The Thomas Chronicles

Some time this past April Senator Reid declared that the war in Iraq is lost. Right around the same time House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was making her pilgrimage to the Mideast to encourage our enemies of our good intentions and to reassure them that they’ll be safe in their country from our meddling.

Despite General Petraeus’s good report on the Surge in September and the cascade of good news all across Iraq, the Democrats have stuck to their guns and maintain that the war is indeed lost. Shia militias and Sunnis are coming over to our troops in droves; actually working together and actively fighting Al Qaeda with us. Michael Yon had a very, very significant picture posted on his website of Muslim and Christian men erecting a Christian cross atop a church. Talk about a picture being worth a thousand words.

To these eyes, baby, that’s winning.

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In my effort to excise some part of me from political intrigue and debate, I’ve added some fun links to my Sidebar. Some of it is Hollywood palaver, some of it is science fiction blogs and magazines.

So, if you, dear constant readers, are desirous of a momentary break from the political cesspool, feel free to dive into these links. I’ll try to include more fun stuff on there as time goes by.

Being raised for the most part to a politically liberal education, I have often heard of the ‘Red Scare’ of Senator Joseph McCarthy. In my high school history books, Senator McCarthy was decried as a demagogue, a dangerous man who used our fear of the Communist menace to accrue power onto himself and to destroy and smear others.

In my English classes when we read Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”, my teacher resorted to historicism and suggested that the play about the famous Salem Witch Trials of New England was Miller’s satire/commentary on Senator Joe McCarthy’s ‘Red Scare’.

I swallowed all this whole. Every bit of it. Joe McCarthy is held up universally as the shadow of America, the prototypical Right Wing, warmongering, unscrupulous demagogue. Over the years this idea became not just a description of one man’s actions as US Senator, but as the caricature of fear mongering. It disappeared into a foundational premise, an assumption, upon which other ideas are based in my mind and in the mind legions of others.

Last night, that all changed.

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That age-old axiom indoctrinated into you since you were in grade school is no longer true. The Republican Party isn’t the party of the rich. It’s the Democrats.

Democrats like to define themselves as the party of poor and middle-income Americans, but a new study says they now represent the majority of the nation’s wealthiest congressional districts.

In a state-by-state, district-by-district comparison of wealth concentrations based on Internal Revenue Service income data, Michael Franc, vice president of government relations at the Heritage Foundation, found that the majority of the nation’s wealthiest congressional jurisdictions were represented by Democrats.

He also found that more than half of the wealthiest households were concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats hold both Senate seats.

“If you take the wealthiest one-third of the 435 congressional districts, we found that the Democrats represent about 58 percent of those jurisdictions,” Mr. Franc said.

…

“The demographic reality is that the Democratic Party is the new ‘party of the rich.’ More and more Democrats represent areas with a high concentration of wealthy households,” he wrote on Nov. 5 in the Financial Times of London, in a preview of his study.

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In preparation for last year’s Thanksgiving dinner, I made a short sojourn to the local supermarket. It was late morning and I was only a cup of coffee old. I knew I should have bought the groceries the night before, but the holiday crept up from behind me like a patient cat stalking its prey. One minute nothing was happening, the next minute BANG!, it’s right on top of you.

When I got there, I didn’t know whether the store was open or not. Back in Houston when I was younger, it was understood by all parties: You don’t leave the house on Thanksgiving. This wasn’t out of some stricture by my family— such as the notorious “Be home by midnight or else” or “Eat your vegetables”— Nope. It was because nothing was open for business except maybe the Denny’s down the road and the movie theaters.

Everything else was shut down for the day. Do not disturb. Kaput.

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I thought I’d pass along a question posed to me last night. To paraphrase:

We are six years into this war and there hasn’t been one single movie made showing the courage and valor of our troops in Iraq. Isn’t there something wrong with this?

*** Update below ***

To my previous post, commenter Hass had the following things to say:

“Nonsense. The IAEA report says no such thing about “building a warhead”. And, those Iranian centrifuges make low-enriched uranium which CANNOT be used to make bombs - doesn’t matter if there’s 3000 or 30 million of them - and they’re under constant IAEA surveillance.

The Iranians have offered to place additional restrictions on their enrichment program - beyond their legal obligations - to ensure that the centrifuges can’t even theoretically be secretly used to make bomb-grade enriched uranium. For example, they’ve offered to operate the facility as a joint venture with foreign governments.

Even Brazil and Argentina, which have recently developed the same technology, have not made such an offer.”

To this I have to confess, the IAEA made no mention about “building a warhead”. However, this doesn’t mean they’re not buiding one either. So, for the sake of accuracy, I was wrong and Hass was correct in this particular. But that is where it ends.

In any honest assessment of the Iranian situation, you would have to come to grips with the public statements of its President Ahmadinejad that he will wipe Israel off the face of the map. He has made his intentions quite clear to the world and to his own people.

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