Restraint

This article, by one Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post, has had me thinking for about a week. It gets right to the crux of what is and has been going on in the world for the past 15 years, at least -- although not quite in the way the author probably intended.

She's talking about a book by a conservative Harvard professor called "Manliness".

In it, she says the following:

"The problem of manliness is not that it does not exist," Mansfield concludes. "It does exist, but it is unemployed." Well, um, excuse me, but I think — it’s just my opinion, now, maybe you disagree, and I’m sure we could work it out — Mansfield has it exactly backward. Manliness does exist. The problem is that it’s overemployed — nowhere more than in this administration.

Well let me tell you Ruth, it is just your opinion, I do disagree, and I'm not so sure we can work it out.

She ends her article thus:

Mansfield writes that he wants to "convince skeptical readers — above all, educated women" — that "irrational manliness deserves to be endorsed by reason." Sorry, professor: You lose. What this country could use is a little less manliness — and a little more of what you would describe as womanly qualities: restraint, introspection, a desire for consensus, maybe even a touch of self-doubt.

But that’s just my view.

Well, I'm glad you're not going out on a limb to claim you're correct there. After all, that would be assertive and manly.

Our culture, our country, has plenty of restraint, and as a matter of fact often too much. It is excactly what brought 9/11 upon us. If you read any of Al Queda's literature, it is rife with how weak we are, how we are crippled with self-doubt and restraint, and how little respect that evil group of people have for these admittedly (by me, not them) noble qualities.

Allow me to expound. Restraint is what allowed 19 men with box cutters to commandeer 4 airliners and fly them into buildings. Foreknowledge and presumption of that restraint gave them the balls to try it. People from a more manly culture would have overpowered 5 men on a plane with boxcutters and kicked their collective asses. But no -- restraint was shown on three of the planes. Guess what? The fourth plane failed.

Restraint is what allowed Osama Bin Laden to live through the 1990's ... St. Bill's years.

Restraint is what Saddam Hussein relied upon to coninue his reign of horrors unmolested.

Restraint is what the U.N. is all about -- restraining anyone from doing anything to stop any tin-pot dictator from doing anything they want to. Inaction favors tyrants. Calling Bush a tyrant for taking action is not only hypocritical, it's dead wrong. This administration is paying, politically, for the restraint of the previous administration, and frankly I admire it's steadfastness in continuing the fight in the face of relentless attacks by the press and the massive and slowly more and more successful propaganda campaign against doing what needs to be done dispite the obvious political pressure against it. These guys aren't as concerned with staying in office as they are in doing what needs to be done.

Like a man.

(note -- that's a metaphor. A an honorable woman will behave the same way, and a dishonorable man will not).