti-American terror. Those same Bush supporters see Bush's reluctance to admit that things are not going well or that mistakes were made in planning as evidence of his strong leadership. In both cases, Bush is merely demonstrating his inability to lead, to be Commander in Chief, effectively or sensibly.

"Victory Iraq"? Maybe, but not without regime change at home, too.

Respectfully Submitted,
Jay Bullock, Iron Blogger Democrat

Battle Victory Iraq - Challenger - Opening Statement

2004-09-22T08:05:00.000-07:00

First, I want to apologize for the delay. Not noticing the timestamp on The Chairman's e-mail, I was working on the belief that the deadline for my opening statement was Wednesday at midnight instead of Tuesday. But thanks to his gentle correction and forebearance, I'm here. I also wish to apologize for the comparative brevity of my opening post. working on a short turnaround time in the most harried part of my week isn't going to lead to a lot of words. I hope that will not be held against me - not greatly at least.

So now, on with the Fiesta!

Iraq. Is the war won? If not, are we winning it? If not, why not and what can we do to win it? The questions we might consider in this Battle seem predicated on the answer to the last one being "no". So I'm going to shortcut the process a bit.

The Chairman asked if we were winning the war in Iraq. My answer is that we already won the war there. You could say that we won the day the commanding general in Iraq recommended the President declare major combat operations over, thus paving the way for nations who had promised us aid but not during those military operations to fulfill their promises. You could say we won the war the day we dragged Saddam Hussein from his spider hole and imprisoned him for a later Iraqi trial. You could say that we won the war the day we gave Iraq back to the Iraqis, returned their nation to a soverign status and gave them control over their own government and destinies again.

For my money, though, I opt for the first. We won the war when, after watching the Iraqi armies rout before Coalition forces and hearing of Saddan Hussein's panicked flight from Baghdad, our troops rode into Baghdad and a cheering crowd topped a statue of Saddam Hussein. That day was April 9, 2003.

I can understand confusion about Iraq. After all, war isn't always so definitive and the aftereffects of a war can last for months, years, or even decades. For instance, we still maintain troops in Japan and Germany 60 years after defeating them in World War II. Our troops still patrol the Korean DMZ 50 years after the armistice. Toppling a country and rebuilding it is a long process fraught with pitfalls and more than ample opportunity for mistakes. Oftentimes forces that oppose the rebuilding blend and change until it's not clear exactly who we're fighting. Vietnam was an excellent example of that and that even happened during the war itself. What we're facing in Iraq right now is one of those blends - a few leftovers of Saddam's regime, a dash of Sunni militants looking to grab a handful of power, a healthy dollop of terrorists who flow over the Iranian and Syrian borders like water, seasoned by the occasional cleric backed by Iranian mullahs. But that's a different fight with different enemies, different tactics, and an entirely different goal than the war we won in April, 2003.

There's a difference between "winning the war" and "winning the peace". I suspect the debate this week will center far more on the rebuilding operations in Iraq than the actual war itself. Conflating those two things to equal importance, or blending them together until they are indistinguishable is not only not useful, but also ultimately harmful. It is that blending that so easily brings the word "quagmire" to the lips of critics (and indeed had them using the term even while Iraqi forces were running so fast many left their weapons behind them and Saddam Hussein was shopping for spiderhole furniture) and gives critics of the President the comfort and safety of 30-year old war protest slogans in which to wrap themselves. I suspect that my opponent is going to blend these two more and faster than a bartender trying to win a Daquiri-making contest while hopped up on crystal meth. Don't be fooled.

We won the war.

Thirteenth Battle

2004-09-20T17:23:00.000-07:00

This week, another former Challenger, bested in battle by my Iron Blogger, returns to seek his revenge. Jimmie Bisse Jr. was Iron Blogger Democrat's first opponent back when Iron Blog started, and now we shall see if he can return to topple the undefeated Jay Bullock.

Iron Blogger Democrat, Jay Bullock, you have been summoned to the battlefield! May you earn another victory and set Iron Blog on the winning course as we resume our battles.

If memory serves me right, one of the biggest topics in the media right now concerning the Presidential campaign is the war in Iraq. This topic is fertile ground for any number of debates, and has already provided topics in the past for us, but I have something very specific in mind. Therefore, the Topic for the Battle is this:

Victory Iraq?

Are we winning the war? Can we win it at all? Have the President's policies steered us towards victory or disaster? Let us see what our combatants have to say.

Allez debate!

Blitz Battle Demographics

2004-09-17T18:56:00.000-07:00

okay, here's a new brain-buster:

Europe will be Islamic in less than 100 years. It is also predicted that the current demographic dominator will be no longer the most populous in the US.

So what of it? This is not the first time we've heard this claim, nor will it be the last if it is true. Whether or not it is true will be irrelevant to the debate as the questions for this one are as follows:

Given the nature of the war on terror, and hostility for Islamic Terrorists in predominantly Muslim countries is, shall we say, a little lacking (save for Iraq, from which I have heard many wonderful things from), Is this demographic shift indicative of a future security crisis? Indeed, as the article linked said, it is already.

What actions are appropriate to take to deal with the new influx of Islam into Europe? What issues will need to be dealt with in order to take these actions? Especially since what this means for the fate of the United States- if Islamism gets its' hand into the EU and gets a decent representation in the ballot box, it could be France, not Iran with the second Islamic Bomb. It could also mean the dissolution of NATO. Do we push for Europe to close its' borders? or is demographic shifting a natural and healthy thing?

what say you? any overt political correctness for the sole sake of "not offending" will be disqualified as only your TRUE FEELINGS will fly on this one. Sources and sound analysis are the best way to score points and win, as Thief has figured out.

ALLEZ DEBATE (even if it is only until sunday)

-Chris from NH
(PS- my school account isn't working right now, so use the address above to email me with issues, arguments, death threats, etc.

have fun

Blitz Battle Assault Weapons

2004-09-15T18:04:00.000-07:00

Well, you've all heard the news by now: The Assault Weapons ban has RUN OUT.

given that nobody else has posted a battle, and I have papers to write, I'll make this one a quickie:

What does this mean? What does this mean for the crime rate? what about personal freedom? is this a blessing or a pestilence? Is the possession of assault weapons unconstitutional in nature, or does the second amendment cover that? Or, does the ban ending run directly counter to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness outlined in the Declaration of Independence?

WHAT SAY YOU, O READERS OF IRON BLOG?

last battle was far too weak. Unless there are more than 5 people participating in this one, there shall be no clear winner.

step it up!

-Chris from NH

Blitz Battle Korea

2004-09-12T20:24:00.000-07:00

For a moment, sit back and visualize something for me.

Visualize living in a small country situated on a peninsula, with your sworn national enemies residing in the direct pathway to the mainland of Asia. Your trade routes are almost exclusively air and sea because of this, and even then, your seamen (no laughing, this is serious) are at risk.

after the bitter, bloody war about 50 years ago that separated your peninsular nation, the North decides to pour the lion's share of their economic "earnings" into military equipment and research. As a result of the stalemate, the North became bitter and decided that at one point in time, Korea will be reunited... under their rule.

to ensure this, they parked 11,000 artillery weapons pointed at over 10 million citizens in your capital city and boast about their nuclear weapons program.

are you scared yet? you should be.

Now take a step back- realize (well, most of you anyways) that you are a US citizen. Your nation is not directly threatened (at least not yet.) However, you have some thousands of troops stationed on this peninsula. Realize that the peninsula is too small to respond to a nuclear attack with our larger weapons... though that is precicely why we are developing tinier nukes. And that any conventional force deployed would have to face the world's fourth-largest standing army. If they wanted to, the DPRK could launch missiles at Japan, China, South Korea, Thailand, parts of Alaska and parts of eastern Russia. Those missiles can carry any type of payload the DPRK desires, including nuclear. And there is not a whole lot we could do to stop them.

so what say you? given the sensitive situation of our troops present in the face of an immense threat, what needs to happen? is North Korea out of control? Is there any acceptable way to negotiate peace? or would a carefully executed war be an exercise in justice and virtue?

this topic should come as little surprise to everyone. Even if the blast wasn't nuclear (I mean come on, you'd know instantly if it was or not, and people are sayin it's "unclear?" I call shenanigans... especially during the WoT. They wouldn't even tell us if it was) it is still an inevitability that the DPRK will possess this technology in the near future.

what should we do?

anxiously awaiting information on this one
-Chris from NH

A Note From The Chairman

2004-09-12T13:18:00.000-07:00

Well. We have a couple Challengers on tap, now, and I was all set to unveil a new Battle. It seems that life is being mean to our Iron Bloggers, now.

Vinod got sent out of town and cannot Battle as scheduled.

Big Dan, being his usual helpful self, was going to Battle instead, until things exploded for him off-line, and now he's out for the week as well.

Jay and Dru generally need more than, oh, 5 hours notice to Battle.

So it looks like one more week of Battling amongst yourselves. At least we have a few Challengers, again!

Have fun!

Blitz Battle: Operating Systems

2004-09-09T19:49:00.000-07:00

And now for something completely different.

We need some levity around here after the, er, spirited discussions this week, and something light to act as a kind of mental sorbet before heading into a real Battle next week (someone has Challenged, n'est ce pas?). Or, given this crowd, this could be the most bitterest Blitz Battle of all.

So, put it on the line, bloggerinos and bloggerinas: What is your operating system of choice? Or of your dreams? Windows XP? Mac OS X? Linux? Something goofy that I've never heard of? Or are you simply nostalgiac for that old Commodore 64? Whatever your gooey GUI may be, make sure you lay out your case IB-style. Feel free to pre-emptively point out the flaws of the other side, too. Bonus points awarded for a spirited defense of your favorite web browser!

Allez debate!

Irreverantly submitted,
Jay Bullock, Iron Blogger Democrat

Blitz battle: Foreign Policy (Uni-lateral)

2004-09-07T20:36:00.000-07:00

okay, straightforward topic here people:

Given that every nation on Earth acts in it's own self-interest, is the US just in doing the same? Given that the US is the dominant Military, Economic and Cultural power in the current world today, are we charged with the task of being the "active steward" of humanity? Or are we just in acting solely in our own interests as the other nations do? Are we just in "going it alone?" Is Russia?

If if you believe that the US in unjust in acting unilaterally in its' dealings with foreign issues, what makes us different than Israel (note Osirik reactor bombing, Lebanon, Syria), the UK (note Falklands), the Soviet Union (note Afghanistan), and China (note Taiwan, DPRK)? Why should we or shouldn't we be able to act in our own interests without outside approval or assistance?

what say you? I'm asking ALL of you, not just Ralph and Folkbum. If you read IB and don't comment, NOW'S THE TIME TO DO BATTLE. Easy topic, easy answers, I challenge you, the readers of IB to battle with this forum as your battleground.

I'm waiting- Bring. it. on.

Blitz Battle: Polling

2004-09-06T18:51:00.000-07:00

If memory serves, I first became concerned about polling earlier this year as I watched the Democratic battle for the presidential nomination. There were so many polls in the field all the time, I figured it would be hard to live in, say, New Hampshire, and not get polled once or twice a day.

And, with the two parties' conventions over, it's getting worse. Time was, Gallup would do a poll, and that was about it. But now you have a new poll (or two or three) released every day, and with sometimes-conflicting results.

Just this past week we've seen polls on this presidential race that show everything from an eleven-point Bush lead to a one-point Bush lead to something in between. Couple that with confusing and conflicting internals (sometimes the pollsters push leaners, sometimes they don't; Gallup has an unbelievable difference between registered voters and likely voters). Sprinkle in some sampling error--like how pollsters miss cell phone users and people who screen with caller ID. Toss in focus groups and you have a morass of data that, in the end, may be useless.

Why is that? These are all national polls, and, as much as we may hate it, elections are decided on a state-by-state basis. Plus these national polls usually don't include Michael Badnarik and David Cobb, even though they will be on far more state ballots than Ralph Nader, who is included in the polls.

So, what say you? Would it be better to leave the polling to just once--election day--and just one method--the ballot box? Or do you like being buried under this mountain of data that may or may not accurately reflect the state of the race? What is this polling good for, anyway? Allez debate, mes amis.

Respectfully submitted,
Jay Bullock, Iron Blogger Democrat

An Important Note From The Chairman

2004-09-04T13:49:00.000-07:00

We haven't received a single new Challenger.

Not one.

This is a major problem. Without Challengers, there's really nothing to do. Shadowboxing doesn't work in a format like this.

Unless we get Challengers, we may have to continue with the Blitz Battle schedule.

As always, my email is open.

Blitz Battle: CFR

2004-09-01T18:23:00.000-07:00

<homer>Big wheel keep on turnin'! Proud Mary keep on burnin'!</homer>
<marge>No, no! That's CCR!</marge>

There's been quite the kerfluffle of late about the "shadowy" 527 committees and such, which has brought up again the question that I thought we'd settled: Campaign Finance Reform.

The McCain-Feingold (AKA Shays-Meehan) law had one overriding aim: to stop politicians' constant panhandling for big dollars and being bought by big donor interests. And that has, indeed, happened.

Unfortunately, the tightening restrictions on hard money raised by parties squeezed soft money through the only loophole left: The formerly innoccuous 527 committees. These committees have been around longer than you might think, but the restrictions placed on them--they are absolutely forbidden from coordinating with campaigns, for example--made them unattractive as long as parties had the power of the soft money.

But the very restrictions that made 527s unappealing to politicos pre-McCain-Feingold are what make the 527s unappealing to us voters now: Since they cannot advocate for any candidate in their advetising, the only thing they can do is denigrate the other candidate in the race. That's why you never hear the Swift Boat Veterans Still Holding A Grudge About Kerry's 1971 Senate Testimony (SBVSHAGAKST) telling you to vote for Bush--they can't. All they can do is tear down Kerry. MoveOn's 527 ads (they also have a PAC, which can coordinate and advocate but which is subject to much stricter rules) do the same thing--attack the Bush administration without any positive words about Kerry. So while the McCain-Feingold law didn't necessarily create the 527 monster, it certainly made the monster more visible.

Besides that, many people feel that McCain-Feingold was an unconstitutional restriction on free speech.

Regardless of how you feel, CFR is staying in the spotlight for at least the next little while. But what say you? Is it a constitutional thing to take the money out of poiltics? Did McCain-Feingold go too far or not far enough? If you were king or queen, what would your campaign finance policy be?

Respectfully submitted,
Jay Bullock, Iron Blogger Democrat

Blitz Battle: Federal Taxes

2004-08-31T18:47:00.000-07:00

For years upon years, what constitutes a fair tax plan has been debated and debated and debated over and over again. In congress, media, and state governments, what is "fair" seems to vary depending on whom you ask.

It is not surprising to note, that the current federal tax code is THOUSANDS of pages long, if not longer if it is compiled in totality. So why does it have to be this complicated? Is there a simple, fair way to make sure everyone pays an equal and fair amount of their income to the tax man?

One example of a tax concept is the flat tax. That is to say implementing a flat income tax across the board for everything. On an embarassing note for us in the good 'ol US, Russia has met with success a 13% flat tax, and so far, it seems to be working fairly well, given the fact that its implemented in Russia, a country wracked with problems more pressing than fair taxes. In Iraq, Paul Bremer implemented a 15% flat tax. How that one will turn out with the oil revenues, we don't know yet. But we shall see soon I expect.

Others still disagree that this is a fair system, and claim that the lowest tax bracket should remain paying a 0% tax while the rest of us pick up the tab.

are you ready?

GO!

-Chris from NH

Blitz Battle: Electoral College

2004-08-30T09:06:00.000-07:00

The year 2000 marked the first time in which a president had been elected not by the popular vote, but instead by electoral votes. Despite the recounts and voiced complaints of thousands (probably millions, but I always err on the conservative side,) George W. Bush was sworn into office in January 2001.

Given that the United States is not a democracy, but rather a Constitutional Republic, should an election result by electorate in place of popular vote be accepted? or should more states adopt the Colorado proposal to give electoral votes by percentage (bush wins 50% vote, he gets 50% of EC votes.) and thereby taking some power away from the Constitutional institution of checks and balances placed in the system?

On the other side of the coin, is the electoral college innately unfair to those in smaller states with no major urban centers? Given that states like NY and CA have a large amount of electoral votes due to the population (mostly from their cities) and votes are generally cast with self-interest in mind, should the cities speak for the rest of the state, and skew the election results?

or should we decide on a new form of representation in the elections? Though it is merely an idea, this may be something we all have to deal with in the near future.

I'm all ferklemt- I give you this topic- Discuss!!

-Chris from NH

A Note From The Chariman

2004-08-29T16:36:00.000-07:00

I'd like to thank all of you who chipped in a donation over the last week - it is greatly appreciated.

Big Dan was scheduled to Battle this week, but is ill, so we'll be going with one more week of Blitz Battles. Also, we desperately need more Challengers of all stripes, so if you've ever thought about stepping up, now's the time.

Thanks!

Blitz Battle- Pax Americana

2004-08-27T19:27:00.000-07:00

In 29 BCE, it was Pax Romana. In 1813, it was Pax Britannica. In 1945, it was time for the rise of Pax Americana.

The latin phrase (literally: American Peace) indicates the American influence in war or peace in the globe, as the dominant party (as Rome and Britain once were) is the United States of America. But what exactly does this mean? What exactly does this give us the right to do, or prohibit us form doing? Are we allowed to defend ourselves at any cost, even when it inflicts innocent casualties upon non-Americans? How did America rise to power? Is the US now a hegemony?

All annoyingly ubiquitous questions in foreign policy to be sure, but necessary nonetheless. In a time where every decision the government of our country makes is scrutinized and criticized for it's global impact, the rights and morals of the dominant power are never satisfactorily defined. What about the UN you say? Well, when they get their moral priorities straight in reference to their ignorance of the Sudan and Congo conflicts, and instead focusing their attention to Israel's wall and creating useless and unenforceable resolutions, we can consider them a source, but for this debate, the UN is nothing more than a collection of idiots in NYC who all have their agenda.

That is not to say that the US does not have it's own agenda however, and that remains the issue: Should America be allowed to pursue its interests unchecked, and are they just in their decision to dominate the world economy and military to the extent that the world is essentially under US control?

or are we all living in Amerika already?

Blitz Battle: Political Conventions

2004-08-25T17:03:00.000-07:00

Old-timers tell me of the heady days when Party Fat Cats would grunt and laugh maniacally through the dense cigar smoke of their Back Room and stagger out, with deals having been struck, backs scratched, and egos soothed, and announce the presidential candidate at their conventions. Nowadays, of course, the presidential candidate is selected by the fine folks of Iowa and New Hampshire a good six months or more before the formality of the convention.

In the olden days of black and white TV the networks turned over a week of Prime Time to the parties' conventions, which featured true drama, like Fannie Lou Hamer or Severe Police Beatdowns or, in the case of the original Manchurian Candidate, assassinations. Nowadays all you get is a handful of tightly scripted hours broadcast to most of America, with mere seconds of highlights on the news or radio.

Once upon a time, conventions were for building up and presenting a platform, a positive statement of what the party stands for and its vision for the future. Nowadays the conventions are for presenting facades and tearing down the otherr party, not to mention spinning the hell out of every single word uttered at the microphone.

So here's my question: What's the point? If the conventions are anachronistic and little better than soft-core political porn; if the candidates' identities are a foregone conclusion; if the free press, being neccessary for a well-informed etc, can't even bring itself to cover the things; should we then just abandon them altogether? Or do we need this theatre, this cathartic release, this forced climax to a displeasing primary season?

What say you, Iron Blog denizens?

Respectfully submitted,
Jay Bullock, Iron Blogger Democrat

Update

2004-08-25T15:44:00.000-07:00

Thank you to all who have given in the past few days - because of you we've been able to get the phone bill under control.

At present, I received $155 dollars in donations - a good amount - from only 6 people. Iron Blog gets hundreds of readers a day. If you're one of the 6 who have given, I thank you. If you haven't, yet, this will be the last time I bug you about it.

I'm currently $115 from getting my electric bill covered. If you have even $5 to spare, it would be greatly appreciated. As The Chairman I try to be anonymous, the nameless, faceless figure who runs the site impartially, but as Joe G. at Moderate Voice said, I'm a real person, and I really need a bit of help right now. If you appreciate the bi-partisan forum I've tried to create here dedicated to open debate from all sides rather than just another echo chamber, please consider clicking the 'donate' button above.

Starting tonight there will be Blitz Battles going up and I won't bother anyone with my personal problems anymore. I thank you all for your understanding and support.

A Note From The Chairman

2004-08-23T16:18:00.000-07:00

The Verdict and Judges' Comments for Battle Arms are now up, you can read them below.

As you've probably guessed, there's no Battle this week. IB Dem Jay Bullock has a family situation to attend to out of town and so the Battle has been cancelled. So we'll be having Blitz Battles this week, and hopefully return to a normal schedule next week. I say hopefully because I may lose online access soon. Loyal readers who wish to help prevent this from happening can help The Chairman catch up on the bills he had to leave unpaid when the State of California couldn't be bothered to pay his live-in caretaker (I'm disabled) for two months because they kept losing her timesheets, and so he had to pay for all living expenses on $792 a month from SSI. Donations are greatly appreciated, no matter how small, and every dollar /really/ helps right now. I'm thinking the next Battle Topic may be "SSI: How the hell are you supposed to live on it?"

Hey. Makes a great Blitz Battle Topic. Discuss. Donations win brownie points in picking the winner, as does shameless pandering, for once. :)

Battle Arms - The Verdict

2004-08-23T13:36:00.000-07:00

A very strong Battle this week, and while the scores are lower across the board than I would have anticipated, the Comments threads this last week were active, and that is what matters most. Many people found themselves challenged by the arguments made on both sides.

And now, the Verdict.

Another hot and heavy Battle at Iron Blog, and another strong Challenger bringing the heat to Iron Blogger Libertarian. The Challenger started strong but stumbled near the middle while Ib Libertarian got stronger as the Battle progressed. Could the Challenger come back and finish it in his fine, Opening form? Was the Iron Blogger just too much blogger for him to handle?

Who takes it? Whose spleen vents supreme?

Challenger Ralph Stefan of Ralph's Garage!

It's The Challenger! For the second week in a row a powerful challenge has toppled a mighty Iron Blogger! let's look at the scores:

Judge Joel scores it 74-72 for The Challenger
Judge Johnny scores it 78-53 for The Challenger (including the first ever perfect 25!)
And Judge Chris scores it 42-52 for the Iron Blogger.

Two Judges to one, The Challenger snatches a victory!

Battle Arms - Judges' Comments

2004-08-23T12:36:00.000-07:00

The closings are posted, the cases have been made, Battle Purpose of Arms is ovah!

On the Panel this week:

On the Left, Joel Caris of Nightmares for Sale.

On the Right, Chris in NH, an Iron Blog regular and two-time Challenger.

And from the Center, Johnny R of The Moderate Voice.

Let's see what the Judges have to say!

Opening Arguments

Joel: This opening argument has a good argument behind it. The Challenger goes right to the gun violence statistics, which is a strong move. He hammers home the sheer volume of guns in our society and the violence that they are used to commit. However, he fails to address any of the potential flaws in his argument. The post wander at times, feeling somewhat unfocused and utilizing some poor transitions. On the other hand, the writing is clear and easy to understand. The post may be a bit unfocused, but it is not confusing for the reader. The sourcing and linking is very good, with The Challenger backing up his statistics with sources and providing unbiased, informative links.

The IBL is working with some good arguments, but he could present them in a much better manner. The structure of this post is clear and, for the most part, the IBL is straightforward in what he is arguing. However, there are some poor transitions and the second point is somewhat confusing. An initial summary of his contentions would have likely made this post more clear. I also had a problem with the IBL definitively stating that the threat of violence from a greater proliferation of handguns has reduced the crime rate. He backs up this assertion with a link to John Lott giving a brief summary of his study, but does not give us the actual data. Furthermore, we are not told how or even if Mr. Lott showed causation rather than correlation. Mr. Lott’s conclusions may be fair, but they are certainly not proven to be true from the link the IBL provided.

Johnny: Good opening; good writing style. Good historical background on why handguns exist and Sam Colt quote. Awesome presentation on handguns (and I am NOT a fanatic against them by the way; I just took my nephew Greg, 13, to the shooting range today so he could begin working on bb target practice). Truly awesome research on gunfights in the old west. Some incredible and imaginative links truly make his case impressive and FUN TO READ and work through. (He's giving me a lesson on how better to do my blog...and I will be visiting and blogrolling him!) Barely attacked the other side. Well writtten. Wonderfully linked....inspired me to work harder on my blog with the writing and linking!

Not as moving as the other one but he begins OK..but does not blow me away (no pun intended). Quotes about violence have validity; I've done some assigned writing and projects for a nongovernment group that has done research on chimps and the aggression is there as well. It is a fact of life. But he's losing me. Maybe I'm just not bright enough to follow his logic, and I hope this isn't heading into an argument such as "we're born to be violent so we can have guns" since that would cheapen the issue (and would suggest he is a mole for anti-NRA groups). I will read on: Good point on risk of reciprocal violence, but not well backed up; all the stuff before is clumsy and convoluted (to me). This is an awkward post to read. I just put a post on my site that someone sent me -- my first Guest Voice -- and although I didn't agree with it and it wasn't perfect, it flowed naturally. This is a jumble of ideas that don't connect that well at times -- but it isn't an attack post with ideological crap so it's not bad. Just ineffectual. Even if I hadn't read the first one, I would conclude this...and I tend to agree with THIS GUY more than the first one (as usual I'm in the middle but not sure removing handguns is the answer). So this contest puts me in an intersting spot -- I'm impressed by the argeument and presentation of the person who I would usually not agree with totally and less impressed and almost wishing I can get a lifeline from the present one I'm reading, who is not making his case all that well. Tepid ending. It's not a bad one. But it doesn't tie in as well with the theoretical stuff he presented earlier. This post is a well intentioned jumble with some organizational problems Writing is not bad. But it misses its target.

Chris: Well, I disagree with this guy, but hey- the scoring won’t be changed! First off, I admire his ability to admit that guns can be fun… it does a lot to relax the mood on an issue that will no doubt leave people on both sides bitter, no matter the outcome. But wait a minute.. wait just a gosh darn minute… where have I seen this opening argument before? Who else admits to owning guns, and is even a member of the NRA (our challenger isn’t, but I’m going to continue anyways)? Where did I see that guns can be fun, but are used solely to kill, and because of that, it doesn’t matter whether or not they can be useful (read: Frank J’s “nuke the moon” essay) as a deterrent… where did I..? Ah! It was in Bowling for Columbine! Though it’s a nice opener, its one that has been used before, and is used tirelessly by many people that I talk to on a day to day basis, and is ubiquitous amongst “intellectual” liberals, I still would like to see something new. However, his entire post wasn’t “preaching to the choir,” so he’ll get more than 2 points. HOWEVER: I do not like incontinuity of logic, and I don’t like the Challenger implying, or trying to make a connection with homicide and legal gun purchase. If someone is going to commit a pre-meditated murder, I don’t think they’re going to be too worried about breaking another, less punitive law. I don’t buy it for a minute. If someone is going to kill, they’ll find a way to do it. A gun is a tool, not a cause. Also, a small nitpick: a $20 .22 cal pistol is most likely an air gun, not a gun that fires rounds powered by gunpowder witha full metal jacket.. though it will penetrate the skin, it probably will not have enough force to penetrate the sternum of a man, and for that reason alon, i don't buy it. Another issue I have with the logic is the “immunity for gun manufacturers.” It’s like trying to sue McDonald’s if you get fat… oh wait.. that happens. Other than that, he states his position, instead of endless tirades about how guns are no good, and he (pardon the HORRIBLE pun) sticks to his “guns” such as the Brady Bill and statistics and covers his bases where the numbers are concerned.

Now, I may be libertarian, but that only means I’m going to be a bit harder on Vinod. Here we go: “and avoid the statistical barrage that characterizes so many gun debates.” Eek. That’s pretty early to have a problem, but I’m not going to bury him before he’s dead. "1.Violence is an intrinsic part of human nature 2. In some cases, violence can only be countered with reciprocal violence 3. Even disproportionate reciprocal violence has social value 4. Individuals can be / are trusted to use this violence appropriately 5. Government can NOT be trusted with a monopoly on necessary violence." Nice and easy, direct, and sound… Though the philosophy department left a lot to be desired… for one thing, he attacked Rousseau (by quoting Pinker and his attack on the “noble savage” theory of said Frenchie) who influenced the founding documents of these United States quite considerably, with the theory he attacked!! Also, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is outdated, and doubt has been cast on it’s validity… Though I suppose it is useful with a few people, it is by no means Truth. However, he does not say this, and it is up to the Challenger to find these chinks in his armor. Also, he needs to use Utilitarian literature like i did in Battle Torture to drive his point about +/- of guns home.

First Rebuttals

Joel: The Challenger needed to do a much better job of rebutting the Iron Blogger Libertarian in this first rebuttal. He does a great job casting doubt upon John Lott, but this post is otherwise lacking. He makes some good points, but leaves the reader without much in the way of backing data or other sourcing. He dismisses Pinker, for instance, without giving us a single reason why we should dismiss his work as “junk science.” The post reads well, is easy to comprehend and uses humor very well, but it does a poor job of challenging many of Vinod’s points in his opening argument. This first rebuttal needs more sourcing and clearer refutations.

The IBL does a good bit of rebutting here and comes away with a much stronger case for it. He counters many of The Challenger’s arguments quite effectively, particularly in the cases of anarchy, human nature, and looking at a variety of different countries that have low crime rates despite high gun ownership. I felt like the IBL did some statistical massaging, though, that was not even necessary. Particularly, the ethnic breakout of statistics seemed pointless, showing some intriguing correlation but not even beginning to take into account a wide variety of other information that would cause questions about causation. Furthermore, the comparison of DGUs to homicide rates rather than overall gun crime seemed misleading and disingenuous. In the sense of style and substance, this post did a great job of being well-organized, clear, coherent and easy to read. The sourcing, as well, was excellent.

Johnny: Opening isn't really an attack. INteresting that he had same reaction I did to the libertarian post....Good junk science link...Excellent response to if they're all so violent why should we arm them...Pretty well demolishing what was to me a bit of a stunningly bumpy post...Knock out on John Lott as an expert. Based on what he shows, Lott is highly predictable...He demolishes Lott. But all the while he is NOT launching an attack on his debate foe....STRONG ENDING AGAIN. Not nearly as elegant as his first, but quite well done. solid.

AHA! He has a very good beginning...But it's going downhill again. He is basically giving almost a feminist argument: "People are PIGS!" (not in the law enforcement sense). Link on Japan is interesting but doesn't really say much about why we should have handguns. Sorry. It didn't sell me. Lots of blahhhhhh stuff here that seems more like a mental exercise than progress.BUT he does WELL in noting that we have lots of guns but we're not a society in anarchy (unless you use as your model Walmarts the day before Xmas). Good points on the penalties... EXCELLENT use ot stats on registration, intra-US differences, crime rates, etc. Interesting state on blacks... GOOD in making case here (in this post) guns for self defense.

Chris: Worry about backing up your points WITH SOURCES rather than song lyrics before you attack an IB. Not impressed at all. Each point the challenger attacked did not have a source that could have refuted the points. Now that we’ve gotten the ball busting out of the way, here’s an easy example of what I mean: Point 1: the easiest thing to do would be to quote religious documents, because those are the only things defending the inherent morality of man. Science points elsewhere. Religion is something most people are uncomfortable dealing with. 2: Cite an example of a failure of violence to solve problems, i.e. the Balkans, or the Chechen conflict. 3: Forget about Lott, Lott was ONE SOURCE- attack the point using positive language by pushing a point of your own here- you can use the utilitarian argument (which is part of Vinod’s foundation in this case) against him, and earn bonus points. Don’t fall for bait, you’ll waste your rebuttal. 4: I see no sources. Saying something is so does not make it that way. SOURCE!! 5: Shot in the foot. Read up on your history before typing… The Nazi party DID enforce a gun ban, and Iraq is not incredibly relevant to this debate. Lay out simple, concrete reasons why Vinod is wrong, and offer analysis with information to back it up… I see none.

I busted balls with Ralph, and Vinod won’t escape it either. I’m mad that he didn’t expand on Hobbes, and I’m annoyed that he spurned his greatest theological asset: Utilitarianism. Education-wise, he’s made us all a bit dumber by teaching us to disassociate the purpose of firearms with social purpose, and that doesn’t fly with me. Granted, he did do a good job in pointing out that stats vary, and can’t be trusted always, but as far as the philosophy behind the concepts go, he needs to whip out some Jefferson, or at least delve into the theories, because this is really costing him big time in the education department. As for the links… yeah, they were alright, but some were questionable, and others were simply non-sequitirs.

Second Rebuttals

Joel: The Challenger nails it with his second rebuttal. He actively challenges
almost every argument from the IBL’s first rebuttal and does so in an effective and persuasive manner. He even turns some of the IBL’s arguments against him, particularly in the case of Canada’s gun ownership and crime rate. He strengthens his own case at the same time, with the persuasive look at the correlation between the rise in handgun sales and the rise in U.S. crime—though this is only correlation and not causation, a point I noted. I was hesitant with some of The Challenger’s early anger toward the IBL, as I felt like he probably was mischaracterizing some of the IBL’s arguments, but there is no doubt that anger fueled this rebuttal in a very effective manner and sharpened The Challenger’s focus. As such, this is a great post stylistically that is very compelling, flows well and is easy to read. Finally, the sourcing was excellent, with solid links from respectable sources that backed up The Challenger’s arguments.

The IBL does a good job of rebutting and countering The Challenger’s accusations of racism and intellectual dishonesty, which felt somewhat overblown. The IBL also helps bolster his own case with the comparisons between countries, cities and states, as well as the nice statistic showing a higher nongun murder rate in the U.S. than the overall murder rate in most other countries. However, this post feels pieced together and sloppy. There is too much slang—“lemme”, “cuz”, “Achance meeting b/t”—and too many unclear sentences. Many of the IBL’s links lead to conservative and pro-gun websites and some of the statistics are unsourced or sourced with broken links. The IBL was strong in his arguments but poor in his execution.

Johnny: Uh, oh. Personal attack. When we get to labels it's a problem. I don't mind lack of humor but they lose me (let's leave the Swift Boats/Kerry Military record style debates away from The Iron Blog..) Reading on...he makes sense about saying men are violent then arming them to the teeth....Good comments on Japan...but isn't he veering terribly off course here??? NOW I can see why our presidential campaigns suck so badly -- no one can FOCUS and stick to THE ISSUE. TRULY SAD...the intellectual dishonesty part here is OK but the link is predictable and almost cliched in this case and it's moving into an attack on the PERSON rather than a discussion of THE ISSUE. Hard to believe this is the guy who wrote that absolutely perfect first post! "Once again, my opponent’s distortions are obvious. He somehow assumes that each defensive use of a gun somehow prevented a homicide. This is clearly not the case." EXCELLENT point that almost -- but does not -- make up for the stuff before it. Whole ending is quite good, makes sense, is done cooly. The first part of his post was not quality stuff. I personally can't see what he was so upset about...

Good beginning. Some sentence are neoacademic in style. Good point about US non-murder rate. Good that he reminds reader of challengers own statement about blacks. But he goes off a little on the deep end about this...good quote from cdc (I see that source is instapundit) weak on non lethal weapons. Am unconvinced by argument he makes here. And the ending peters out! TERRIBLE ENDING! So...this guy does better at the beginning, then buries the reader in a ton of stats (I am VERY SUSPICIOUS of that and it induces ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ)...then has a virtual non-ending. Was it deleted by mistake?

Chris: FINALLY!!! The challenger has brought his war face and started to bust Vinod’s chops for shortcomings in his argument. He dissects the sources well, and provides information of his own to counter, pushing his point further. However, he did jump to conclusions a bit when calling Vinod’s post racist. Statistics are not racist. Numbers have no feelings. Also, Vinod did not accuse Japan of valuing conformity and submission, Bill Whittle did. The challenger just passed this over and made a blanket claim that racism was thoroughly present in Vinod’s rebuttal, and for the most part, it wasn’t. Intellectual dishonesty? He used the argument well, but it is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. He even turns a point against himself when he bring up the Hollywood robbery. By saying the police needed to arm themselves more appropriately, the logical deduction from that prompt is: “Police aren’t armed enough,” not necessarily that “we need to disarm.”

Vinod is wonderful with words. In one rebuttal, he properly defends himself from accusations of racism, and intellectual dishonesty. He also pulls in more stats and started using more irrefutable sources, such as the CDC. He did a nice job with the rebut which nabs him points, and did well to do overkill on his arguments against the Challenger’s assertions. HOWEVER (ever present, isn’t it?) I would have liked to see even more structure, and as for the interest value… I have a gallon of coffee right next to me in hopes that I’ll stay awake long enough to complete my judging of this notably boring debate.

Closing Arguments

Joel: The Challenger nails his closing argument. He does a great job of casting doubt on the IBL’s case by countering many of the IBL’s argument with his own counterarguments, casting his own case in a very flattering light. He does an excellent job of summarizing his previous posts while making the case seem fresh. The post is written in a forceful and persuasive manner. The paragraphs flow into one another and everything here is very clear and coherent, without ever becoming wordy or indulgent. There is a great passion in this writing that shows the issue is important to The Challenger and fuels the certainty of this closing argument in a manner that is clearly conveyed to the reader. Well done.

The IBL summarizes his case well in this closing argument. He also leaves aside the statistics for the most part and instead reminds us of certain compelling cases that seem to contradict The Challenger’s arguments. The post is structured well and does a nice job of bringing together the original points and arguments and arranging them into a coherent and compelling argument. In particular, the IBL makes a strong case for the need for self-defense and the desire for individual sovereignty. The post, however, is not as clear as it could be, with certain sentences being somewhat confusing or just poorly structured. The post feels as if it could have been streamlined and made more clear.

Johnny: Excellent beginning. He gets right down to it and quite effectively shows flaws in the other's argument. His arguments about his opponents "flawed logic" are, in reality, virtual knock out punches. Very well done. Very much to the point. Very focused and specific. Not really personal. Excellent ending. Not as good as the first one he did but you could hold this one up as a model for others on the left and right to emulate. He closed the sale....but after this I read the NEXT one...and he could open and close it in HIS favor. (This is the one I do first).

I have to be honest. This is a TOUGH post to judge. The opening is so convoluted. It is "on message" but it's the kind of piece of writing where someone seems to be trying to write something that looks like good intelligent writing -- when simple declarative sentences and concepts that flow from each other would be MUCH more productive. I almost don't know what to do with this as I read it...but I will read on: The opening reminds me of a political science teacher I had who spent 40 minutes of a 45 minute period talking about the methodolgy he'd use. The bell rang 5 minutes later and he said:" What? So soon?" And we whispered: "Not soon enough." I finished reading. This is one of the weakest closing statements I have read on the site.

Chris: This closing seems to be a “seether” if you will… By that I mean, the challenger goes back to statistics that he provided, and points that he made as if they were gospel, and carries an irritated and bad mood to it. The Challenger does, however use sources to back up his arguments that he and Vinod used before, and he did do a good job of “sticking to his guns.” Not a bad closing, but my coffee maker still hates both combatants.

The case was refreshingly easy to read, and it was short, sweet, and to the point. It wrapped up the argument well, and addressed the debate itself and the directions it turned. It did not use nearly enough sources to back up points, and relied too much on humorous anecdote to push a point instead of sourcing. Mildly entertaining rebuttal, but what it makes up for in re-read value, it loses in informational value.

Strong words to both Combatants from our Judges. Now only the Verdict remains!

Battle Arms - Iron Blogger Libertarian - Closing Statement

2004-08-22T10:46:00.000-07:00

Arms are a dicey, sensitive subject that forces the body politic to confront some of the deepest, darkest aspects of the human condition. Few contemporary issues challenge an idealist more than these few pounds of metal shaped by a gunsmith from a lump of raw material into a political statement. Are human incorrigibly violent? Is crime the product of an inanimate object so seemingly regulatable and whisked away by legislative fiat? Or does it stem from deeper sources that some groups have conquered better than others through the bewildering array of tools known as culture? With political correctness and post-modern cultural relativism dominating so many types of discourse, is it even fair to make and point out potentially unflattering cultural comparisons?

Ultimately, is the unpleasant tension of Domestic Detente the best humans can reliably count on?

Unfortunately, in answering the Chairman's call about the Purpose of Arms I fear that the response is an unpleasant one on all sides. A subject philosophers debated for centuries is now being conclusively answered through the tools of evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology - Humans are Violent. Given this, mortal threats against man lurk in even the most civil bastions - we may be impressed with societies that have achieved a low violent crime rate, but we have yet to see one that's achieved zero or whose broad lessons are exportable en toto to the great dynamic, heterogenous experiment of America.

Arms, even in our modern times, are ultimately required for one human to credibly kill another human.

We need them not because they help us achieve a perfect world but rather, merely a world better than the one we've been born into and have created vis a vis our fellow man.

I'm sympathetic to the type of world The Challenger's wants to see. However, not all ideals are realistic - especially when they start with the messy, conflicted raw material of Human Nature. More often than we like to accept, the choice society faces is not between Good and Bad but rather between Bad and Worse. In this case, not between "No Guns / No Violence" vs. "Guns / Violence" but rather between "No Guns / Violence" and "Guns / Defense against Violence".

In order to make his case, the challenger ultimately needed to prove that the stuff of man could be changed - which he hasn't. In lieu of that, the challenger's argument primarily rests upon the assertion that certain low/zero gun ownership nations have lower crime rates than the US. However, in at least one major case - Japan - the challenger was forced to agree that culture was the dominant, proximate variable rather than gun policy. In several other cases, for ex., Sweden vs. Finland or Australia vs. New Zealand, we have neighboring countries with diametrically opposite gun laws and yet identical violent crime rates.

My case started with the mortal violence of man and moved forward by deriving it's corollaries. If man is violent, then sometimes violence or the credible threat thereof is the only defense. Sometimes, even small breaches of the social convenant (e.g. auto theft) need to be credibly met with large potential consequences (risk of getting shot). And, for a variety of reasons, mano a mano violence can't be solved with government intervention but rather only via mano a mano counter-violence.

But perhaps ultimately, while I did more than my share of dabbling in statistics, the ultimate issue wasn't one of comparing good vs. bad stats but rather the decidedly libertarian stance of "why shouldn't I have the right?" No matter the potential harm, we trust adults with many other situations of comparable or greater harm - why should we allow them that exercise in this most personal of all circumstances - defense of my own body?

I agree that these issues give birth to a larger locus of political thought - and hence are divisive on many fronts. I close with a debate I saw on television a few years back on the topic of gun control - a progressively flustered control proponent was against a gun rights advocate. After a few rounds of banter, she exasperatedly said -

"Why don't you gun freaks just leave and start your own country?"

He responded - "We did, who invited you in?"

Perhaps arms are truly is The Issue that separates?

Battle Arms - Challenger - Closing Argument

2004-08-21T18:55:00.000-07:00

I hate to point this out but Mr. Valloppillil is literally chasing his own tail. As he accurately points out, I am taking a straight line while he is taking a rather tortuous circuit around the issue at hand. I would have pointed this out to him sooner but I had too much fun watching him go around in circles.

In one breath, he wants us to believe that there aren’t enough guns in urban areas to properly protect citizens. In the next breath, he’s citing statistics that show that 30% of all blacks own guns. In one breath he’s claiming that high crime rates in the Washington DC are due to handguns not being available and in the next breath he’s telling us how they are easily obtained in the surrounding areas. In one breath he’s talking about how the CDC would agree that gun ownership does not correlate to high crime but when you follow the link, it says there is “insufficient evidence” to say one way or another. In the next breath, he ignores a study that shows that licensing and registration helps keep handguns out of criminals’ hands and does lower crime. I don’t know what to say about this tortured logic but I can’t jump through the hoops of contradiction that he does.

My opponent claims that other countries have high rates of gun ownership but he continually denies the reality of this document that shows these guns aren’t handguns but long guns. He would prefer we not make the distinction for obvious reasons. He’ll talk about how there aren’t any parts of the country that have a low number of guns and a low crime rate. What he fails to point out is that there are no parts of the country that aren’t flooded with guns. He might as well start looking for a Yeti or the Big Foot. He drills us down into large urban areas and by his own admission, they are areas that are surrounded by liberal gun laws that allow the importation of cheap handguns. I am supposed to believe that California has “MEDIUM” guns when I posted a source that showed that Californians purchased 169,469 handguns in 2002. If that is “MEDIUM”, I hate to see what his definition of “HIGH” is. Not to be deterred, he points out that tax rates may have risen in my chart about handgun proliferation when in fact the chart was based on tax revenues. It shows the wholesale value of handguns from 1955 to 1993 based on excise tax. We could probably find out how many cheap handguns are being dumped on America but the gun industry isn’t saying. I guess it is all that transparency they have in their industry. This is an industry that sold over a half of a billion dollars worth of handguns in 1993 at the wholesale level. The profits are massive.

He will talk about the culture of fear and violence in America and it might as well be written on a slab of stone and delivered by Moses for all he’s concerned. His take on the issue is that this is the culture and nothing can be done about it. I point out to him that there are laws and regulations that this society can implement which will combat this culture of fear and violence. My opponent rebuts with silence.

He talks about sovereignty and I point out to him that even owners of swimming pools have to abide by rules and regulations. You are past sovereignty when you place a swimming pool in a backyard with a neighborhood full of kids and you provide no barriers to prevent those children from wandering into your pool. In the same manner, 341,000 stolen guns each year represent a significant threat to law-abiding citizens throughout the country and transcends personal sovereignty. It is beyond obvious that these people aren’t protecting themselves, they are arming criminals. Until 1993, you probably had more government regulations regarding swimming pools than you did handguns. Yet today, the gun industry has opposed every effort to license, register and make handguns safer. My opponent rebuts with silence.

The CDC and any number of government agencies are mystified by the reduction of crime in the mid-1990’s. I point out that the "Brady Bill" was enacted during this time and the government finally got tough with gun registration and licensing. They are all amazed and I produced a study as to why we saw this reduction in crime. My opponent rebuts with silence.

That is enough of my opponent’s failed logic. In my opening statement I talked about the handgun culture that was created in the 1950’s and 1960’s. By romanticizing the handgun in movies, television, books and magazines, the American public was sold a bill of goods. We eagerly snapped up handguns and the love affair began. I then presented to you the results of this love affair. Rising crime rates coupled with death and murder on a massive scale. In my first rebuttal, I demonstrated that no matter how well intentioned the gun owner, guns were being stolen from their owners at an incredible rate. In my second rebuttal I demonstrated how the gun industry is big business and they have no intention of dealing with the safety issues regarding handguns.

The pro-gun lobby is well funded and clearly ruthless. There are huge profits at stake. At the same time, we cannot lose sight of what civil society is all about. We must stand up to the culture of fear and violence that so many mouthpieces in society are trying to shout from the rooftops. Proponents of this fear and violence, both witting and unwitting, are winning this discussion. We must, as a society take a sobering look at where we are heading. When the police must raid civilian gun stores to fight criminals, it is clear that we have crossed the line as a society.

There are better methods that we can cultivate as a society for self-defense and personal sovereignty. I beg all of you to think long and hard about what can be done to take handguns and assault weapons out of criminals’ hands and restore order to this society. We have bombarded you with statistics but you should not lose sight of the tens of thousands of people who die from handguns. They are real people and the blood that flows is red, just like yours and mine.

I would like to thank the Chairman for the opportunity to debate this issue. It has been a tremendously enjoyable experience for me. I would also like to thank all the great people who read this blog. You folks make it all worthwhile and I was energized by all your comments, both pro and con.

Thank you,
Ralph Stefan

Battle Arms - Iron Blogger Libertarian - Second Rebuttal

2004-08-21T01:17:00.000-07:00

Whoa - looks like I lit a firestorm. If I offended, I certainly didn't mean to. If I presented an incorrect stat, I did so out of honest intentions. If I led this nation into war based on faulty intel...errr that's someone else.

Crime, Culture & Race

Now, I recognize that issues of Culture and even moreso Race are "3rd Rail" issues ("touch 'em and die!"). There's a mighty tendency to take any statement on these issues and extrapolate them in the most negative light possible. Given the tortured & continuing history of these topics in our nation, you've gotta exhibit some care on these topics before hitting "Publish".

A (the?) core of the challenger's case is the impact of guns on crime. He draws a straight line from guns whereas I take a rather large detour into the criminal & the culture he swims in. It's one thing to refute correlations (later), but it's more prescriptive to also introduce culture as an alt theory. In fact, I often believe that for many, it's a very deep seated reluctance to criticize culture (aside from the majority / dominant one, of course) that makes, or more accurately, requires demonizing guns instead.

For example, on Japan, the Challenger argues -

One can argue that Japanese culture is at the core of their lower crime rates. I agree and I would also like to point out that their gun control laws are a reflection of that culture.

Everything we're discussing is multivariate. The real question is what is the dominant, causal factor in low Japanese crime - it's Culture. Gun bans, as the challenger seems to accept, are at best a second order contributor towards the crime rate. But you can't make that causal connection between the 2 without first going through culture.

Similarly, when the US's non-gun murder rate is still higher than many other country's overall murder rate - there's clearly culture rather than guns at work.

Blacks & Guns

The point of the (controversial, terse) Black homicide & gun ownership numbers was precisely captured when the challenger said they indicated a particular type of -

large urban and poor areas

The high gun / low crime in N. Dakota vs. low gun / high crime in black communities is precisely because of cultural differences between Fargo and South Central LA. I have every confidence that individuals in S.C. LA can experience Fargo-like crime rates if some aspect of that culture carried over (and perhaps Fargo would become more interesting if it imbibed other parts of SC LA culture).

The larger point is echoed in the challenger's opening statement -

Homicide is the number one cause of death for young black males age 15 to 24.

Contrary to saying "black people aren’t worth as much" - the source I cited & argument I'm making is that that Blacks need to do *more* to defend themselves - the government sure isn't doing it! -

Blacks are also heavily represented in California and in those Northeast and Midwest states which, like California, deny citizens their right to bear arms. Thus criminals in black neighborhoods can usually be confident of not meeting armed resistance from the law-abiding citizenry. This safe working environment emboldens criminals to commit more crimes.

But that is only half the problem.In the absence of self-defense, the moderating influence on crime must come from the police. Unfortunately, the way police crack down on crime – by cracking down on all kinds of minor infractions, looking for excuses to search people, being suspicious of everyone who looks suspicious – is a great irritant to the law-abiding citizens.

The lethal combo of black victimization & offense rates frankly requires the detente of guns more than many white communities. In fact, many argue that gun control started with the goal of unilaterally disarming blacks. Alas with devastating effects within the Black community - T. Shakur, Esq -

And they say It's the white man I should fear But, it's my own kind Doin' all the killin' here

The Statistics Game

Lesson for the next time around, when playing with statistics & gun control, it's impossible to get only partially pregnant.

For example, The challenger discusses US crime trends w.r.t. guns -

If handguns reduce crime, there should be a reduction in crime as we armed ourselves throughout the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s. Instead, as handguns threaded there way into society, we can see rising crime. We see that as crime went from under 2,000 incidents in 1960 to 6,000 in 1993, handgun manufacturing turned into big business.

Leaving aside that the challenger is measuring tax receipts rather than total guns in circulation (perhaps tax rates went up?), his statistics STOP in the early 90s. What happened afterwards? Let's look at this some stats-

1970-1990

211M total guns in '91

Stagnant

1990-2004

All-time high

upto 250M by 2000?

Decreasing (22yr low)

More guns, less crime? Not necessarily, but there are many cases where gun ownership does NOT correlate to high violent crime. Something the CDC would agree with -

A report published by the Centers for Disease Control on Thursday found no conclusive evidence that gun control laws help to prevent violent crime, suicides and accidental injuries in the United States.

A smattering of comparisons across Nations, Stations, and Cities (My apologies - this was originally a nice, readable table but I'm having trouble getting blogspot to accept HTLM tables) -

NATIONS

Switzerland

Sweden

Finland

GUNS: Zero
CRIME: High

Israel

GUNS:High
CRIME: Low

Australia

GUNS:Zero
CRIME:High

New Zealand

GUNS: High
CRIME: High (equal to Australia)

Canada

GUNS: Medium (lower than US, higher than Europe)
CRIME: Low

How about a few states?

Vermont

GUNS: High
CRIME: Low (113/100K violent crime)

California

GUNS: Medium
CRIME: High (621/100K violent crime)

Texas

GUNS: High
CRIME: High (545/100K violent crime)

An exercise for the reader - It wasn't too hard to find states that had all combos of high/low gun ownership and high/low crime rate EXCEPT low crime rate AND low guns. Suggestions?

Done with states? How about cities?

Washington, DC (560K pop)

GUNS: Nearly banned
CRIME: VERY High (1,507/100K violent crime; 134% growth since ban)

San Francisco (700K Population)

GUNS: Low
CRIME: V. High (856/100K violent crime)

Austin, TX (600K Population)

GUNS: High
CRIME: High (500/100K violent crime)

What's crazy is that while Washington DC has a near handgun ban and the nation's worst crime rate, the surrounding communities (Reston, Arlington, etc.) have among the most lax gun laws in the country and very low crime rates.

Back to the Basics

Back to Self Defense ;-). The challenger asks -

My opponent keeps going back to the intrinsically violent nature of man. I pointed out to him in my first rebuttal that the issue is moot in my opinion because even if he could prove that we are intrinsically violent (he can‘t), it would make little sense to arm our citizens to the teeth with weapons that can cause death at the twitch of a finger.

I might not have signposted the argument well enough - lemme try to summarize the past couple thousand words of screed - Achance meeting b/t an individual and a potential aggressor can unfold thusly -Our Interaction Options

nonviolently - Great when this happens but we can't expect it 100% of the time given human violence stats from everyone from Hobbes to Steven Pinker. (earlier referred to this as the "false choice")
sometimes violently, both unarmed, then the stronger person or the one who can handle more pain wins. Pity the weak, women, and the elderly in such a world ("the PCP felon" "a world like the UK")
sometimes violently, only he is armed, then he wins ("outlaw guns, then only outlaws have guns"; "a world like Russia"; Washington DC)
sometimes violently, he may be armed BUT he's afraid I may be too, he's often deterred from both major and minor crime ("is it worth getting shot over a car?" ; the diff b/t "homicide rate" and "violent crime rate"; "domestic detente")
sometimes violently, we're both armed, he engages, I've got perhaps a 50/50 chance (the "bad rather than worse" situation)

Maybe I should've structured my opening statement this way? Next time. In any case, folks like the challenger who seek a gun ban think we're choosing between #1 and [#3, #5]. Thus the reason I spent so much time arguing #1 & human nature. Even if you believe that #2 is a desirable situation (I don't; "UK vs US violent crime stats"), you've got to chart a path to get there that avoids a long, deadly stay-over in #3 (given our >230M existing guns, global trade, etc.).

#4 is the realistic ideal cuz it's the Nash Equilibrium & because it avoids confrontation altogether - and yet this is the hardest case to quantify (the various DGU stats) - and hence why judging this topic purely based on dueling stats so flawed.

Less Than Lethal Weapons

I have no trouble with Tazers, sockguns, etc. But until they have all the portability (sock gun vs. pistol?), storage (can a tazer stay in a glove compartment for 5 yrs?), utility (if I miss on first shot with a tazer, do I have 8 more rounds in the clip?), etc. they simply aren't wholesale replacements for guns...

Perhaps the tech will catch up and address these issues, but until then, if he's got a gun, I don't want to be limited to a tazer.

Sovereign Individuals & Swimming Pools

The Challenger -

I find my opponents comparisons of the gun industry to the swimming pool industry as somewhat disingenuous.. The sole function of a handgun is to harm another person.

Just to be clear - I wasn't comparing swimming pools as a whole to guns. I used swimming pools to illustrate the otherwise abstract concept of Individual Sovereignty. Specifically - why don't we engage in society-wide, utilitarian cost/benefit assessment of pools? The benefits are thoroughly ethereal (fun &; frolic in the sun?) while the costs are dramatic and clear (1000 dead kids!). The reason we don't ban them is because, as a free republic, we use sovereignty rather than social utilitarianism for most decisions. We allow adults to make up their own minds regardless of whether "we" think we know what's better for them.

The Challenger's real issue is, instead "the sole function of a handgun is to harm another person". But if human nature is violent, and I can't rely on anyone else, why shouldn't I exercise sovereignty to move out of the pits of Option #2 / #3?

Battle Arms - Second Rebuttal - Challenger

2004-08-19T14:58:00.000-07:00

In my first rebuttal I purposely attempted to inject some humor and brevity into the discussion for the sake of making my submission more readable as I realize this is part of the scoring system. After reading the racist and intellectually dishonest screed that my opponent submitted as his first rebuttal, I have an extremely bad taste in my mouth and I doubt you will find any humor in this rebuttal. For this I do not apologize as I find this more a matter of principle and the judges can penalize accordingly.

-Racism

First off, I would like to address the racist aspects of IBL’s post. My opponent keeps going back to the intrinsically violent nature of man. I pointed out to him in my first rebuttal that the issue is moot in my opinion because even if he could prove that we are intrinsically violent (he can‘t), it would make little sense to arm our citizens to the teeth with weapons that can cause death at the twitch of a finger. This does not deter him and he points out that there is a society of people who are less violent and who experience far less crime then we do. This would seem a contradiction to his contention that people are intrinsically violent. His only choice at this point is to point out that they are unnatural. I suppose he would want us to believe that the Japanese are actually a race of space aliens and we should ignore them in terms of the human experience. What really sticks in my craw is this little bit of racist demagoguery: “a culture whose prize assets are conformity and submission”.

Japanese culture is extremely complex and to attempt to dismiss it with a wave of the hand and a racist claim of “conformity and submission” is both wrong and dishonest. The Japanese prize group solidarity. In America, we might call this teamwork. In a country that is an island with limited resources, it is easy to understand why this is so. In addition, respect and honor play a major role in Japanese society. I can’t view any of these traits as negative and there have been numerous times in my life where I have desired that both others and myself behave with more respect and honor.

With that in mind, let us compare the crime rates of the United States and Japan. Japan reported fewer than 2,300 crimes per 100,000 people in 2002. The United States reported 4,118.8 serious crimes per 100,000 people in 2002. In terms of homicide rates, Japan has 1.10 homicides per 100,000 people in 2000 compared to the United States that reported 5.64 in the same year on the same chart. It should be noted that these are overall homicide rates and not just gun homicide rates.

Finally, what I find extremely repugnant is the fact that my opponent somehow takes satisfaction in the fact that we are successfully exporting our culture of violence and fear to the teenagers of Japan. It’s only a matter of time.

One can argue that Japanese culture is at the core of their lower crime rates. I agree and I would also like to point out that their gun control laws are a reflection of that culture.

If this wasn’t bad enough, my opponent pulls the race card out yet again:

Homicide Offender Rate/100,000 by Race in US (2000):
3.4 - White
25.8 - Black
3.2 - Other
...if you remove homicides committed by blacks, you get a US
homicide rate of only 2.6/100,000, lower than Germany (3.27) and France
(3.91)

There are number problems with this racist point. The first being, if we “sliced” statistics for other countries like he’s doing for the United States, you could drop the homicide rate for any of the countries he has listed. Just exclude crime in large urban and poor areas of any country and you can create the same effect for that country. This points up to the first of a number of statistical ploys he uses which demonstrate the tremendous amount of intellectual dishonesty he used in his post. Secondly, there is some implied value system where black people aren’t worth as much as a white citizen. Who cares if we have a high homicide rate as long as black people are getting killed? I find this implication truly repugnant. Third, he claims that France has a homicide rate of 3.91 people per 100,000 residents and Germany has a homicide rate of 3.27 in 2000. He cites a blog for the source and when you follow the link that the blog sites as the source, you receive the following error message:

“The International Crime Statistics are only available to authorised police
users.”

Let’s look at his other source for homicide statistics. According to the Canadian Centre for Justice, the homicide rates for France and Germany in 2001 were 1.78 and 1.05 respectively and in 2002 they were 1.88 and 1.11. These numbers are significantly lower than the 3.4 homicides per 100,000 that my opponent cites for “white America”. This is one example of the distortions and errors that can be found in his rebuttal. This leads us to a rebuttal on some of his other statistics.

-Intellectual Dishonesty

The statistical points I made in my first two posts were aimed at presenting the reality of guns and crime in the United States. You didn’t have to “slice” the data to get at the conclusions. What I see in my opponent’s rebuttal is the constant bombardment of deception to spin statistics to point to his conclusion. I would describe this as intellectual dishonesty and I can’t really say what his motivations are. With that said, let me tackle some of his other deceptions he uses above and beyond the “white America” statistic.

Here, admittedly at the extreme, the world might look like Russia which has an
ostensible handgun ban but possesses a murder rate 5x the US's.

Unfortunately, what IBL fails to point out is that after the fall of the Soviet Union, anarchy exists throughout Russia and there is a general state of lawlessness. Russia may have gun laws but there is no one there to enforce them.

Cultural differences aside, let us use a culture that is most similar to our own as a source of comparison. That would be England. If you use the opponent’s own source, we find that homicide rates are significantly lower in England at 2.01 per 100,000 compared to 3.4 for white America.

My opponent claims the following:

Canada has a relatively high gun ownership rate (21M Guns / 30M people)
but a much lower crime rate.

According to the Justice Department Canada, the US has three times the number of guns per capita. Furthermore, if one looks at the make up of those guns, one finds that the number of handguns in Canada and Israel paled in comparison to the United States. If you go to page 5 of this document, one can see that in 1988, Canada and Israel had very few handguns compared to the United States. The U.S. tallied over 56 million handguns while Canada had 595,000 and Israel had 171,448.

Rather than comparing countries, we can look exclusively at our own crime data. If handguns reduce crime, there should be a reduction in crime as we armed ourselves throughout the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s. Instead, as handguns threaded there way into society, we can see rising crime. We see that as crime went from under 2,000 incidents in 1960 to 6,000 in 1993, handgun manufacturing turned into big business.

Wholesale Value of Firearms Manufactured in the United States as Estimated From
Federal Excise Tax (in millions) [16]
Year Handguns Other Guns
1955 9 ............... n/a
1965 28 ............ n/a
1975 125 .......... n/a
1985 251 .......... 444
1987 253 .......... 383
1989 382 .......... 444
1991 422 .......... 456
1993 538 .......... 547

9 million dollars worth of handguns were sold in 1955 as compared to 538 million in 1993. As the handgun industry grew, the crime rate rose.

Counting defensive gun uses (DGU) is hard - how do we tally "crimes that didn't
occur?" Nevertheless, estimates range from the almost laughably high 2.5M DGU's a year down to a more believable 100,000 DGU's a year.

Clearly, even the low estimate dwarfs the 11,000 firearm homicides cited
by the challenger.

Once again, my opponent’s distortions are obvious. He somehow assumes that each defensive use of a gun somehow prevented a homicide. This is clearly not the case.

An armed society is not an anarchy

I’ll provide a definition of anarchy here. This brazen bank robbery in North Hollywood should alarm anyone. These criminals wounded ten police officers and three civilians. The shooting went on for over 2 hours and the police could only subdue these criminals by raiding local gun shops for weaponry and ammunition. I ask you, what is wrong with this picture?

- The Gun Industry Out of Control

I find my opponents comparisons of the gun industry to the swimming pool industry as somewhat disingenuous. Much like the comparisons to the automobile, it doesn’t really hold any weight. The sole function of a handgun is to harm another person. Furthermore, if you start shooting a handgun, it is probably a good idea to shoot to kill. This would be true for both law-abiding citizens as well as criminals. Thus, the handgun when properly used has the sole purpose of killing people. Pools and automobiles have different purposes and I hope we can all agree on that.

Swimming pools can be dangerous. Needless to say, there is a push for barrier laws and it would be my hope that the swimming pool industry is not supporting an anti-barrier campaign. Surely barriers increase the cost of swimming pools but I would find it extremely unethical if the swimming pool industry mounted a campaign against this effort based on potential lost profits. Unfortunately, much like the auto industry opposed air bags, the gun industry has made a concerted effort to thwart legislation like the “Brady Bill” and any other efforts to make handguns safer. Whether it is “smart gun” technology, “gun fingerprint” technology or the banning of armor piercing bullets, the gun industry has opposed it. Laws that require the licensing and registration of handguns have been opposed even though they take handguns out of criminal’s hands as evidenced by this study. It’s a game of subterfuge and lies all maintained to protect profits.

Computerized toys have become commonplace yet the gun industry somehow finds it impossible to integrate a computer chip into a handgun so that only the owner can fire it. Amazing isn’t it? They oppose “gun fingerprinting” based on the fact that so many guns are stolen, it would be of little use. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if a gun can only be fired by the owner, stolen handguns have little value. At that point, gun fingerprinting becomes a valuable tool in the prosecution of crime.

If the gun industry continues to dump cheap handguns on society, I don’t see how we have any other choice but to ban them. They clearly have no concern for the safety of citizens so we are left with no alternative.

- Self-defense

People have the right to defend themselves and I will not argue that point. There are a number of mechanisms through which this can be achieved. They range from cans of mace and pepper spray to newer technologies like stun guns, air tasers and super sock guns. Of course, the handgun industry would prefer that these devices be banned and not developed in favor of their lethal forms of self-defense.

I believe that through the use of technology and the elimination of handguns, we can take the handgun out of the criminal’s hand and make this country safer. I feel that licensing and registration was an excellent start and we need to continue the effort to remove handguns from our society. I find the gun industry’s continued efforts to profit on the death of 11,000 people each year to be both unethical and immoral.

Sincerely,
Ralph Stefan

Battle Arms - First Rebuttal - Iron Blogger Libertarian

2004-08-18T21:00:00.000-07:00

The Challenger presents the classic arguments against an armed populace - murders, accidents, suicides, etc. are no doubt horrible costs. But the question isn't "are there costs?" - there certainly are - but rather "are these costs justified?"

My core argument is that individuals have the need & right to self defense to protect their life / liberty / property within society.

1) Human nature is central to the debate

Ralph argues that this is out of scope -

While I find these propositions quite interesting, I feel they are better suited for a theological or philosophical discussion as opposed to a political discussion on gun laws. I certainly have my opinions regarding the inherent nature of man but this certainly isn’t the time or place to discuss them.

Unfortunately, this issue goes to the heart of whether there's violence modulo arms. Madison famously observed -

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?

Questions of what can, can't and must be regulated begin with a strong theory of what men would do heeding purely their own interests and impulses. Violence is classically the first issue that introduces governance - it's literally what makes life nasty, brutish, and short.

Human nature is central because it forces us ask - however pithy the phrase - whether guns or people create violence. The answer has profound policy implications.

The challenger does implictly possess such a theory - that human violence can be directly reduced by targetting arms. In essence, that arms are no good other than to incite or exacerbate violence.

2) Human nature causes violence, not guns

Far from being the scientific quackery the challenger contends, there are strong, well-accepted results which indicate, alas, that Violence is a fact of life - regardless of the presence of arms.

culture and socialization play important roles in encouraging violence... [but] ignoring the powerful biological and evolutionary forces at work is "the single most useless--and dangerous--approach one could take in trying to explain human violence."

We're stuck with this stuff folks. In certain powerful social conditions, you can escape it temporarily - for ex., Japan -

Of course, many societies have far lower [crime & violence] numbers. Japan is a fine example. I'm sure if the United States had 2000 years of a culture whose prize assets are conformity and submission then our numbers would be a lot lower. Alas, we are not that society. Thank God, we are not that society.

Until we create these conditions here, or genetic engineering directly eliminates this violence, we're left with the unpleasant tension of domestic detente. Those outliers who escape the socialized suppression of violence are, in the end, held in line by the threat of reciprocal violence from either cops prosecuting on behalf of victims or their fellow citizens refusing to become victims in the first place.

We likely agree that, for better and for worse, American society allows and even encourages all sorts of outliers. The Japanese will have to take a more aggressive stance towards crime as their youth begin to encourage more outliers.

3) Given human nature, the challenger presents false choices

The challenger's rhetoric asks judges to choose between -

A non-violent society created by removing guns
A violent society with guns

Let's be clear, I WANT to live in the first world. His arguments emotionally resonate and there's a certain satisfaction from blaming gun vendors rather than something as squishy as human nature -

It is a culture of fear that must be created in order to sell more guns. The more that people fear, the more guns they can sell.

In a society that admonishes "be all that you can be", "do what feels right", and encourages "self-esteem" over "repression," there's a fundamental dissonance from arguing "fear humans (sometimes)."

Unfortunately, we're faced with a "bad vs. worse" situation where the options actually are -

A violent society which tries to remove guns
A violent society with guns

Depending on government's effectiveness, the first option at best removes the equalizing aspect of guns in phyiscal confrontation. The strong can once again physically abuse the weak (rape, assault, robbery, etc. and eventually murder by other means - knives, bats, wet noodles, etc.) until the cops show up. The overall violent crime rate in the UK - cited below - gives us some idea of what this world might look like. One small vignette from across the pond-

"My wife woke up screaming and then I woke up. The man then ran downstairs and went out through the kitchen door." Mr Caeiro, who is 5ft 6ins, rang 999 to report the break-in and was told by police that because the intruder was no-longer believed to be in the house they would be there in 15 to 30 minutes...I opened the back door ... then this man attacked me with a metal bar. "He hit me on the shoulder and I was knocked back into the kitchen. The door opened and the man tried to come inside.

At worst, given the over 200M guns in circulation, and to use a pithy phrase, only the outlaws will have guns. Here, admittedly at the extreme, the world might look like Russia which has an ostensible handgun ban but possesses a murder rate 5x the US's. The armed criminal amidst unarmed, law-abiding individuals is literally a kid in a candy store.

4) An armed society is not an anarchy

The challenger argues an armed citizenry destroys the rule of law -

By advocating and encouraging citizens to own handguns and assault weapons, we are implicitly encouraging them to be judge, jury and executioner. What place does this have in a civil society? They have a term for this. It is called anarchy...Guns designed to kill people have no place in civil society.

Based on the challenger's sources, there are already some 233M guns within the US. 40% of US households possess. And yet, we're far from being an anarchy and true vigilanteism is an absurdly rare phenomena. The reason? It's well understood that the only legitimate gun use against a person is in self-defense - a basic "gun law" that a 5 yr old can derive. Shooting someone outside of self-defense carries rather stiff penalties - anecdotally, gun owners are far more likely to "lock 'em up & throw away the key" for gun crimes than non-gun-owners.

5) Culture determines crime rate, not guns

I wanted to avoid the statistics game but, mea culpa, I invited it by citing my own. Sigh. Few things drag down a debate like dueling & constantly reinterpreted statistics. Nevertheless, let me take a few moments to hack up the challengers attempts to connect the gun rate directly to the crime rate -

British Crime Rates - The challenger cites radically lower gun crime rates in Britain vs. the US. However, when merely measuring gun crime, there's a certain tautology that a society with theoretically zero guns will have fewer gun crimes. Although there's a point to be made that gun crimes still exist in the UK, the real story, however, is overall violent crime rates -
Twenty-six percent of English citizens -- roughly one-quarter of the population -- have been victimized by violent crime. Australia led the list with more than 30 percent of its population victimized.

The United States didn't even make the "top 10" list of industrialized nations whose citizens were victimized by crime.

The percentage of the population that suffered "contact crime" in England and Wales was 3.6 percent, compared with 1.9 percent in the United States and 0.4 percent in Japan.
The British example instead demonstrates that the risk of disproportionate response is useful for reducing even non-mortal crimes like rape, assault & robbery.
High Gun Rate EU Nations -- These nations have crime rates similar to their low gun rate neighbors -
The Swiss, New Zealanders and Finns all own guns as frequently as Americans, yet in 1995 Switzerland had a murder rate 40% lower than Germany's, and New Zealand had one lower than Australia's. Finland and Sweden have very different gun ownership rates, but very similar murder rates. Israel, with a higher gun ownership rate than the U.S., has a murder rate 40% below Canada's.
Canada has a relatively high gun ownership rate (21M Guns / 30M people) but a much lower crime rate.
Registration vs. Fewer Guns -- The Time Magazine article the challenger cites as proof that "gun control" discusses registration rather than limits to the number of guns in circulation. Citing registration is ambiguous because it *does* implicitly acknowledge that there are useful, legitimate reasons for an armed citizenry - certainly not the big picture argument the challenger sought.
Intra-US differences -- even within the US, socio-economic conditions within different communities create vast differences in violence & gun ownership. Slicing geographically, you could look at some northern states -
States such as Vermont, New Hampshire, North Dakota and Montana, where gun ownership is at least twice what it is in Canada, have murder rates as low as one-half that in the provinces which are their immediate neighbours.
Slicing ethnically (and rather controversially...) -
Homicide Offender Rate/100,000 by Race in US (2000):
3.4 - White
25.8 - Black
3.2 - Other
...if you remove homicides committed by blacks, you get a US homicide rate of only 2.6/100,000, lower than Germany (3.27) and France (3.91)
And yet, Blacks own fewer guns than whites -
Despite being victimized by crime at several times the rate of whites, only 30 percent of black adults own guns, compared to 43 percent of whites.

6) Defensive gun use is a real phenomena

My case is fundamentally based on guns being used defensively. Since we've opened the stats Pandora's Box, it's probably time to provide one here.

Counting defensive gun uses (DGU) is hard - how do we tally "crimes that didn't occur?" Nevertheless, estimates range from the almost laughably high 2.5M DGU's a year down to a more believable 100,000 DGU's a year.

Clearly, even the low estimate dwarfs the 11,000 firearm homicides cited by the challenger.

7) Social utilitarianism is not the final decision rule

The dueling statistics debate above can quickly fall into the trap of utilitarian decision making sidestepping the important factor of Individual Sovereignty.

Let me explain by example - if there are "too many" swimming pool accidents (1000 children killed annually!), do we ban swimming pools? Statistically, the 8M pools in the US have the same mortality rate (1K/8M = 0.013%) as firearms (30K/230M = 0.013%). To make the comparison more true, leave out homicides / suicides which likely aren't factors in pool deaths & focus just on gun accidents (~800/yr) --> you're literally safer from accidents with a gun in the house than a pool in the backyard!

Clearly, noone advocates a ban on swimming pools by somehow computing the "good" from pool ownership and weighing it against the bad. We instead trust individual adults to manage these risks and make their own personal cost/benefit analysis about pools - despite 1000 of them every year making a poor choice with heart-wrenching results. Why do we allow this? Because they are adults. Sovereign adults.

Similarly, from the standpoint of a single sovereign individual, given -

the intractable violence in human nature
killing or the threat thereof sometimes providing the only defense & having a powerful effect even on non-mortal crimes
the state being neither physically capable NOR legally required to serve you in the moment of need
tools (arms / guns) which can be effectively employed by any individual

Why shouldn't I have the choice of providing my own, personal, last line of defense regardless of how others may have screwed up theirs?

Battle Arms - First Rebuttal - Challenger

2004-08-17T17:16:00.000-07:00

I must say that my opponent’s opening statement wasn’t quite what I expected. It certainly doesn’t contain all the usual talking points that I am used to encountering when I discuss this issue. I would have been the last person to think I’d be debating the “inherently violent nature of man” in a discussion on gun control. Seeing Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs was a real eye popper. He would have made my life easier had he gone with the standard pro-gun spiel. Although his post required added scrutiny on my part, in the final analysis, his creative arguments are as flawed as those found in the standard pro-gun spiel. For this I am relieved. With that in mind, let us proceed to his points.

1. Violence is an intrinsic part of human nature

That’s certainly a mouthful. We might as well discuss the inherent goodness of man. While I find these propositions quite interesting, I feel they are better suited for a theological or philosophical discussion as opposed to a political discussion on gun laws. I certainly have my opinions regarding the inherent nature of man but this certainly isn’t the time or place to discuss them. Nonetheless, anyone who claims to have scientifically proven the intrinsic violent nature of man or the inherent goodness of man is probably practicing junk science.

If I accept Pinker’s assertion that all people are seething volcanoes underneath their cool exteriors, it makes little sense to work towards arming all these people with inventions that allow them to inflict serious physical harm on themselves or other people with the twitch of a finger. Even if I believe that all men are inherently good, it still makes little sense to arm our citizens to the teeth. They are both non-sequiturs.

2. In some cases, violence can only be countered with reciprocal violence

Perhaps even more than unheeded, appeals to intellect & reason may go
unheard altogether as when dealing with the proverbial Moro
tribesman or PCP-crazed felon -

You know, when I start seeing Moro tribesmen walking down the street or a PCP-crazed felon on the loose, I’ll be the first guy to buy a gun with the proper stopping power. I mean really. All those gangs of marauding people looking to fulfill their physiological needs are a real menace to society. This whole line of argument is both absurd and points the heart of the pro-gun methodology. It is a culture of fear that must be created in order to sell more guns. The more that people fear, the more guns they can sell. How does one get past the safety needs in Maslow’s hierarchy when they live in perpetual fear? As the Kinks say, paranoia the destroyer.

I’m not that concerned about Moro tribesmen, PCP-crazed felons or people seeking to fulfill physiological needs. Teenage boys armed to the teeth concern me. It really is time to disarm.

This risk of reciprocal violence provides the basis of our entire criminal
justice system via the theory of deterrence.

This is why our society goes to great lengths to fund and support a justice system and at the same time makes great efforts to eschew vigilante justice. Furthermore, when I followed your link for deterrence, I missed the words “reciprocal violence”.

3. Even disproportionate reciprocal violence has social value

I’d imagine that the ayatollahs and mullahs would agree with you. We really need to start chopping off the hands of kids who shoplift. That’ll send out a message. I didn’t even know that stealing a car was a violent crime but then, that’s how far gone this argument is to begin with. A couple of weeks ago, I caught some kids toilet papering my trees. You reckon I should of pulled out my mythical Glock and fired a few shots in the air or should I have plugged them in the back as they ran away when I turned the porch light on? This “two eyes for an eye lash and your upper molars for an incisor” is based on what religion or ideology? I’m really curious. There are plenty of ways we could reduce crime significantly that involve inhumane and extreme methods. My question to you is: would you want to live in that society?

An authority no less than John Lott offers us statistics that armed citizens reduce crime? I honestly think those statistics aren’t worth the disk space they reside on. The man is a barking moonbat. You can find some quotes of his over here. Allow me to cherry pick.

In the wake of the March 1998 schoolyard ambush of children by children in
Jonesboro, Arkansas, Lott voiced his strong support for arming teachers and
other school personnel against gun-toting juveniles. Lott argues, "Allowing
teachers and other law-abiding adults to carry concealed handguns in schools
would not only make it easier to stop shootings in progress, it could also help
deter shootings from ever occurring."---"The Real Lesson of the School
Shootings," The Wall Street Journal, March 27, 1998.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! AAAAH! SOCK PUPPETS! ~best Homer Simpson voice~

Lott has given himself seventeen five-star reviews using various techniques to
conceal that he was the author. He's also written concealed negative reviews of
books whose authors he didn't like. (For example, after Michelle Malkin's column
denouncing him (see above), he gave her book a one-star review.) He has posed as
another person and posted defenses of himself on discussion groups, going so far
as to say things like "[Lott] was the best professor I ever had."
When confronted by the Washington Post, Lott responded "I probably shouldn't have done it -- I know I shouldn't have done it -- but it's hard to think of any big
advantage I got except to be able to comment fictitiously," said Lott.
But the very next day Lott started up again under a different sock puppet. He later
went so far as to have one puppet disagree with things he posted as another
puppet!

THAT’S NOT ALL FOLKS! It appears that some of his data has coding errors. There also appears to be missing survey data. The list is endless with this guy. I have to stop now because I am starting to sound like an infomercial. Needless to say, anything Lott says and any statistic he provides needs to be taken with a truck load of salt.

Not to worry though. There are reliable studies that we can use to properly ascertain the effectiveness of gun control. A Time magazine article describes a study from John Hopkins University that shows that gun control decreases gun crime. Who woulda thunk it?

It sounds like a no-brainer, but like any new information in the battle over gun
control, it’s bound to ruffle a few feathers: Registration and licensing
requirements deter criminals from buying guns. That latest bit of data in the
gun control debate, courtesy of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at the
Johns Hopkins University, indicates that stricter guidelines for gun purchases
mean fewer firearms end up in the hands of criminals. States with the lowest
incidence of criminal gun activity are those with both licensing and
registration guidelines. And the best results of all, according to the Hopkins
study, come in states surrounded by other states with similarly tough gun laws,
so that criminals can’t simply slip over state lines to replenish their
supplies.

4. Individuals can be / are trusted to use this violence appropriately

By advocating and encouraging citizens to own handguns and assault weapons, we are implicitly encouraging them to be judge, jury and executioner. What place does this have in a civil society? They have a term for this. It is called anarchy. This is not an issue of trust but it is an issue of law, order, justice and civil society. I trust you to own and properly maintain a double-barreled shotgun. Guns designed to kill people have no place in civil society. I might as well complain about my lack of rights to carry around a bazooka in Times Square.

5. Government can NOT be trusted with a monopoly on necessary violence

Now, there are a hundred macro-political reasons why this may be the case
(historically, the Nazi's, Stalinists, Saddam's, etc. all started in one way or
another with a true monopoly on instruments of violence).

This is laughable. The pro-gun guy will always talk about his need for self-defense. Suddenly, when you hit point five, he’s not talking about self-defense. He’s now talking about how he can’t overthrow the government without his Saturday Night Special. I don’t know what to say to you guys other than you should make do with your long guns and pitchforks when you storm the gates of the White House. If you bring enough torches, you might be able to also round up Edward Scissorhands and Frankenstein when you corner George W. Bush on the White House roof.

What gun control laws did the brown shirts implement during their beer hall days? What gun control laws were in place when Saddam held power? Last I looked, instead of a chicken in every pot, Iraq had an AK-47 in every hand.
he jumped up next to me, jabbed some blunt metal object into my ribs /
armpit and said "Give me your money!"...it thrust home the message that YOU are your own last line of defense.

I had previously read your account of that robbery attempt. I was extremely glad to hear that you escaped serious injury.

No matter how well intentioned the gun owner, guns are stolen. From 1987 to 1992, there were an average of 341,000 firearm thefts per year. Over half of the firearms stolen were handguns. You would think that with all the security afforded by these firearms, owners could hold onto them at a higher rate. Unfortunately, that is not the case. When people own guns, criminals steal them. When criminals steal them, gun crime occurs.

Surely my opponent doesn’t view modern day England and Japan as fascist states. If one compares the statistics for homicides and suicides between these countries and ours, the numbers are startling. Both England and Japan prohibit handguns. Gun homicide rates for Japan are .03 per 100,000 people. In England it is .007 per 100,000 people. This compares with the United States that registers 62.4 deaths per 100,000 people. Surely these numbers are cause for serious pause.

This country needs to belly up to this problem. This is truly a great American tragedy.

Respectfully submitted,
Ralph Stefan

Battle Arms - Iron Blogger Libertarian - Opening Arguments

2004-08-16T20:12:00.000-07:00

The ultimate goal of arms is for the individual to defend himself, his rights, and his property against other individuals through the credible threat of mortal force. This is a very complex topic so I'll expend some effort here to crisply articulate a small number of core points and avoid the statistical barrage that characterizes so many gun debates.

1. Violence is an intrinsic part of human nature

Perhaps the first and most important issue in this debate is on the origins of violence. No less a body than the UN has felt the need to take a stance on this crucial question -

The Seville Statement on Violence was drafted by an international committee of 20 scholars at the 6 th International Colloquium on Brain and Aggression held at the University of Seville, Spain, in May 1986, with support from the Spanish Commission for UNESCO. The Statement's purpose is to dispel the widespread belief that human beings are inevitably disposed to war as a result of innate, biologically determined aggressive traits.

One thing I'll credit the UN with - once you start with this premise, much of their philosophy becomes rather internally consistent. The problem, alas, is that this well-intentioned Statement is nevertheless fundamentally inconsistent with actual scientific research. I'll cite perhaps the preeminent brain researcher of our time - Steven Pinker-

The noble savage [myth] has been refuted by studies of hunter-gatherers and societies more generally that show how violence and warfare are a human universal...if you do the numbers and count the bodies, two deaths in a band of 50 people are much bigger than the September 11th casualties in a society our size.
Careful studies show that hunter-gatherers are dead serious about war. They make weapons as destructive as their ingenuity permits. And if they can get away with it, they massacre every man, woman, and child. In our own society, which is far more peaceful than the native groups, if you ask people whether they have ever fantasized about killing someone, anywhere from 70 percent to 90 percent of the men and about 40 percent to 60 percent of women say that they have.
...There are also parts of the brain that seem associated with violence and outbursts. We know this partly because of accidents or operations through which certain portions of some people's brains were removed. Some sort of inhibitory brake was removed, and the individuals became more prone to violence.

And it's precisely that restraint - our ability to NOT act on these universal impulses which folks like Pinker cite as perhaps the crowning achievement of Civilized society. Our institutions, culture, and society writ large provide this brake. (In some macabrely humorous data, researchers have recently determined that humans are most violent immediately prior to this socialization - at the tender age of 2 yrs old. Luckily for us, their physical abilities aren't quite up to par with their intentions. ;-)

The prognosis - until human beings themselves can be reengineered, the propensity for mortal violence will continue to be a Tragic fact of life. Our times may be modern but our base nature dates back to the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation - a thoroughly violent time & place. No matter how successful our particular social tools have become, the continued existance of crime & war provides prima facie proof that they are far from perfect or universal throughout the world.

2. In some cases, violence can only be countered with reciprocal violence

Because the violence we eventually face targets the base of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - it can only be dealt with at a similar level - reciprocal mortal violence. Appeals towards the greater good from more cooperative behavior can go unheeded -

Game theory does show that cooperation is better than non-cooperation. However, this theory is based on the assumption that all parties will cooperate. Enter into the formula a non-cooperating entity and the players will lose something. It matters little if the entity is an evil non cooperating player or a predatory animal.

Perhaps even more than unheeded, appeals to intellect & reason may go unheard altogether as when dealing with the proverbial Moro tribesman or PCP-crazed felon -

...physiological factors may actually play a relatively minor role in achieving rapid incapacitation. Barring central nervous system hits, there is no physiological reason for an individual to be incapacitated by even a fatal wound, until blood loss is sufficient to drop blood pressure and/or the brain is deprived of oxygen.
...Strong will, survival instinct, or sheer emotion such as rage or hate can keep a grievously injured individual fighting, as is common on the battlefield and in the street. The effects of chemicals can be powerful stimuli preventing incapacitation. Adrenaline alone can be sufficient to keep a mortally wounded adversary functioning. Stimulants, anesthetics, pain killers, or tranquilizers can all prevent incapacitation by suppressing pain, awareness of the injury, or eliminating any concerns over the injury. Drugs such as cocaine, PCP, and heroin are disassociative in nature.

This risk of reciprocal violence provides the basis of our entire criminal justice system via the theory of deterrence.

3. Even disproportionate reciprocal violence has social value

There is tremendous social benefit from the aggressor worrying that his target may behave in a disproportionate manner. This point transforms the question from the defender asking "does a kid trying to steal a car deserve to get shot?", into the kid asking himself "is it worth risking getting shot to steal this car?" The troubling "mental transaction cost" burden of these heavy and unpleasant questions should be borne as much as possible by the transgressor rather than the victim. This follows the economically optimizing maxim that cost should be borne as close as possible to the activity in question.

Empirically, John Lott provides some of the concrete data about the power of deterrence in some of these circumstances -

For each additional year that a concealed handgun law is in effect the murder rate declines by 3 percent, rape by 2 percent, and robberies by over 2 percent.

The threat of mortal reciprocal violence, even in these (arguably) non-mortal crimes (rape & robbery) had a beneficial deterrent effect and reduced overall crime rate. Even though Captain Kirk's phasers had "kill" & "stun" settings, it was to his & his crews' benefit that he never told an tentacled enemy what it was set on before brandishing the weapon.

The first 3 points lay out the case for the inevitability of mortal violence& its use as a social tool - the next 2 points argue why they must be broadly vested.

4. Individuals can be / are trusted to use this violence appropriately

American society - and ultimately the entire classical liberal experiment - begins with the assumption that these types of decisions and this type of power ultimately reside within the individual and are very carefully pruned by the government. There are a million treatises by authors famous and infamous on this point but I'll point instead at a favorite essay by the blogosphere Right Wing poet laureate, Bill Whittle -

We trust the people. We fought wars and lost untold husbands and brothers and sons because of this single most basic belief: Trust the people. Trust them with freedom. Trust them to spend their own money. Trust them to do the right thing. Trust them to defend themselves. To the degree that government can help, great - but TRUST THE PEOPLE.
...Here is my dry-eyed, cold-hearted, sad conclusion: I believe that the freedom, convenience and economic viability provided by the automobile is worth the 40,000 lives we lose to automotive deaths each year --- a number made more horrible by the fact that perhaps 40% are related to drunk driving and therefore preventable.

By the same calculation, I accept that the freedoms entrusted to the people of the United States is worth the 11,000 lives we lose to gun violence each year.

When push comes to shove, and for the NET rather than ABSOLUTE better, we trust individuals with the power to apply mortal, reciprocal violence. We TRUST them with decisions about their own self defense in the face of such threats. We have a web of rules (which roughly boil down to "don't initiate violence") surrounding this power and luckily, human beings are able to rise to the occasion. For example, John Lott notes one particular case rather relevant to point #3 -

During state legislative hearings on concealed-handgun laws, possibly the most commonly raised concern involved fears that armed citizens would attack each other in the heat of the moment following car accidents. The evidence shows that such fears are unfounded. Despite millions of people licensed to carry concealed handguns and many states having these laws for decades, there has only been one case where a person with a permit used a gun after a traffic accident and even in that one case it was in self-defense.

5. Government can NOT be trusted with a monopoly on necessary violence

Now, there are a hundred macro-political reasons why this may be the case (historically, the Nazi's, Stalinists, Saddam's, etc. all started in one way or another with a true monopoly on instruments of violence). BUT, I'm going to open my case with a micro-social case near and dear to me - the government simply can't apply force in time -

he jumped up next to me, jabbed some blunt metal object into my ribs / armpit and said "Give me your money!"...it thrust home the message that YOU are your own last line of defense. While I was impressed with what was probably a 2-3 minute response time from SFPD, the essential plotline for the entire encounter was nevertheless determined in less than 10 seconds.

A government which could react within the 10 seconds to be relevant here would probably require every 5th man on the street be on its payroll as a Law Enforcement Officer - not a world I'd want to live in.

Battle Arms - Opening Argument - Challenger

2004-08-16T20:01:00.000-07:00

As I look down into my lap and eye the glistening 7.32 inch barrel of my Glock .357 Magnum, I can only ponder where to begin. I guess the first thing to say is that I am honored by the invitation to debate in this fine forum and I thank the Chairman for the opportunity. This is an extremely important issue for our society and I hope I can do it justice.

The primary purpose of handguns and assault weapons is to kill people. I find it alarming that such inventions have threaded their way into our society in such a thorough and deadly manner. As the deaths continue, I feel it is important to work towards laws which restrict and ban the possession these weapons. We are a society that is literally drowning in guns. Towards these ends, I would first like to do a brief history of handguns. I would then like to present to you how we as citizens of this fine republic have been programmed to view handguns in a positive way. I then hope to show you how far gone we are with this love affair of handguns. Finally, I hope to examine the real costs of such a love affair in terms of lost lives as well as economic damage.

The primary purpose of a handgun is to kill other people. Here’s the earliest gun I could find. It was termed a hand gonne and its primary purpose was to shoot a charging knight. You can go through the evolution of handguns from the hand gonne to percussion cap and it is all about killing people. As about.com notes, the percussion cap had “a devastating effect in the U.S. Civil War”. With the invention of the revolver, a new and improved killing machine was developed. Sam Colt’s invention allowed firing without reloading and as the Colt website proclaims:

"Abe Lincoln may have freed all men, but Sam Colt made them equal."

This is indeed the case if one desires the streets of our country to be a battlefield. In fact, I think we did an excellent job of fulfilling Sam Colt’s vision. It should be duly noted that Colt struggled until he found his niche market, the U.S. Ordnance Department.

Who doesn’t like a good gunfight? We glorified the old west in books, magazines and movies. Those were real individualists and there is nothing better than a loner with a handgun. The handgun is the ultimate symbol of both personal security and autonomy. In an insecure and fearful country, who could ask for more than a handgun? Hollywood knew it had a winner on its hands with handguns. With westerns losing their appeal, Hollywood turned its attention to more modern handgun themed movies. No movie in the history of Hollywood did more for the handgun than the movie Dirty Harry. This led to vigilante handgun films like Death Wish. Are you afraid and fearful? Buy a gun and do a little vigilante justice. The handgun made its way into the American psyche big time in the early 1970’s and there was no turning back. As we nestled up to guns, gun crime went up significantly. From the mid-80’s to the mid-90’s, gun crimes went from 329,232 in 1984 to 581,697 in 1993.

What was the reality in the old west? Gun fighting wasn't really all that common:

Gun fighting peaked in the 1870s: Six fights in TX and KS in 1870, 22 in 1871,
13 in 1872, 27 in 1873, 14 in 1874, 13 in 1875, 22 in 1876, 21 in 1877, 36 in
1878, 14 in 1879. In the 1880s: 25 in 1880, 27 in 1881, 15 in 1882, 9 in 1883,
17 in 1884, 7 each in 1885-6, 20 in 1887, 10 in 1888, and nine in 1889. 1895-96
were bad years, 19 fights in each, but then it began to taper off.

These numbers pale when compared with the 581,697 gun crimes we had in 1993. For all you NRA folks out there, put your gun away before visiting this link. Those aren’t real shots being fired. There wasn’t a whole lot of face-to-face gun shooting. This would be for good reasons. It doesn’t take a whole lot of brains to figure out what the odds were in a face-to-face shooting. Instead, handguns played a major role in bushwhackings, ambushes and assorted shootings where the victim had no chance of defense. This properly mirrors what we experience today. If only they had cars in the old west? I guess we are all victims of the in-house drive-by. There is real irony in the fact that Clint Eastwood, a man who made his fortune making westerns and modern day handgun movies would come full circle and act and direct in a movie like the Unforgiven. I think it properly puts into perspective what killing people is all about.

When something smells rotten, I always follow the money trail. Lo and behold, the handgun business is big business. In 1995, there were over 233 million firearms in the United States. The pile of handguns keeps getting higher as cheap handguns are widely available today. In 2002, Californians alone purchased 169,469 handguns. Dumping cheap handguns on America is big business. Hundreds of thousands of cheap handguns are produced and sold each year and the profits are huge. Their right to dump these handguns on America is upheld by a well-funded lobby that spent 3.7 million dollars in the 2000 election cycle to back candidates who support their cause. Their opponents spent $394,000 for the same election period. It is no small wonder that gun control has gone off the radar while conceal and carry permits are on the rise.

Guns are really cool. In my humble opinion, they rate right up there with M-80's. I experienced no small amount of joy blowing up model cars and assorted stuff as a kid. Who can resist throwing an M-80 into a sewer and see it make a huge sewage splash and hear it reverberate throughout the neighborhood? Guns, like M-80’s make a loud noise and you can shoot stuff up. Unfortunately, when you peel away the boyish destruction, you are left with a path of devastation. In 2001, there were 29,573 firearm related deaths with 11,348 of those deaths the result of homicide. Homicide is the number one cause of death for young black males age 15 to 24. In 1996, roughly 96,000 people received gunshot wounds with roughly a third of them being fatal. There were 357,822 gun crimes in 2002. This is clearly an epidemic. The social, economic and human costs are massive.

There is no small list of specific incidents involving guns and assault weapons that have taken a grave toll on our citizenry. Attacks in schools, trains, or any other place people work or gather are well documented.

Statistics from the ATF show that half of all guns used in crimes are legally purchased. One can only wonder how this industry continues to thrive given their path of mayhem and destruction. Careful examination of the powerful gun lobby reveals the reality. The millions of dollars the gun lobby uses to pay off our representatives and legislators make them literally untouchable. The government is falling over itself to provide immunity to gun manufacturers. If only the cigarette industry had greased more palms? The gun lobby is brutal. They oppose all measures to use technology to make guns safer. They oppose technology to “fingerprint” weapons. They oppose efforts to ban armor piercing ammunition. One can only wonder what their justification$ are.

Given the massive amount of violence and death, we have made progress. James Brady, White House press secretary for Ronald Reagan was severely injured and crippled in an assassination attempt on then President Ronald Reagan. His wife Sarah mounted a tremendous campaign to bring gun control to the forefront of political debate. In a stunning victory, the "Brady Bill" was enacted in 1994. The bill required outlandish requirements like gun licensing and background checks. It originally provided for a five-day background check but that has since become obsolete thanks to a computerized FBI system. As you view my statistics above, please note the precipitous drop in gun crime that coincides with enactment of this bill. We need to continue this effort and work towards a general ban of weapons that have no primary use other than to kill people. That said, I have no problem issuing conceal and carry permits to people who actually have a real need to carry a weapon. This would include situations where people must carry large amounts of money in high crime areas. The process to obtain such permits must be vigorous and thorough.

I fully understand the cries to carry weapons. My question is, where do we draw the line? If someone tells me about his need to own assault weapons, I am certain that there will be another person who claims his need to carry hand grenades. From this, we have someone who desires to possess a rocket propelled grenade launcher. I personally draw the line at the utility of the weapon. Weapons with the primary purpose of killing people should be banned. They have no place in civil society. That said there is much cognitive dissonance in regards to this point of view. When such matters arise, I generally reach into my personal experiences to properly evaluate the situation. In my case, it doesn’t leave any doubt in my mind.

- My grandfather was shot in the head and killed with a handgun that was concealed when the murderers entered his store.
- My brother was shot in the chest by a group of 16-year-old kids who had a handgun. His mistake was to walk down the street at night. The young robbers shot him after they determined that he had no money on his person. They took his jacket off him before they shot him. The bullet missed his heart by less than an inch and he walks around with a piece of lead in his chest today.
- I knew a guy who made the mistake of getting out of his car in a road rage incident. He was shot dead on the spot with a handgun.
- I knew a guy who was having mental problems and he got his hands on $20 .22 caliber pistol and shot himself in the heart.

All of the people who pulled the triggers in the above scenarios used less physical effort than would be required to open a jar of pickles.

I don’t want to live in a war zone. I don’t want my kids to live in a war zone. I’ll be happy to carry a gun when the government deems it necessary that I fight in a war. Short of that, I think civil society deserves better than what the laws are offering today. For people who desire to carry guns in public, I recommend they go to Iraq where the gun laws are quite liberal.

Best regards,
Ralph Stefan

Battle Affirmative Action - Verdict

2004-08-15T22:38:00.000-07:00

Necessity forces me to post the Verdict without first posting Judges' Comments. Due to extreme emergencies in my life, today, and the late scores (understandable) from a few Judges, I just don't have the time to go through all the comments and reformat them for publication here, right now. If the Judges wish to post them on their sites, great. If they choose to email them to all interested parties, wonderful. I can't do them right now.

This Battle was very impressive on both sides - my Iron Blogger had a very strong debut against a Challenger who is, arguably, our toughest, yet (sorry, Dan).

And now, the Verdict.

A hard-fought Battle to the very end, both Combatants making powerful cases for their respective side. Challenger Bryan S bringing the heat, but new Iron Blogger Green shows she's more than capable of filling her position.

Who takes it? Whose spleen vents supreme?

Challenger Bryan S of Arguing With Signposts

It's The Challenger! Let's take a look at the scores.

Judge Pineapple Girl scores it 65-56 for the Iron Blogger
Judge Patton scores it 62-56 for the Iron Blogger
Judge Jheka scores it 75-62 for The Challenger
And Judge CDT Michael scores it 82-69 for The Challenger

A split decision on part lines 2 Left to 2 Right, The Challenger sqeaks it out on an 11 point difference. Down to the wire, another tight Battle! Congratulations to our second Challenger to get the win against an Iron Blogger!

Twelfth Battle

2004-08-15T21:48:00.000-07:00

This week our Challenger is one of our own - an Iron Blog Judge, commentor and now Challenger, Ralph Stefan is one of those rare breed of true Centrists. He shares ideology with both parties and just as often, neither party, his positions ranging from Left to Right. I am pleased to have him as our Challenger this week, and look forward to the Battle.

Iron Blogger Libertarian, Vinod Valloppillil, you have been challenged to the ideological battlefield. May you once again stand strong and uphold the honor of the Iron Bloggers.

If memory serves me right, the Libertarian party believes in a return to the core basics of the Constitution - and that would include the Second Ammendment in its purest form. Too many arguments have been fought over gun control, assault weapons and the like. What I want to get to is the true, beating, bleeding heart of the matter. The Topic for the Battle is this:

The Purpose Of Arms

Why do we have them, and what purpose do guns serve in our society in modern times? Should they only be used for hunting? For self-defense? Is gun collecting a legitimate reason to allow gun ownership? At their core, are guns nothing more than a tool for killing, and if so, do we need them? Let us see what our Combatants have to say.

Allez debate!

(NOTE: Scores are not all in for Battle Affirmative Action. The Judges' Comments and Verdict will be posted as soon as possible.)

Battle Affirmative Action - Closing Arguments - Iron Blogger Green

2004-08-14T22:03:00.000-07:00

I want to begin my closing arguments by thanking Bryan for his time and effort, the Chairman for providing the forum, and the readers for lending their thoughts and/or attention to this issue.

This morning, while half of my mind was obsessing over what to write for my closing argument, my 7-year-old son provided me with a perfect opener. "Mom," he said to me "I have come up with an alternate plan."

"An alternate plan?" I queried.

"Yes. In case, you know, I can't be a Major League baseball player when I grow up."

"Oh?" I said, "What is this alternate plan, Monk?"

"Well, there are a few of them. Plan B, I could be a professional golfer."

"A golfer? When have you ever played golf?"

"You know...putt putt golf. I'm pretty good at it. Anyway, Plan C would be to work where dad works. Plan D would be fixing computers like J (my significant other)...or maybe testing games and graphics. Plan E would be working at a High School. Like you do, mom."

I was hurt that my career choice was at the bottom of the list, but I was heartened by the fact that he had such a diverse array of options to choose from, and that the people in his family and community provide the examples he needs to feel as though each of those career options are viable opportunities for him. I was also thankful to him for providing such a clear illustration of how representation is as crucial to development and goal setting as opportunity is to achieving those goals:

It is educationally sound for the minority student attending a racially impacted school to have available to him the positive image provided by minority classified and certificated employees. It is likewise educationally sound for the child from the majority group to have positive experiences with minority people which can be provided, in part, by having minority classified and certificated employees at schools where the enrollment is largely made up of majority group students. It is also educationally important for students to observe that women as well as men can assume responsible and diverse roles in society.

In my opening argument, I quoted President Lyndon B. Johnson, but I left out a Nixon quote from this article:

Before launching his second presidential bid, Nixon, in language worthy of LBJ, told reporters that "people in the ghetto have to have more than an equal chance. They should be given a dividend." "On this score," he added, "I would be considered almost a radical." The Republican candidate reiterated a similar position a year later, promising to give "everybody an equal chance at the line and then giving those who haven't had their chance, who've had it denied for a hundred years, that little extra start that they need so that it is in truth an equal chance."

Which sounds as if it was inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

"Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree, but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic." -- 1964, Why We Can't Wait.

"A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro..." quoted by Stephen B.Oates, Let The Trumpet Sound.

My opponent has criticized me for lacking optimism. He feels that we have come far enough in the 30 some-odd years since the inception of Affirmative Action to begin dismantling it. I have attempted to prove that we have not. Statistical evidence from all sectors of society point to the fact that racial injustice is a persistent reality. I've read so many articles about racism this week, that I can barely stand to quote from any more of them. In fact, I really just want to close my eyes and take myself to that happy place where race doesn't matter.

I apologize to my opponent for what he perceived was an ad hominem attack, but I really was hoping that I could prod him into giving me a different way of interpreting the astounding amount of evidence that defines the systemic racism that exists in our country today. Admittedly, linking to information about the Bell Curve was like using a high-voltage taser rather than a gentle nudge with a wooden baton. I was trying to give him an out. All he had to do was explain the cognitive dissonance that exists in his argument that current anti-discrimination laws are enough to eliminate discrimination, when from where I'm standing they most clearly do not:

From July 2001 to May 2002, Bertrand and Mullainathan sent fictitious resumes in response to 1,300 help-wanted ads listed in the Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune. They used the callback rate for interviews to measure the success of each resume. Approximately 5,000 resumes were sent for positions in sales, administrative support, clerical services, and customer service. Jobs ranged from a cashier at a store to the manager of sales at a large firm.

The catch was that the authors manipulated the perception of race via the name of each applicant, with comparable credentials for each racial group. Each resume was randomly assigned either a very white-sounding name (Emily Walsh, Brendan Baker) or a very African-American-sounding name (Lakisha Washington, Jamal Jones).

The authors find that applicants with white-sounding names are 50 percent more likely to get called for an initial interview than applicants with African-American-sounding names. Applicants with white names need to send about 10 resumes to get one callback, whereas applicants with African-American names need to send about 15 resumes to achieve the same result.

At least I seemed to get him to change his rhetoric from calling supporters of affirmative action "racists" to calling them members of the "race industry."

I have to admit that I don't necessarily believe that my opponent is a white supremicist just because he can't explain why the race gap exists. But I was sorta hoping to hear more of a solution for closing it rather than the weak insistence that race simply does not matter. My opponent wants to convince you that I'm engaging in a "strange loop" by advancing the concept of white privilege, but what kind of strange loop is he engaging in by verbally waving away a preponderance of statistical evidence that shows that people of color, as a group, live with the daily challenges of discrimination?

The odd thing about the arguments my opponent makes is that there is so much unconscious racism in many of his statements. From the misinterpretation and misapplication of the words of Dr. Martin Luther King (regardless of how my challenger feels about the statement he quoted, I have to say that it is his privilege to interpret Dr. King's words in whatever manner he sees fit. However, it is his responsibility to consider how Dr. King would have wanted those words to be applied, rather than co-opting them in an attempt to prove a point.) to the success stories of black athletes and entertainers as opposed to Scientists and Historians, to the insistance on "color-blindness," my opponent makes all of the fumbles that are common among people who have a limited amount of social/cultural literacy with regard to people of color. Whether my opponent knows this or not, these types of commissions are indicative of an ignorance of racial dialog, and demonstrate the importance of inclusive experiences.

The argument that simply removing the barriers of discrimination is enough to counteract our nation's history of systemic racism and the effects of this racism on communities of color simply does not make sense. The challenger wants us to believe that dismantling white privilege is not possible because the "race industry" is more invested in making him feel guilty for his privilege than in encouraging him to acknowledge and examine the racial preferences that have been awarded him since birth. He wants us to believe, in the face of a history of injustice, that if we close our eyes and wish really hard, discriminatory practices will disappear without the aid of policies of equalization such as affirmative action. Further, my challenger would have us believe that it's more important to cater to perception rather than reality:

Several studies of court cases also show that the number of racial discrimination cases filed by whites and sex discrimination cases filed by men ranges from 2% to 5% of all discrimination cases. The remaining cases involve charges of discrimination by people of color, women, the elderly, the handicapped, etc. (Burstein, 1991; "Reverse discrimination against whites is rare," 1995). Another study of complaints filed with the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission between 1987 and 1994 revealed that only 4% involved changes of reverse discrimination (Reskin, 1998).

In response to this, I say to my challenger, that's not optimism...that's willful ignorance.

My argument is that we are a nation in crisis. The race gap is so wide that we can't just diminish it by outlawing discrimination. Discrimination is already outlawed, and it's still rampant. What we can and must do is continue to apply affirmative action where it is currently being applied, as well as expand it to areas where it is desperately needed. If justice alone was the benefit of affirmative action, it would be enough. But equalized opportunity brings not only long-awaited justice where applied, it brings representation, and, eventually, equal distribution of power. Affirmative action is one way that we can slow the escalator of white privilege to allow people of all races an equal chance at the privileges that those in power are so unwilling to share:

Quote, "We have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and non-violent pressure. Lamentably, it is a historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture, but as Reinhold Neibuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals," end quote. That was the Reverend Martin Luther King in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

I have shown the results of yanking affirmative action where it was once applied. And, while results in other areas are promising, I believe we have a long way to go:

[...]we have made great progress in the past generation, but there is much more to be done. Drastic inequalities still exist in hiring practices and salary. On average, college educated African-American women annually earn $19,054 less than college educated white men. Also, on average, a woman with a Master's degree makes $4,765 less than a man with an undergraduate degree. With the help of affirmative action, minorities and women now have greater access to the business world. We need to further this progress so that everyone has an equal shot at higher-level jobs and fair compensation. The Supreme Court agrees that the "skills needed in today's increasingly global marketplace can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse people, culture, ideas, and viewpoints" (Supreme Court majority opinion, Grutter v. Bollinger, 2003).

Kind Iron Blog readers, this has been my first debate at Iron Blog, and I have learned much. I have worked hard to bring you an array of links and information that might help shed light upon some of the many facets of this discussion. It is my hope that I have in the process, at the very least, introduced some of you to ideas and concepts you had not yet considered about race, white privilege, justice, and the application of affirmative action.

It is also my hope that when my son is old enough to finally choose which career is right for him, he can be certain that he has earned his position through hard work and dedication, and not due to unearned privilege granted to him by virtue of the color of his skin.

Thanks, as always, for your time.

Drucilla B. Blood
Iron Blogger Green

Battle Affirmative Action - Closing Argument - Challenger

2004-08-14T21:24:00.000-07:00

To begin this final statement, I wish to thank the Chairman and the judges for the opportunity to debate this topic. I wish to thank the IBG for her time as well.

Throughout this debate, I have strived to maintain a semblance of decorum. I have attempted to remain above petty sniping and snide remarks about issues that do not touch upon the topic at hand. I feel I have fought that battle alone.

As we end this debate, I feel more certain than ever that the removal of affirmative action is the right course if we are to achieve true equality for all Americans.

Because I see a color-blind society as more than a myth. A color-blind society should be the goal toward which we strive. Rather than see every problem through the prism of race (and certain races at that), we would do better to focus our collective efforts as a society to ensuring that ALL people who labor under adverse life circumstances have access to the opportunities that exist in America. A color-blind society is truly more aligned with the American ideal as expressed in the declaration of independence, from which I quoted in my opening statement.

In order to achieve such a goal, preferential treatment based on race alone cannot be a part of the equation.

But instead of moving toward a goal that even Dr. King advocated in his "I Have a Dream" speech, affirmative action advocates fight a battle of semantics - redefining the ideal to suit their belief in the entitlement (for that's what it is) to preferential treatment through AA. Those who seek to maintain preferential treatment programs must accomplish some tall feats, indeed.

They must argue against the ideal of a color-blind society. They must turn their back on the very "dream" that resonates among people of all races in America - that individuals would be judged on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. They must argue against individual differences in opportunity between members of each race, and between racial groups. They must argue that preferential treatment based solely upon the race of the individual is somehow different from, well, preferential treatment based solely upon the race of the individual. They must argue that 20 points on an admissions application for a person of color is qualitatively different than a "Whites Only" sign at a lunch counter. They must argue that "good" racism can reverse the effects of "bad" racism.

They must argue that racism is in the DNA of the American system, that it cannot be addressed through alternative measures (like punishment for actual instances of discrimination - you know, actual justice), and that individuals of certain races MUST have these preferences in order to succeed. They must argue that advancing opportunity for one race at the expense of another race - or sex - trumps the need for individual members of a race or sex to have an equal opportunity. They must argue that people who do believe that race should not be an issue in these areas are actually racists. They must argue that "justice" is defined as a redistribution of opportunity based on race.

I admit that up to this point, they've done a pretty good job. As I have researched this topic, I have been amazed to see an entire industry of people whose sole purpose in life seems to be the perpetuation of racial division in society through the advocacy of white (primarily male) guilt and black entitlement.

They explain away the differences in preferences between races by saying "blacks have it harder than you do" to Hispanics, native Americans, Asians, and Indians. They say to white women, "yes, you've been oppressed, but not as much as this black man, so you lose." Such victimization one-upsmanship is truly sickening to behold. It is saddening indeed to watch AA proponents attempt to put greater or lesser value on the sufferings and mistreatments of various statistical groupings.

Whereas the calculus I propose is pretty simple: no race or sex should receive preferential treatment based solely upon those characteristics, the calculus of affirmative action is incredibly complex and loaded with racial overtones.

At its bare minimum, you get 1 point for being a woman, one point for being "not white," and another point for being black. To deny that such a calculus is not inherently racist is to deny that 1+1=2.

In each of my posts on this topic, I have quoted extensively from black scholars (more than one, lest I be dismissed as relying on a single source) who disagree with affirmative action. Their voices highlight what is a crucial point in the debate: even all blacks don't agree with preferential treatment based on race. As you have seen as well, these voices of disagreement are dismissed as "Uncle Toms" or "hit m(e)n for organized racism."

Rather than acknowledge that races are not monolithic entities acting in consort to advance or deny one another, affirmative action proponents dismiss the independent thoughts of members of their own race. Perhaps Dr. Sowell, LaShawn Barber, Justice Thomas and others are merely recipients of "white privilege." As well, they tacitly denigrate the millions upon millions of white people who never owned slaves, and actively worked to end white racism.

None of which is to say that different racial groups fare differently within society. There is much to do to ensure adequate treatment for people of all races. Unfortunately, affirmative action addresses none of these areas.

Preferential treatment in college admissions doesn't address failing primary schools. Preferential treatment in hiring decisions doesn't address adequate access to health care. Preferential treatment in contract decisions doesn't ensure that our laws are enforced equally among races. Preferential treatment does nothing to reverse the trend toward single-parent households within the black community, many of whom end up in poverty (along with single-parent households in the white and hispanic communities).

Rather, preferential treatment (nee affirmative action) whispers the thought that is truly damaging to equitable treatment: "You can't make it without our help." I am amazed at how AA advocates cannot see the paternalism of their own ideology.

IBG states in her final rebuttal that affirmative action is "anti-racism." In doing so, she highlights the post-modern tendency to redefine words to mean what they don't mean. Racial preferences that serve my aims are not really racism. They are what I say they are.

In my opening statement, I made three arguments against affirmative action: It is contrary to the spirit of the American ideal, it furthers division rather than alleviating it, and it fails to acknowledge true diversity.

In polling results, ballot referendums and lawsuits, there is ample evidence that affirmative action policies have not created unity, but further division among races. In the cries of "Uncle Tom" and "hit man for organized racism," AA advocates have shown their disdain for diversity of opinion, and in redefining "equal" as "equal plus some," they perpetuate the violation of the American ideal.

Again, I thank you for your time.

Respectfully submitted,

Bryan S.

Battle Affirmative Action - Second Rebuttal - Iron Blogger Green

2004-08-13T20:57:00.000-07:00

The challenger began his disorganized second rebuttal by mentioning the intervention of "real life" and it's undesired consequences. Granted, as a single mother who is employed full-time and spends the rest of her time attempting to homeschool her unruly children, I am all-too familiar with real life, and I do feel for my challenger. Yet it's ironic that he would present this temporary intervention as an excuse, while arguing against the established system to counteract the disadvantages of a lifetime of artificially imposed "real-life" circumstances.

At any rate, I wish my challenger the best and hope that whatever real life situations have been intervening with his ability to spend the enormous amount of time it takes to write these rebuttals (he's definitely making them look easier than they are!) are not too serious in scope or outcome.

To begin, I need to get two things off my chest

First, my challenger ends his argument with a reference to a color-blind society, and I couldn't more heartily disagree with him. Generally, when one argues about the mythical color-blind society, one is actually arguing that we as a society can move past matters of racism by ignoring the fact that race matters:

What is conveniently ignored is that while certain members of certain races have indeed been allowed through the class barriers, within each class people of color consistently populate the lowest echelons. By refusing to flip the toggle switch and render the class lines visible, so to speak, American society is given the illusion of a continuum containing a random racial distribution. Flipping the toggle switch reveals a society whose reality contrasts jarringly with the illusion, a society of discrete groupings (classes), each characterized by the distribution of white on top, and black and brown underneath. The working class is characterized by white skilled laborers and mostly black/brown unskilled laborers, and the middle class is similarly composed, though considerably whiter overall. (I would comment on the make-up of the ruling class, but they won’t let me into their meetings!)

Perhaps this is why I have so much trouble understanding and swallowing pretty much any of his argumentation. There is a fundamental conceptual misunderstanding that we are having here, and it is based on the perception that equal opportunity will eliminate color rather than promote true diversity:

When originally formulated, the concept of a color-blind society was seen as the answer to discrimination and prejudice: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., for example, advocated judging people not by the color of their skin, but by their internal character. Misguided and devious advocates have co-opted it, taken it out of context and failed to understand a basic assumption made by King; such an approach has meaning only if we operate on a level playing field where equal access and opportunity exists for all groups. This condition does not currently exist in oar society.

The practice of color-blindness is a dangerous and frightening proposal because it will perpetuate and create greater disparities in our society. It will undermine accountability for civil rights violations (hate crimes, discrimination in the workplace and biased racial profiling), health care disparities, and racial/ethnic disease patterns important for medical treatment, educational inequities and so forth.

In my research on the causes and effects of racism, I have come to realize that color-blindness uses "whiteness" as the default key to mimic the norms of fairness, justice and equity by "whiting" out differences and perpetuating the belief in sameness. The denial of power imbalance, unearned privilege and racist domination are couched in the rhetoric of equal treatment and equal opportunity.

Second, my challenger seems to be attempting to redefine the term "affirmative action" as preferential treatment for women and certain races in the areas of hiring and admissions. My definition of affirmative action differs. I view affirmative action as equalizing opportunity in the areas of hiring and admissions in order to promote true diversity. If we are going to talk about "preferential treatment" in the areas of hiring and admissions, we can leave race and gender out of the equation altogether and focus on those who are already the true recipients of affirmative action.

Now, on to the rebuttal (by the way, I wish you all could have heard the peals of shrieking laughter I heard when I asked my children to please give me some time to write a reBUTTal. Ah, the glories of potty humor.)

In his argumentation, my opponent repeatedly takes the word of one well-positioned black man, and attempts to apply that opinion to the entire population of people of color. While it is true that there are many people of color who are positioned solidly in the middle class and above, there are still obstacles that stand in the way of truly equal opportunity. I cannot and will not deny that class is a factor. But race is a factor, regardless of class. I disagree with Judge Thomas' assertion that the son of a middle-class black man necessarily has it easier than the daughter of a single white woman. I, in fact, am the daughter of a poor, single white woman...and I have known many sons of middle class men of color in my lifetime who have had and continue to have significantly more challenges than I have ever had to face.

Certainly, neither anecdotal nor statistical evidence equates to individual impact. But if Affirmative Action has done damage to a significant amount of white males, wouldn't that damage be visible when viewing statistics? In actuality, studies have revealed that the perceived impact of affirmative action on white males is a lot worse than the actual impact.

Earlier I alluded to how half to two-thirds of whites and males believe that reverse discrimination is common. Some of the polls asked respondents whether they, personally, had lost a job, promotion, college seat, etc. because of affirmative action. When the question is phrased this way, the number of whites and males who respond 'yes' drops significantly to between 2% and 13% (Steeh & Krysan, 1996). These numbers are also considerably lower than the percentage of people of color and women that respond 'yes' to similar questions. In a recent survey by the National Conference for Community and Justice (2000), for example, 13% of whites said that they had been discriminated against in the past month at restaurants, while shopping, during worship, at work or in other situations. On the other hand, 16% of Latinos, 31% of Asians and 42% of blacks said 'yes' to the same question.

Additionally, to argue that there should be no impact on white males is arguing backwards. Of course white males are affected. The current state of affairs is due to the fact that white males currently enjoy more power than they have actually earned, and yes, it is time to give some of that unearned power back.

I began this discussion taking care to point out that affirmative action and racial discrimination is not strictly a black/white thing. However, I do have to point out that there are unique challenges within the African-American experience in this country that warrants special attention. With the African-American population, we not only need to combat generations of racism, but also the ingrained and intentional inferiority complex that was necessitized by slavery and is perpetuated by our society's refusal to admit to the systems of oppression which continue to this day. When my opponent talks about "certain" minorities, he is either intentionally ignoring or unintentionally ignorant of the significant disadvantage these "certain" minorities continue to struggle with, both individually and as a whole. As one of my favorite bloggers, Prometheus 6 says in reference to The Shaping of Black America:

Black people had to be broken to be slaves, and White people had to be broken to be masters. How else can you explain slave owners who allowed slaves to buy their own freedom when by law anything the slave owned already belonged to his master?

As for the quote by Sowell:

These black students are simply distributed differently within both systems -- no longer being mismatched with institutions whose standards they don't meet. They now have a better chance of graduating.

I have often wondered out loud how preferences are influenced by the society in which they are formed. In other words, we might perceive that women have a preference for one area of study, but that preference might have been artificially constructed by a lifetime of social conditioning pushing her in that direction. Affirmative Action, appropriately applied, can act as a counterbalance by actively encouraging diversity in fields of study traditionally pursued by white men. In turn, this encouragement results in more women populating these fields, encouraging more girls to take up study and participate. I wonder if perhaps the lack of minority students in certain fields creates a self-fulfilling prophecy due to unconscious exclusion or prejudice on the part of those who are already in the field, much as women frequently need to work harder to "prove themselves" in fields dominated by males. Whatever way you look at it, I find it difficult to believe that so many people of color would self-select areas of study and employment which place them at such a glaring economic disadvantage:

Racial-ethnic minorities are a far smaller percentage of the labor force than are women (23.1 percent versus 46.6 percent).1 Their disproportionate representation in certain jobs is, nevertheless, worthy of attention. Women of color-African-American, Latina, and Asian-are over-represented in institutional service work, in occupations such as private household workers, cleaners, nurses' aides and licensed practical nurses, typists, file clerks, kitchen workers, hospital orderlies, and some occupations in the food packaging and textile industry. Other jobs that have disproportionate numbers of women and men of color include guards and corrections officers, mail and postal clerks, social workers, telephone operators, bus drivers, taxi drivers and chauffeurs, and some operator or laborer jobs within manufacturing.

As far as the application (or lack thereof) of affirmative action to the Asian minority:

In the United States, affirmative action programs at universities usually benefit only black African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans. Asian Americans, although a racial minority, do not benefit at most colleges because their makeup in the student body exceeds their makeup in the general US population. White-skinned people do not benefit in universities where their makeup in the student body is less than their makeup in the general US population because they are not members of a racial minority.

This is not to say that racism does not affect Asian Americans, but it is to say that racism affects Asians in a unique way which perhaps requires a different approach, but does not necessitate the dismantling of affirmative action:

The goal of affirmative action is to re-orient our society away from one of unearned privilege towards justice. It is this goal that gives affirmative action the unique status of being a social initiative which, in the end, cancels itself out. Our society can only successfully combat the effects of white privilege and the concentration of power when Affirmative Action is applied effectively, and races are represented more equitably in all areas of society. We've moved forward slowly, in fits and starts, due to the dominant culture's reluctance to relinquish some of it's power. This reluctance perpetuates the systems of oppression which cause schisms between races and crises within communities of color. True integration (NOT assimilation) is the only
method of establishing a society based on meaningful contribution rather than means alone.

My opponent wants to argue that anti-discrimination laws are enough to equalize opportunity, yet he refuses to acknowledge that discrimination still happens. In other words, he wants to abolish affirmative action, thereby reversing it's positive impact, without any other viable way to ensure that organizations with a proclivity towards discrimination do not discriminate. Just as the opposite of racist is not "color-blind" but "anti-racist" - discriminatory practices must be combatted not through passive means, but by actively encouraging inclusion of people who have historically been damaged by discrimination.

Once again, I thank you for your time.

Drucilla B. Blood
Iron Blogger Green

Battle Affirmative Action - Second Rebuttal - Challenger

2004-08-12T21:36:00.000-07:00

I apologize in advance for the disjunction that this post may take. Real life intervened for the challenger today, and so these thoughts are taking shape as sand trickles through the hour-glass to the deadline. I am approximately 200 words over the 2,000 "soft cap," as well, but felt constrained to include relevant court citations.

First, I should say that there are areas of agreement between the IBG and myself. She lauds “actively encouraging diversity.” I am in full agreement with that. We should encourage diversity in all areas of American life and culture.

Her final statement: In closing, just as systemic racism has a negative impact on all of us, so are we all affected positively by making a commitment to honor and encourage the success of people from a diverse array of cultures, races, and backgrounds. In my next post, I will address how actively encouraging diversity is essential to a healthy society, and is in fact the only way we can bring an end to the necessity of affirmative action.

Is something that no American true to the ideals upon which this nation was founded could disagree. But I am afraid that she tells only half of the picture with that statement.

IBG states that affirmative action (defined as preferential treatment for women and certain races in the areas of hiring and admissions) is the real world equivalent of “actively encouraging diversity.” Rather, I maintain that affirmative action so defined is not the real world equivalent of “actively encouraging diversity,” but a real world equivalent of the racist system it seeks to replace.

To simplify things, I will only speak here about affirmative action based upon race. I plan to respond to her charges on the basis of two points: individuality (and within group disparity) and racial disunity.

Individuality

IBG notes that I do not refute her statistics that prove that blacks as a group struggle against greater obstacles than do whites. I cannot dispute such statistics.

But the problem with statistics based solely upon race is that they deny the opportunities afforded the individual.

To give just one example, unlike my opponent, I have actually met Justice Thomas, whom her citation refers to a as a “hit man for organized racism” In conversation with him on the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, he noted a very cogent reason why race-based affirmative action is wrong.

As he put it, "the son of a middle class black man is not disadvantaged when it comes to opportunity" as compared to the child of a poor white person (say, the daughter of a single mother). And yet, that child of middle class means would receive preference over a child of lower income solely on the basis of race.

In short, it is not the “white race” that is being hindered by race-based affirmative action, but an individual - an individual who may have far less objective opportunity than the beneficiary of such preferential treatment.

To use another example, I mentioned earlier that I am 1/8 Cherokee. According to the federal government, I would be allowed to list myself as an "underrepresented minority" in applying for jobs and admission to college. However, should I use such a racial identification, would my acceptance into a prestigious school actually increase "diversity"? Perhaps since there are probably very few balding, tattooed Christian hockey goalies in the world. The same would apply for a person of mixed black/white race. Should that person receive the benefits of "underrepresented minority" status, simply because of a portion of black heritage?

What Ms. Blood and those in the race industry would have us do is sacrifice individuals of one racial group for individuals of another. I fail to see how this achieves racial equality.

As Thomas Sowell put it in an actual statistical study of affirmative action in academia:

Statistical “laws” apply to large numbers of random events. But universities do not hire large numbers of random academic employees; departments each hire small numbers of specialists within their respective fields. To establish numerical goals and timetables for such small-sample unpredictable events is to go beyond statistics to sweeping preconceptions. Nowhere can one observe the random distribution of human beings implicitly assumed by affirmative action programs. Mountains of research show that different groups of people distribute themselves in different patterns, even in voluntary activities wholly within their control, such as choice of card games or television programs, not to mention such well-researched areas as voting, dating, child-rearing practices, et cetera.

Racial Disparity

One concept my opponent refuses to deal with is the fact that affirmative action hits different races differently. I would encourage her to read the dissent in the case cited earlier, Grutter v. Bollinger.

In fact, the vast majority of slots in the law school were already handed out to those who scored very high on the LSAT. What "affirmative action" meant was a higher chance at the few remaining positions.

Even there, race was a factor among racial subgroups:

From 1995 through 2000, the Law School admitted between 1,130 and 1,310 students. Of those, between 13 and 19 were Native American, between 91 and 108 were African-Americans, and between 47 and 56 were Hispanic. If the Law School is admitting between 91 and 108 African-Americans in order to achieve "critical mass," thereby preventing African-American students from feeling "isolated or like spokespersons for their race," one would think that a number of the same order of magnitude would be necessary to accomplish the same purpose for Hispanics and Native Americans. Similarly, even if all of the Native American applicants admitted in a given year matriculate, which the record demonstrates is not at all the case,* how can this possibly constitute a "critical mass" of Native Americans in a class of over 350 students? In order for this pattern of admission to be consistent with the Law School's explanation of "critical mass," one would have to believe that the objectives of "critical mass" offered by respondents are achieved with only half the number of Hispanics and one-sixth the number of Native Americans as compared to African-Americans. But respondents offer no race-specific reasons for such disparities. Instead, they simply emphasize the importance of achieving "critical mass," without any explanation of why that concept is applied differently among the three underrepresented minority groups.

In short, as I have said all along, race-based affirmative action doesn’t level the playing field. It discriminates wildly.

Review of the record reveals only 67 such individuals. Of these 67 individuals, 56 were Hispanic, while only 6 were African-American, and only 5 were Native American. This discrepancy reflects a consistent practice. For example, in 2000, 12 Hispanics who scored between a 159-160 on the LSAT and earned a GPA of 3.00 or higher applied for admission and only 2 were admitted. App. 200-201. Meanwhile, 12 African-Americans in the same range of qualifications applied for admission and all 12 were admitted. Id., at 198. Likewise, that same year, 16 Hispanics who scored between a 151-153 on the LSAT and earned a 3.00 or higher applied for admission and only 1 of those applicants was admitted. Id., at 200-201. Twenty-three similarly qualified African-Americans applied for admission and 14 were admitted. Id., at 198.

I understand my opponent’s squeamishness with addressing this issue. It is a touchy subject. As mentioned earlier, Grutter is a woman. A very bright (3.8 GPA), qualified (161 LSAT) woman, but a woman who is white.

But white women are not the only minorities who suffer under attempts to redress statistical variation through individual discrimination. As noted in the Michigan case, Hispanics and native Americans didn’t fare much better.

Here and Yon

My opponent engages in a classic post hoc fallacy in attributing declines in enrollment of blacks at the University of Texas and the California university system to repeals of affirmative action. To again quote Sowell, the numbers don’t bear out the assumption:

Without affirmative action, its advocates claim, few black students would be able to get into college. In reality, there are today more black students in the University of California system and in the University of Texas system than there were before these systems ended affirmative action.

These black students are simply distributed differently within both systems -- no longer being mismatched with institutions whose standards they don't meet. They now have a better chance of graduating.

What of the idea that affirmative action has helped blacks rise out of poverty and is needed to continue that rise? A far higher proportion of blacks in poverty rose out of poverty in the 20 years between 1940 and 1960 -- that is, before any major federal civil rights legislation -- than in the more than 40 years since then. This trend continued in the 1960s, at a slower pace. The decade of the 1970s -- the first affirmative action decade -- saw virtually no change in the poverty rate among blacks.

In other words, most blacks lifted themselves out of poverty but liberal politicians and black "leaders" have claimed credit. One side effect is that many whites wonder why blacks cannot lift themselves out of poverty like other groups, when that is in fact what most blacks have done.

IBG cautions me against misrepresenting the positions of famous black leaders. On the contrary, it is she who is missing the boat. Douglass specifically railed against meddling from whites who would seek to do the blacks some good once they were free. As she notes, whites continued to do so. Her solution: continue to do so.

Let him live or die by that. If you will only untie his hands, and give him a chance, I think he will live. He will work as readily for himself as the white man.

Who is closer to the spirit of Douglass’ words?

She further claims that I misrepresent Dr. King’s speech. On the contrary, I agree with Dr. King’s sentiment as expressed in that speech. I fail to see how his judgment regarding the situation in 1965 (when desegregation was still a hotly debated topic in the south) is the required reading of the situation today.

Buh? Guh? So, wait. My opponent is arguing against affirmative action, and fervently pointing to a justice who says that the court expects racial preferences will no longer be necessary TWENTY-FIVE YEARS from now?

I should note that my agreement with Justice O’Connor, as specified in my opening statement, was in everything but the timing. She also should note that Justice O’Connor was on the other side of the argument in the other UM case - Gratz v. Bollinger, invalidating the undergraduate system that assigned points solely based on race.

My opponent later goes on to play the amateur psychologist, assigning to me opinions that I do not hold in a subtle ad hominem attack.

In re: “white privilege,” it is hard to refute a definition that is, within itself, unfalsifiable. While I may point to the numbers of whites who enjoy no such “privilege,” like my friend Robert, the definition of “white privilege” builds in a refutation of negating evidence. Thus the “strange loop” that I mentioned in my first rebuttal. I am saddened that my opponent chooses to use just that strange loop to argue again for “white privilege,” denying a much more realistic indicator of place in society: green privilege.

My opponent further confuses progress in achieving a more diverse workforce through non-discrimination laws (which I support) with progress made through preferential treatment of women and (certain) minorities. She cites the military, refusing to mention that the article she cites includes cautionary notes that the military is a closed system unlike the market economic system that exists out here.

Further, the “affirmative action” policies she cites in the military include a great number of policies which are, quite simply, non-discrimination policies, i.e., providing equal opportunity to access to promotions and training.

She includes these two points, which do not address preferential treatment:

- Emphasize merit and have patience, but measure results: The long-term support for the program has depended upon the firm belief that merit principles are indispensable. The payoff has required both patience and investments. Patience, however, can degenerate into flagging commitment unless progress is carefully measured, tracked and related to goals.

- Investments for a quality pool: The organization works to recruit, retain and upgrade the skills of women and minorities to ensure that they, like their white male colleagues, can compete effectively in the promotion pool.

Rather than ask whether a mandated social program from government should be the way to achieve a truly color-blind society (in keeping with the true ideal of “all men created equal”), I ask whether transferring racial preference to a statistical group from another statistical group is truly “affirmative” or necessarily “equitable”?
My opponent ascribes miracles to affirmative action (again, defined as preferential treatment for women and some minorities), but are the encouraging gains of the last 30 years due to such preferential treatment, or the removal of discriminatory barriers that were previously in place?

It is not my suggestion that “privilege” does not exist. But “privilege” does not flow from the color of one’s skin, no matter how much IBG and the race industry repeat the mantra. There is too much evidence to the contrary. Evidence of individuals who excel and others who fail despite the blessings or curse of a certain skin color.

Thank you again for your time,

Bryan S.