By its very nature, the war on terror will be fought mostly in the shadows. Unfortunately, politicians and bureaucrats MUST, at least in their own minds, be seen to be fighting the good fight. By the rules of The Game, perception is reality.

Unfortunately, we the public bear the brunt of the actions mandated by these authorities.

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An Oral History of al Qaeda’s Leader

by Peter L. Bergen

The United States is succeeding in its struggle against terrorism. The time has come to declare the war and terror over; so that an even more effective military and diplomatic campaign can begin.

by James Fallows

The Atlantic - September 2006

Thanks to Richard Reed, we take off our shoes and now we dump all our liquids before we board the aircraft. If this goes on, we may well end up checking our clothing and going through security in paper pajamas.

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Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of its Enemies Since 9/11

by Ron Suskind

The ugly truth is that Lebanon is a failed state. A sovereign state has many responsibilities. Three of the most important are:

1. Defend its borders.

2. Control what goes on within its borders.

3. Protect its citizens from harm whether that harm comes from within or without its borders.

Lebanon has failed in all three of these critical responsibilities.

What is Israel to do?

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This is the kind of Inaugural Address that John F. Kennedy might have given if he was entering his second term in January or 2005. It’s worth reading and if you can’t get past Bush, imagine it in another voice. The transcript follows (more…)

From the Best Minds in America, Bold Solutions to the Problems Politicians Dare Not Address

So far, ideological proposals have led to deadlock and the failure to secure our southern border for the past 30 years. Is a real solution possible? I think so.

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Collected Writings

by Michael Kelly

I’m reading it now. Commentary coming soon.

Coming Soon

Coming Soon

I’m no great fan of George W. Bush. I admire his resolve but his tactical prosecution of the War on Terror has been a disaster. How to deal with Islamic fundamentalism is THE strategic challenge that our country faces in the early decades of this century. So far, George W. Bush is failing to meet this challenge.

The administration has bungled the war effort by:

1. Trying to fight a war on the cheap.
2. Poor planning.
3. Going it alone.
4. Failing to articulate a vision.

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So much of the so called political debate in this country is of a very low standard.

Ideologues on both ends of the political spectrum trot out the same tired talking points – everybody’s screaming – nobody’s listening – and the resulting stew is seasoned with ramblings of the lunatic fringe.

In advocacy politics, truth is sacrificed in favor of impact and mind share. The political game is all about winning elections and good governance falls by the wayside.

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Why did I set up yet again another political blog?

For three reasons:

First, we live in interesting times. There is a lot going on in the world that will have a great impact, for good or ill, on our country, the world and future generations. I believe we are at a tipping point where the world will get a whole lot better or a whole lot worse based on the decisions we (as a species) make over the next 10, 20 or 50 years.

Second, so much of the so called political debate in this country is of a very low standard. Politics in this country is all about The Game and good governance falls by the wayside. I wanted to create a venue for reasoned discussion and debate about the issues of the day.

Finally, third, I wanted a place where I could write about important issues that I am passionate about on a daily basis.

I hope to make CentristRants.org into a venue for reasoned discussion and debate about the issues of the day.

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CentristRants.org is a work in progress. The Multiple Columns By Category WordPress template is a hack job at best. I will be working toward moving it (and a supporting plug-in?) into standards based compliance over time.

Anybody who wants this stuff can have it “as is.” Any support will be on a catch-as-catch-can, co-development basis – i.e. I expect as many or more answers as I do questions. Discussion of this development will be held in the in the commentary of this posting.

At launch, CentristRants.org suffers from the following known defects:

1. Total violations of the WordPress Loop by additional queries to retrieve posts for the Left, Center and Right columns separately. This prevents the home page from being recognized as the home page. Instead, the sidebar refers to the 3_Right archive. Also, this forces me to set the number of posts to show to 999 so I can be sure that some posts from each column will be displayed and because the links to previous entries and next entries do not work if and when they occur.
2. The “stars on blue” background on the left and the “red stripe” background on the right do not fill the entire area within the containing division.
3. The template is not generic yet. It’s hard coded for the columns I want. In the future, it will be soft coded to treat all categories that match the name pattern ._* where . is 0-9 and * is a legal tag in style.css (such as #* == #Left) as input to the multiple columns.

Hey, it’s good enough to get started. Comments and suggestions welcome.