Charlie Wilson's War

I remember thinking during the trailers for Charlie Wilson's War back in 2007: "who the hell is Charlie Wilson?" I fancied myself a foreign policy geek back in the '80s, and yet I can't remember having heard of the guy.

Raise your hands if you thought Ronald Reagan won the cold war. Well, you're all wrong. It was really Charlie Wilson; after all, the movie said so. And, oh yeah, Charlie Wilson was a liberal Democrat.

See how it works?

Reagan's name is mentioned exactly once in this movie. He was lucky. Not so lucky was Michael Pillsbury Reagan's Assistant Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning (in other words, a Republican political appointee). Pillsbury successfully advocated the real Afghan war game-changer: providing the Stinger anti-aircraft missile to the Mujahideen. Yet Pillsbury does not receive a single mention.

Faring better was Michael Vickers, a former "Green Beret" and paramilitary officer in the CIA's Special Activities Division. He was the key architect of the strategy, and the movie at least gives his character a speaking role. But . . . Vickers would go on to also serve as a Republican political appointee, so that role is reduced to that of weapons geek.

Raise your hands if you think that the U.S. operation, however necessary, created later difficulties by funneling its aid through Pakistan's Islamist-dominated ISI, who directed the bulk of the aid to their co-religionist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Hekmatyar, in turn, used much of that military assistance against other Mujahideen, and later support the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Was that a problem? Well . . . yes, but that's only because we denied Charlie Wilson's request for more money to fund Afghan school construction. After all, the movie said so.

See how it works?

But there is a lot to like about this movie. For one thing it is refreshingly anti-Soviet, and it makes a hero of Charlie Wilson, a man sufficiently anti-communist to support Anastasio Somoza, Nicaragua's right-wing dictator deposed by the Sandinistas. (This fact goes unmentioned in the movie.) Congressman Wilson admits frankly that his political career is beholden to Jewish donors outside his district. Alert observers will notice that many of the moral paradoxes in the movie are discussed. The operation required us to work with Islamic sh!tholes like Pakistan and nasty characters like General Zia. The Stingers missiles are given their due, and the movie doesn't actually lie about how they came to the Mujahideen, it just doesn't talk about it.

And I am totally a sucker for Aaron Sorkin's screenplays. Yeah, I know he's a liberal slimeball, but no writer I know can capture alpha-male verbal jousting with quite the same flair. The dialog is outstanding, particularly between the supporting cast members.

Outrage of the Week

. . . and it's only Thursday.

A bit of background on this story: evidently, the USAF conducts periodic inspections of its installations to ensure that they are in compliance with all regulations, programs, and policies. These are called "Unit Compliance Inspections" or UCIs, and are a pretty big deal. They occur every few years and a base will typically spend several months in intense preparation for one.

I received an email from a friend stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, OH. They are undergoing a UCI this week, pursuant to which they are conducting anti-terrorism exercises for the benefit of the inspectors.

According to my contact, the first paragraph of today's exercise bulletin reads:

FBI announced yesterday they had added “liberty DEFENDERS”, an Ohio based group to the domestic terrorism watch list. This group, to date, has been a non-violent organization based on beliefs that the federal government exercises too much control over state governments and civil liberties. Historically, this group has used special interest lobbyists and underground news letters to spread their ideologies and voice their discontent with the federal government.

Right. Because we all know, now that Jesus is president, that the only people complaining about civil liberties violations are terrorists.

What a travesty.

Richmond High School Demographics

Hard on the heals of my article criticising hip-hop culture, a fifteen year old girl in California was gang raped outside a high school dance while dozens of people stood around taking pictures with their cell phones.

Check out the demographics of Richmond High School, where the crime took place.

Watch Larry King and his posse dance around the salient feature.

Notorious

I watched the movie Notorious on DVD. Notorious concerns the life and violent death of the rapper Chris Wallace, a.k.a. "Biggie Smalls", a.k.a. "The Notorious B.I.G." It gives a reasonably accurate account of the East Coast / West Coast hip hop rivalry in the late 1990s, bracketed by the murders of rapper Tupac Shakur in 1996 and Wallace in 1997.

The movie should have been entitled 101 Reasons to Homeshcool Your Children. Although the Wallace and Shakur murders succeeded in penetrating my conscious at the time, I was happily unaware of the backstory; after all, if a couple of violent black men with violent backgrounds, selling albums about violence, come to violent ends, well, everything else was just detail, as far as I was concerned.

Yet these rappers generated vast sums of wealth from their record sales, and that money didn't come from blacks alone. Plenty of white middle class boys (and girls?) spent their parents money on this glamorization of the urban criminal underclass. Whatever one may think of rap and hip hop as a musical genre, the fact is that its penetration into the mainstream brought with it everything we betas mean when we talk about "bad boy alphas".

The course of Wallace's own life perfectly illustrates the female capacity for self-deception. Wallace racked up sexual conquests while persuading at least three women -- all of whom should of known better -- that, really, he would be faithful to them. Sorry girls. If he wasn't chaste before he met you, he's not likely to remain chaste after he's with you, especially when he works in an environment where younger and younger girls are throwing themselves at him.

This is both the source and the purpose of the status, the status conferred by all the adoring male fans looking to these rappers as role models of masculinity. They went on to establish their own hierarchies, which women, in their turn, bought into. And thus the hip-hop ethos penetrated deeply into "mainstream" youth culture. It would be nice to think that living in a "good school district" insulates your children from this, but I wouldn't count on it. My own cousin's children went to public schools in Montgomery County, MD, back in the late '90s, and they were heavily into this kind of music.

One of the movie's vignettes has the young Wallace telling his mother about career day at school. Evidently, Wallace was fairly bright and a good student in his youth. But Wallace thought the tradesmen and low-level professionals his school brought in to speak to the students looked "broke-assed", by which he meant they didn't have the gold chains and other status markers of ghetto drug-dealer chic.

It occurred to me that the kind of people that succeed in middle-class professions are also the kind of people likely to have middle-class values in general, and likely to eschew expensive ghetto status symbols in favor of, for instance, saving towards a down-payment on a house. But these uses of money are less visible, and in any case not easily appreciated by ghetto youth anyway. So I can imagine that they carry little credibility with their intended audience.

The movie shows the perils of religious identification. Wallace's mother imparted to her son some of her own ersatz Christianity, and despite the rampant sex, drugs and violence that characterized his life, Wallace continued to identify as Christian until his death. This very nicely illustrates the importance of SES and racial controls when conducting studies on religion and sociology. I would argue as well that, say, church attendance is an important control as well. (I will write more about this in an upcoming post.)

Nixon/Frost

Frost/Nixon, keep in mind, is not based on the actual interviews that David Frost conducted with former president Richard Nixon in March of 1977. Rather, the movie is based on a broadway play of that name, a play that takes admitted liberties with the facts. Richard Nixon never actually apologized for his role in the Watergate coverup during their final interview (Although he really did say, "If the president does it, it's not illegal," nor did he call Frost the night before that interview.

But that fictitious phone conversation, in which Nixon, in a drunken rage, reveals to Frost his plans to claw his way back to power, is morally vital to the story. This play gives us a window into the rabid Nixon hatred that prevailed among the intelligencia for at least a decade after the man had retired to private life. Frost and his team of researchers don't just want information from Nixon, they want to put him on trial, with themselves as judge, jury, and executioner. Particularly in the person of Frost consultant James Reston (played by actor Sam Rockwell as a snivelling, sactimonious prick), they aren't primarily upset about Watergate except as a way of further embarrassing Nixon. They want to blame Nixon for strategic decisions made in a time of war.

It is the political corruption of journalism on full display, a corruption that the play/movie justifies by the prospect of a Nixon comeback. Such a comeback was surely fanciful in the extreme by 1977, and I find it highly unlikely that Nixon himself seriously contemplated seeking elective office ever again.

But the movie certainly works. Michael Sheen captures the Frost story arc as he matures from a playboy entertainer into a serious and disciplined interviewer. Frank Langella plays Nixon well, but it is the slightly doddering Nixon of the late '80s, not the late '70s; Nixon was only 64 at the time of the interviews, and in reality was quite energetic.

Audit the Federal Reserve

Today, nearly 13 TRILLION in taxpayer dollars in bailouts and loans has been agreed to by Congress, the Bush and Obama Treasury Departments, and the out of control Fed.

Whether it's watching a phony "stimulus" package get rammed into law or watching Congress pass a $700 BILLION bank "bailout" under threat of martial law, the American people are agitated and increasingly angry.

As I know you're aware, the Federal Reserve is shrouded in secrecy. Their meetings are off-limits to the public. Their inner workings are off-limits to the public.

And just recently, the Federal Reserve told Congress "NO WAY" when asked to account for $2 TRILLION in taxpayer-backed loans!

Well, why do you think they refused?

They know coming clean with Congress and the American people on how they doled out that two TRILLION dollars would result in an anti-Fed firestorm.

So can you imagine the impact of a full-scale audit? You and I will finally be able to show the American people that the Federal Reserve System leads to:

• Constant economic crises -- the housing crisis and the resulting chaos is just one example of an economic bubble created by centrally-planned interest rates and money manipulation;

• The destruction of the middle class -- as fuel, food, housing, medical care and education costs soar, everyone who is NOT on the government dole is forced to make do with less as the value of their money slowly decreases;

• Currency destruction -- history shows us that riots, violence and full-scale police states can result when people finally realize our money isn't worth the paper it's printed on and REFUSE to accept it.

And unless you and I do end the madness in Washington, D.C., we may be closer than we'd like to think to learning that history lesson firsthand -- right here in our own streets.

It's time you and I put a stop to a renegade Federal Reserve by exposing the Fed's out of control actions to the American people. And Congressman Ron Paul and Senator Jim DeMint have a bill before Congress to do just that, known as the "Audit the Fed" Bill (HR 1207 and S 604).

Sign the petition here.

Gene Simmons on NPR

Most of you have probably already heard this interview that KISS member Gene Simmons gave to Terry Gross on NPR back in 2002. But for those of you who haven't, it's definitely worth the 20 minutes.

Before Justin accuses me of being a reprobate, let me state for the record that I do not endorse to the "Epicurean hedonism" to which Simmons subscribes. But I was nevertheless struck by how intellectually unarmed is modern liberal feminism, as typified by Gross, in the face of such a challenge to its core premises. Simmons quite literally reduces Gross to point-and-sputter. I lost count of the number of times in which she uses the word "obnoxious".

Here is part one of the interview; the other two parts should automatically load in succession.

Since we had discussed the lifestyle of Christian rock musicians last week, I wanted to say, in the context of Simmons' assertion that all rock performers are in it to boost their sex appeal, that the members of Rush seem to be an exception to that generality. I'm not invested in that observation; on the contrary, absent any religious devotion, chastity doesn't make much sense as an individual commitment. (It makes much more sense as an enforced social norm, but that's a discussion for another day.) Yet despite being committed secularists, it appears from the Wikipedia entries that Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart all married in their early twenties and stayed married. (Technically, Neil Peart's first wife, who died of cancer in 1998, was common law.) I don't know what kind of . . . compromises were involved in this achievement, but still: pretty impressive.