Our troops are the steel in our ship of state. And though our nation may be travelling through rough waters, they give us confidence that our course is true, and that beyond the pre-dawn darkness, better days lie ahead.

Ships these day are made of steel. The hull, the decks, the walls separating interior compartments, the propeller and engine – more or less the only essential part of the ship not made of steel is the wiring. Every thing that isn’t steel in a ship – furnishings, insulation, the crew – is not normally considered when one thinks of what is the essence of a “ship.” Is the president saying that our troops are the essence of the country, and everyone else is some variety of unnecessary creature comfort? Our country is made of troops, and the rest of us are just deck chairs and decorative windows?

But there were ships before steel. For thousands of years, wooden ships sailed through rough waters and many stormy nights on the ocean, venturing to every corner of the globe. Wooden ships crossed every ocean, explored both the Arctic and Antarctic, and in the overwhelmingly vast majority of times were perfectly safe. Making a ship out of steel is a neat luxury of the modern age, but it’s not essential to making a ship. Many ships made out of steel sink (paging DiCaprio, L.) and many ships made out of wood float (paging Columbus, C.).

So if our soldiers are the steel of our ship of state, are they just a luxury? We could have a wooden ship of state that, so long as we didn’t ram against people who had steel ships of state, would be perfectly fine. Indeed, in this age of steel ships many people look back on wooden ships with nostalgia. Perhaps the world would be better if every ship of state was wood, instead of expending the needless resources making them out of steel, which is only necessary in the case of conflict with other ships of state.

And since when does steel give sailors confidence that their “course is true”? Experienced sailors can navigate by the heavens; if a captain knows where he’s going and how to use an astrolabe, a steel compass is just a luxury. Moreover, there’s no reason why a compass needs to be made of steel. Inferior quality iron will work just fine for a compass needle. Is the president saying that we could do with lesser quality soldiers? Eliminating all but our National Guard would leave us, perhaps, with an iron compass, but an iron compass works just as well as a steel compass for determining if the course is true.

Finally, and most nonsensically, steel has absolutely nothing to do with “giv[ing] us confidence . . .  that beyond the pre-dawn darkness, better days lie ahead.” Sometimes, even if your ship is made of steel, there are no better days ahead. Unless you’re coliding with a steel ship, actually, I’d say that whether your ship is made of steel is more or less irrelevent to whether there are better days ahead. The word he’s looking for isn’t “steel,” it’s “optimism,” but I wouldn’t try to sail across a swimming pool in a ship made of optimism.

If George Bush had used that metaphor, we’d have been lectured on how stupid he was. Since it’s Barry, though, we’re probably just too dumb to understand.

As Moe Lane points out, I think it’s fairly obvious that Sebelius isn’t being threatening when she uses that word, she’s being “inarticulate and stupidly insensitive.” Perhaps she needs to be reeducated regarding leftist totalitarianisms of the 20th Century?

Lane, on the real importance of the word: “Use of a term like ‘reeducation’ indicates that the user of it has decided that there’s nothing wrong with his or her argument; the flaw lies in whoever is not being persuaded by it.  So there’s no need to fix the argument itself, obviously.”

I think the non-partisan lesson that should be emerging from Obamacare is the danger of passing big (i.e. physically large) bills without bipartisan support. I agree that there’s tons of misinformation out there, and it comes from all sides. I don’t have a clue what the law does to me, and I challenge anybody to produce a comprehensive list of what the law does to them. That’s what happens when you pass a two-thousand page bill: absolutely nobody knows what it really means.

If I could make one reform in the rules of Congress, it would be this: any law longer than 50 pages must pass with 60% of each house. If a matter is controversial, good republicanism demands that the voters at least be able to understand it and act accordingly in the next election. The Obama administration’s “people’d-love-it-if-they-only-understood-it” defense is lame beyond belief – we’ve gone from “Change You Can Believe In” to “Change You’re Too Dumb To Understand” – and, when examined in the light of how they handled the legislative process, is in fact no defense at all.

ignorony: ig-n(ə-)rən-ē, n.: the unintentional irony of the ignorant. E.g., “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!”; or “Stop treating illegal immigrants like second-class citizens!”

I’m struck by the charge of “seditious conspiracy” for a couple of reasons. First, it sounds like a charge for which someone would have been hung, drawn, and quartered in 16th Century England. That has to be the most antiquated, medieval-sounding offense still on the books. Second, look how broad and vague the statutory definition is. If you thought “sedition” was vague, and “conspiracy” vaguer, just wait until you see you “seditious conspiracy”! I don’t know much about federal law, but just from the wording of the statute, I think I could commit the crime if Dorothy and I plotted to go into our front yard and take down our mailbox.*

*Dear ATF: We have made no such plot.bv

Update: I thought Glenn Reynolds’s snark against the elite legal community worth adding: “And I’m sure top lawyers from top law firms on Wall Street and K street will be lining up to provide the Huttaree militia with a pro bono defense, too.”

“I liked what he said,” Palin told us in a phone interview. “I talked too in my book about the fallen nature of man and why war is necessary at times.” For Palin, that view strikes close to home: Her eldest son, 20-year-old Track, is an Army infantry member who recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq.

Track is “an Army infantry member”? That’s sounds strange to my ears. Can’t we say infantryman? I understand the urge to avoid “man” language, but that urge is misplaced when it reaches a situation like this, where all “members” of the infantry are in fact men.

Read this story. And count how many choices that this woman made that led up to her abortions. Opposing abortion has nothing to do with opposing “choice,” no more than opposing theft or vandalism or slavery involves opposing “choice.” That is, surely all things we ban restrict “choice” in some way, but the relevant question is whether that is a choice we believe should be closed off to our fellow citizens. Monopolizing the word “choice” for the pro-abortion cause is perhaps the single most audacious maneuver in the lengthy American history of twisting language for political purposes. What’s galling – utterly galling – is how the entire media goes along with it.

In numerous ways, that cut for both major ideologies, it makes things simpler to use these words. But that doesn’t make it accurate, and it doesn’t change the underlying realities of war.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.

- George Orwell

 

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.

- John Derbyshire

 

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.

- Thomas Friedman

To this, let’s add Abraham Lincoln: “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”  Thomas Friedman, get thee to a laogai.

When a big bill is dumped on us, we are challenged to read and understand the text. Usually we don’t, but the text is there, and there’s nothing scurrilous about trying to read it, calling attention to worrisome language, and putting our arguments in vivid words. A candidate, on the other hand, is not a text to be read, but there are facts about him that we may want to know. If someone asserts a fact about a candidate and says, for example, that Obama is a Muslim or Obama was born in Kenya, then the candidate, if he doesn’t choose to ignore the assertion or simply make his own flat assertion of denial, is forced to come up with some evidence, which may be difficult and may lead to a new phase of the controversy in which the evidence is challenged.

This is completely different from a controversy about a written text that people are trying to read. If the text doesn’t mean what its opponents are saying, it should be easy for the authors of the text to show how it means something good or to amend the text and make its goodness obvious. The authors of the text should trounce their opponents. If they can’t, we should fear and mistrust them.

That’s how things work in a boisterous democracy like ours, and long may it be so.

Prof. Althouse concludes by looking at the situation now that sentors have announced the end-of-life “counseling” provision is being pulled: “[W]hy didn’t Democrats argue their side? Why did they back down? I suspect it’s because they really did hope to save money by substituting painkillers for curative treatments for the old and disabled.”

I think it’s difficult to listen to all the talk of “curve-bending,” to hear Obama wax philosophic about the waste involved in replacing his granny’s hip, to see the end-of-life “counseling” language in a bill that’s supposedly designed to cut healthcare costs, and then conclude that Althouse is wrong. Whatever they said publicly, and whatever outs they may have tried to leave themselves in the bill, those who drafted it were looking to save money by not providing treatment to people who are supposedly near the end of their lives.

“Recently we learned of a malicious desecration of a photo of the Governor and baby Trig that has become an iconic representation of a mother’s love for a special needs child,” Palin spokeswoman Meghan Stapelton said in a statement provided to CNN.

Here’s the undoctored original: