Trouble Brewing

I have written before about something that fills me with a profound sense of unease. Armed members of the Mexican Army routinely violate our borders, apparently acting as hired gunmen for gangs of drug smugglers.

The latest happened just a few days ago. Two members of our National Guard directly observed six armed men wearing strange uniforms on our side of the border.

Consul-at-Arms asks a good question. Why in the world are our National Guardsmen serving unarmed on the border?

There is no way for me to know. Maybe the powers-that-be don’t want our troops to, you know, shoot some invading members of a foreign military? Because that would be my first guess.

Should we allow the Guard to be armed while on the border? That all depends on whether or not you think it is a good idea to keep corrupt foreign military units and their murderous drug smuggling paymasters on their side.

(Hat tip to Bear Creek Ledger.)

Faulkner Knew Leaks

Twentieth century novelists and then twentieth century critics became quite interested in the narrator’s point of view – surely from whose point of view we see, say, Lolita is important. When Benjy, whose mind is that of a toddler, tells us one section of The Sound and the Fury, we know Faulkner is going to be limited in the commentary that his narrator is (realistically) capable of providing. These are artistic choices and we see them forming the stories. Huck Finn‘s strength comes from the limitations Twain embraced – he has to show us rather than “tell” us much because his narrator, even though he matures in interesting ways, is naive.

Given this, why does the press think the public has no interest in knowing whose point of view is structuring a reporter’s narrative about someone or other’s malfeasance or mere incompetence? We know from some other angle this may well seem someone else’s (the leaker’s?) responsibility. We also realize that within a bureaucracy many a person is passed over for promotion or engages in turf building that puts his ambitions at odd with another’s. We assume leakers are not evil, but we also assume they are human. Light is a good disinfectant.

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Just Another Country

Via Blogdex, we find U.S. Deploys Slide Show to Press Case Against Iran, which may leave you wondering if we’ve been sleepwalking toward disaster for the past four years:

The presentation, conducted in a conference room at the U.S. mission in Vienna, includes a pictorial comparison of Iranian facilities and missiles with photos of similar-looking items in North Korea and Pakistan, according to a copy of the slides handed out to diplomats. Pakistan largely supplied Iran with its nuclear infrastructure but, as a key U.S. ally, it is identified in the presentation only as “another country.”

Just another country … whose ISI enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the Taliban, if it did not actually create the Taliban; where Islamists rule two out of four provinces, including North-West Frontier, where in all likelihood both Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar have obtained refuge; and which has transferred nuclear technology to a sworn enemy of the United States. Just another country …

Answering the Question

Kevin Drum in The Washington Monthly has an article that starts out talking about how the Democrats don’t want to discuss security issues. He points out that 38% of the Republican delegates to this year’s national convention mentioned security subjects, while only 4% of the Democrat delegates wanted to talk about them. He then goes on to list four topics that should be included in any serious discussion of the danger of Islamic totalitarianism.

So I figured, what the hell? It’s worth a post. It’s not like anyone will bother to listen, anyway. Kevin wants a Liberal to address these issues (which I’m not), and anyone else will dismiss my opinion since I don’t have a string of letters after my name.

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