Egrets, I've had a few.* Lazy Sunday at the Last Manatee

* shamelessly ripped off from DailyKos blogger "Kestrel".

The tension is mounting here as the Psychic Octopus is one away from a perfect World Cup. Germany has won and we are only hours away from Netherlands versus Barcelona (let's be honest here). Does the Octopus win a fish prize?

Remember the Hutaree Militia out of Michigan? It seems one of their members was arrested yesterday for plotting to kill President Obama, during his trip to the Midwest.

Amitai Etzioni has a new proposal for small government conservatives. He proposes that the Department of Justice prepare legal opt-out forms where you can have your taxes decreased by 2/3rds if you agree not to partake of any government services, with the exception of the military. My objection is that Etzioni calculates the cost of the military wrong--it's 40% of discretionary spending. So you get a 60% reduction on your taxes instead.

Ezra Klein, policy wonk at the Washington Post, saved us $4 trillion on our national debt this past week. So instead of going on a roll, he decides to play the party pooper. You know all the hype about elections, the media coverage, the campaign expenditures and the like. Well, it doesn't matter. Ezra found some geeks who have played around with their computers and says the results of the elections within 2% error depends on the state of the economy and that specifically means how much money people feel they have in their pockets. Forget everything else. Of course, this year that's bad news for Democrats. If this catches on, it may be bad news for all the political hired hands.

The American Psychological Association wants Dr. James Mitchell stripped of his license for his participation in overseeing the 2002 torture of Abu Zubayah,who was thought to be the Number 3 of Al Qaeda. The APA warned members from participating in all programs that were considered torture during the last eight years. Since the proceedings are in Texas, it's anyone's guess about the result. For the record, classified documents have come out within the past month from the Government which indicate Abu Zubayah may not even had been a member of Al Qaeda, let alone number 3.

Richard Minter, writing in the Daily Beast, says that some of us who are making fun of the gonad bomber and the Times Square bomber are missing the point about Al Qaeda. Since the end of the Bush Administration and the first 18 months of the Obama Administration, Al Qaeda has suffered crippling blows to their middle-level managers and can not maintain the basic organizational ability to mount sophisticated operations anymore. They are stuck with buying local cell phones, which are easily followed by intelligence, and their front businesses and mechanisms for laundering money have been closed down through international cooperation. With the constant assassinations of their number 3s and other high-ranking operatives, they lack the experience of developing backup plans and fielding supportive manpower to cover the primary actors in any given action. They are in their third generation, which lacks the military experience and spycraft of the previous plotters.

But never fear, Ryan Mauro of the Christian Action Network posts a piece on David Horowitz' www.frontpagemagazine.com "Muslim Enclaves U.S.A." Building on Daniel Pipes' 2004 work documenting how Muslims are creating seperate enclaves based on sharia law in the United States, Mauro outlines several groups in the United States who are creating little Muslim enclaves in Baltimore and Philadelphia. He claims Muslims of America, a group Homeland Security links to the Pakistan terrorist group Jamaat Ul-Fugra, owns 22 villages sporting such names as "Islamberg", "Holy Islamville" and "Aliville". While interesting, the article neglects the threat of rampaging Mexican Muslims. Perhaps, that's in the follow-up piece. I thought the caliphate ended in Cordoba.

Following up on Hillary Clinton's defense in Poland of the struggling civil society around the world, Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum wrote a defense of democracy promotion, admitting the whole idea got a little abused during the Bush Administration with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But she argued that President Obama should speak on the subject more frequently.

Not having any of this, Pat Buchanan in "The Democracy Obsession" at www.amconmag.com says that the United States blew the opportunity to adopt a policy of non-intervention right after the Cold War. He then blames the superfluous foreign policy elites for conjuring up the intervention in Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, the Persian Gulf War, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He accuses the National Endowment for Democracy and Freedom House of subverting regimes in Belgrade,Caracas, Kiev, Tbilisi, Beirut and Bishkek. He argues that democratic states don't make us any secure and are not our friends. He slams W for pushing democracy in the Middle East. Pointing out that pressuring Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine to have elections yielded us the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbullah and Hamas. He points to South Africa, Brazil, India and Turkey as prime examples of democracies going their own way--away from the United States. He points to both India and Brazil lining up with China to fight caps on carbon emissions and Turkey drifting toward Iran and Syria because of its reactions to Israeli actions.

Coming off his book on World War II, where he blames Churchill, he gets his digs in at the Brits again. He points out that the British sided with Mexico during the Mexican War and with the South in our Civil War. He points out that democratic governments such as Sweden and Ireland were neutral during WWII but that the Soviet Union and Chang Kai Shek sided with the U.S. He says that France denied Reagan airspace for his attack on Libya but that Salazar's Portugal gave Nixon the use of the Azores during the Yom Kippur War. He also has to throw in his plug for Pinochet in Chile.

With the fade of the Third Wave of Democratization, democracy advocates will have to answer Buchanan on the merits of his case and not slam him as an isolationist , anti-semite as we used to. America's engagement with the world will have to be re-thought and the advantages and limits of democracy promotion will have to be honestly addressed. My reservations these days are about the corporatization of democracy promotion programs. Those involved literally constitute multi-million dollar industries. Democracy promotion became institutionalized during the Clinton Administration when USAID committed billions to the effort, spurring the creation of democracy programs in every NGO known to man and then some. At the time, I was proud of my small role in pushing this development but sometimes it seems we neglected the other issues of development and we sold people on what democracy promotion really wasn't. Even during George W. Bush, democracy promotion was heralded as conflict resolution and as a tool of peace, not war. Today, major defense contractors reap the benefits of democracy funding, pulling down contracts of $50 million or more to implement just small segments of a democracy program. And under few cirumstances can the development of democracies in previously underdeveloped countries yield automatic allies in foreign policy.

What is ruinous to democracy promotion is its militarization and integration into war efforts. Take the slogan of democracy advocates, "Democracies don't start wars." We just got through an American administration which adopted a strategic policy of pre-emptive war. Or the idea during the W administration that democracies don't create terrorists. Throughout the 1970s, we had the alienated young in Western Europe create the Baader Mienhoff Brigade, the Red Brigade and in the United States the Weathermen. On the Left, there is the notion that it is poverty that creates the terrorism of the Middle East. But the profile of Al Qaeda and others are of upper-middle-class , college educated young people, disgusted at the discrepancy of wealth in their countries and repulsed by Western policies, who reconstitute themselves with religion and react violently to their conditions. That's why I am dubious about efforts in Afghanistan about nation-building. While they can ameliorate the local conditions, they don't address the heart of the problem.

And, finally, Glenn Beck says that Woodrow Wilson is America's most evil President. Reading Pat Buchanan's article, he might agree since Wilson started the whole American thrust toward democracy promotion and self-determination. But I gather Beck suggests that Wilson kicked off the whole "progressive" agenda to bring about socialism in our time. It's an interesting topic to consider--evil American Presidents. One of the nice things about the United States is that we really only have nincompoops, mediocrities, inadequate and sometimes corrupt Presidents. But do we get to evil?

For my generation, Richard Nixon ranks high on the ugly scale but can we even suggest this maudlin, insecure man, who actually had to rehearse walking like a President, was evil? Corrupt, cynical and Machivellian, sure. Did he commit evil acts? Yes. But he doesn't rank with Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and the others in the evil pantheon. He envied them. That's for sure.
Even W, whom I would rank as one of and maybe the worst President of the United States, given the extensive damage he did in every area of our life, just didn't have the heart to implement Dick Cheney's scheme for an all-powerful President. I think this accounts for why he was absent for the last two years of his Administration.

So Woodrow Wilson? Wilson was a racist and embarked on a domestic crackdown on strikers and dissenters, but he also tried to embrace a reform agenda. For years, Wilson ranked about 16 in the Siena College rankings of Presidents. He too was crippled for the last years of his Administration by strokes and illness. But Woodrow Wilson as evil? C'mon.