Posting a review of the novel One Second After reminded me of this Web destination:

The Effects of a Global Thermonuclear War

Wm. Robert Johnston's hypothetical 1988 scenario, presented in the dispassionate language of the social scientist, is truly frightening. An excerpt:

12:00 midnight CDT 5/6 August 1988: The nuclear exchange is generally over. In the U.S. 5,800 warheads detonated totaling 3,900 mt. Soviet and NATO weapons successfully used in Europe numbered 3,300 (1,200 mt) (excluding tactical weapons). About 6,100 warheads (most of them American, but some Chinese, British, and French) exploded in the U.S.S.R. with a total yield of 1,900 mt. Mainland China (P.R.C.) received 900 (detonating) warheads (1,300 mt) from its northern neighbor. Other areas receiving at least a dozen warheads include Canada, North and South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Greenland, Puerto Rico, India, Israel, Australia, Guam, Cuba, Syria, and Egypt. Hundreds of other nuclear weapons have been used in naval combat, in troop combat in West Germany and along the U.S.S.R./P.R.C. border, and in defending the Soviet Union from nuclear attack. About 50% of the global strategic and theater nuclear arsenal has been used. About 10% was launched but did not reach a target and 30% was destroyed on the ground. Altogether, World War III has involved the detonation of 18,000 warheads with a total yield of 8,500 mt. Including tactical weapons, there were 67,000 nuclear weapons in the world a day ago; now, there are 10,000 left.

In the U.S. about 110,000,000 people have died altogether, with the 135,000,000 survivors including 30,000,000 injured. In the U.S.S.R. about 40,000,000 have been killed out of a pre-war population of 285,000,000. Mainland China has had 100,000,000 killed out of a population of 1,090,000,000. Examples of other countries: United Kingdom, 20,000,000 killed (out of 57,000,000); Denmark, 2,700,000 killed (out of 5,100,000); Australia, 3,000,000 killed (out of 16,000,000). In Mexico over 3,000,000 have been killed, mostly in cities on the border with the U.S. Throughout the world about 400,000,000 have died.

These bald statistics, based, as Mr. Johnston notes, on "intelligent speculation," perhaps explain why a nuclear war never actually happened. But this is the possibility with which we lived throughout the Cold War era. Good riddance to those troubled times.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:14 AM EST

Updated: Thursday, 4 March 2010 8:33 AM EST

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This interesting article by Gary Andres in the Weekly Standard analyzes the reasons why Democrats seem intent on passing ObamaCare with razor-thin partisan majorities despite the broad-based opposition of the American people.

Of the four reasons advanced, the two that seem most plausible to me are (a) peak majority and (b) base preservation. The idea behind (a) is that the Democratic congressional majority has reached its peak and is set to decline. So it's now or never for health care "reform." As for (b), it's driven by concern about the reaction of the party's progressive base if ObamaCare flops. What could be more demoralizing for progressive activists who've invested so many hopes in the Obama Administration? Wouldn't they desert the Democrats in droves?

How such considerations might influence individual Democrats in Congress, who may not be particularly progressive and have their personal political survival to worry about, remains to be seen. Would they really be willing to initial their own electoral death warrants for the sake of such theories? Well, we're about to find out…

Posted by tmg110 at 7:55 AM EST

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Defeat may be an orphan—but theories explaining defeat have the support of an enormous extended family.

Progressives are wringing their hands and rending their garments over the manifest failure of the Obama presidency to live up to its promise of hope and change. What went wrong? As usual in such situations, fingers are being pointed in every direction. It’s all Rahm Emanuel’s fault. No, it isn’t Emanuel’s fault—he’s the West Wing’s sole voice of reason. All right, then, it’s those dastardly, obstructionist Republicans. Oh, but wait, with healthy Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, the GOP is in no position to obstruct anything. OK, then it must be the dumb, ungrateful American people. And so it goes, with increasing shrillness of tone, to the great delight and amusement of conservatives like me.

It’s obvious, of course, why progressives have fallen into such a snit. The answer to their question is staring them in the face, every time they behold the President’s visage on a computer monitor or TV screen. Barack Obama is what went wrong—because he was never right to begin with.

On the tabula rasa that was candidate Obama, progressives inscribed all their fondest hopes. Free health care for all! Green jobs! Social justice! World peace! An end to American exceptionalism! The French will like us again! In the eyes of people for whom patriotism is so fifteen minutes ago, Obama looked like the answer to their (strictly secular) prayers. Hence the adulation with which his candidacy was received. Even members of his campaign staff, who surely ought to have known better, got into the habit of calling him “black Jesus.”

The real guy, alas, isn’t much of a Messiah. He's pretty second-rate, in fact. But this is forbidden knowledge that would make progressives feel really stupid if they took it in, so a scapegoat is necessary. Maybe Rahm, or maybe Nancy and Harry, or maybe those GOP rats, or maybe the whole lousy American people—but it can’t be Barack Obama. It just can’t.

Posted by tmg110 at 7:23 AM EST

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Great historical turning points are sometimes obvious only in retrospect. For those living through the history in question, a turning point can be passed with little notice. This may just have happened in the case of the Obama presidency.

The thing about turning points is that there's no turning back from them. When Lee lost at Gettysburg, the fate of the Confederacy was sealed. When Nixon approved the Watergate cover-up, he destroyed his presidency. History permits no do-overs.

Barack Obama may in fact have ruined his own presidency by the manner in which he made himself president. Presenting himself to gullible voters as a post-partisan national savior, he raised expectations to a stratospheric level that he and his administration never had a hope of meeting. More than one year into his tenure, the oceans have not receded, the terrorists have not beaten their suicide vests into iPods, and the atmosphere in Washington is more virulently partisan than ever. Even so, had he followed a sensible, moderate course, the President could have recouped. But sensible and moderate are two words that no objective observer would use in describing the Obama Administration. Instead we have witnessed hubris harnessed to incompetence. And now we see their inevitable result.

I think that future historians will cite the first three months of 2010 as the time of turning that ruined Barack Obama's presidency. The failure his his grandiose health care "reform," the collapse of climate alarmism, and the impending graduation of Iran to the status of a nuclear power refute every premise on which the Obama Administration is founded. I'd be glad to be proved wrong—Obama is President of the United States, after all, and his fate is to some extent ours. But I'm pretty sure that he's blown it. And the only thing that surprises me, frankly, is how little time it took him to screw everything up.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:52 AM EST

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It's a sure sign of White House disarray: stories in the media arguing that this presidential adviser is a ham-fisted doofus, while that on is a clever tactician with a firm grip on reality. An example of what I mean is this story:

Hotheaded Emanuel may be White House voice of reason

Rahm Emanuel is officially a Washington caricature. He's the town's resident leviathan, a bullying, bruising White House chief of staff who is a prime target for the failings of the Obama administration.

But a contrarian narrative is emerging: Emanuel is a force of political reason within the White House and could have helped the administration avoid its current bind if the president had heeded his advice on some of the most sensitive subjects of the year: health-care reform, jobs and trying alleged terrorists in civilian courts.

Now it may be quite true that the sharp-elbowed Emanuel is the Administration's resident political realist. But that's not the point. What I find remarkable about this story is its subtext. If Emanuel is the voice of reason, then isn't the President being unreasonable? That, in fact, is the gist of the emerging narrative. The rhetorical knives are out, and some of them are aimed at Obama's back.

In strict logic, there's nothing startling about the proposition that Obama brought his problems on himself. What is interesting is the readiness of certain figures in the media, Congress and the White House itself to throw the President under the bus. Now that's buyer's remorse.

Posted by tmg110 at 7:46 AM EST

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New polling reveals an ominous trend for the Democrats: President Obama's approval rating has collapsed in the nine states that flipped from Bush in 2004 to Obama in 2008. As NRO's Daniel Foster notes in his comment on these polls, things look grimmest in Indiana:  Rasmussen has Obama's approval/disapproval rating at 44/54 and Research 2000 has his favorability/unfavorability rating at 46/49. This is significant because Indiana is likely to be a battleground state in November. If the Dems do poorly there, they could have a very bad night nationwide.

Barack Obama's name will appear on no ballot anywhere in the country. But the record of his presidency will cast a long shadow over the nation on Election Day 2010—and as things stand today, that's not good for the Democratic Party.

Posted by tmg110 at 7:24 AM EST

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Well, we appear to have reached the point at which the actual content of a health care "reform" bill has now ceased to matter. As NPR's Mara Liasson put it yesterday on Fox News Sunday, "Passing this bill is not going to be a political winner. I mean, either way, it’s pretty grim. But I think it’s marginally worse if they go home with nothing. They show that they cannot govern effectively." Got that? We need health care "reform" so that Democrats can show us they're capable of governing. Sheesh.

Posted by tmg110 at 9:21 AM EST

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FYI, he's the patron saint of Wales. So have a leek for lunch today.

Posted by tmg110 at 8:58 AM EST

Updated: Monday, 1 March 2010 9:04 AM EST

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Hey, guess what? Washington, DC is working just fine. It's we the people who are causing all the problems. That's what Evan Thomas says in Newsweek, so I guess it must be true:

The problem is not the system. It's us—our "got mine" culture of entitlement. Politicians, never known for their bravery, precisely represent the people. Our leaders are paralyzed by the very thought of asking their constituents to make short-term sacrifices for long-term rewards. They cannot bring themselves to raise taxes on the middle class or cut Social Security and medical benefits for the elderly. They'd get clobbered at the polls. So any day of reckoning gets put off, and put off again, and the debts pile up.

Actually, I agree to a point with his analysis. The American people's entitlement mentality is a big part of the problem we face today. But where did the entitlement mentality come from, Evan? Wasn't it created and nurtured by the liberals progressives who created those entitlements in the first place? Remember FDR? LBJ? Ted Kennedy? But Thomas has a hope for their political heir, Barack Obama,

Almost all objective medical experts agree that something should be done to cut back the vast jury verdicts won by clever trial lawyers in medical-malpractice cases. But the Democrats have declined to even try. Why? Because trial lawyers are among the biggest campaign contributors to the Democratic Party.

If Obama were to come out squarely for medical-malpractice reform—in a real way—he would be making an important political statement: that as president he is willing to risk the political fortunes of his own party for the greater good. It would give him the moral standing, and the leverage, to call on the Republicans to match him by sacrificing their own political interests—by, for instance, supporting tax increases to help pay down the debt.

Once again, I agree with this to a point. There's not the slightest chance, however, that Obama will do anything of the kind. Recall his health care "reform" pitch. Essentially the President has been saying that we can have it all: more coverage, better access and higher quality, all at a lower cost. Nothing need be sacrificed—except of course by faceless corporate entities such as insurance companies. How's that for pandering to the entitlement mentality?

So, Evan, I wouldn't be looking toward the White House for the profile in courage you seek. Progressives like Obama created the entitlement monster. And you may remember what happened to Victor Frankenstein…

Posted by tmg110 at 4:18 PM EST

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Dear President Obama,

I watched your health care summit. Gosh, it sure didn't work out  the way you hoped it would, did it? Oh, I know you were trying to pretend that you're all bipartisan and stuff—but if that were really the case, you would have held your summit with Republicans about six months ago. Doing it just blast week revealed the contempt with which you, your administration and your congressional allies view ordinary people. You think they're stupid. You thought you could fool them. You were wrong.

Sincerely,

American Public Opinion

Posted by tmg110 at 3:39 PM EST

Updated: Sunday, 28 February 2010 3:55 PM EST

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