Month: May 2002

— Clinton pollster Mark Penn says the Dems need to reach out to dads to remain relevant (For Democrats, Key Voters May Be Married to Soccer Moms)

According to Mark Penn, whose polls formed the political road map of the Clinton White House, the Office Park Dads, or “OPDs,” are the husbands of those legendary swing voters of 1996, the Soccer Moms. And there is deep political disagreement in these mythic households of American suburbia. While the Democrats were carefully marketing themselves to the Moms in recent years, they lost the Dads, he said.

It’s a fact that men, especially, white men, were the voting bloc that went most strongly for Bush in 2000, with white women only slightly in favor of the President and ethnics of both sexes lining up for Gore (although ethnic men were less enthusiastic about him than ethnic women.) This was a reversal of the pattern in the Clinton elections were men were more evenly divided and women made the difference. But the question is: “what do the Dems have to do to appeal to dads?”

Ask a fathers’ rights activist and he’ll tell you that half of dads are divorced or separated from their wives, or will be someday. Democrats have pushed divorced dads into the poorhouse or the underground economy with child support obligations that are completely through the roof, and an enforcement system that mocks the civil liberties of all Americans much worse than anything John Ashcroft proposes for the war on terrorism. Democrats are largely responsible for a Congressional Resolution on Fathers’ Day urging dads to pay their child support and shut up about it, so they’ve got a lot to atone for. And wishing for something doesn’t make it so.

Source: Ben Domenich and RoboPundit.

— The Times of India speculates that Abdul Lone was killed by militant Pakistani separatists because he was a force for peaceful resolution of the Kashmir question:

Hurriyat leader Abdul Ghani Lone’s killing has been timed with the Prime Minister’s visit to the state. Lone was seen as one of the Hurriyat leaders closest to the Indian authorities, and was believed to be agreeable to elections in the state. He had been an MLA in the 1970s. The leader was also seen to be close to the US. His dastardly killing today could be a terrorists’ message to the Indian government, and a warning to other moderate leaders in the Hurriyat Conference.

Control of Kashmir has been the major bone of contention between India and Pakistan since partition. Historically, there has been a slight majority of Sufi Muslims in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, so following the logic of partition, the region should have gone to Pakistan, but the King preferred to go with India. Pakistan has never been satisfied with the status quo, and has attempted to sway the balance of loyalties by running the Kashmiri Pundits out of the state. They essentially succeeded in the Kashmir Valley in 1990 through a campaign of terror, and have since focussed on the southern areas of the state.

Jammu and Kashmir is important to India because its a mountainous buffer between their country, China, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Bloggers should be interested in any conflict in which Pandits are murdered and victimized en masse, of course. See Kashmir News Network for more information.

— The Kolkata Libertarian believes that all-out nuclear war between India and Pakistan is a distinct possibility, for a number of reasons that he mentions. Among these:

India does not possess the surgical-strike capabilities of the U.S., which means that it’s going to be an all-or-nothing set of scenarios when the two sides go to war. If the Indian military had the technological, logistical and operational means with which to wage a low-level offensive battle, they would have had it over with last December. Instead, they have resorted to the only available response – the threat of large-scale war on multiple fronts, followed by the inevitable tit-for-tat nuclear response.

We all like to think, here in the West, that nuclear war is too horrible for anyone but a madman to seriously contemplate. The pressures on Musharraf and the tensions within his country and between Pakistan and its neighbors are such that going completely crazy would be a short trip for the dude. The situation over there is much more serious that most Americans think, and much more serious than the situation in the Middle East. Colin Powell should forget about the Israelis and concentrate on averting tragedy on the Indian Subcontinent right now.

Incidentally, the reason that religious fanaticism is so strong in Pakistan has to do with national identity. This country was thrown together at the time of Indian independence as a payoff to Jinna for his role in the swaraj struggle (correction: to keep him from making trouble in India post-independence.) The name “Pakistan” combines an acronym made up of the three ethnic groups (Pashtun, Afghani, Kashmiri) with the Indo-European word for “land”, “stan.” The only common bond in Pakistan is Islam, which becomes fanatical when called upon to act as a national value system and not just something you do at the Mosque on Friday. It’s an old-timey creed, in other words.