A few things happened on Sunday; one I saw, the other I read about — neither event surprising.

While watching Fox News Sunday, I listened to Senator John McCain (R, Arizona) say that he believed Iran’s nuclear weapons program “is the most serious foreign policy crisis since the end of the Cold War. A nuclear capability in Iran is unacceptable.”

Senator McCain said he agreed with the Bush administration’s decision to press for sanctions against Iran before the United Nation’s Security Counsel, saying the move would force Moscow and Beijing to choose sides. “If China and Russia want to be on record as being supportive of Iran in their nuclear ambitions, then I think that obviously has consequences as well.”

McCain threw his hat into the energy independence ring as well: “We’ve got to get quickly on a track to energy independence from foreign oil. And that means, among other things, going back to nuclear power.”

Israel Weighs In On Iran:

Despite Sharon’s absence, Israel’s defense minister hinted Saturday (01-21) that the Jewish state is preparing for military action to stop Iran’s nuclear program, but said international diplomacy must be the first course of action.

“Israel will not be able to accept an Iranian nuclear capability and it must have the capability to defend itself, with all that that implies, and this we are preparing,” Shaul Mofaz said. His comments at an academic conference stopped short of overtly threatening a military strike but were likely to add to growing tensions with Iran.

Sanctions and Oil:

McCain advocated energy independence (as should all logical Americans!) as oil and financial experts are quoted as saying: “Oil prices could soar past $100 a barrel, if the UN Security Council authorizes trade sanctions against Iran, which the West accuses of trying to make nuclear bombs, and Iran curbs oil exports in retaliation. A sharp global economic slowdown could follow.” Just this past week, the price per barrel almost reached $70 on the heels of global concern about Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Oddly enough, this one time no one in the global community “buys” Iran’s bit about needing nukes for power.

But Iran would also pay a hefty price if the petro-dollars that now represent 80 percent of export revenues are reduced, potentially stirring civil unrest in a nation with a 14 percent unemployment rate.

”They would shoot themselves in the foot,” said Mustafa Alani, director of national security and terrorism studies at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center. ”It’s one thing to test the market psychology, it’s another to take the actual step and stop oil exports.”

Bracing for sanctions, Iran’s central bank said on Friday that it is moving its foreign currency reserves out of European banks.

Iran, the second-largest oil producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, exports roughly 2.5 million barrels per day. It also controls the strategic Strait of Hormuz, a critical shipping lane.

”Even if Iran pulled a small amount of its oil off the market, say it pulled a half million barrels a day, I could see oil prices literally jumping over the $100 per barrel mark,” said James Bartis, a senior researcher at Rand Corp.

John Kerry: Amazing Silent On Iran? Here’s Why:

Kerry went on another rant yesterday about President Bush’s handling of the war on terrorism, and his so-called inept handling of North Korea’s nuclear program. In retrospect, he didn’t have much to say about Iran. As NewsMax.com wrote:

Probably because, had Kerry’s previous advice on Iran been taken, the mullahs in Tehran would be even closer to obtaining nuclear weapons than they are now.

During his first debate against President Bush on Sept. 30, 2004, the Massachusetts Democrat actually said it would be a good idea for the U.S. to give Iran the fuel they needed to make a nuclear bomb.

The question from moderator Jim Lehrer: “Do you believe that diplomacy and sanctions can resolve the nuclear problems with North Korea and Iran?” Kerry’s answer:

“With respect to Iran, the British, French, and Germans were the ones who initiated an effort without the United States, regrettably, to begin to try to move to curb the nuclear possibilities in Iran. I believe we could have done better.”

The top Democrat then urged:

“I think the United States should have offered the opportunity to provide the nuclear fuel. Test them. See whether or not they were actually looking for it for peaceful purposes. If they weren’t willing to work a deal, then we could have put sanctions together.”

Another reason we are so very lucky one specific man currently occupies the White House.

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The bottom line: a showdown with Iran is coming; the global community appears, at this point, to be behind the US stance — this week.

The best teams won, and rather handily. Yesterday, the Pittsburgh Steelers beat the Denver Broncos 34 to 17 — and beat them like the proverbial drum. Jake Plummer did his best but the entire Denver team looked flat. Pittsburgh took charge and never looked back.

A short time later, a revved Seattle Seahawk team beat the Carolina Panthers 34 to 14 (how odd that the winning teams both scored 34 points, and the losing teams scored within 3 points of each other). Seattle just looked sharp and Carolina was flat. Neither losing team really got into their respective games.

The Pittsburgh Steelers will face the Seattle Seahawks in Super Bowl XL (40), in Detroit on Sunday, February 5th.

The Steelers will be the next Super Bowl champions. A beautiful and fitting way for Jerome Bettis to end his career.

Easy prediction.

Private Mike McNaughton running with President Bush.

Who is Today’s Hero?

I had occasion, this weekend, to rent the DVD of the movie Grizzly Man.

This was a documentary produced by German director Werner Herzog in 2005, a movie that won the 2006 Chicago Film Critics Association award for best documentary, along with best documentary awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, National Society of Film Critics, New York Film Critics Circle, Online Film Critics Society, San Francisco Film Critics Circle, 2005 Sundance Film Festival awards for best director, and Toronto Film Critics Association for best documentary.

I’m a bit behind the times. I just now rented the DVD from my local store. And at the conclusion I was astounded, dumbfounded, impressed and yet, satisfied. It was as it should have been. It’s simply the way the world works.

It was unfortunate that he was killed; it was sadder still that he brought another human (37-year-old girlfriend Amie Huguenard) into the mix and she was killed as well — evidence indicating that, though she was afraid of the bears, she stayed behind during the attack to do what she could — despite Treadwell shouting that she should run — and was torn apart for her efforts.

At the DVD’s conclusion I thought: this is a most appropriate political allegory for our times. I wonder how many people can see it or even interpret this meaning? Allow me to define the situation and I’m certain the clouds will part for you, if they haven’t already.

Timothy Treadwell was the consummate actor, showman, liar, provocateur, alcoholic, drug addict, and an excellent representative of my generation — the Baby Boomers. Life was All About Him. Just ask him. As his parents said in the film: when he failed to get the bartender’s part on Cheers that Woody Harrelson acquired, Timothy’s life went downhill. And oh: Treadwell wasn’t his real name either.

Somehow, somewhere he made the transition to self-styled naturalist, videographer and protector of an environment that many said, essentially, needed no protection because — are you sitting down? — it was already protected.

“Treadwell” saw himself as a modern day eco-warrior. This is evident in his numerous setup monologues at tripod’s end. Essentially he brought two digital videocams and a tripod into the environment of Alaska’s Katmai National Park — an area that has the world’s highest concentration of brown bears and Grizzlies in the world. He managed to do so for 13 years until he met the right — or the wrong — bear at the wrong time, on October 5th, 2003.

As Roger Ebert said in his review of the film:

“My life is on the precipice of death,” Treadwell tells the camera. Yet he sentimentalizes the bears, and is moved to ecstasy by a large steaming pile of “Wendy’s poop,” which is still warm, he exults, and was “inside of her” just minutes earlier. He names all the bears, and provides a play-by-play commentary as two of the big males fight for the right to court “Satin.”

A bear analyst, John Rogers, observed on the Katmai National Park website:

It is well known that Timothy Treadwell was an aspiring actor who worked as a waiter and bartender with problems of drug addiction and alcoholism in California. However, during the summer of 1989, he underwent a transformation so sudden and remarkable that it allowed him to survive thirteen summers of camping with brown bears before being killed and consumed by them. During this time, the world got to know Treadwell as the bear-man, the educator of children about bears, the author and film-maker, the actor and con-artist . . .

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This is not to say that Treadwell did not find or engrave some very anthropomorphized images of Alaska into video. Hell, I have a Sony VX-2000 myself — a very nice camera — but I never thought to push the envelope as he did.

Clearly my own personal favorite scenes were not with the bears; they were with the foxes that shadowed many of his movements in the Katmai wilderness. And yet these animals were cognizant of their place in the Great Scheme of it all. They were playful, yes; but they inherently knew just where they could go and where and when.

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As Treadwell did not.

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An Inuit native proffered an insightful comment when he said, in essence: we respect the bears and they respect us, at a distance. Treadwell did not respect the bears and paid the ultimate price.

Treadwell and Huguenard died in this fashion: the attack came with little warning. Somehow, someone managed to activate the digital video camera but the lens cap was still present; the camera recorded a black screen but all the audio. The attack ran for some six minutes. Werner Herzog listened to the audio and recommended to the final holder of the video, former girlfriend

Wikipedia notes:

In the end, it was a single surly bear that did him in at a point later in the year than Treadwell was traditionally still living in the park. The bear that killed Treadwell and his girlfriend was not one of the bears Treadwell usually encountered. This too seems to have been confirmed by the manner of his demise. Rangers had warned Treadwell before his death that they did not want to have to harm bears to come to his rescue. In the end, two bears were killed in the effort to retrieve his remains and those of his companion. A video camera, with the lens cap in place, was recovered at the site. The video camera had been turned on at some point during the attack, presumably by Huguenard, but the camera only recorded six minutes of audio before running out of tape. Troopers who were at the scene describe the audio as chilling. There are no plans to ever make the recording public.

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I really, really hope I don’t have to do what I’ve nominally called the “logical extension” in terms of understanding how this situation plays out now.

But if explain it I must. . .

A finer allegory couldn’t exist.

I recently visited the Chatterbox Chronicles and left some comments regarding her post. In the process of my response I realized: there’s a reason for all this recent nonsense, and it’s very simple. The question is: why?

First, to what nonsense am I referring?

The continued (and thoroughly entertaining!) self-immolation of the Democrats via their self-destructive, based-in-emotion and logic-lacking pandering comments — see my previous post, for last Monday’s wonderful examples. Or Miss Chatterbox’s comments. Or Fetching Jen’s comments. Or Hugh Hewitt’s General Zod comments. Powerline had this comment. Revka’s Take posted this. Texas Fred made this salient note.

In my opinion, the rise of stupid, thoughtless comments from the Left has been stunningly geometric in, say, the past month — and even moreso the past week or two. It’s as though they’re building up to a purposeful crescendo. But it’s a crescendo that isn’t leading to an insightful epiphany — it’s leading to a political downfall and its backpressure and rain of fallout is hurting the country, plain and simple. One Democrat has recently written about this fallout: former New York Mayor (1978 to 1989) Edward Koch.

Politics are politics. I understand that — most everyone else does too. But what is the point of attempting to eviscerate one’s country with a suit by the ACLU on behalf (of all people) of Christopher Hitchens and James Bamford who both — get this — think the NSA tapped into their phone conversations. They say the US must — get this — prove it didn’t. Oh so easy, yes, to prove a negative?

What is the point of objecting to the protection of one’s country? What is the point of objecting to ensure another 9-11 does not occur on domestic US soil? What is the point of objecting to the US taking the fight to the enemy — an enemy whose stated goals are no less than the Islamization of the entire planet, the eradication of America, of “Zion,” and the suppression and/or outright deaths of those who would disagree with radical Islam.

And yes, sometimes things really are that basic.

That’s the self-destruction part. Here’s the hatred part:

It’s all about the hatred of George W. Bush.

First, the Left believes GWB “stole” two entire elections. They believe it with all their hearts. And therein lies the elemental rub and major difference between the two parties and philosophies. It is no surprise that the truism is this: Democrats and liberals are driven by emotions; Republicans and conservatives by facts, history and reality.

Jonathan Chait in the 09-29-2003 issue of The New Republic made some rather prescient, back then, observations, admitting that GWB was not his best friend:

I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it. I think his policies rank him among the worst presidents in U.S. history. And, while I’m tempted to leave it at that, the truth is that I hate him for less substantive reasons, too. I hate the inequitable way he has come to his economic and political achievements and his utter lack of humility (disguised behind transparently false modesty) at having done so. His favorite answer to the question of nepotism–“I inherited half my father’s friends and all his enemies”– conveys the laughable implication that his birth bestowed more disadvantage than advantage. He reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school–the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks–shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks–blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing– a way to establish one’s social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.

Mr. Chait continues:

Have Bush haters lost their minds? Certainly some have. Antipathy to Bush has, for example, led many liberals not only to believe the costs of the Iraq war outweigh the benefits but to refuse to acknowledge any benefits at all, even freeing the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror. And it has caused them to look for the presidential nominee who can best stoke their own anger, not the one who can win over a majority of voters–who, they forget, still like Bush. But, although Bush hatred can result in irrationality, it’s not the product of irrationality. Indeed, for those not ideologically or personally committed to Bush’s success, hatred for Bush is a logical response to the events of the last few years. It is not the slightest bit mystifying that liberals despise Bush. It would be mystifying if we did not.

Mr. Chait then gets down to the meat of his article:

But Bush is never called to task for the radical disconnect between how he got into office and what he has done since arriving. Reporters don’t ask if he has succeeded in “changing the tone.” Even the fact that Bush lost the popular vote is hardly ever mentioned. Liberals hate Bush not because he has succeeded but because his success is deeply unfair and could even be described as cheating.

Now if you enjoyed that, then you’ll enjoy this next bit:

But perhaps most infuriating of all is the fact that liberals do not see their view of Bush given public expression. It’s not that Bush has been spared from any criticism–far from it. It’s that certain kinds of criticism have been largely banished from mainstream discourse. After Bush assumed office, the political media pretty much decided that the health of U.S. democracy, having edged uncomfortably close to chaos in December 2000, required a cooling of overheated passions. Criticism of Bush’s policies–after a requisite honeymoon–was fine. But the media defined any attempt to question Bush’s legitimacy as out-of-bounds.

Yes, you read it correctly — as I expressed in one of my recent comments on another blog — the Left think the MSM or DEM actually gives Bush a “pass” for excoriation. Can you possibly feature that? The Left-driven MSM “looking the other direction” with regard to any issues involving George W?

There really appears to be little remaining of their collective Left realities.

Victor Davis Hanson has a great article about the issue from 2004 and reflected:

Let’s start with the admission that much of the invective is irrational, fueled by emotion rather than reason. Thus the black leadership uses slurs such as “Taliban” and “Confederacy” against Bush, even though no other president has selected an African-American secretary of State and national-security adviser or pledged so many billions for AIDS relief in Africa. Liberals talk of social programs starved, but domestic spending under Bush increased at annual rates greater than during any Democratic administration in recent history. Just read howls of conservatives who worry about Bush’s Great Society-like programs.

Mr. Hanson distills it down further: Bush is a conservative southerner with a drawl. He is a “bible thumper.” Bush is a Manichaeist — he breaks life down into black and white, Good vs. Evil. And he is a renegade aristocrat — not a blueblood easterner.

Further, Michael Novak from National Review Online wrote in a July, 2004 article:

Nevertheless, George W. Bush has been re-conceived and re-wrought into everything that the sophisticated Leftist absolutely hates about Americana: Its innocence. Its boyishness. Its Christianity. Its unpretentiousness. Its heedlessness of all the shibboleths the Left most highly values.

And, in addition, the president exercises unsuspected political skills. The man has actually won most of the political fights he’s taken on. And he has turned the country in a far more Reaganite direction than anyone ever imagined under that anodyne term, “compassionate conservatism.”

Personalizing Social Security? Cutting the teachers’ unions out of total control of the schools? Supplanting the governmental plantation with private charitable initiatives, which actually show better success rates than the welfare state? The handwriting is on the wall, piercing through the dreams of the big-government Left, foretelling the end of the social-democratic illusion.

How did this hick have the nerve to be so radical in government — he who so barely won the election of 2000? (Stole it, the most bitter partisans still say, despite all the studies disproving it.) How did he have the nerve?

The Right tends to think that the Left is stupid — never learns, keeps repeating the same old errors. The Left is different. The Left tends to think that the Right is mean, narrow, selfish, evil (on top of being stupid). I once had a professor at Harvard who was trying to explain what it was like for Immanuel Kant, the greatest philosopher of his time, to have succeeded in winning a teaching position only in Konigsberg, far from the glittering list of leading universities in Germany. That would be, he said, like winning tenure at . . . at . . . at Ohio State. (So superior do Harvard professors feel toward Middle American universities.) In this spirit, the Left also thinks the congenitally evil, conservative Bush is also stupid and second-rate.

Who is Bush to drive the last nails into the coffin of social democracy, and all those big-government dreams? The Left can feel the demography slipping away from them, and the strong currents of the future, too, and the bilious taste of failed ideas rising in their throats. It is now or never for the Left. It is desperation time.

In an August 2004 issue of Newsmax, Youngstown Mayor George McKelvey was quoted as telling Ohio’s cheering Republican delegates at a breakfast that “the left wing hates George Bush the most because he believes in God, and you better believe that.”

You know, it could be that simple, too.