Where’s The Love?

If the New York Times editorial page did not exist, the Onion would have to make it up for entertainment. Today the Gray Lady tackles the immigration compromise, lauding it for its bipartisan nature — while casting its opponents as vitriolic haters:

The problems with the restrictionist provisions of the Senate immigration bill are serious and many. It includes a path to citizenship for 12 million illegal immigrants, which is a rare triumph for common sense, but that path is strewn with cruel conditions, including a fine — $5,000 — that’s too steep and hurdles that are needlessly high, including a “touchback” requirement for immigrants to make pilgrimages to their home countries to cleanse themselves of illegality. The bill imposes an untested merit-point system that narrows the channels through which family members can immigrate.
And it calls for hundreds of thousands of guest workers to toil here temporarily in an absurd employment hokey-pokey — you put your two years in, then one year out, then repeat that twice and go home forever. It would be massive indentured servitude — colonial times all over again, but without any hope of citizenship for those taking our most difficult and despised jobs.
Those who want this bill to be better are horribly conflicted by it. Their emotions still seem vastly overmatched by the ferocity of the opposition from the restrictionist right, with talk radio lighting up over “amnesty,” callers spitting out the words with all the hate they can pour into it.
It is encouraging that the bill survived several attempts by that camp to blow it apart, including an amendment that would have stricken the legalization section outright. The center held last week. But it will take a real effort to make the Senate bill much better, given that a core group of senators are bound to the ungainly architecture of their “grand bargain” and that any progress in significantly altering or improving it could unravel the deal.

Undeniably, some people have allowed themselves to get too emotional in this debate. It’s a rather broad brush that the Times paints here, however, in that anyone on the right seeking to defeat this bill or change it — as the Times wants to do for its own purposes — are automatically “spitting out the words with all the hate they can pour into it,” which is not only hysterical but ungrammatical. The editors could use some editors.
The truth is that this bill damages the rule of law at the moment while promising to restore it in the long run. Those who object to that approach recall the 1986 amnesty, without the scare quotes, which came before a promised securing of the border. That promise still remains unfulfilled, and those who oppose a second amnesty want more than promises this time around. Even if one disagrees with the position or finds the emotional level disquieting, one has to acknowledge that these opponents have a point.
Furthermore, polls show that most people have an objection to the manner in which this bill attempts to solve the problem. An overwhelming majority of Americans believe that border security is a much more pressing problem than normalization. Does the Times believe that 70% or more of America belongs in that group of “haters” that want to see border security first before normalization?
The Times gets more hysterical than those whom they criticize when they talk about the guest-worker program being a form of “massive indentured servitude”. In the first place, it’s voluntary. If they don’t like it, workers don’t have to enter the program. They’re also free to leave if they do come here and don’t like the conditions. The conditions as they exist today come much closer to indentured servitude, where employers can extort labor with the threat of exposure to the ICE. I agree that the guest-worker program could create a lot of problems, but modern slavery isn’t one of them.
I know most CQ readers don’t bother with the Times, but it’s good to keep an eye on them. They still have influence, although this editorial demonstrates why that influence continues to fade.

The Next Scandal At Justice?

The Prowler at the American Spectator reports that the next scandal at the Department of Justice may reflect very poorly on the White House — the Clinton White House. While the Democrats rant over Monica Goodling’s unsurprising revelation that the DoJ considered political connections for political appointments, the Prowler reports that the Janet Reno-led DoJ did the exact same thing:

“We knew the political affiliation of every lawyer and political appointee we hired at the Department of Justice from January 1993 to the end of the Administration,” says a former Clinton Department of Justice political appointee. “We kept charts and used them when it came time for new U.S. Attorney nominations, detailee assignments, and other hiring decisions. If you didn’t vote Democrat, you weren’t going anywhere with us. It was that simple.”
In fact, according to this source, at least 25 career DOJ lawyers who were identified as Republicans were shifted away from jobs in offices they held prior to January 1993 and were given new “assignments” which were deemed “noncritical” or “nonpolitically influential.” When these jobs shifts came to light in 1993, neither the House nor Senate Judiciary committees chose to pursue an investigation.

This is the same issue that has caused a wave of criticism from the Democrats in Congress during this session. It’s what makes this part of the so-called “scandal” so laughable. Of course political appointments get political vetting. Of course affiliations matter in these positions. While I don’t think making lower-level assignments dependent on those affiliations is a good practice, it was naive to think that this administration differed from the last in that aspect.
This reminds us that the real scandal at Justice isn’t that anyone broke the law in firing the prosecutors, although Goodling thinks she broke the law in her personnel practices. The scandal is the incompetent manner in which all of this was handled, and the absentee-manager performance of Alberto Gonzales. By pushing a non-existent legal case against the Bush White House, the Democrats overplayed their hand and made themselves look foolish by raising expectations of a Monichristmas for the netroots.
UPDATE: I forgot that I “must credit” Right Wing Nut House for the incredible scoop that Reno’s DoJ also played politics with hiring and assignment decisions!

Will The Surge Miss Its Goals?

The Pentagon has grown convinced that the political goals of the surge will not be met by the time the supplemental expires, the Los Angeles Times reports today. Only one of the three main reforms still has a chance for implementation by September, and the oil revenue plan still has to work its way through a parliament taking the bulk of the summer as a vacation:

U.S. military leaders in Iraq are increasingly convinced that most of the broad political goals President Bush laid out early this year in his announcement of a troop buildup will not be met this summer and are seeking ways to redefine success. …
Enactment of a new law to share Iraq’s oil revenue among Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish regions is the only goal they think might be achieved in time, and even that is considered a long shot. The two other key benchmarks are provincial elections and a deal to allow more Sunni Arabs into government jobs.
With overhauls by the central government stalled and with security in Baghdad still a distant goal, Petraeus’ advisors hope to focus on smaller achievements that they see as signs of progress, including local deals among Iraq’s rival factions to establish areas of peace in some provincial cities.

In truth, these goals will not be redefined as much as the expectations revised towards reality. The Iraqis have come closest to oil-revenue sharing because it is the one topic on which they all agree action is necessary. Everyone in Iraq is a stakeholder in that debate, and they actually have a proposed law that has entered the final processes of deliberation.
For the other proposed reforms, these conditions do not exist. Provincial elections might be closest, but at least two of the provinces are not yet stable enough to conduct them. Anbar and Diyala have active insurgencies and al-Qaeda networks that, for the moment, preclude the kind of census-taking and building of electoral infrastructure to allow it. The second, the reversal of de-Ba’athification, doesn’t even have majority support from the Iraqis. Both the Shi’ites and the Kurds have no desire to see their former oppressors back in power, even within the confines of a Shi’ite majority government. They want to see them tried for their crimes, not allowed back into the bureaucracies, especially those with control of security services.
In that sense, the surge will not present much success for the Bush administration come September. That will make the task of funding continuing operations in Baghdad more difficult, to be sure. However, it may well be that the military goals of the surge — a reduction in insurgent activity and the dismantling of terrorist networks — will show significant progress by then. And as General Petraeus and his staff propose, the better short-term goal on which to focus would be the cooperation and support within Iraq for the counterinsurgency strategies employed by the US this year.
By September, if Petraeus has scoped the situation correctly, the political progress of reforms may not be terribly relevant. He’s betting that the tribal alliances the US is building, and the increased engagement of Sunni tribes in the political process, will demonstrate more than enough progress to justify his continued operations. At that point, Democrats will increasingly realize that a cut-and-run from Iraq altogether is nothing more than a fantasy, and may be willing to give Petraeus another few months to see what he can do.

Bush, The Liberal

Richard Cohen makes the case that Republicans have noted for the last six years — that the Bush administration has not been conservative at all, but rather an exercise in big-government, liberal action. Calling Bush a “neo-liberal”, Cohen hits some convincing points in his argument that Bush resembles a cross between Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson (via Memeorandum):

An overriding principle of conservatism is to limit the role and influence of the federal government. Nowhere is this truer than in education. For instance, there was a time when no group of Republicans could convene without passing a resolution calling for the abolition of the Education Department and turning the building — I am extrapolating here — into a museum of creationism.
Now, though, not only are such calls no longer heard, but Bush has extended the department’s reach in a manner that Democrats could not have envisaged. I am referring, of course, to the 2001 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, better known as No Child Left Behind. I will spare you the act’s details, but it pretty much tells the states to shape up or face a loss of federal funds. It is precisely the sort of law that conservatives predicted Washington would someday seek — and it did.
Similarly, let’s take a look at the much-mocked notion of diversity. Bill Clinton was widely berated for his effort to have an administration that looked like America — women, African Americans, Hispanics, you name it. Whether by design or not, Bush has also managed that feat. A female education secretary is one thing, but a national security adviser — the uber-macho post — is something else, and that went first to Condi Rice. And over at Justice, Bush chose Alberto Gonzales, the son of Hispanic migrant workers and, incidentally, a lawyer with the singular gift of forgetting meetings he attended. (In private practice, did he forget to bill?)
I am not suggesting that any of these appointees — including Bush’s former White House counsel, Harriet Miers — are what is pejoratively known as affirmative action hires. I am suggesting, though, that Bush has not only diversified his Cabinet and staff but obviously got enormous satisfaction in doing so. You only have to listen to Bush talk about the virtues of immigration — another liberal sentiment — or his frequent mention of the “soft bigotry of low expectations” to appreciate that the president is a sentimental softie, what was once dismissively called a “mushy-headed liberal.”
Allow me to make the case that this is also true when it comes to Iraq. I acknowledge that the war is a catastrophic mistake and was incompetently managed. But if you don’t think it was waged on behalf of oil or empire, then one reason for our involvement was an attempt to do some good — rid the world of a really bad guy and make life better for Iraqis and others in the region. This “liberal” intent may have left Dick Cheney cold and found Don Rumsfeld indifferent, but it appealed to Bush and it showed in his rhetoric and body language. Contrast it to the position of the so-called foreign policy realists, exemplified by the first President Bush and his trusted foreign policy sidekick, Brent Scowcroft.

I’ve made this same argument a number of times on this blog. In fact, most people forget that George Bush did not run as a doctrinaire conservative in 2000, but rather as a “compassionate conservative” — one that would use the federal government as a solution to social ills, rather than cast it as a culprit for them. Bush added Dick Cheney to the ticket in large part to assuage conservative fears that he would turn into his father.
As Cohen notes, those fears have been mostly realized. The Bush administration has overseen profligate spending by successive Republican Congresses, and pushed that spending along with efforts that expanded federal oversight in areas conservatives fear to tread. Chief among these has been the expansion of the Department of Education, which has seen its spending more than double during his tenure. It seems that Bush has not yet seen a federal program he dislikes well enough to cast a veto on spending.
Iraq, as I have noted, is not an exercise in conservatism either. It is an expressly Wilsonian project, attempting to make the world safe for democracy by transforming the Middle East. The conservative strategy would have been to topple Saddam and leave the Iraqis to figure out the rest — but that would have left vast oil resources in the hands of the strongest factions able to grasp power in the vacuum left behind. Instead, Bush and his team decided to attack terror by kicking out the struts that prop it up — the oppression and despair in the Muslim world created by kleptocracies and mullahcracies in the region.
Cohen agrees, although reluctantly. Cohen calls the realism that Scowcroft and Bush 41 used to leave Saddam Hussein in power, and then to stand by while he decimated the Shi’ites in the immediate aftermath of the first Gulf War, “sickening”. He worries that the “incompetently managed” effort will cause liberals to forget that it was John Kennedy who said that we would “pay any price, bear any burden . . . to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Cohen seems to be reaching a conclusion that many Democrats have reluctantly started to grasp; we cannot leave Iraq to the terrorists, and betray the Iraqis and our own values a second time.
If that conclusion means that Bush has to be accepted as a liberal, I’m fine with that. I think George Bush himself would accept that as a workable tradeoff.

Now Sit Back And Let Peace Roll Across The Globe

The United States has held its first diplomatic contacts with Iran in over 27 years — since the time the Iranians overran our embassy in Teheran and held our embassy staff hostage for 444 days. The meeting at the ambassadorial level came as a result of demands from the Iraqi government and the proponents of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, which claimed that official contacts between the two nations would improve the security of the new democratic state in Iraq:

The United States and Iran held rare face-to-face talks in Baghdad on Monday, adhering to an agenda that focused strictly on the war in Iraq and on ways the two bitter adversaries could help improve conditions here.
The meeting between Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker of the United States and Ambassador Hassan Kazemi Qumi of Iran — held in the offices of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki — produced no agreements nor a promise of a follow-up meeting between the nations, participants said. …
He said he “laid out before the Iranians a number of our direct, specific concerns about their behavior in Iraq.” The United States has repeatedly accused Iran of meddlesome activities in Iraq, including training Shiite militiamen and shipping highly lethal weaponry into Iraq for use in attacks by Shiite and Sunni Arab militants against American troops.
Mr. Crocker said he told his Iranian counterpart that those activities “needed to cease.”
“We all are pretty much in the same place in terms of declaratory policy,” he said. “The problem lies, in our view, with the Iranians not bringing their behavior on the ground into line with their own policy.”

I don’t think that talking with the Iranians does much harm, except to the extent that it sends a bad signal to the democracy activists within its borders. By focusing the talks exclusively on Iraqi security concerns, it helps to keep the talks from appearing to endorse the reign of the mullahs. Those pushing to end that reign from within might note the subtleties of the diplomatic dance and not conclude that the US has resigned itself to dealing with the theocrats currently oppressing the Iranian people.
The talks won’t do any good, however, while the Iranians see Iraqi chaos in their best interests. They want to see American troops tied up in Iraq and battling insurgencies and al-Qaeda terrorists there. It gives the mullahs a handy excuse for exercising even more power over their own people, and it creates the kind of political instability in the region that becomes a force multiplier for their own terrorist proxy groups.
Iran does not fund Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad for the purpose of creating stability, after all. They want to destabilize the entire region, dominated by Sunnis, and either replace them with Shi’ite leadership or weaken them until they fall under Iranian hegemony by default. The only power in the region capable of opposing the Iranian mullahs in that strategy is the United States, and they want us either tied down in Iraq or forced out of the region altogether.
Diplomacy has its place, but the effort has to be reciprocated. As Michelle Malkin notes, the Iranians have made clear their view of reciprocity by indicting three Americans in Iran for espionage:

Iran has formally charged two Iranian- American academics currently in jail in Tehran with espionage.
A judiciary official said a third Iranian-American, Nazi Azima, who works for Radio Free Europe, faced the same allegations but had not been arrested. …
Kian Tajbaksh is also a well-known academic and social scientist who had carried out some work for the Open Society Institute of George Soros – an organisation Iran says was trying to instigate a “velvet revolution” to topple the clerical regime.

Three Americans who wanted to help expedite this dialogue now face death or long prison sentences for pursuing the ISG’s suggested diplomacy. That appears to be a more concrete answer than any provided by the weekend meeting.

Romney Pulls Into Second Place

Just a few days ago, I asked Duane “Generalissimo” Patterson why Romney had such a difficult time progressing in the polls. He seemed mired at 8% support despite having the best organization and fundraising operations in the GOP. Now, however, a new Rasmussen poll shows that Romney may have found some wind for those massive sails as he outpolled John McCain and moved into second place by a razor-thin margin:

The immigration reform debate may be shaking up the race for the Republican Presidential nomination. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has inched past Arizona Senator John McCain for second place in the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone poll. Just two weeks ago, Romney was in fourth place among GOP hopefuls.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) remains on top with 25% support. That’s essentially unchanged from last week. In fact, Giuliani has been at 25% or 26% in the polls for four straight weeks.
This week, Giuliani is followed by Romney at 16%, McCain at 15%, and former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson at 12%. While Romney’s one-point edge over McCain is statistically insignificant, it’s worth noting that McCain had a six-point advantage over Romney just two weeks ago.

This could be fallout from the immigration debate. Despite publicly stating that he would support some form of comprehensive reform that included normalization, Romney wasted no time in attacking this version of reform. That quick decision may have opened eyes among the conservatives in the GOP who have not trusted Romney’s recent conversion on other social issues.
That new support appears to come at the expense of McCain and perhaps the second-tier candidates. Rudy’s numbers have changed little since the end of April, when he got buffeted by his stumble on abortion. He still has a 9-point lead, now over Romney. McCain drops back three points, and Fred Thompson, who has not yet declared, lost two. Interestingly, it looks like Rudy got no bump for chewing out Ron Paul in the last debate, but didn’t lose any ground either.
Romney has a substantial lead in Iowa among likely caucus voters. This latest poll shows that the momentum seems to have shifted nationwide as well. Insiders tell me that Romney’s Q2 fundraising numbers will be substantially better than his record-setting Q1 numbers and that they have continued to grow the organization. If all that money keeps flowing into that large campaign structure, Romney will be well positioned to take advantage of that momentum and turn himself into a phenomenon.
Addendum: Don’t forget that I will be traveling to Des Moines for tomorrow’s Romney campaign through Iowa, capping the day off with a live broadcast tomorrow evening on CQ Radio of Romney’s open-forum event at 6 pm CT. Don’t miss it!

Choosy Social Cons Choose Rudy

According to Pew Research and the Politico, a significant part of Rudy Giuliani’s national polling lead comes from conservatives at odds with his domestic policy views. Rudy gets 30% of the social conservatives in the GOP, a factor which keeps him in the lead over John McCain, who gets only 19% of that bloc. What does that tell us about the Republican primary voter base? Has pragmatism won out over ideology, or is there an overriding ideology that commands that support? At Heading Right, I take a look at some of those dynamics and propose my own analysis.

Cindy Sheehan Says Adios

Once the “darling” of the Left, a woman to whom crowds flocked, Cindy Sheehan has discovered that she has worn out her welcome by attacking everyone. In a missive she sent to the Democratic caucuses in Congress, Sheehan has renounced her membership in the party, claiming to have been as abused by the Left as she was by the Right:

Cindy Sheehan, whose soldier son was killed in Iraq three years ago, said yesterday she was stepping down from her role as the figurehead of the US campaign against the war.
“This is my resignation letter as the ‘face’ of the American anti-war movement,” she wrote in a sometimes bitter diary entry on the website Daily Kos. “I am going to take whatever I have left, and go home. I am going to go home and be a mother to my surviving children, and try to regain some of what I have lost.” …
“I was the darling of the so-called left as long as I limited my protests to George Bush and the Republican party,” she wrote. “However, when I started to hold the Democratic party to the same standards that I held the Republican party, support for my cause started to erode, and the ‘left’ started labelling me with the same slurs that the right used.”
On Saturday, in an open letter to Democratic members of Congress, she announced that she was leaving the party because she felt its leaders had failed to change the country’s course in Iraq.

I used to comment regularly about Sheehan and her antics, but had laid off recently. For one thing, she presented too easy a target. She clearly had lost her bearings, if not her mind, lionizing Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez while reviling George Bush as a dictator. She rarely said or did anything coherent. While she was the face of the anti-war movement, it showed them as hysterical and very uninformed.
Democrats may have used and exploited her, as she complains now, but she allowed them to do it. She practically threw herself in front of cameras, and the Bush-hatred she spewed matched their own rhetoric perfectly. She didn’t attempt to separate herself from the politics of the situation, but instead embraced it enthusiastically.
However, when she started literally kissing up to Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, the Democrats got very nervous about their connections to Sheehan. They started putting some distance between Sheehan’s antics and the mainstream of the party, and when they did that, Sheehan lashed back at them. Apparently they answered her, and she didn’t like criticism from her former supporters — and now she’s quitting as a result.
I hope she does return to her family and regain what she has lost. She lost her son, and she lost the rest of her family when she tried to turn herself into a weird kind of martyr. Now that she’s climbing down off the cross, perhaps she can finally find some comfort in her surviving children and leave behind the lunacy she has exhibited in her fringe-Left campaign against not just George Bush but the country towards which she feels so much bitterness.
UPDATE: Rick Moran has more thoughts.

AP Still Gets Kyoto History Wrong

Earlier this year, I noted that the Associated Press either did a poor job of research or revealed their bias against the Bush administration by incorrectly recounting the history of the Kyoto Treaty in the US. They used the Left’s talking points in reporting that the present administration rejected Kyoto and had the responsibility for the lack of its implementation. Jim Krane apparently isn’t alone at the AP in passing along misinformation, as CQ reader Jal Ark noticed:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (news, bio, voting record) said Monday she led a congressional delegation to Greenland, where lawmakers saw “firsthand evidence that climate change is a reality,” and she hoped the Bush administration would consider a new path on the issue. …
Her trip comes ahead of next week’s Group of Eight summit and a climate change meeting next month involving the leading industrialized nations and during a time of increased debate over what should succeed the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 international treaty that caps the amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted from power plants and factories in industrialized countries. It expires in 2012.
President Bush rejected that accord, saying it would harm the U.S. economy and unfair excludes developing countries like China and India from its obligations. Pelosi, who strongly disagrees with that decision and many other of Bush’s environmental policies, said Friday she said she wants to work with the administration rather than provoke it.

Once again, the AP has failed to report the history of this treaty correctly. While Bush does not support the Kyoto approach, he had nothing to do with rejecting the pact. The Senate rejected it in 1997, almost four years before Bush took office. When Al Gore pushed Bill Clinton to sign the treaty, the Senate reacted by passing a resolution informing Clinton that Kyoto would not get ratified.
That resolution got sponsored by Chuck Hagel and Robert Byrd, and it passed by a roll call vote in which not a single Senator voted to support Clinton and Gore. The final vote was 95-0, and it included such Democratic luminaries as Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, and Barbara Boxer rejecting Kyoto. I have the resolution itself in the extended entry, and it makes clear that the Senate would not abide a pact which excluded the developing nations of China and India. Since it still does not include those countries, there is no reason to think that the Senate has changed its position, nor should it.
Even if I hadn’t already written about this, I could have found this in about ten seconds simply by doing a search of the Internet. The Wikipedia entry is well-researched, and even an advocacy group manages to get this correct. Why can’t the AP? Now that two of their reporters have found it impossible to accurately recount the history, it seems less likely that it reflects incompetence and more likely that it reflects a bias — especially since that vaunted system of fact-checking and editorial oversight has once again allowed misinformation into print.

Continue reading “AP Still Gets Kyoto History Wrong”

Film Review: Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee

As CQ readers have surmised, I have mostly taken today off after a long weekend of birthday celebrations. My sister flew out from California for a couple of days, and we celebrated her birthday as well as my son’s and the Little Admiral’s, who turns 5 on Wednesday. After a weekend of these celebrations, the First Mate and I found ourselves tired out. I bought The Reagan Diaries for later reading, and both of us caught up on our sleep.
This evening, though, we decided to take a look at HBO’s new movie, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, which tells the story of the Native Americans in the Dakotas between the Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee. It has a stellar cast, including a cameo for Fred Thompson as President Ulysses S Grant, in what some will hope turns into dramatic foreshadowing in real life. Aidan Quinn, Adam Beach, and Anna Paquin star, but the focus remains on the Sioux tribes and their betrayal at the hands of those who thought themselves the advocates of the American Indians.
The history may not be well known by viewers before seeing the movie. If not, the film gives the audience a good tour of the fourteen years between Custer’s idiotic attack and the uprising at Wounded Knee. An attempt to renege on a treaty with the Sioux in order to get to the gold in the Black Hills created instability in what little order the US had with the Sioux after Custer, and in the end forced the natives to repudiate the entire treaty process. This led, in the end, to a massive overreaction by the US and state governments in putting down what they saw as a dangerous uprising in the end of 1890.
The film brilliantly depicts all of these issues, using the historical characters of Charles Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman as the “witnesses” to the depredation and oppression of the Sioux, and Henry Dawes as the perpetrator the the betrayal by Washington DC. It’s necessarily sympathetic to the Native American point of view, especially since Adam Beach as Eastman suffers betrayals from all sides. Dawes starts off by demanding of Grant a merciful and positive approach to saving the Indians from extinction, but Dawes becomes the architect of the land grab that eventually causes the tribes to reject the ever-changing demands to renegotiate the treaties with the US.
The acting is uniformly excellent. It features a cast largely drawn from the Native American community. Wes Study makes a cameo appearance as Wovoka, the Paiute visionary who taught the Sioux new dances that he promised would bring an end to white people and restore the Native American tribes to supremacy over the earth, as well as bringing back the buffalo. It’s shot in a stylish and affecting manner, and gives a fairly accurate account of history in an manner which grips the viewer.
If you have a chance to watch this, make sure you do. It’s a part of history that does not get taught well in the US, especially the post-Custer reaction that made that singular Sioux victory a Pyrrhic event.