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Dick Morris’ reminder of the support from foreign sources that the Clintons have received over the years isn’t particularly earthshaking.  It isn’t really news; their dealings with the Chinese were well known when they occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  It doesn’t paint a pretty picture of the role of foreign influence in another Clinton administration.  The question is, what should we do?  (By we, I’m thinking about Christians.)

There’s no doubt that another Clinton administration will witness an onslaught on Evangelical Christianity, including broad attacks by the IRS, an attempt to undermine or eliminate home (and possibly Christian) schooling, and very broad hate crimes legislation such as is administered in Canada.  Evangelical Christians cannot afford to fight back by the usual "taking a stand" and wrapping themselves in the flag, as they are wont to do now.  Every federal courthouse and prison has a U.S. flag flying over it.  The core problem for any kind of conservative in a left-wing administration is that it inverts their whole concept of country.  For Christians, "God and country" may quickly become "God or country."

A part of any solution lies in the out of country connections that they can develop.  These are already taking place.  The Anglicans are busy creating a network (of sorts) of churches with offshore headship.  Other denominations and para-church ministries should look at the same thing; after all, most denominations of any size have more members outside of the U.S. than in, and that includes availing themselves of the joy of offshore financial resources.  Christians of many kinds are seriously conflicted on illegal immigration; there are too many people coming into this country illegally who come to the Lord to pass up.

The Federal government cannot expect its citizens to remain blindly patriotic when its leaders succumb to influence and many times outright bribery from foreign governments and sources.  (It will try, though.)  A government which expects its citizens to revere its sovereignty but compromises it on a higher level can’t expect to maintain its credibility indefinitely.  Beyond that, a country whose moneyed and chattering classes "run the aisles" when the Saudis and others bail out its central financial institutions will create a climate of "cognitive dissonance" within the nation that will come back to haunt it.
If we end up saddled with another Clinton administration, we need to look at our options.  If she has foreign friends, we should too.

I’m getting to the point where I find articles like Joe Conason’s "Mike Huckabee, the Constitution and Biblical Law" more amusing than a source of anger.  His ultimate objective, of course, is to show that Mike Huckabee is a dangerous theonomist who would impose a theocracy if elected President.

Such fear is based on the assumption that same imposition is a potential reality, which is why liberals spend so much time worrying about it.  If it were not so, they would ignore it.  But neither liberals nor Evangelicals understand that, as things stand now, the "Religious Right" is in no position to impose much of anything on the U.S.  There are two basic reasons for this.

The first is that the whole Evangelical game plan for life is well suited to get people off of the very bottom of society and equally ill-suited to get them to the very top.  People who posit George W. Bush as an example of the contrary forget that a) he comes from a prominent family with the educational and social opportunities that come with it, all of which are missing from most Evangelicals’ personal arsenals, and b) has done some patently unbiblical things (mostly in the Middle East) which indicate he is not as sharp of an Evangelical as many thought he was.

This leads to the second point: the whole Evangelical game plan is crippled by a defective paradigm of authority, one which is underscored by the fact that Huckabee, according to Conason, is a Gothard man.  As I discussed last month, Evangelicals’ "seamless" theory of authority (especially Gothard’s) is crippled by the structure of Evangelical churches.  Born in rebellion and diffuse in nature, Evangelical churches are unsuited for the task that theonomists would have them perform in a theocratic state.  Without a unified church ready to exercise state powers, Evangelicals’ hopes of imposing any form of theonomy will remain a mirage.  You simply cannot impose a Christian regime on society without a state church, and Evangelicals will not abandon their institutional and theological diversity to make that a reality.

Turning to more immediate matters, it’s unlikely that Huckabee has broad enough appeal even within the Republican Party to secure the nomination.  He may very well influence the ultimate selection of a nominee, either through the primary process (John Edwards is doing that on the Democrat side) or in a brokered convention.  But he lacks the financial resources and the broad base to get any further than that.  But, hey, Evangelicals have been influencing the party without a candidate for a long time (with very marginal results in the broad view.)

If there is a danger to liberals, it’s that the Christian influence in "flyover country" may make it more and more difficult to recruit suitable candidates to fill the ranks of the military once people in same flyover country realise that they’re fighting someone else’s wars with no benefit to themselves.  They’re already running out of patience with the Iraq adventure, as Julian Delasantellis’ article reminds us.  Liberals may not see how relevant this would be in a post-Bush post-neo-con world, but Bill Clinton found Haiti and Kossovo suitable objects of the U.S. armed forces, and these incursions were useful for his own purposes.  It’s hard to envision a Democrat president who would do otherwise unless they are very, very weak.

It’s not too often that I make an engineering commentary on this site, but the characterisation of the NTSB’s conclusion that a design flaw was the "critical factor" in the I-35 bridge failure in Minneapolis, MN, strikes me as a little misleading. (The NTSB’s own announcement is here.)

In its interim report, the FHWA went into great detail about how the gussets that failed were the most "underdesigned," to cut to the chase.  From this, the safety recommendation wisely urges the following:

For all non-load-path-redundant steel truss bridges within the National Bridge Inventory, require that bridge owners conduct load capacity calculations to verify that the stress levels in all structural elements, including gusset plates, remain within applicable requirements whenever planned modifications or operational changes may significantly increase stresses.

This is good thinking.  The problem is that it’s easy to misinterpret the failure to mean that, if the original designers of this (and any other bridge) had done their job properly, that this wouldn’t have happened.  To some extent that’s true, but it needs to be tempered by a few observations.

First, the bridge lasted forty years.  Generally speaking, serious design flaws manifest themselves earlier.  The most egregious example of this was the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, "Galloping Gertie," which literally tore itself to pieces when the narrow span resonantly interacted with the wind.

Second, the bridge was "beefed up" in the 1990’s.  This added weight to the bridge.  Any weaknesses in the bridge–design, material quality, maintenance neglect, or otherwise, are magnified by increases in bridge weight.

Third, the entire U.S. Interstate system is operating well over capacity in terms of traffic and weight load, especially truck traffic.  That too reduces the factors of safety in bridge components, making them more prone to failure.

Fourth, any design has weaknesses.  You can count on a structure, if it fails, to do so at its weakest point.

It’s entirely possible that, had the original conditions the bridge was designed for had continued without the addition of load (live or dead,) this accident would not have happened.  That’s the flip side of the NTSB’s recommendation, and that’s why the FHWA and state DOT’s need to take care when adding load to structures.

It’s a tribute to designers when designs persist in conditions beyond what they were intended to.  An example of this was the foundations of oil platforms in Katrina, not one of which failed even in that disaster.  But it’s not something that those who tend to our infrastructure, working in a society that frequently doesn’t fix what’s broke, can simply afford to take as a given.

The flap over Hillary Clinton’s remarks about the role of Dr. Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement can be seen as a tempest in a teapot, as so many discussions of race in this country are.  But her idea that it was Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Civil Rights Bill in 1964 speaks more about her idea of the role of government than it does about her racial attitudes.

When Hillary Clinton underscores the passage of legislation, what she is saying in effect is that government fiat is what drives the agenda in society.  The state of the law in the early 1960’s was the codification of racial attitudes that went back a long way.  A large part of a more equitable society is the changing of attitudes, and that was a large part of Martin Luther King’s objective and agenda, a process that continues today.  For Clinton, things are simpler: pass a law or obtain a Supreme Court decision, demonise the opposition by criminalising it, and that’s that.

But that doesn’t always work.  The best example of this is Roe vs. Wade.  Thirty-five years after that decision, we still have a viable anti-abortion movement in this country, one that the left still fears.  It’s possible that, if that decision had been an act of Congress, it would have had more impact on people’s attitudes, but the left hasn’t shown any stomach to abandon the safety of a Supreme Court decision.

If raw, government power is what you want, then Hillary’s your woman.  That’s one reason why she still has the loyalty of so many on the left.  But there are many, even in her own party, who long for an alternative, and the fact that her opposition has coalesced with an opponent who is seen as black makes her job harder.

On a visit to Houston, my client was kind enough to take me to a very nice South American restaurant. One of the items on the menu was the pollo camisado, or literally the shirted chicken (the “shirt” consisted of plantain chips.) I joked that Juan Peron’s favourite dish would have been pollo descamisado, or shirtless chicken.

Peronistas and students of Latin American history will recall that a large part of Peron’s support came from the working classes, referred to as los descamisados, the shirtless ones. It’s also worth recalling that Peron’s second (Eva) and third (Isabel) wives played prominent roles in the government, Isabel actually ending up President herself. It’s also worth noting that Argentina continues the tradition of elevating presidential wives with Cristina Fernández de Kirchner now President.

In this backdrop Hillary Clinton’s rise as a viable Presidential candidate isn’t so extraordinary. But the parallel goes beyond that. As the exit polls from her victory in New Hampshire remind us, much of her appeal is to single, economically disadvantaged women. It’s tempting to complete the circle by referring to these supporters as las descamisadas, but in our leering society such a reference would inevitably be taken the wrong way. (One should remember, however, that American soccer star Brandy Chastain demonstrated that one could become descamisada and still not be past outerwear).

The wrong way, however, brings up another subject: the link that feminists make between economic freedom and sexual freedom. The fact that both were kick-started in the same era makes it easy to think that both are the product of the same source. But reality is a more complicated business that it appears, and like many other results of the 1960’s this is no exception.

Up until then the paradigm was simple: the man went out and worked and the woman stayed home and raised the children. But this simplistic model seemed unsatisfactory for many reasons. The combination of the erosion of men’s fidelity through the Playboy philosophy and women’s rising expectations of men keeping their end of the bargain helped to fuel the explosion that our country hasn’t quite recovered from. (And for those of you who think this is ancient history, consider the number of Presidential candidates who are products of the era.)

Starting at that time the marriage rate went into in a state of decline. Single parenting (either permanent or through serial monogamy) is the way of life in many households. Women end up carrying more than their half of heaven in the field of single parenting, with the depressed income levels that generally go with it. The promise of sexual freedom has soured in the face of the poverty it has created.

The core of the problem—at least on the front end—was stated at its most basic by the Chinese author Lu Xun. In 1923 he addressed a women’s college in a famous (in China, at least) address “What Happens after Nora leaves Home,” a reference to Henrik Ibsen’s play “A Doll’s House.”  In that address he stated the following:

“The crucial thing for Nora is money or – to give it a more high-sounding name, economic resources,” Lu Xun explained. ”Of course, money cannot buy freedom, but freedom can be sold for money. Human beings have one great drawback, which is that they often become hungry. To remedy this drawback, and to avoid making people puppets, the most important thing in society seems to be economic rights. First, there must be a fair sharing between men and women in the family; secondly, men and women must have equal rights in society.’”

The key to making personal independence work is economic self-sufficiency (or at least viability.) Simply achieving freedom isn’t enough. The result of that was best put by someone better known to Americans, Janis Joplin: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” The equality of rights was far ahead of Old China’s to start with, and continues to advance, but insufficient opportunity—for a long list of reasons—has blunted the existence of legal equality.

So, as Lenin would ask, what is to be done? Enter Hillary Clinton, whose own antecedents give her a ready-made solution to the problem. Much has been speculated as to the “why” of Hillary Clinton, but Camille Paglia has probably the best explanation one could want:

A swarm of biographers in miners’ gear has tried to plumb the inky depths of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s warren-riddled psyche. My metaphor is drawn (as Oscar Wilde’s prim Miss Prism would say) from the Scranton coalfields, to which came the Welsh family that produced Hillary’s harsh, domineering father.

Hillary’s feckless, loutish brothers (who are kept at arm’s length by her operation) took the brunt of Hugh Rodham’s abuse in their genteel but claustrophobic home. Hillary is the barracuda who fought for dominance at their expense. Flashes of that ruthless old family drama have come out repeatedly in this campaign, as when Hillary could barely conceal her sneers at her fellow debaters onstage — the wimpy, cringing brothers at the dinner table.

Hillary’s willingness to tolerate Bill’s compulsive philandering is a function of her general contempt for men. She distrusts them and feels morally superior to them. Following the pattern of her long-suffering mother, she thinks it is her mission to endure every insult and personal degradation for a higher cause — which, unlike her self-sacrificing mother, she identifies with her near-messianic personal ambition.

From these antecedents, Hillary’s solution is simple: replace the men and the family with the government. Such a solution would, as Lu Xun put it, make people puppets, but forty years of waiting for men to come to the rescue that didn’t and a social system not designed for a nanny state has given Clinton a ready made constituency. As political commentators have noted, the mobilisation of single women as a political force could carry Clinton to the White House.

But first she must get past her own party, with two main obstacles. The first is the upper income part of the party, which has become enamoured with Barack Obama’s call for change (change to what is unclear.) The second is the black community, which is finally beginning to see Obama as truly one of their own and having a real shot at the Presidency. The solidarity of the “oppressed” is cracking in a very visible way, and the outcome of this complex drama is not yet clear.

But in the meanwhile las descamisadas continue to struggle to make it through life. They would do themselves more favours, however, by following the Way of the Saviour—with its directives and benefits, personal and economic—rather than looking for another messiah who promises freedom but in the end makes puppets.

In the novel The Ten Weeks, both the heroine and her father drive variations of the Citroen 2CV, the latter the original and the former the Dyane.  This form of "basic transportation" helped many Europeans to have a car–with ecologically friendly gas mileage–of any kind in the years after the devastation of World War II.

Below: Citroen 2CV.  Planning for this car started before World War II, but it wasn’t until after the war that it was first produced, finally discontinued in 1990.

The memory of the 2CV is the first thing that struck me when I saw Tata’s Nano, a video of which you can see below.

It’s easy for people in the "developed" countries to laugh at this.  But, as I noted earlier, the last laugh will probably be Tata’s.