Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Mostly because it's a time for the family and it's not overly commercialized. When Thanksgiving is approaching, you don't have to worry about budgeting funds for gifts or credit card bills the following month. All you have to worry about is exercising and/or dieting to work off your over-consumption.
One of my favorite columnists, Mark Steyn, has written a column about Thanksgiving. As a Brit living in America, he always provides a unique perspective to things. It's a very good column and an interesting perspective comparing the longevity of the US Constitution and the European constitutions. When you hear someone pining for America to be more like Europe, keep this in mind:
Thanksgiving (excepting the premature and somewhat undernourished Canadian version) is unique to America. "What's it about?" an Irish visitor asked me a couple of years back. "Everyone sits around giving thanks all day? Thanks for what? George bloody Bush?"
Well, Americans have a lot to be thankful for.
Europeans think of this country as "the New World" in part because it has an eternal newness, which is noisy and distracting. Who would ever have thought you could have ready-to-eat pizza faxed directly to your iPod?
And just when you think you're on top of the general trend of novelty, it veers off in an entirely different direction: Continentals who grew up on Hollywood movies where the guy tells the waitress "Gimme a cuppa joe" and slides over a nickel return to New York a year or two later and find the coffee now costs $5.75, takes 25 minutes and requires an agonizing choice between the cinnamon-gingerbread-persimmon latte with coxcomb sprinkles and the decaf venti pepperoni-Eurasian-milfoil macchiato.
Who would have foreseen that the nation that inflicted fast food and drive-thru restaurants on the planet would then take the fastest menu item of all and turn it into a Kabuki-paced performance art? What mad genius!
But Americans aren't novelty junkies on the important things. The New World is one of the oldest settled constitutional democracies on Earth, to a degree the Old World can barely comprehend. Where it counts, Americans are traditionalists.
We know Eastern Europe was a totalitarian prison until the Nineties, but we forget that Mediterranean Europe (Greece, Spain, Portugal) has democratic roots going all the way back until, oh, the mid-Seventies; France and Germany's constitutions date back barely half a century, Italy's only to the 1940s, and Belgium's goes back about 20 minutes, and currently it's not clear whether even that latest rewrite remains operative. The U.S. Constitution is not only older than France's, Germany's, Italy's or Spain's constitution, it's older than all of them put together.
There was a comment on an earlier post of mine that I found interesting:
gypsy hammond said... The surge is working? That must explain why 2007 has seen the highest level of troop deaths since the war began. But then, defining success downwards has been a hallmark of this war and this administration.
While this reflects the usual "it's all Bush's fault" thought process, what caught my eye was the statement about 2007 being the highest level of troop deaths. So I went to icasualties.org to see if it's true.
And it is.
But Gypsy's comment is a little disingenuous. The commenter states that the Surge isn't working because 2007 has the highest troop deaths so far.
So the critical point is: When did the Surge begin?
President Bush announced the Surge in January 2007, saying that 35,000 additional troops will be sent to Iraq. The troops were deployed between Febuary and May 2007. In June 2007, the Surge's offensive operations began (once all of the troops were fully deployed).
Using Excel and the figures from icasualties.org, I built a chart to better reflect what is happening from January 2006 through November 2007 (click on the image for a larger view):
So clearly, once offensive operations began in June 2007, US military deaths have begun to significantly decline. Coupled with the Anbar Awakening, it really looks like Iraq has turned around for the better.
The media hardly reports on Iraq anymore BECAUSE deaths are down, there are few if any car bombs, etc. etc. It reminds me of the old saying about the news media: "We don't report when a plane lands successfully, only when they crash". That's what is happening with Iraq RIGHT NOW! Even to the point that Afghanistan (which they've ignored for a while) is now being painted as a failure because Iraq is not.
What is really distressing though, is the complete and utter disconnect with reality I am observing from the Democratic Leadership (Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi in particular). They continue to say that the Iraq War is lost. And worse, they are continuing to try and cut off support for the troops to ensure that the war is lost.
Whose side are they on? We can all argue about how the war began, but the reality is that it happened and we need to deal with the current situation. And the current situation shows that the Iraq War can be (and possibly is) won. To continue to try and pull the rug out from under the troops when they are succeeding is one of the most politically suicidal moves I have ever witnessed. The American people may not agree with how the war started or if the war was worthwhile, but few Americans want our troops to lose - and that's something that Reid and Pelosi obviously don't understand.
Four years ago, I attended a Veterans Day observance in Orleans, Mass. Near the head of the parade, a 106-year-old named J. Laurence Moffitt rode in a Japanese sedan, waving to the small crowd of onlookers and sporting the same helmet he had been wearing in the Argonne Forest at the moment the armistice took effect, 85 years earlier.
I didn’t know it then, but that was, in all likelihood, the last small-town American Veterans Day parade to feature a World War I veteran. The years since have seen the passing of one last after another — the last combat-wounded veteran, the last Marine, the last African-American, the last Yeomanette — until, now, we are down to the last of the last.
An Italian musician and computer technician claims to have uncovered musical notes encoded in Leonardo Da Vinci's "Last Supper," raising the possibility that the Renaissance genius might have left behind a somber composition to accompany the scene depicted in the 15th-century wall painting...
Pala explains how he took elements of the painting that have symbolic value in Christian theology and interpreted them as musical clues.
Pala first saw that by drawing the five lines of a musical staff across the painting, the loaves of bread on the table as well as the hands of Jesus and the Apostles could each represent a musical note.
This fit the relation in Christian symbolism between the bread, representing the body of Christ, and the hands, which are used to bless the food, he said. But the notes made no sense musically until Pala realized that the score had to be read from right to left, following Leonardo's particular writing style.
It's been interesting watching the news as Iraq has been improving... it's been getting more and more difficult to find any reports, other than independent reports from Michael Yon and other freelance reporters in Iraq.
It looks like the Times of London has noticed the same thing:
Is no news good news or bad news? In Iraq, it seems good news is deemed no news. There has been striking success in the past few months in the attempt to improve security, defeat al-Qaeda sympathisers and create the political conditions in which a settlement between the Shia and the Sunni communities can be reached. This has not been an accident but the consequence of a strategy overseen by General David Petraeus in the past several months. While summarised by the single word “surge” his efforts have not just been about putting more troops on the ground but also employing them in a more sophisticated manner. This drive has effectively broken whatever alliances might have been struck in the past by terrorist factions and aggrieved Sunnis. Cities such as Fallujah, once notorious centres of slaughter, have been transformed in a remarkable time.
Indeed, on every relevant measure, the shape of the Petraeus curve is profoundly encouraging. It is not only the number of coalition deaths and injuries that has fallen sharply (October was the best month for 18 months and the second-best in almost four years), but the number of fatalities among Iraqi civilians has also tumbled similarly. This process started outside Baghdad but now even the capital itself has a sense of being much less violent and more viable...
The current achievements, and they are achievements, are being treated as almost an embarrassment in certain quarters. The entire context of the contest for the Democratic nomination for president has been based on the conclusion that Iraq is an absolute disaster and the first task of the next president is to extricate the United States at maximum speed. Democrats who voted for the war have either repudiated their past support completely (John Edwards) or engaged in a convoluted partial retraction (Hillary Clinton). Congressional Democrats have spent most of this year trying (and failing) to impose a timetable for an outright exit.
Me? I think the big news in Iraq is that Iraq was turned around because of two men: General Petraeus and Sec. of Defense Rumsfeld. It is now obvious that Rumsfeld's strategy of a "light footprint" (meaning few troops on the ground) allowed Al Qaeda to thrive and move throughout Iraq unimpeded causing spiralling violence and civilian casualties. Once Rumsfeld resigned, it gave Bush the ability to change strategies and in the end appointing General Petraeus. His "surge" strategy provided the additional troops to stop Al Qaeda and help turn native Iraqi insurgents to our side. If President Bush had gotten ridden of Rumsfeld sooner, the story of the Iraq War could have been very different.
Sorry about not posting last week. I've been swamped at work and home!
But anyway...
I found this interesting NBC News report (via InstaPundit) that talks about the Nanny State movement and how it can create kids that are unprepared for the real world. I've written about this before (HERE).
In particular, this phenomenon has struck South Jersey recently, as a 7 yr. old kid was suspended for creating a stick figure drawing of him and his friend playing with water pistols...
Check this out. I think I'll pick up the guy's book!
Neall lives in Deptford, NJ and works in Exton, PA. He writes about technology, music, books, and news. He is an IT expert and published author. He's also a musician and songwriter.
