Month: January 2006

by hilzoy

Via AmericaBlog, here’s the Concerned Women for America:

“The iconic Barbie Doll has become another tool for promoting gender confusion among children. On the Barbie Web site, www.Barbie.com, there is a poll that asks children their age and sex. The age choices are 4-8, but as Bob Knight, Director of CWA’s Culture & Family Institute, notes children are given three options for their choice of gender.”

On the audio link from the web page, which contains a faux news piece on the subject of Mattel’s perfidy, they say:

“And this is directed at children aged four through eight. Those are the only age options in this poll. that’s a really young age to be directing something along the lines of bisexuality, gender confusion.”

Guess what the third option is? Do they give children the option of saying they’re androgynous? Hermaphrodites? What one of the guys in the biker bar I used to work at called “She-males”? The horrifying answer is below the fold…

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by hilzoy

Victor Davis Hanson thinks — and I use that term generously — that those of us who believe that the war in Iraq is going badly do so only because we have no sense of history and are unwilling to accept success when it stares us in the face:

“The same paradox of success is true of Iraq. Before we went in, analysts and opponents forecasted burning oil wells, millions of refugees streaming into Jordan and the Gulf kingdoms, with thousands of Americans killed just taking Baghdad alone. Middle Eastern potentates warned us of chemical rockets that would shower our troops in Kuwait. On the eve of the war, had anyone predicted that Saddam would be toppled in three weeks, and two-and-a-half-years later, 11 million Iraqis would turn out to vote in their third election — at a cost of some 2100 war dead — he would have been dismissed as unhinged.

But that is exactly what has happened. And the reaction? Democratic firebrands are now talking of impeachment.

What explains this paradox of public disappointment over things that turn out better than anticipated? Why are we like children who damn their parents for not providing yet another new toy when the present one is neither paid for nor yet out of the wrapper?

One cause is the demise of history. The past is either not taught enough, or presented wrongly as a therapeutic exercise to excise our purported sins.

Either way the result is the same: a historically ignorant populace who knows nothing about past American wars and their disappointments — and has absolutely no frame of reference to make sense of the present other than its own mercurial emotional state in any given news cycle.”

Also, we thought we weren’t going to take any casualties at all:

“After Grenada, Panama, Gulf War I, Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and the three-week war to remove Saddam, we decreed from on high that there simply were to be no fatalities in the American way of war. If there were, someone was to be blamed, censured, or impeached — right now!”

Let’s just pass over the last point in silence — the idea that anyone thought that the war in Iraq would not involve casualties is too ludicrous a straw man to waste time on. Let’s also pass over the fundamental incoherence of Hanson’s basic argument, which as best I can tell goes like this:

(1) Liberals expected the war to go badly.

(2) It didn’t.

(3) Liberals are very disappointed, because, having no sense of history, they expected everything to be perfect.

(Huh?)

Let’s talk, instead, about who in this debate has a good sense of history and its disappointments.

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