The McCain Roller Coaster

You must be at least 54" tall to ride the Straight Talk Express.

The McCain campaign has been going through some ups and downs lately, while Barack Obama is flying high on his world trip.

Last Friday, McCain submitted an op-ed about Iraq to the New York Times after Obama's was published four days before. On Monday, the Drudge Report, erm, reported that the Times asked McCain to rewrite it, as it largely criticized Obama's plan and presented no strategic vision of his own. Once this story broke, conservatives were immediately up in arms about media bias.

Two things: (1) There isn't really any bias here: The Times will gladly publish what McCain has to say, as soon as he has something substantive to say. True, Obama's op-ed criticized Bush and McCain, but it largely laid out (and made the case for) his own plan. McCain's simply tore Obama down. (2) Why didn't the Times simply avoid conservatives' grumbling about media bias, publish the editorial in the first place, and watch as others criticized McCain's criticism and lack of a coherent strategy?

The Times may have caused conservatives to rally around McCain, but now, with Obama largely succeeding abroad, Maliki supporting Obama's 16-month withdrawal timetable, and Bush negotiating with the Iranians, McCain seems to have lost his foreign-policy cred...and his temper. His comment that "Senator Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign," is a sign of unpresidential frustration.

But McCain's foreign policy ideas have largely been ridiculous from the start: Permanent bases in Iraq? Militancy with Iran? Removing Russia from the G-8 (which is impossible, considering that the other member nations would have to agree) and establishing a "League of Democracies" that would only ostracize the Russians and freeze Russo-American relations to nearly Cold War levels?

In short: "He has appeared brittle and inflexible, slow to adapt to changes on the ground, slow to grasp the full implications not only of the improving situation in Iraq but also of the worsening situation in Afghanistan and especially Pakistan."

And that's why for all of his experience, John McCain's foreign-policy views are worse than Barack Obama's.

Fortunate Son

The Drudge Report today broke the news that British Royal Prince Harry has been on the front lines in Afghanistan since December (http://www.drudgereport.com/flashph.htm). I say, right-o, chum!

I think this is fantastic. Of course, there's the possibility that publicizing this makes bonnie Prince Harry a target for the Taliban, and the Royal Family was right to keep it under wraps for as long as they did. But it's fantastic that he's right in there with honest-to-God soldiers, doing
honest-to-God fighting (reportedly). It's a lot more than the Bush twins can say, along with most of the sons and daughters of our Congressional officials and presidential candidates.

Granted, according to the article, he's only on a three-month tour, but given the fact that the British Regular Forces (including the Army, the Naval Service, and the RAF) have 20,000 fewer enlisted men and women than they did five years ago, perhaps he'll serve more (see http://www.dasa.mod.uk/natstats/tsp1/gender.html). We'll have to keep an eye on what the Royal Family and British government have to say about that.

Whether you disagree with the greater War on Terror or not, I think most would say having Prince Harry, who's third in line for the crown, is a great morale boost and gives a little more integrity and credibility to the British war effort. Rather than say a Royal life is worth more than that of a regular Tommy in the trenches, Prince Harry is sending a message that he feels no more important than any one else his government sent to fight. It gives the phrase, "a government of laws, not of men," a greater ring of truth in the UK. Could this be a new trend? That would be a fantastic turnaround from the days of Vietnam and Creedence Clearwater Revival protest songs. But it will be a long time before we get there.

It's All in the Paradigm

I have to give a shout out to the Drudge Report (http://www.drudgereport.com/) for this one.

Anybody with at least slight misgivings about all the fuss regarding global warming might be interested to know that, according to a column by Lorne Gunter in the NationalPost.com on February 25th (http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=332289), the northern hemisphere is currently experiencing an uncharacteristically cold winter. The article reports that based on data from the US National Climatic Data Center, the average temperature for American cities in January '08 was three tenths of a degree Fahrenheit cooler than the average of that month for the twentieth century.

Whats more, Toronto was smashed with seventy centimeters of snow two weeks into this month, breaking the record of 66.6 cm. That record dates back to 1950, and was the total for the entire month - not just the first half.

Asia has been hit hard, as well. China is experiencing the worst winter there in a century, and the article says cities there have been brought to a standstill. Power lines were brought down by snow and ice, and conditions were too harsh to hazard any repairs, leaving residents with out power for as long as several weeks. According to the article, with all things considered, Siberia, Mongolia, China, in addition to northern North America, are covered in more snow than those continents had been since 1966.

Finally, the most notable and important tidbit concerns that arctic sea ice that we hear so much about. Records indicate that substantial amounts of that ice have been lost due to global-warming-induced melting. In fact, melting has caused the reduction of the ice to the lowest point on record. However, you might be intrigued to learn that these records only date back to 1972. Surely, thirty-six years is nowhere near an adequate amount of time to determine a trend for as grand a system as global climate.

Of course, somebody is going to tell me that after the warming, there's going to be cooling. After all, that's how it happened in The Day After Tomorrow. But according to Bernard Goldberg, author of Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right (HarperCollins, 2007), the debate over global warming hasn't always been about global warming. In fact, in regards to the "global climate change" debate, as you may have noticed it is increasingly called as of late, a study by the Business and Media Institute shows that the New York Times and Time magazine have interchangeably run stories about global cooling and global warming for more than a century, beginning with cooling in 1895, warming in 1933, back to cooling as late as 1975, and back to the warming paradigm, which we are currently hearing about (see pages 67-69). In short, they don't know what they are talking about, and there is no way for anyone to be sure. Earth's weather makes up such a complicated system that it is folly to believe that any trends could be identified in a thirty-year sample, despite the argument from some.

My point isn't that we're about to tumble head first into an ice age. It's that Mother Nature has far more up her sleeve than we can correctly evaluate in such a short time span. Before we make stupid decisions regarding the need to reduce our carbon footprint (and how to do so), following the example of a man who buys "carbon credits" from his own company, we need to realize that there are much larger natural forces at work. Surely, it would be egotistical folly to say that our understanding of said forces can be derived from slivers of time, taken as samples that are supposedly representative of the entire climatic history of our planet.