Posted 8:12 AM by Robert Ronald Smith

Continued depression

When I first put "Cemetary" on my website, it was for slain civilian Iraqis. I started the Coalition/U.S. cemetary later. During "Shock and Awe", there were almost no Coalition casualties, and the number of Iraqi civilians killed mounted quickly.

As both counts continued to rise, I had to take the Iraqi cemetary off my home page because it was simply too large... and then the Coalition losses mounted to the point that a cemetary for them seemed appropriate.

In looking back, the Coalition cemetary is larger than the Iraqi cemetary was when I first put that up. We're now approaching 1,000 Coalition dead, and 846 (88% of them) are American. Not much of a "coalition", is it?

The Iraqi CIVILIAN cemetary that I maintain on a separate page, has reached a KNOWN MINIMUM of 9,436 dead. Iraq Body Count estimates that it may be as high as 11,317. It's almost impossible to wrap one's mind around numbers like that, which is why I created the cemetaries. If you visually "walk" through them, you can get a better feel for just how many people have been wasted on this futile, destructive war.

The body counts are just the tip of the iceberg. Only our government knows (and they're certainly not telling) how many U.S. servicemen and women have been seriously injured. Because of body armor, the injuries that DO occur are often terribly disabling... head wounds and loss of arms and legs. Many more will have suffered extreme mental anguish that may never go away.

I do indeed find all this quite depressing, especially when I look at poll results. Although Americans are slowly coming to realize that what they've been told by the administration (with a lot of help from Fox News and other complicit new groups) have been bald-faced lies, there are still a great many people here who stubbornly refuse to believe what is staring them in the face. That's ignorance on a scale that depresses and scares me.

There are times I hate being right. I opposed this war before it started, as a matter of principle. It was unjustified BEFORE it became a "quagmire". If it had gone according to plan (although it looks like there wasn't much of a plan)... if everything had gone well... it still would have been WRONG. Unfortunately, nearly everything HAS gone sour, and many Americans now think we should exit while they still think we SHOULD have invaded. They now want us out because it hasn't gone well. Some of them are no doubt muttering that we should have just nuked Iraq, rather than lost American lives.

If we pulled out of Iraq today... completely out... it would still give me the feeling that we've stopped pounding on our heads with a hammer... and being relieved that we managed to stop before striking a fatal blow.

Posted 7:07 PM by Robert Ronald Smith

Maybe it's the heat

No, I'm not complaining about our temperatures, which have, for the most part, been totally delightful. As I get older, heat seems to bother me more. I suppose the real truth is that as I get older, everything bothers me more. I'm sorry to say that I'm frustrated with the progress of the libertarian movement. I see the same problems I saw in 1996, and the same stubborn unwillingness to get serious about strategy.

Like so many before me, over an 8-year period, I worked harder for the libertarian cause than I ever worked at making a living. I painstakingly convinced others to make some major changes that have provided the basis for real growth, only to watch as those foundations are being frittered away by carelessness and a lack of strategic thinking.

To be fair, libertarians face the constant problem of impatience. They see tragic consequences all around us, and a deepening danger from our bloated and increasingly intrusive government. When you see so many things going terribly wrong, and believe you know what can solve those problems, patience is difficult to retain. So, libertarians are regularly deluged by hundreds of ideas that might reach a few people, who might just listen, and might just join our struggle. With great enthusiasm and great energy, we DO everything we can think of... but with little forethough, and with no strategic planning.

It's so difficult being an all-volunteer organization that my hopes may well be unrealistic. It's painful to have to find a way to tell a volunteer that their new-to-them idea won't produce significant results. It's painful to try to get eager volunteers to do "grunt" work that is necessary but no fun. It's painful to try to imbue new young volunteers with past experiences and learned lessons when they want to try out their new ideas. It should be obvious that if a scattering of ideas was good enough, we would have had more progress to this point. There are no magic bullets, and no resources we can afford to waste on schemes that are less than damned good.

When you add in a poor economy, the fact that most libertarians are working people, the obstacles our D & R opponents place in front of us, plus an increasingly dumbed-down, busy, complacent public, we libertarians may be working on an impossible task. Time will tell.

Posted 7:18 AM by Robert Ronald Smith

Mr. Reagan has gone

It may seem odd for a libertarian to mourn the loss of a Republican President, but I always felt a kinship with Reagan. He had qualities I wish I had, such as a seemingly endless optimism in the goodness of man. Despite having strong moral ideas of right and wrong, he didn't seek to force those ideas on others. Judging by comments from those who worked around him, what most of us saw in public was the real Ronald Reagan; no subterfuge, no "public" face hiding the real guy. He was a plain-talking, honest man who spent no effort trying to impress others. He seemed far more concerned about results than appearances, and more concerned about long-term results than short-term... all qualities I wish I could more consistently display.

I don't think Reagan was of particularly high intelligence... a trait I have noticed can sometimes be a big advantage. He undertook goals that smarter people would have avoided, and plunged ahead with that optimism that if the idea is right, it can succeed.

It seems rather clear that Reagan was not a great administrator, and that some things went wrong on his watch. I've long believed that one cannot be great on the level of vision and also great at detailed implementation, so I can excuse Reagan, and other Presidents, for some poor implementation. That problem is one reason why government (and other organizations) become less controlled and less effective the larger they get.

Reagan was a serious Christian, yet as an atheist, I never felt threatened by his religious views. Although his beliefs could have been anti-gay, the first gay couple to overnight in the White House were invited by he and Nancy.

The public view of Reagan, especially here in Minnesota, has been grossly distorted by lies and misrepresentation. I don't think that bothered him much, but it bothers me, because those distortions have led many people down the "primrose political path"... placing blame in the wrong places, and placing suspicion in the wrong directions. Left-wingers were desperate to somehow avoid admitting that Reagan turned the world from the brink of disaster into a most peaceful, prosperous period. Those left-wingers, rather than learning from a postive experience they couldn't take credit for, instead resorted to massive, repetitive, distorted smears... the worst sort of political manipulation, to further their own political ends, at the expense of the whole country.

Conservatives deserve a lot of blame as well. They didn't continue the Reagan legacy. They, as usual, didn't have the political courage to stand up, as he had, for what was right and would succeed. They also submitted to their lust for power, and took actions, in Reagan's name, that he would never have approved of. Neocons have taken the U.S.'s dominate position that Reagan wanted as a basis for ending the Cold War and furthering peaceful coexistance, and subverted that dominate position into empire-building. It's quite the opposite of what Reagan envisioned.

Some day the Reagan years will be correctly understood, but I doubt that it will be in my lifetime. In a nation that still believes that Lincoln and FDR were great Presidents, it may be a very, very long time.