Justice Clarence Thomas: "About the only way I would get invited to Columbia is if I was a Middle East dictator with nuclear weapons." Heh! (Hat tip: InstaPundit.)

One of the things that struck me watching the first part of Ken Burns’s The War last night on my TiVo was the focus on body counts. Whenever he would talk about a battle in the Pacific, it was always the comparitive body count that seemed to matter most: yeah, we lost X number of men, but the Japanese lost more, so it was a success! And it wasn’t just Burns. One of the soldiers he interviewed talked about a failed Japanese ambush on Guadalcanal in which 900+ Japanese soldiers were killed, but only 36 Americans died. “That was really great for morale,” the soldier said. And of course, I understand why — that’s a huge victory — but at the same time, I thought, wow, it really shows how your perspective changes in war. Those 36 dead Americans undoubtedly had good friends in the unit who were devastated to lose them. And yet it was “great” for morale that they were the only ones who died.

With that in mind, I was struck by the top headline in today’s issue of USA Today as I walked past a news box in downtown Knoxville this afternoon:

“19,000 militant fatalities since ‘03.” My initial, instinctive reaction upon reading that was: “Really? 19,000? Well, hey, that puts those 3,800 American fatalities in perspective, doesn’t it?” To which I think, upon reflection, that the correct answer is: yes and no. On the one hand, this is a very, very different kind of war than the mass-mobilization, fight-to-the-last-man battle that was World War II, so the cruel arithmetic of body counts doesn’t have the same significance. Plus, unlike in conventional wars, we have to ask whether our presence in Iraq is breeding anger to such a degree that two new militants are popping up for every militant who dies. (I don’t presume to know the answer to that question; I’m just saying it has to be asked.) But on the other hand, it is nice to know that we’re more efficient at killing the enemy than they are at killing us. I mean, I think we all suspect that instinctively, but it’s nice to have hard numbers to back it up.

Here’s the full story. It points out that “U.S. commanders consider the number of enemy deaths a poor measure of progress in an insurgency.” I sort of figured that, but even so, seeing the headline got me thinking along lines similar to the question I asked earlier this month in reference to blogger Michael Totten’s account of the surge’s success: “why aren’t we hearing more about this sort of thing?” The subheadline on the USA Today story reads, “Military discloses stats for first time.” Well, for heaven’s sake, what’s taken them so long?

Leaving aside the merits for a moment, and looking at this purely as a P.R. issue, it strikes me as head-smackingly stupid for the Bush Administration to not publicize these numbers. Even if they’re not terribly meaningful in reality, an awful lot of people will have the same initial reaction I did — or perhaps even a more rah-rah version of it, along the lines of Hey! We’re kickin’ ass! — and many won’t then retreat to the more philosophical “yes and no” answer that I eventually settled on. They’ll stick with instinctual “hell yeah!” sort of response. Needless to say, from President Bush’s perspective, such reactions are pure gold.

Memo to the Bush Administration: If you want people to support an ongoing war, you need to tell them we’re killing the bad guys. It helps with morale. It gives people something to rally around. It prevents them from feeling like the whole effort is pointless and we’re just wasting money and lives. Helping the Iraqi people build a stable democracy — that’s a worthy goal, but an esoteric one, hard to wrap your mind around. But killing bad guys: everybody understands that.

Ideally, you’d like to be able to say that we’re killing the bad guys more efficiently and consistently than they’re killing us. The government understood that in World War II, which is why they initially suppressed the news of how bad the death toll at Pearl Harbor was, and how poorly things were going in some early Pacific battles. They had to lie to rally support. All the Bush Administration needs to do is tell the truth! So what’s taken them so long? Why aren’t they shouting these numbers from the rooftops?

The article explains that the answer is at least partially a reaction to Vietnam:

The U.S. military rarely discusses the numbers of enemy dead, fearful of raising parallels with the Vietnam War when the U.S. military’s reliance on “body counts” led to allegations of inflated figures because of political pressure to show results.

Well, I understand that fear, I guess, but isn’t this a case of the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction? Just because you don’t want to exaggerate body counts, which I certainly agree with, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t even release accurate ones! Especially with the media being veritably obsessed with the body count on our side, doesn’t it make sense to tell ‘em the count on the other side, to provide some context? Yet the military didn’t even release this data of its own accord. It was “provided at USA TODAY’s request.”

Say what you will about the media and its biases, but one thing I know for sure is this: journalists love numbers. You give them a number that quantifies, or purports to quantify, a major news story, and they will report it far and wide. This is a reality that Rudy Giuliani understood when he refused to speculate about the death toll on 9/11, and that Ray Nagin, Kathleen Blanco and others failed to understand when they shot off their mouths about “10,000 body bags” after Katrina. (Giuliani, like everyone else, probably feared the World Trade Center toll was well into the five digits, but he knew better than to give voice to that fear, since his pessimistic estimate, based on nothing, would have been treated like gospel in the media. Instead, he said the toll would be “more than any of us can bear” — a pitch-perfect answer, even if it frustrated the number-hungry journos. By contrast, the Louisiana officials had no such self-restraint, and the result was widespread and long-lasting overreporting of Katrina’s toll.) Whether they love the war or hate it, the media would report these numbers if the administration was harping on them regularly, and the numbers would provide a valuable counterweight — in media coverage and public perception, regardless of the realities on the ground — to the ever-growing, always-heavily-reported “milestones” in the death toll among U.S. soldiers.

I am continually baffled and amazed by this administration’s incompetence, not only in mismanaging the war in Iraq, but in mismanaging the propaganda war at home. Good grief.

Following hot on the heels of yesterday’s proof that Bush is Hitler, now we have proof that the Texas Longhorns are evil — or at least, that they’re supported by both President Bush, who the Left believes is Hitler, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who the Right believes is Hitler! Texas: favorite team of the Little Hitlers! Mack Brown, Colt McCoy and Limas Sweed are the new axis of evil!

P.S. This post invokes Godwin’s Law on the Texas football season, which means the Longhorns are now obligated to forfeit all of their remaining games. Congratulations, Oklahoma, you’ve just won the Big 12 South. :)

This story, out of Hendersonville, Tennessee, is the sort of thing that’s liable to make Becky cry these days. Hell, it might make me cry, if I think too hard about it. It’s really, really sad. Excerpt:

On Friday, Mrs. Reeves delivered her seven-pound,
14-ounce boy into this world without complications. Soon afterward she
phoned Iraq to deliver the happy news. There, Spc. Joshua H. Reeves,
her soldier-husband of two years, was stationed with troops from Fort
Riley, Kan. …

One
day’s joy turned to sorrow on Saturday as a bomb detonated as Joshua
Reeves’ Humvee drove down a Baghdad street. Leslie Reeves…was still in the hospital with her new baby when she learned
she was a widow.

So says Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It would be funny, because of its blatant absurdity, if it weren’t coming from someone whose government executes gays as a matter of policy.

Also, it seems Columbia President Lee Bollinger gave Mad Mahmoud quite a mouthful in his introductory remarks. (Hat tip: InstaPundit.) I haven’t watched the video yet, but it sounds like a pretty awesome, and well-deserved, "string of insults," as Ahmadinejad put it later, taking umbrage just as he took umbrage at Mike Wallace daring to ask direct and forceful questions on 60 Minutes. (You’ll have to forgive Mahmoud; he’s not too familiar with the whole “free speech” thing.)

Less awesome is the fact that, apparently, Ahmadinejad got a good reception from some of the far-left idiots in attendance at the Columbia event. Anybody who childishly mimicks anti-Bush talking point is okay by them, I guess. Some think he’s “entirely reasonable.” Some even have crushes on him! And some were utterly humiliated by President Bollinger’s factually accurate “insults,” and cheered and applauded Ahmadinejad when he criticized Bollinger’s lack of “manners.” I guess some folks weren’t really interested in a free and unfettered exchange of ideas, including harsh criticisms and tough questions for Dear Leader Mahmoud?

But hey, although they might not realize it, those Ahmadinejad-apologist fools are actually an unwitting testament to what’s great about America: in this country, you have the unalienable right to be an idiot — and more to the point, the unalienable right to speak out against your government, no matter how wrong-headed your views might be. Imagine if George W. Bush (or, ahem, perhaps a slightly more articulate American leader) came to speak at a university in Iran, and started reciting anti-Ahmadinejad talking points. There might be some Iranian dissidents who would cheer, but they would do so at great personal risk, as they could potentially be arrested or even killed if the government deemed them enough of a threat. Certainly, the government would do everything in its power to exclude them from the lecture hall if it could identify them in advance, thus producing a mirage of monolithic anti-American sentiment. In this country, by contrast, no such effort was made; the government did not try to “manage” the event so as to make sure the audience response was uniformly anti-Ahmadinejad. The marketplace of ideas was allowed to do its thing, unfettered and unimpeded, and thus, unlike in Iran, and unlike in the fanciful dystopia that some radical lefties erroneously believe they are currently living in — y’know, Chimpy W. Hitler’s fascist police state of Amerikka — the result was the gloriously messy cacophony of viewpoints that can only happen in a free country. Somehow I suspect the amazing virtue of that reality will be lost on Mahmoud, but we shouldn’t let it be lost on us.

Can someone explain to me why this isn’t making bigger headlines?

Israeli commandos seized nuclear material of North Korean origin during a daring raid on a secret military site in Syria before Israel bombed it this month, according to informed sources in Washington and Jerusalem.

The attack was launched with American approval on September 6 after Washington was shown evidence the material was nuclear related, the well-placed sources say.

They confirmed that samples taken from Syria for testing had been identified as North Korean. This raised fears that Syria might have joined North Korea and Iran in seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.

(Hat tip: InstaPundit, who wins the understatement-of-the-year award for saying, “This seems like news.”)

Aye, it be hot in Iraq, and don’t let those bloody MSM scalawags tell y’ different! (Tip o’ the hat: Cap’n Glenn of the Good Ship InstaPundit.)

My mom has been doing some genealogical research, and has apparently found the answer to a question I’ve long wondered about: just how many generations ago did the Irish side of my family (the McNamaras) emigrate from the old country and come to America? It seems the answer is six. My dad is a fifth-generation American on the McNamara side, and I’m sixth-generation.

According to my mom’s research, my great-great-great-grandfather, John McNamara, was born in Ireland in 1822.  His wife Mary, my great-great-great-grandmother, was also born in Ireland, in 1828.  I don’t know when they got married, but it seems they had their first child in 1855 or thereabouts, in Connecticut. Their fifth child, born in 1863 (also in Connecticut), was Daniel, a second-generation American and my great-great-grandfather. Dan McNamara begat Joe McNamara, who begat Helen McNamara Loy, my paternal grandmother. And the rest, as they say, is history. (Though as Nana Loy would point out, "What the hell do they know? They’re a bunch of horse’s asses anyway." Or words to that effect. :)

My understanding is that the McNamaras always claimed that they had come over before the Great Potato Famine, but we’ve never been sure if that claim was accurate. It has been speculated that certain proud members of the family might have wanted to separate themselves from the riffraff, if you will, by pretending they weren’t forced to come here because of starvation, as so many other "shanty Irish" were. Well, now we finally have some dates, and let’s see: if we assume that John and Mary were married in Ireland, and that she was at least 18 when they got hitched, that would mean they left Ireland sometime between 1846 and ~1855.

The famine was from 1845 to 1849. Ahem. You do the math.

So my ancestors, it seems, were quite likely refugees of the Great Potato Famine. Interesting.

UPDATE: Belatedly, it occurs to me that my logic vis a vis the timetable may not be entirely airtight. All we know, I think, is that John and Mary were both born in Ireland; we don’t actually know that they emigrated together, as adults, as opposed to emigrating separately, as children, and then meeting and marrying in America. The latter is also possible, and it would not be at all surprising if two first-generation immigrants met in this country and married each other; immigrant communities were very tight-knit in those days. If that were the case, it would mean the McNamaras did indeed come over here before the famine.

Of course, the other thing that’s odd about this whole train of thought is that, although I talk about these great-great-great-grandparents as "the McNamaras" because they are the ones who carried the name McNamara, the reality is I’m really only talking about a small sliver of the Irish ancestry from the "McNamara side" of my grandparentage (i.e., from my Nana Loy). One-eighth of it, to be exact. John and Mary McNamara were Nana Loy’s great-grandparents; they represent a mere 12.5% of her bloodline. Yet she was 100% Irish. That means seven-eighths of Nana’s (and my) Irishness came from other ancestors, who may have emigrated at other times, under other circumstances.

Regardless, I find this sort of stuff fascinating. I wish I knew more about my ancestors; I’d love to read their life stories, if they were written down anywhere. Even little snippets of information, though, make me feel more connected to these long-ago ages past. For my Immigration Law class at Notre Dame last fall, we had to write a brief paper about our own "immigration history," and in the course of researching it (again mostly via my mom), I learned all sorts of stuff I’d never known before, like how the Loomers (my maternal grandfather’s side) are really a very old family in this country, dating back to the mid-1600s, as I recall. They didn’t come over on the Mayflower, but they weren’t that far removed from it either. … Alas, very very little is known about the Loys. We don’t even really know where they came from, or what the origin of the name is.

As Fark.com would say, EVERYBODY PANIC.

Vladimir Putin dissolved his government…

…the military announced the creation and testing of “The Dad Of All Bombs“…

…and a bunch of people had sex.

Somehow, I’m sure these events are all connected. And the connection probably involves vodka.

President Bush will announce this week plans to cut U.S. troops in Iraq
by about 30,000 — to pre-’surge’ levels — by next summer, a senior
administration official confirms to CNN.

John McCain and Joe Lieberman:

The Bush administration clung for too long to a flawed strategy in this war, despite growing evidence of its failure. Now advocates of withdrawal risk making the exact same mistake, by refusing to re-examine their own conviction that Gen. Petraeus’s strategy cannot succeed and that the war is "lost," despite rising evidence to the contrary.

The Bush administration finally had the courage to change course in Iraq earlier this year. After hearing from Gen. Petraeus today, we hope congressional opponents of the war will do the same.

Some of that "rising evidence to the contrary" can be found in Michael Totten’s absolutely fascinating first-hand account from Ramadi, a city once written off by the Marines as irretrievably lost, but now reclaimed thanks to the surge. It’s the most convincing account I’ve read of the success we’re (finally) having in Iraq, and frankly, I don’t understand why the hell it’s being left to individual conservative bloggers to write accounts like this. Where is the media? Where is the Bush Administration’s vaunted propaganda machine? Seriously, why aren’t we hearing more about this sort of thing? If we were, I think it would go a long way toward convincing Americans that there actually is a purpose to remaining in Iraq, that there are real, attainable goals we can achieve by continuing the fight — that we can still win, and that "victory" actually means something real and tangible.

Anyway, whatever you think of the war, Petraeus, or the "surge," Totten’s article is excellent and I highly recommend it. (Double hat tip: InstaPundit.)

CORRECTION: In comments, Totten himself writes, “for the record, I am neither a liberal nor a conservative.” Well, I for one certainly know what that’s like. :) I stand corrected, and I apologize for the error.

“Did Mr Bush last week set America inexorably on a path to the next war?”

If so, I somehow think the fallout (no pun intended) will last a wee bit longer than three days.

Russia will send a man to the Moon by 2025. But will they do the other things?

P.S. Maybe they could send Putin? And leave him there?

P.P.S. In Soviet Russia, you do not send man to Moon; Moon sends man to you.

As forecasted here (see “PS” at bottom of post, and Comment #6 :), the cyclone-scraped nation of Jamaica has bowed to Reality and postponed its scheduled August 27 election by a week.

In other Democracy-related news, the USofA’s Democratic National Committee’s Rules & Bylaws Committe has voted that millions of Florida Democrats’ ballots will be thrown out if they are cast on January 29 as decreed by Florida’s Republican-dominated legislature, rather than on February 5 (or later) as required by DNC Rules.

(Note: The foregoing paragraph is actually a massively-oversimplified distortion of a complex & important election-Law-vs.-party-Rules story; but what can I tell ya, I’m just feeling Fox-Newsy today. :)