Cato the elder

Why We Need A Third Party

2005-06-30T17:05:00.000-05:00

Let's just say you should scroll down for an explanation:

The recent poll results from Democracy Corps just show we need a third (or even fourth or fifth) party in America. Having only two is an abomination. Parties are what America is all about. Besides, having only two means there are never any parties on my block. If you let me form a party myself, that will soon change.

Furthermore, note that neither party is addressing the real concerns of America. I understand that both parties say they want a drug-free America, but like P.J. O'Rourke said, if that's the case then I want my free drugs now. And don't tell me I'm confusing two different kinds of parties. Have you ever seen a political convention or a candidate addressing his supporters on election night? Streamers, confetti, balloons, alcohol. Count me in. We need as much of that as possible.

Wrong Patient, Dr. Ferguson

2004-09-16T17:49:00.000-05:00

Has George W. Bush Killed Off Conservatism?
Andrew Ferguson
Bloomberg
(9/14/04)

[...]As a guide either to governing or to politicking, conservatism is over, finished, kaput. [...]

The ``laundry-list'' technique that Bush used in that long first half was perfected by Clinton. And it is more than a rhetorical trick. The laundry-list speech, consisting of brief summaries of one program after another, is uniquely suited to a style of governing, and a philosophy of government, that Bush has happily embraced. [...]

Call it the omnicompetent state. Clinton didn't invent it, of course, but he was its pre-eminent salesman, even when he announced, as he did in his 1996 State of the Union address, that the ``era of big government is over.''

[Bush's] recent Medicare expansion alone, by some estimates, will cost $2 trillion over the next 20 years. And several speakers at this month's Republican convention -- including Education Secretary Rod Paige and retired General Tommy Franks -- boasted that for many programs (special education and veterans affairs among them) Bush had spent more in four years than Clinton had in eight. [...]

After opening his convention speech with a promise to ``restrain federal spending, reduce regulation'' and create a ``simpler, fairer'' tax code, Bush promised, in the next paragraph, to ``double the number of people served by our principal job-training program and increase funding for community colleges.''

In the paragraph after that, he said he would create ``opportunity zones'' by adding new provisions to the tax code.

Then he said he would ``offer a tax credit to encourage small business'' and ``provide direct help,'' also known as money, to low-income Americans to buy health insurance. [...]

Also, he'll build health centers in every community in America, and 7 million more homes in the next 10 years, and ``provide a record level of funding'' for education.

Don't forget Pell grants for the middle class, and early intervention programs for kids. And a new reform -- medical savings accounts -- that will further complicate the tax code.

Then he promised to simplify the tax code again.

At the end of his laundry list, Bush made an artful pivot. He attacked his opponent, John Kerry, for ``proposing more than $2 trillion in new federal spending.''

Those Democrats are such spendthrifts.

Like Clinton, Bush pretends all this frenetic governmental activism is revolutionary -- uniquely adapted to our unprecedented new era. (Every era thinks it is unprecedented.) There is much talk about ``expanding choice.'' Underlying it, however, is an idea that's not new at all: the citizen as client, a consumer who fulfills himself by coming to rely on the blandishments of government.

For reasons that aren't clear, Bush insists on calling his approach ``conservatism.'' Surely we can find a more accurate term. Has ``Clintonism'' already been taken?

Interestingly enough, Ferguson comes out with this article at the same time Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review is arguing that Bush's State of the Union speech contained a practical plan for crushing American liberalism and pissing on its corpse. Ferguson is wrong, Ponnuru is right. The expansion of Medicare was painful but you can bet it was going to happen anyway with over 70% of the public supporting it even when informed of the drawbacks. The choice for Republicans was either to make the best of it while they could or let the Democrats demagogue the issue and hand their butts to them in the future. Bush seized the moment and got us health savings accounts, which should do something about exploding health costs by lessening third-party payments.

Many of the other spending increases during the Bush administration have been unnecessary, but Bush has probably governed about as conservatively as he possibly could have, considering the divided electorate. Bush has gotten us fast-track trade authority and significant tax cuts, while working on reforming Social Security, cutting our bloated civil service down to size, and quite possibly completely overhauling the old income tax system (Stephen Moore points out that Bush's piecemeal and stealthy steps towards either a flat tax or a consumption tax have been brilliant).

Ferguson doesn't mention it here, but another frequent conservative complaint is that Bush supported steel tariffs. This is a chapter-and-verse example of how some conservatives are reluctant to engage in the dirty but necessary work of politics: Bush agreed to the tariffs as a bargaining ploy to receive fast-track trade authority, which conservatives have wanted for years. Bush received the authority, then used the looming prospect of a trade war as a convenient excuse to ditch the tariffs, thus cutting our losses. The strenuous criticism of Bush over an issue that no longer matters lends credence to the old stereotype of conservatives as the stupid party; truth be told, conservatives ought to give Bush a medal for pulling this off.

Bush's policy of making government more accountable to the people -- of subverting already-existing government policies to promote personal independence, of turning sheep into shepherds -- deserves at least a certain measure of awe. Modern liberalism cannot survive circumstances where people clearly perceive a link between their freedom to choose and their economic circumstances. Again and again, in both domestic and foreign policy, President Bush has lauded human freedom both for its power to liberate and for its power to serve. The Republic will be well-served by his re-election.

Just In Case You Think the Media Really Has the Goods on Bush...

2004-09-09T20:57:00.000-05:00

Go here, here, here, and here. We'll see if those mea culpas keep coming (scroll down all the way).

Bush Bad, Murderous Ideology Good

2004-09-09T20:47:00.000-05:00

Harkin: Bush Lied To America
TheIowaChannel.com
(9/9/04)

Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin had a strong reaction to newly released records about President George W. Bush's service in the Texas National Guard.

On Wednesday, CBS' "60 Minutes" reported that records kept by Bush's former commanding officer show Col. Jerry Killian was pressured to give Bush positive evaluations.
Bush told reporters that he received no special treatment.

Harkin said these records show that the president hasn't been honest.

"The documentation shows that the president was not being truthful," Harkin said. "The president lied to the American people in the Oval Office when he spoke with Tim Russert. That's why this is news. It goes to the character of George W. Bush."

Tom Harkin doesn't trust our president. Who does he trust? Well, Daniel Ortega, for starters.

Don't Be Fooled By Cheap Imitations!

2004-09-01T22:44:00.000-05:00

Former Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi thinks the GOP is deceiving the public:

Here at the Republican National Convention, you can tell with each passing day just how formidable, disciplined and unabashedly deceptive the Bush campaign will be as it wages political war with John Kerry. [my emphasis]

Trippi apparently wasn't at a certain political convention last month, where Le Partie Democratique -- most of whose partisans consistently rank national security near the bottom when asked to prioritize a list of national issues -- tried to sell the American people a cock-and-bull story about how tough they were on defense issues. Sorry, Joe -- those Republican clothes just don't fit.

Want to Read John Kerry's Anti-American Ravings for Free?

2004-08-26T16:28:00.000-05:00

Go here and read his introduction and epilogue to The New Soldier, a book published by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1971.

Then consider two quotes:

"We will not quickly join those who march on Veterans' Day waving small flags, calling to memory those thousands who died for the "greater glory of the United States." We will not accept the rhetoric. We will not readily join the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars -- in fact, we will find it hard to join anything at all and when we do, we will demand relevancy such as other organizations have recently been unable to provide. We will not take solace from the creation of monuments or the naming of parks after a select few of the thousands of dead Americans and Vietnamese. We will not uphold traditions which decorously memorialize that which was base and grim."

-- John Kerry, from the epilogue to The New Soldier

"I'm John Kerry, and I'm reporting for duty."

-- John Kerry, first line of presidential nomination acceptance speech, 2004 Democratic National Convention

One-Question Sanity Test

2004-08-26T14:16:00.000-05:00

If you can read this article and truthfully imagine the media asking such questions about their coverage of Bush's time in the National Guard, please see a shrink before you hurt yourself or others.

Another Day Closer to Victory...

2004-08-26T12:56:00.000-05:00

The Brothers Judd have a number of good stories up about John Kerry's rapidly sinking presidential hopes. First up, ABC's The Note (third item down) mentions that Kerry wants to debate Bush every week. This is, of course, the classic sign of a campaign that knows it's in trouble: only losing candidates demand debates because they are behind and have nothing to lose; winning candidates avoid them because they can cause potential stumbles.

Next, the Los Angeles Times has Bush pulling ahead in their latest poll. Whoever heard of a candidate getting a surge before his party's convention?

And finally, there is good reason to think that the Current Employment Statistics study (i.e. "the payroll study") by the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been underestimating job growth for quite some time (even the BLS itself is starting to take notice of the problems with its survey). No matter how much the Democrats scream about The Worst Economy Since Herbert Hoover™, their traction with the public is going to be severely limited if people see a good economy with their own eyes.

What else does this leave the Democrats? Caterwauling about the awful war that's been disappearing from the American radar screen ever since June 28th?

Bottom line: From here on out, it's Miller Time.

"Who Cares about Human Rights When We've Got a President to Dethrone?"

2004-08-26T12:37:00.000-05:00

Making Excuses
Nat Hentoff
The Washington Times
(8/16/04)

When Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle and Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, along with jubilant Democrats, appeared at the Washington premier of Michael Moore's"documentary," "Fahrenheit 9/11," I began to realize that some of us in this divided nation are living in a different, surreal world. Mr. Moore, for example, has said of the terrorists in Iraq:

"They are not the enemy. They are the revolution, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow -- and they will win. Get it, Mr. Bush?"

Even the news media are unthinkingly describing murderous bombers, beheaders and assassins as "the insurgency." Historically, that phrase often had an honorable connotation, especially in America. George Washington and Samuel Adams were insurgents. Why not just call the jihadists and their allies by their rightful names: homicidal terrorists?

Meanwhile, the growing chorus keening that this is a needless war includes not only Democratic strategists and acolytes, but also Ralph Nader. Fervently joining them are such selective antiwar groups as MoveOn.org and the International Action Center. Have any of such fierce organizational opponents of the Iraq war called for free elections in Cuba or Zimbabwe, as they, in effect, scorn the actual coming of free elections in Iraq? [...]

There are days when I wonder if I'm having a bad dream. "Fahrenheit 9/11," for example, is playing in Cuba to large audiences long conditioned to distorted propaganda.

And, on July 1 of this year, Albert Hunt, the resident liberal on the Wall Street Journal editorial pages, wrote: "For many Iraqis it's a more dangerous country than even (under) the brutal Saddam regime."

Does he include the families of those whose Saddam's regime murdered, who continue to sift through the mass graves hoping to find the identifiable shards of those bodies? [...]

When Saddam's prisons were briefly opened up while Saddam was still in power, there was disclosure in the American media of the gouging of eyes of his prisoners and the raping of women in front of their husbands for whom the torturers wanted to extract information.

But even now, when much more of Saddam's atrocities have been disclosed, a reporter from the New York Observer asked folks on the street if they could say anything positive about Saddam.

In the July 12 Observer, quite a few could. An editor of an arts magazine said of Saddam: "He's committed. Actually, he's not duplicitous. I think he's very much open about what he believes and what he will do with his power, which is actually unlike Bush, who is incredibly duplicitous and lies."

A pity this woman couldn't have voted for that murderously committed leader of his people while Saddam was -- unopposed -- on the ballot in prewar Iraq.

Note how a horrified Hentoff wonders if he's having "a bad dream" when he sees so many Americans protesting the liberation of Iraq. I occasionally read articles by other principled leftists who comically fail to understand why their fellow liberals have been so vehemently against a war of liberation. A conservative would correctly respond that the reigning passion among most war opponents is opposition to America, not freedom for other peoples.

As regards opponents of war, I've long thought the true indicator of their feelings comes from their consistent failure to protest nasty regimes whose behavior does not implicate America. This sort of things runs rampant in the "mainstream press": A few years ago, Time magazine ran an article comparing the pope to Fidel Castro, which caused George Will to remark that liberals appear constitutionally incapable of disapproving of a communist the way they disapprove of, say, Joe Camel.

After the Vietnam War ended, a leftist war opponent started a petition protesting the actions of the Communist governments in Southeast Asia and sent it around to her old buddies in the antiwar movement. As I recall, about 30% of them signed it. I would consider that figure to be roughly representative of the percentage of pacifists and leftists who truly care about human rights abuses regardless of the party committing them. Of course, those are the folks most likely to drift rightward over time. Hentoff is in good company.

"Take Off Your Earrings, Roger -- We've Got Work To Do"

2004-08-26T12:07:00.000-05:00

A Canvasser's Journal
Tom Gogola
The Nation
(8/19/04)

The top-ten responses given by passersby to this New York City street canvasser working for the Democratic National Committee's "Beat Bush" fundraising campaign:

"I love Bush!"
"We love Bush!"
"Why don't you people get a clue already?!"
"Fuck off!"
"Fuck you!"
"I licked Bush this morning."
"Beat Bush? Got a stick?"
"Beat Bush? I'm going to shoot the motherfucker!"
"Politics suck"
"Kerry's a fag."

I was standing under an awning on 8th Avenue between 52nd and 53rd streets in Manhattan, and having a tough go of "Beating Bush" with my canvasser's clipboard; most pedestrians scampered right on by with barely a glance in my direction. [...]

The crew was not happy to be out here, and I, as "team leader," shared their unhappiness. We had already lost the young Polish-American student who'd been assigned to the group. She claimed female troubles moments after we deployed, gave me her clipboard, and was never seen or heard from again (at least I never saw her again). I was left with two teenage boys, one wearing flip-flops (with nary a whiff of irony) and boasting an eyebrow piercing, who wore his red DNC shirt like a hat. He was just about the last person you'd give your money to, and hardly anybody did. Both kids were just out of high school (local fancy-pants schools) and were headed off to college in the fall. By 2:00pm they had raised between them something like 20 bucks and were trying to cajole me into an early bailout. They took long lunches; they recognized as I did that this was a wet and wearying fund-raising scenario compared with the big DNC blowout at Radio City Music Hall a few nights previous. [...]

At least as I experienced the Bush Beating youngsters, they generally were not jaded, world-weary, misanthropic or cynical. Skeptical, yes, and some seemed particularly out-front radical, even beyond the obligatory flesh-piercing and rampant multiculti joie de vivre. But some were so self-centered that I wanted to smack them. [...]

At the Whisky, the requisite slamming of tequila shots would commence, and the endless fillings and refillings of pitchers of beer, all guzzled lustily in the aftermath of another hot day pounding the pavement for elite Democrats. Summertime flings would be launched, canvassing war stories told and retold, there was dorm chat and chants of "Four More Beers!" There were always a couple of cherubic, Olsonish blonde girls wearing those fashionably tacky early-eighties-style skirts that seem to be everywhere this summer; there were earnest former Deaniacs fully committed now to the Anybody But Bush program; there was Abdul, who was going to Howard Law in the fall. I liked Abdul because I could joke with him about Howard's lousy affirmative action policies and he didn't report me to Al Sharpton.

Drinking and "saving democracy" go hand in hand, since, after all, canvassing is one of the most thankless job known to humankind, and it takes a certain kind of personality to be able to stand the work day in and day out without going postal. You must be deaf to verbal abuse and theatrical in some measure; I can do the latter but I'm lousy at the former. For this reason, I burned out after two weeks. They swore at me, I swore right back. They gave me the finger, I flipped the bird in their face. They'd say, "We looove George Bush." I'd offer my sarcastic condolences. This is very bad canvassing form though the tart-tongued Mrs. Heinz Kerry might have approved.

Furthermore, you've got to be able to deal with being totally ignored by the vast majority of passersby, and you must be ready to indulge and engage that angry and gullible old local lefty paranoid who's (hopefully) still got a few dollars' worth of grief to unload on George Bush. They love Nader and Dean and want to blab all afternoon about it, but you've got to wrap it up quick and make the grab for their wallets. These people are in no short supply in New York City, and also provided the worst liberal-bonehead response of all when asked if they wanted to help Beat Bush: "Oh, don't worry, we're going to beat him this time."

I wouldn't be so smug about that if I were you.

Mr. Gogola's account of his fellow volunteer snotnoses highlights a general problem that some liberal Democrats have: they'd like to act up as much as possible but rightly fear having the American public see their gooniness on full display.

"Perplexed"

2004-07-16T02:21:00.001-05:00

Godless Americans Group Announces Endorsement of Kerry-Edwards
Press release
Godless Americans Political Action Committee
(7/14/04)

A newly formed group encouraging political action on behalf of “Godless Americans” has announced that it is endorsing the Sen. John Kerry for president and Sen. John Edwards for vice president in the 2004 national elections.

Ellen Johnson, Executive Director of the Godless Americans Political Action Committee, said that the Kerry-Edwards slate was “the clear choice over President Bush, who has spent the last four years eroding the separation of church and state, ‘packing the courts’ with judges who ignore the First Amendment, and imposing a de-facto Religion Tax through the federal faith-based initiative.”

Johnson said that the PAC grew out of the November, 2002 Godless Americans March on Washington that brought thousands of nonbelievers to the nation’s capitol for a rally on the mall.

“There are nearly 30 million Americans who describe themselves as having no religion,” said Johnson. “This includes Atheists, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists, Rationalists and others who have little or no voice in our political process, and who are often ignored by the major political parties.”

“We intend to change that.” [...]

Johnson said that the Kerry-Edwards slate was “the best alternative to four more years of George Bush and Pat Robertson running the country.”

Fifty million people freed from theocratic tyranny must not be enough.

Neither America Will be Voting for Edwards

2004-07-15T01:37:00.000-05:00

Edwards' Life Clashes With Campaign Message
David Gelernter
Los Angeles Times
(7/11/04)

Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina seems like a decent and likable man, the political equivalent of a handsome, slightly under-ripe bunch of bananas, just the thing if you are looking for bananas and can't find any ripe ones, or don't know the difference. But I can't believe the public is going to buy this act. Last week, I heard an admiring TV pundit explain, to general agreement from his fellows, that Edwards' "two Americas speech" is his No. 1 asset, followed closely by his self-made-man, up-from-the-working-class life story. The problem is, they cancel each other out.

That "two Americas" stuff suggests a country divided by a barricade, with the poor stuck on one side and the rich living it up on the other. [...]

Edwards' life story shows that his message is false. If your story is "poor boy makes good," your message can't possibly be "this is a two-part nation where poor boys are prevented from making good." [...]

Edwards' whole campaign shtick suggests he's a regular guy, just plain folks, a slob like us. So if he got over this barricade (or barrier or whatever it is), why can't anyone who really wants to? Answer: Anyone can, and everyone knows it. [...]

[H]ow exactly is this retired trial lawyer going to convince anyone or his dog that he has the answer to unemployment? That is rich. How many people have been thrown out of work because of exorbitant insurance rates forced by lawsuit terror — rates that close down businesses while obscenely rich trial lawyers get richer? [...]

Yet Edwards is on to something, in a way. Consider this proposition. "There is something out of whack about the connection between the U.S. economy and U.S. society. The wiring is fouled or the pipes are cracked or something, because the wrong activities (like trial lawyering) keep getting encouraged and rewarded. We need to think this problem through and solve it."

That I believe. What I can't believe is that Edwards will ever say it.

He is unlikely to say: "Ladies and gentlemen, why in God's name should I have made so unbelievably much money as a trial lawyer while gardeners, architects, policemen, civil engineers, physical therapists and Marine lieutenants make so (relatively) little? [...]

Nor is he likely to say: "Look at the Democratic presidential ticket, ladies and gentlemen; now look at the Republican ticket. Four rich candidates. Given that Democrats are the party of campaign finance reform, I'm hardly in a position to point out that our screwball campaign finance laws have turned every politician in the country into a money-grubbing beggar, unless he is too rich to have to bother; before long only multibillionaires will dare run for president.

"And speaking of money-grubbing: I'm hardly in a position to preach sacrifice — but isn't there any way to get more of our brightest young people to pass up law degrees or MBAs and become Talmudists, priests, physicists, archeologists?"

Two generations ago, nearly any married woman who felt like it could stay home and actually rear her own children. Today she's practically got to be married to a trial lawyer to afford it. Anyway, that's what people believe. Is this supposed to be progress? Why?

These are "liberal" questions. Too bad there are no liberal (or conservative) politicians with the cojones to ask them.

Here's a scary thought: How many Americans would become trial lawyers if they didn't have consciences?

Get This Guy a Spot at the Dem Convention

2004-07-01T22:34:00.000-05:00

Key excerpts from Saddam in court
BBC News
(7/2/04)

Saddam Hussein: How can you judge me in advance when I have not yet been tried? These are charges and not crimes. I demand lawyers. Do you have a law certificate and since when have you been recognised as a judge, after the occupation or before that?

Judge: Since the days of the previous regime and until now. The coalition authority asked me to hold this trial.

Saddam Hussein (laughing): Then you are trying me by order of the invasion forces. By what law are you trying me?

Judge: I am trying you in accordance with the Iraqi law.

Saddam Hussein: Then you are trying me by the law that I enacted. You are trying me by a law that I approved and ratified.

Saddam Hussein: I do not want to make you feel uneasy, but you know this is all theatre by Bush to help him with his election campaign. The real criminal is Bush.

Michael Moore has taught you well, Obi-wan.

In Case You Didn't Already Know...

2004-06-29T19:23:00.000-05:00

Paul Krugman is a pathetic lowlife.

Soon to be Off-Air America

2004-06-28T16:01:00.002-05:00

Is Franken Really Beating Limbaugh?
Byron York
National Review Online
(6/28/04)

In recent weeks, Air America, the startup liberal talk-radio network, has claimed early ratings success in the battle against conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh. The network says that Al Franken, host of Air America's O'Franken Factor, which airs on station WLIB in New York City, beat Limbaugh, whose program appears on WABC, in New York in the key audience demographic of listeners age 25 to 54. [...]

The early ratings — they were not actually ratings but extrapolations made by Air America from preliminary-ratings data — spurred a lot of enthusiastic talk among Air America supporters. [...]

There are no definitive measures for the time Air America has been in operation since its premiere March 31. Arbitron, the radio-ratings service, publishes quarterly ratings. The first quarter of 2004 — January, February, and March — was before Air America went on the air, and the second quarter — April, May, and June — is not quite finished.

But there is some information about Air America's audience that is available now. In addition to its standard quarterly measure, Arbitron keeps track of rolling three-month ratings. For example, along with the January/February/March quarterly rating, Arbitron compiles a preliminary February/March/April rating and a March/April/May rating. Those measures provide a glimpse of how the ratings are progressing between the standard quarterly periods. [...]

In the January/February/March period, a time when WLIB broadcast its old Caribbean music and talk format, the station earned a 1.3-percent share of the New York audience in the time period from 10 A.M. until 3 P.M., placing it 25th among the New York market's radio stations. During that time, WABC earned a 4.4-percent share, making it tied for fourth place in the market.

In the February/March/April period, which measured two months of the old WLIB format and one month of the new Air America format, WLIB earned a 1.6-percent share of the audience in the 10 A.M. to 3 P.M. time slot, ranking 23rd in the market. WABC earned a 4.9-percent share, ranking third.

In the March/April/May period, which measured one month of the old WLIB format and two months of the new Air America format, WLIB again earned a 1.8-percent share of the audience, putting it tied for 22nd in the market. WABC earned a 4.9-percent share, putting it tied for third place.

These numbers cannot be precisely compared to the demographic figures in the ratings claimed by Air America. Nevertheless, they suggest that Air America was likely premature in claiming victory over WABC and Limbaugh. More will be known on July 16, when Arbitron releases its final ratings for the second quarter of this year.

Whatever its ratings, Air America's more serious problem at the moment is financial. Last week the Wall Street Journal published a devastating account of what appeared to be gross financial misrepresentations by some of the network's founding executives (they have since left the company). The bottom line is that Air America appears to have far less money than it originally claimed.

The situation is so serious that radio experts suggest the network will have to abandon its current business plan if it is to survive. Specifically, Michael Harrison, editor of Talkers magazine, says Air America must stop insisting that stations air its entire day of programming and instead offer specific programs, like The O'Franken Factor or The Randi Rhodes Show, to stations that might want to air them.

"The answer is clear," says Harrison. "Get rid of the idea of the network, take the best shows — Franken, Rhodes, and maybe [Janeane] Garafalo — and syndicate them....They have to come around to it soon, or they're going to run out of money."

Amusingly, this runs directly counter to one of the most popular excuses lefties cited for their lack of success in talk radio: That liberal radio shows sandwiched between conservative shows or embedded within nontalk formats are unable to sustain listener attention. The "solution," they told us, was to hijack a station and construct an all-leftist, all-the-time format. Now that their beloved "people" aren't tuning in, one can speculate that they will feel free to petition the government -- or George Soros, who is almost as wealthy -- for funds. If they fail to do that, their only recourse is to return to the formula that paid such craptacular dividends for Jim Hightower and Mario Cuomo. No wonder these goofs despise the free market.

Nix Prix: Kix Blix To Styx

2004-06-28T16:01:00.001-05:00

Hunger, global warming as worrying as WMD -Blix
Reuters
(6/28/04)

Hunger is a bigger concern for many people than the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the world should keep such security risks in perspective, former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix said on Monday.

Blix led the U.N. search for alleged Iraqi biological, chemical and ballistic arsenals until it was cut short by the U.S-led invasion of the country last year.

He has criticised Washington and London for going to war without the express approval of the U.N. Security Council and has said the two probably knew then that they were exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq in making their case for war.

"One might get the impression from governments and media in the U.S. and Europe that the risk that reckless groups and governments might acquire weapons of mass destruction is the greatest problem facing our world today," Blix said in a speech to Vienna's Diplomatic Academy. [...]

Blix quoted British Prime Minister Tony Blair as saying that that risk was an "existential issue", but said there were other equally pressing problems.

"Let us not forget, however, that to hundreds of millions of people around the world, the big existential issue is hunger, and also that wherever you live on this planet, the risk of global warming and other environmental threats are existential" Blix said.

I'd say this guy is venturing outside his area of expertise, except that he hasn't demonstrated any expertise that I've noticed.

Cutting Off Nose, Spiting Face Department

2004-06-28T16:01:00.000-05:00

Scans uncover secrets of the womb
BBC News
(6/28/04)

A new type of ultrasound scan has produced the vivid pictures of a 12 week-old foetus "walking" in the womb.

The new images also show foetuses apparently yawning and rubbing its eyes.

The scans, pioneered by Professor Stuart Campbell at London's Create Health Clinic, are much more detailed than conventional ultrasound.

Professor Campbell has previously released images of unborn babies appearing to smile.

He has compiled a book of the images called Watch Me Grow. [...]

The images have shown:

From 12 weeks, unborn babies can stretch, kick and leap around the womb - well before the mother can feel movement

From 18 weeks, they can open their eyes although most doctors thought eyelids were fused until 26 weeks

From 26 weeks, they appear to exhibit a whole range of typical baby behaviour and moods, including scratching, smiling, crying, hiccoughing, and sucking.

Until recently it was thought that smiling did not start until six weeks after birth.

Walking? I never knew a blob of protoplasm could do that.

Meanwhile, in a related story:

More than 40 million legal abortions have been performed and documented in the 30 years since the U.S. Supreme Court declared abortion legal. The debate remains focused on the legality and morality of abortion. What's largely ignored is a factual analysis of the political consequences of 40 million abortions. Consider:

• There were 12,274,368 in the Voting Age Population of 205,815,000 missing from the 2000 presidential election, because of abortions from 1973-82.

• In this year's election, there will be 18,336,576 in the Voting Age Population missing because of abortions between 1972 and 1986.

• In the 2008 election, 24,408,960 in the Voting Age Population will be missing because of abortions between 1973-90.

These numbers will not change. They are based on individual choices made--aggregated nationally--as long as 30 years ago. Look inside these numbers at where the political impact is felt most. Do Democrats realize that millions of Missing Voters--due to the abortion policies they advocate--gave George W. Bush the margin of victory in 2000?

Mr. Eastland goes on to analyze the data in detail. There is certainly some room to quibble with his interpretations of the facts (i.e., If abortion had continued being illegal, how many of those abortions would have occurred regardless?), but there can be little doubt that legalized abortion has cost the Democrats voters and almost certainly lost them the 2000 election. Nice going, Donks.

"No Evidence" The Democrats Know What They're Talking About

2004-06-21T16:16:00.000-05:00

9/11 panel: New evidence on Iraq-Al-Qaida
Shaun Waterman
United Press International
(6/20/04)

The commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks has received new information indicating that a senior officer in an elite unit of the security services of deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein may have been a member of al-Qaida involved in the planning of the suicide hijackings, panel members said Sunday.

John F. Lehman, a Reagan-era GOP defense official told NBC's "Meet the Press" that documents captured in Iraq "indicate that there is at least one officer of Saddam's Fedayeen, a lieutenant colonel, who was a very prominent member of al Qaida."

The Fedayeen were a special unit of volunteers given basic training in irregular warfare. The lieutenant colonel, Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, has the same name as an Iraqi thought to have attended a planning meeting for the Sept. 11 attacks in January 2000, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The meeting was also attended by two of the hijackers, Khalid al Midhar and Nawaf al Hamzi and senior al-Qaida leaders.

Lehman said that commission staff members continued to work on the issue and experts cautioned that the connection might be nothing more than coincidence.

When "experts" say a connection like this might just be a coincidence, you know it's time to break out the noisemakers and send somebody on a beer run.

The Gipper Versus The Zipper

2004-06-21T16:11:00.000-05:00

AP Poll: Most Americans rate Reagan superior to Clinton
Will Lester
Associated Press
(6/21/04)

Most Americans say Ronald Reagan, who died this month, will be remembered as a better president than Bill Clinton, who is trying to improve his image with a new autobiography, according to an Associated Press poll.

Bringing down a slave empire versus bringing down an intern: Yeah, I'd say this one's settled.

You Are Being Lied To

2004-06-21T00:20:00.000-05:00

The 9/11 commission does see an Iraq link
Jack Kelly
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
(6/20/04)

On Thursday, the lead headline in the Post-Gazette was "Saddam, al-Qaida Not Linked. Sept. 11 Panel's Conclusion at Odds with Administration." In the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that day, the banner headline read: "9/11 Panel Debunks Saddam Link. Report: No Evidence of al-Qaida Ties."

This was false, as the chair and vice chair of the 9/11 commission hastened to make clear.

"Were there contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq? Yes. Some of them were shadowy, but they were there," commission Chair Thomas Kean told reporters on Thursday.

"There were connections between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein's government," said commission Vice Chair Lee Hamilton. "We don't disagree with that. What we have said is that we don't have any evidence of a cooperative, or a collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein's government and these al-Qaida operatives with regard to attacks on the United States [italics added]. So it seems to me that the sharp differences that the press has drawn, that the media has drawn, are not that apparent to me."

Since the Bush administration has never claimed that Saddam had a role in planning the 9/11 attacks, or earlier attacks on the USS Cole, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the Khobar Towers bombing, or the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, there is essentially no difference between what the commission said in its staff report, and what President Bush has been saying all along.

In Friday's paper, the PG made no mention of what Kean and Hamilton had to say about the erroneous reporting of the day before.

The Post-Gazette and Tribune-Review were by no means alone in getting the story wrong. The erroneous PG story Thursday was from The Washington Post. The story we ran Friday, headlined "Bush, Cheney Defend Linking Iraq, al-Qaida" -- which avoided mentioning that both the chairman and co-chairman of the 9/11 commission agreed with Bush --was from The New York Times.

Television news was worse. MSNBC's Keith Olbermann began his broadcast Wednesday night with the announcement: "Memo to the vice president: 9/11 commission finds, quote 'no credible evidence,' unquote, of any link between al-Qaida and Iraq." CBS's John Roberts said the Bush administration "took a devastating hit when the 9/11 commission declared there was no collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. The report is yet another blow to the president's credibility."

Anti-anti-Saddamism
William Kristol
The Weekly Standard
(6/28/04 issue)

Perhaps John Kerry simply made the mistake of believing what he read in the New York Times. There it was, the lead headline on Thursday, June 17: "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie." Or perhaps he read the Los Angeles Times headline: "No Signs of Iraq-Al Qaeda Ties Found." Or the Washington Post: "Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Is Dismissed." Or maybe he was watching CBS News the night before, as John Roberts explained that "one of President Bush's last surviving justifications for war in Iraq" took "a devastating hit" as the 9/11 Commission "put the nail in that connection" between Saddam and al Qaeda.

So Kerry pounced. No matter that this coverage ranged from tendentious to false. The Bush administration, he claimed, "misled America." "The administration took its eye off al Qaeda, took its eye off of the real war on terror in Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan and transferred it for reasons of its own to Iraq." And "the United States of America should never go to war because it wants to; we should only go to war because we have to." [...]

This is surely a major moment in the presidential race. John Kerry had, until last week, been running a disciplined general election campaign, carefully suppressing his left-leaning foreign policy instincts, soberly emphasizing his commitment to fighting the war on terror and to seeing through the effort in Iraq. Then he couldn't resist the temptation to jump on the (misleading) press accounts of the (sloppy) 9/11 Commission staff report, in order to assault the Bush administration on the issue of terror links between Saddam and al Qaeda.

The Bush administration has fought back. President Bush explained on Thursday, "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda is because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda." [...]By the end of the day, 9/11 Commission chairman Tom Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton were emphasizing that the commission had never said Iraq-al Qaeda links did not exist. Nor, Hamilton explained, did he "disagree" with Cheney's statement that there were "connections between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's government." The New York Times, having asserted on Thursday that the commission's report "challenges Bush," failed on Friday to report this statement of Hamilton's.

Now, as Stephen F. Hayes points out elsewhere in this issue, the staff report is an unimpressive document. It is sloppy and contains errors of commission and especially omission. It doesn't even attempt to deal with the reported presence of an Iraqi official, Ahmed Hikmad Shakir, at a 9/11 planning meeting in Kuala Lumpur in January 2000. It concludes that Mohammed Atta was not in Prague to meet an Iraqi intelligence agent in April 2001, based largely on the fact that his cell phone was used in the United States during those days--even though we know that the plotters shared cell phones among themselves, and that the cell phone in question would have been useless in Europe. (The report says nothing, meanwhile, about Atta's two unexplained but well-documented trips to Prague the previous year.)

But however blame may be apportioned between the commission's staff report and the media's tendentious coverage of it, Kerry has chosen to enter the fray. So we can now have the fundamental debate the country deserves: Does Kerry deny what the Clinton administration consistently maintained, what the Bush administration asserts, and what appears utterly clear--that Saddam Hussein had ties with terrorists and terrorist groups, including al Qaeda? That Saddam "created a permissive environment for terrorism," as a spokesman for British prime minister Tony Blair put it? No one else denies that the man who mixed the chemicals for the 1993 World Trade Center bomb, Abdul Rahman Yasin, came from and returned to Baghdad, where he lived for the next 10 years. Does Kerry? [...]

Suddenly, last week, the choice and the stakes in the presidential race became clearer.

There was a link between Saddam and al-Qa'eda
Melanie Phillips
London Telegraph
(6/20/04)

To the anti-war lobby, it was cause for jubilation. "No Qa'eda-Iraq tie" crowed The New York Times. "White House misled the world over Saddam" exulted our own Independent. And presidential candidate Senator John Kerry claimed that the Bush administration had "misled America over the need for war".

The excitement was over a preliminary assessment of evidence about al-Qa'eda by the US commission investigating September 11. The only problem was that the press coverage was untrue. The report does not rule out links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'eda. On the contrary, as the commission's chairman, Thomas Kean, confirmed: "There were contacts between Iraq and al-Qa'eda, a number of them, some of them a little shadowy. They were definitely there."

As so often in the coverage of Iraq, those who make the (illogical) claim that there was no such contact and therefore no cause for war saw in this report only what they wanted to see.

They read the words: "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qa'eda co-operated", and claimed official confirmation that no links had existed. But the report actually says: "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qa'eda co-operated on attacks upon the United States" - not that they never dealt with each other. On the contrary, it says they did deal with each other, particularly in Sudan.

In any event, the report is hardly authoritative. [...]

The main question [...] is why it devoted only one paragraph to the Saddam/al-Qa'eda link and ignored most the evidence amassed by Stephen Hayes in his recent book, The Connection. For while none of this is conclusive, it makes a powerful case. [...]

The book quotes a "well-placed" intelligence source saying: "Bin Laden was receiving training on bomb making from the IIS's [Iraqi Intelligence Service's] principal technical expert on making sophisticated explosives, Brigadier Salim al Ahmed. Brigadier Salim was observed at bin Laden's farm in Khartoum in Sep-Oct 1995 and again in July 1996, in the company of the director of Iraqi Intelligence Mani-abd-al-Rashid-al-Tikriti [to discuss] bin Laden's request for IIS technical assistance" in making bombs.

Hayes quotes another "regular and reliable" intelligence source who said that bin Laden's top deputy Ayman al Zawahiri "visited Baghdad and met with the Iraqi vice-president on 3 February 1998. The goal of the visit was to arrange for co-ordination between Iraq and bin Laden and establish camps in al-Falluja, an-Nasiriya and Iraqi Kurdistan under the leadership of Abdul Aziz." Hayes says that visit coincided with a $300,000 payment from Iraqi intelligence to Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic jihad, which merged with al-Qa'eda.

Recently, yet more evidence has emerged. The Wall Street Journal reported that captured documents listed one Ahmed Hikmat Shakir as a senior officer in the elite paramilitary Saddam Fedayeen. By an amazing coincidence, an Ahmed Hikmat Shakir was present at the January 2000 al-Qa'eda "summit" in Kuala Lumpur at which the September 11 attacks were planned.

It is of course possible that this was a different Ahmed Hikmat Shakir. However, Hayes reveals subsequent events showed this man was very important indeed to Iraq. Four days after September 11, he was arrested in Qatar and found to possess phone numbers of the 1993 World Trade Centre bombers' safe houses and contacts, as well as information about an al-Qa'eda plot to blow up airliners. But he was released, re-arrested in Jordan and released again (with CIA collusion) - following pressure from Iraq at the highest level. What is the point of an inquiry into al-Qa'eda that doesn't even consider such evidence?

Bill Clinton's administration was absolutely certain that Saddam was in cahoots with al-Qa'eda. It was a given. That is surely why, after September 11, Pentagon officials were obsessed with Iraq. Whether Saddam was personally involved in 9/11 was irrelevant; if he was aiding al-Qa'eda's terror, he had to be stopped. But this has been obliterated from the collective memory in order to place the most malign interpretation possible on the motives of the Bush administration.

Of course, one should be wary of intelligence. But the volume and specificity of these claims surely mean they should be addressed. Yet journalists for whom such nuggets would normally trigger a feeding frenzy astonishingly fail to report them and mislead the public instead. That is because the only story in town is that George W Bush and Tony Blair lied - a blinding certainty that cannot be disturbed by anything so inconvenient as the facts.

There They Go Again
Stephen F. Hayes
The Weekly Standard
(6/28/04 issue)

It's settled, apparenty. Saddam Hussein's regime never supported al Qaeda in its "attacks on America," and meetings between representatives of Iraq and al Qaeda did not result in a "collaborative relationship." That, we're told, is the conclusion of two staff reports the September 11 Commission released last Wednesday.

But the contents of the documents have been widely misreported. Together the new reports total 32 pages; one contains a paragraph on the broad question of a Saddam-al Qaeda relationship, the other a paragraph on an alleged meeting between the lead hijacker and an Iraqi agent. Nowhere in the documents is the "Al Qaeda-Hussein Link...Dismissed," as Washington Post headline writers would have us believe. In fact, Staff Statement 15 discusses several "links." It never, as the Associated Press maintained, "bluntly contradicted" the Bush administration's prewar arguments. The Los Angeles Times was more emphatic still: "The findings appear to be the most complete and authoritative dismissal of a key Bush administration rationale for invading Iraq: that Hussein's regime had worked in collusion with al Qaeda."

A complete dismissal? Only for someone determined to find a complete dismissal. The major television networks and newspapers across the country got it wrong.

By Thursday afternoon, the misreporting had become too much for some members of the 9/11 Commission. Its vice chairman, former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton, defended Vice President Dick Cheney against his attackers in the media:

I must say I have trouble understanding the flak over this. The Vice President is saying, I think, that there were connections between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's government. We don't disagree with that. What we have said is just what [Republican co-chairman Tom Kean] just said: We don't have any evidence of a cooperative or collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein's government and al Qaeda with regard to the attacks on the United States. So it seems to me that sharp differences that the press has drawn, that the media has drawn, are not that apparent to me.

Hamilton is half-right. The report was far more nuanced and narrowly worded than most news reports suggested. But while nuance is a close cousin of precision, it is not the same thing. And the two paragraphs on the Iraq-al Qaeda relationship are highly imprecise. Statement 15 does not, in fact, limit its skepticism about the Iraq-al Qaeda connection to collaboration on "the attacks on the United States." It also seems to cast doubt on the existence of any "collaborative relationship" (while conceding contacts and meetings) between the two.

[Hayes proceeds to outline in great detail the evidence of links between Saddam and al Qaeda. Do read this if you have the time, dear reader. -- Cato]

When it comes to the broader question of the relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda, the commission cannot be expected to write the definitive history. In the end, it will be up to the Bush administration to make available to the public as much intelligence as possible without jeopardizing sources and methods. Americans are not idiots. They can be expected to grasp the difference between circumstantial evidence and proof; between shared goals and methods and a proved operational alliance. They can accept that not all analysts will agree, and some facts will remain elusive. What they should not have to settle for is the current confusion.

The daily life of an elite media reporter: Get up. Read DNC fax. Parrot. Go to bed. Repeat.

"A Conflict of Visions," Indeed

2004-06-17T16:51:00.000-05:00

Victor Davis Hanson's latest:

Two views are emerging about our post-September-11 world. One is angry, but also therapeutic—and most often embraced by the Left. I think it goes roughly like this. Removing the Taliban in our initial rage might have for a moment seemed necessary, but things now in retrospect have proved not much better than before in Afghanistan and might well get worse. There was no need for the Iraqi campaign. Thus the Europeans and moderate Arabs were right that chaos would result and terrorists multiply in its bitter aftermath. Sharon has only antagonized the Palestinians, set back the peace-process, and made America’s war far more difficult. Mr. Bush’s unilateral rhetoric and vainglorious posture have needlessly offended the Europeans, who now have recently developed a real dislike of the United States and likewise complicated our task.

Here at home the Patriot Act and certain dangerous new jurisprudence are greater concerns than any prior inability of rounding up sleeper cells. No wonder almost every day an Al Gore, Howard Dean, or Ted Kennedy is screaming or yelling about something. It doesn’t feel good to have so much money, education, and sophistication and still not be able to stop this dangerous course of events—that are the “worst ever,” “unprecedented,” and “a new low” in American history.

The other interpretation is somewhat tragic, largely upbeat about our recent accomplishments, and held by those on the more conservative side. Given the bleak options after the destruction of the World Trade Center, the prior murderous history of Afghanistan, and the depressing landscape of the Middle East, the past three years are nothing short of miraculous: Taliban gone; constitutional government emerging; and a good man like Karzai trying to end fundamentalist terror. Saddam, his sons, and Iraqi genocide are now over with. And despite the daily turmoil, Iraq is likewise inching toward some type of consensual government in less time than was true of a more sophisticated postwar Japan or Germany. There is a good chance that the Israelis will leave Gaza; suicide bombing is vastly reduced; a new fence will give both sides a breather until—and if—a legitimate Palestine government emerges to negotiate final borders.

As far as our “allies” go, Mr. Bush simply tore off the scab of the preexisting wound of Europe-American relations, in which the subsidized protection offered by the United States in the post-Cold War had far earlier led to an array of conflicting passions on the continent, arising out of an increasingly anti-democratic EU, envy, dependency, and resentment. In America proper—without much erosion of our daily ease and freedoms—we have rounded up scores of terrorists and thus so far avoided another mass murder. Consequently, conservatives are more likely to speak in calm tones than either scream for resignations or in wild-eyed fashion cite conspiracies that are destroying America.

How to adjudicate these two conflicting views of the present situation? We cannot. Why so?

The answer is that our interpretations of the present crisis are predicated on our own larger views of mankind itself. The tragic sense accepts us as flawed and thus expects setback, mistakes, and even moral lapses. The therapeutic view in contrast demands perfection right now and thus allows for few, if any, mistakes.

It sounds as if Mr. Hanson has been reading his Thomas Sowell lately.

On to the Next Quagmire

2004-06-17T16:26:00.000-05:00

The Brothers Judd Blog links to this encouraging story about public perceptions of Iraq:

Americans are paying markedly less attention to Iraq than in the last two months. At the same time, their opinions about the war have become more positive. The number of Americans who think the U.S. military effort is going well has jumped from 46% in May to 57%, despite ongoing violence in Iraq and the widening prison abuse scandal. And the percentage of the public who believes it was right to go to war inched up to 55%, from 51% in May.

The new Pew survey indicates that many Americans are becoming less connected to the news about Iraq and possibly more hardened to events there. Just 39% say they are tracking developments in Iraq very closely – down 15 points since April and the lowest level this year. In addition, 35% say that people they know are becoming less emotionally involved with the news from Iraq, a sharp increase from 26% last month.

The poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, conducted June 3-13 among 1,806 Americans, found lower attention to the war in Iraq even before the death of former President Ronald Reagan dominated the news. Overall, four-in-ten paid very close attention to Reagan's death and memorial service, which is about the same level as interest in former President Nixon's death and funeral a decade ago (36% very closely).

About three weeks ago, I told my younger brother that Iraq was going to be a nonstory by the time the election swung around, due to the fact that a democratic government was slowly being established there. I just wish I'd been smart enough to document this thought on my blog, the way Mr. Judd did on his.

"Tonight on CBS, Another Horror Story from Abu Ghraib..."

2004-06-17T16:07:00.000-05:00

The American Spectator picks up on yet another story you won't find on ABCNNBCBS:

On June 9, Demetrius Perricos announced that before, during and after the war in Iraq, Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction and medium-range ballistic missiles to countries in Europe and the Middle East. Entire factories were dismantled and shipped as scrap metal to Jordan, the Netherlands and Turkey, among others, at the rate of about 1,000 tons of metal a month. As an example of speed by which these facilities were dismantled, Perricos displayed two photographs of a ballistic missile site near Baghdad, one taken in May 2003 with an active facility, the other in February 2004 that showed it had simply disappeared.

What passed for scrap metal and has since been discovered as otherwise is amazing. Inspectors have found Iraqi SA-2 surface-to-air missiles in Rotterdam -- complete with U.N. inspection tags -- and 20 SA-2 engines in Jordan, along with components for solid-fuel for missiles. Short-range Al Samoud surface-to-surface missiles were shipped abroad by agents of the regime. That missing ballistic missile site contained missile components, a reactor vessel and fermenters -- the latter used for the production of chemical and biological warheads.

"The problem for us is that we don't know what may have passed through these yards and other yards elsewhere," Ewen Buchanan, Perricos's spokesman, said. "We can't really assess the significance and don't know the full extent of activity that could be going on there or with others of Iraq's neighbors."

Perricos isn't an American shill defending the Bush administration, but rather the acting executive chairman of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and his report was made to the Security Council. Yet his report didn't seem to be of much interest to a media which has used the lack of significant discoveries to question the rationale for the war.

To paraphrase P.J. O'Rourke, the media will start reporting this sometime during the second Trump administration.

From the "Your Spouse Is Nuts" Department:

2004-06-01T03:42:00.000-05:00

I didn't think you were speaking literally!

We'll Let John Kerry Know About This on November 2nd

2004-06-01T03:21:00.000-05:00

Iraq Situation Improving
Associated Press
(5/30/04)

Despite war and occupation, Iraq has seen a surge in human rights organizations, political parties and independent newspapers -- entities almost unheard of under Saddam Hussein, said a report by an Arab think tank.

The report by Egypt's Ibn Khaldoun Center for Development Studies welcomed the promise of elections, the freedom of expression and independence of the media but was careful not to credit the Americans for the progress.

"Even though all indications of political rights and human rights mentioned in this report clearly illustrate that the situation in Iraq after occupation is much better than Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the truth remains that any situation would have been better than Saddam Hussein," the report said.

Read that last sentence again. Even the Arabs are starting to "get it." Too bad the Democrats don't.

No, Pat, No!

2004-05-28T00:08:00.000-05:00

The excellent Little Green Footballs blog posts its comments on Pat Buchanan's recent article in the Arab News, pointing out that Charles Krauthammer is not, as Buchanan says, a neoconservative. LGF accurately points out that Buchanan is a loser. Their language is a little more restrained than that, but the meaning comes through clear enough. For gooseturds like Buchanan, "neoconservative" means nothing more -- and nothing less -- than "Jew." Here are more deep thoughts from the Paleos' leading caveman:

“So, how do we advance the cause of female emancipation in the Muslim world?” asks Richard Perle in An End to Evil. He replies, “We need to remind the women of Islam ceaselessly: Our enemies are the same as theirs; our victory will be theirs as well.”

Well, the neoconservative cause “of female emancipation in the Muslim world” was probably set back a bit by the photo shoot of Pfc. Lynndie England and the “Girls Gone Wild” of Abu Ghraib prison.

Indeed, the filmed orgies among US military police outside the cells of Iraqi prisoners, the S&M humiliation of Muslim men, and the sexual torment of Muslim women raise a question. Exactly what are the “values” the West has to teach the Islamic world?

“This war ... is about — deeply about — sex,” declaims neocon Charles Krauthammer. Militant Islam is “threatened by the West because of our twin doctrines of equality and sexual liberation.”

On the upside, at least Pat has found a brand new venue for his ravings.

"All Lies and Jest"

2004-05-25T22:25:00.000-05:00

Jason van Steenwyk has provided us with an devastating analysis of the ways in which the press distorts the coverage of Iraq. He quotes from the transcript of a press conference given by Major-General James Mattis and others. Here is the relevant passage:

Unnamed Reporter: What happened yesterday at 3 a.m. in Al Qaim? Was there a wedding on? A wedding celebration?

Gen. Mattis: You joined us a little late, as I said to the young lady here, I said how many people how many people go to the desert 10 miles from the Syrian border and hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization? Over two-dozen military-aged males... let's not be naïve. Let's leave it at that.

(Question unintelligible)

Gen. Mattis: I can't...I've seen the pictures, but I can't...bad things happened. Generally...in Fallujah, I never saw a Marine hide behind a woman or a child or hold them in their house and fire out of the building. I don't have to apologize for the conduct of my Marines.

Steenwyk goes on to note:

As you can plainly see, General Mattis clearly shifted his point of reference from the site of the so-called 'wedding party' to Fallujah. When he said he did not have to apologize for the conduct of his Marines, he was contrasting his own Marines' tactics with those of the insurgents, who make a common practice of hiding behind women and children.

This is when things get interesting. Steenwyk goes on to dissect the lamestream media's "treatment" of Mattis's quote. A few examples:

The Globe and Mail: "Bad things happen in wars," said Major-General James Mattis, the U.S. Marine commander in charge of occupation forces in western Iraq.

"These were more than two dozen military-age males. I don't have to apologize for the conduct of my men."

[Steenwyk:] That's right, they blow the quote, they take the last sentence out of the Fallujah context and mix it in with the "wedding," and they don't bother with the ellipses normally expected of a journalist when he omits portion of the text of remarks. [...]

The New York Times:

Maj. Gen. James Mattis, the commander of the First Marine Division responsible for the remote stretch of desert where the strike was carried out, asked, "How many people go to the middle of the desert 10 miles from the Syrian border to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?"

At a news conference in Falluja, west of Baghdad, he said that two dozen men of military age were among those killed.

"Let's not be naive," he said. "Bad things happen in wars."

"I don't have to apologize for the conduct of my men," he added.

[Steenwyk:] Again, the decontextualization from Fallujah. And I'm still looking for "bad things happen in wars" in the transcript. [...]

Reuters:

"How many people go to the middle of the desert 10 miles from the Syrian border to hold a wedding 80 miles from the nearest civilization?" Mattis said in Falluja.
"These were more than two dozen military-age males. Let's not be naive...Bad things happen in wars.

"I don't have to apologize for the conduct of my men."

[Steenwyk:] Again, Reuters seems to invent "bad things happen in wars," skips the expected ellipses, and distorts the context of Mattis's assertion that he does not have to apologize for the conduct of his Marines. (Why are so many outlets distorting the exact same way? Are they not doing their own reporting, perchance?)

Most of the other press outlets make the same mistake, and Agence France-Presse quotes a comment Mattis supposedly made about Nick Berg's beheading, even though there's no mention of it in the transcript.

As Steenwyk notes, the Washington Post is just about the only elite media institution that got the quote right. Everyone else screwed the pooch.

If the MSM were an equal-opportunity screwer-upper, this sort of thing could be ascribed solely to the incompetence of American reporters. But since the distortions always seem to go in an anti-U.S., anti-conservative, anti-Iraq War direction, I think we've got to dig a little deeper in our quest for explanations. Thankfully, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has encapsulated the issue quote nicely. A couple of weeks ago, he said something like this (I can't find the quote online but I know he said it):

If the recent media coverage of our problems in Iraq has you feeling confused, and angry, and depressed, I'd like to suggest that this is no accident. It's the point.

Yep.

Insult Americans, Win a Prize!

2004-05-24T18:16:00.000-05:00

The New York Times has printed an editorial by one Asla Aydintasbas sticking up for Ahmed Chalabi. Surprised? You shouldn't be. In a comment on NRO's "The Corner" today, Rich Lowry, in one sentence, said absolutely everything that needed to be said: "This is the strange new respect that comes with bitterly denouncing the U.S. occupation."

A Joke? The Punchline is Sitting in the Senate.

2004-05-24T18:03:00.000-05:00

To Saddam's prisoners, US abuse seems 'a joke'
Gert Van Langendonk
The Daily Star
5/24/04)

BAGHDAD: Ibrahim al-Idrissi, 37, goes to work every day with a handgun in a holster on his hip. In most countries, the line of work Idrissi is in wouldn't require such firepower. But this is Iraq. Idrissi is the president of the Association for Free Prisoners, an Iraqi non-governmental organization that has been documenting the execution of political prisoners under the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Many of Saddam's torturers and executioners are still at large. There have been two attempts on Idrissi's life, and three on the organization's headquarters in Baghdad. "Fortunately, their aim hasn't been very good so far," Idrissi says. [...]

So far, the organization has been able to confirm the execution of 147,000 prisoners by Saddam. Last year, the garden of the group's headquarters, in a villa on the bank of the Tigris River in Kahdimiya, was filled with wailing and sobbing as hundreds of families came to check the names of their missing relatives against the lists being posted on a daily basis by the Idrissis and other volunteers. The lists were based on files recovered from Saddam's security apparatus. Behind the house, hundreds of now empty filing cabinets have begun to rust. [...]

Ibrahim Idrissi has mixed feelings about the recent uproar caused by the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib under the US occupation. "As a humanitarian organization, we oppose this," he says. "But these are soldiers who have come to Iraq to fight, not to be prison guards. It was to be expected. Of course, if there are innocent people in there ... it is possible, I guess, that some of them are innocent."

If Idrissi seems a bit callous about the fate of the Iraqis in US-run jails, he has probably earned the right to differ. He recalls a day in 1982, at the General Security prison in Baghdad:

"They called all the prisoners out to the courtyard for what they called a 'celebration.' We all knew what they meant by 'celebration.' All the prisoners were chained to a pipe that ran the length of the courtyard wall. One prisoner, Amer al-Tikriti, was called out. They said if he didn't tell them everything they wanted to know, they would show him torture like he had never seen. He merely told them he would show them patience like they had never seen."

"This is when they brought out his wife, who was five months pregnant. One of the guards said that if he refused to talk he would get 12 guards to rape his wife until she lost the baby. Amer said nothing. So they did. We were forced to watch. Whenever one of us cast down his eyes, they would beat us."

"Amer's wife didn't lose the baby. So the guard took a knife, cut her belly open and took the baby out with his hands. The woman and child died minutes later. Then the guard used the same knife to cut Amer's throat." There is a moment of silence. Then Idrissi says: "What we have seen about the recent abuse at Abu Ghraib is a joke to us."

Ted Kennedy, as we all know, has declared that Saddam's torture chambers have re-opened under U.S. management. Massachusetts ought to be ejected from the Union for electing this schmuck.

Bomb Their Villages With Title Deeds

2004-05-19T12:36:00.000-05:00

The Constituency of Terror
Hernando de Soto
New York Times
(10/15/01)

Newspaper headlines and television anchors across the United States ask, "Who are these people who hate us so much?" We who live in the Third World and the former Soviet nations know terrorism well. [...]

But these terrorist politicians have a common problem. They are small minorities in their own countries. To take power, they need to swell their ranks, and in the developing world, the overwhelming majority of people are poor. The difficulty is that for the past 30 years the poor in most places have been more interested in becoming entrepreneurs than revolutionaries. To improve their lives, they have migrated by the millions to the cities. You can see these migrants in the streets of the Middle East or Asia, selling what they manufacture in their shanties, from carpets and books to tools and engines.

They have worked harder than most people in the West realize. In Mexico alone, according to our research [He means research conducted by his Institute for Liberty and Democracy -- Cato], the poor today own assets worth $315 billion, seven times the value of Pemex, the nation’s oil monopoly. In Egypt, the poor control some $245 billion of goods — 55 times the total foreign investment made in Egypt over the last 150 years. All over the developing world, the poor are inching toward a market society.

What is a terrorist to do to divert the poor from economics to politics? He must try to create an irresistible emotional shock that focuses people on their differences with the West rather than their aspirations to resemble it.

To polarize people in this way, you do something as atrocious as possible and hope that the enemy will retaliate even more violently and indiscriminately, killing more innocent people and creating legions of refugees. The terrorist politicians hope then to sit back and wait for the poor, and those whose hearts go out to the poor, to rally around their leadership. [...]

In my native Peru, we helped undermine the Shining Path terrorist movement in the 1990’s by reforming laws to make it easier for the poor to gain legal title to their homes and small businesses. In my experience, the Shining Path and similar groups elsewhere have protected peasant land claims as part of their politics — and once the state itself protects those claims through granting clear title, the terrorists lose their political hold. This strategy was actually first used by the Prussians to rally their farmers to defeat Napoleon in the early 19th century.

To divert the poor from the siren call of terrorists, America and its allies must appeal to their entrepreneurial interests. It is not enough to appeal to the stomachs of the poor. One must appeal to their aspirations. This is, in a way, what the terrorists do. But their path leads only to destruction.

Up to now, the West’s policies and economic incentives have concentrated on encouraging the rest of the world to follow good macroeconomics: to stabilize currencies, balance budgets and privatize public enterprises. The influence, power and glamour of the West are still so great that most countries have followed these prescriptions. The West did not get involved in the details; its beneficiaries have progressed (or failed) on the strength of their own imaginations and programs. It is now time for the West to create new policies that inspire governments to harness the entrepreneurial energy that is already humming among the poor and focus on development at a micro level, encouraging capitalism from below.

The long-term fight against terrorism needs to offer millions of potential warriors a formal stake in the economic system they are striving to join. Any campaign that does not drive a political and economic wedge between terrorists and the poor is likely to be short-lived.

Here's why we should listen to de Soto: The Shining Path was a huge movement when he came along (it tried to assassinate him three times), and it is now in abysmal shape after the Peruvian government instituted his policies. His two books, The Other Path and The Mystery of Capital, emphasize the importance of providing the poor with legal title to the property they already essentially own. Without this, only the elites get to make money, and the economy stinks to high heaven.

This matter goes beyond the question of terrorism: Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a Native American Republican, has cited de Soto's writings in arguing that Indian tribes should sink their communal ownership policies and institute private property. On a personal note, I once worked as a high school teacher's assistant on an Indian reservation once a week, and I could not believe the total lack of direction the kids had. This is no accident: They live in an essentially socialist environment where entrepreneurship is not rewarded, so why should they care about their futures? Since land is communal, a person who wants to start a business doesn't have much collateral for a loan (this is related to the presence of so many mobile homes on Indian reservations: they are easier to repossess), and he has to run a gauntlet of regulations to get anything going (a chart in one of de Soto's books outlines some 200-plus steps that must be navigated to start a business in a typical third-world country). If at any step in this process, a rival family takes over from the current administration of the tribe during an election, they can put the kibosh on whatever project the entrepreneurial Indian is undertaking. There is no independent judiciary. And even the lucky person who gets past all of this faces immense hostility from his neighbors. The same situation exists in any number of poor nations.

I'm not one of those people who think that poverty causes terrorism per se, but I do believe that one of the best ways to combat it is to emphasize how much people have to gain from standing with the United States. De Soto deserves a Nobel Prize for his work outlining how much wealth the world's poor could potentially command, but he won't win it because the economics Nobel tends to go to technical economists who deal with problems most people couldn't care less about. When the Bank of Sweden instituted the prize in 1969, they actually stipulated that it be awarded for technical work and not for, um, helping people, which might be why Ludwig Erhard -- West Germany's version of de Soto -- never won it. He'll just have to settle for the Milton Friedman Prize. And for the satisfaction of being right.

Moore is Less

2004-05-19T11:50:00.000-05:00

The myths of Moore that are sold as facts
by Fraser Nelson
The Scotsman
(5/19/04)

‘Bush is an idiot." If I say this about ten thousand times, it can become a bestselling book: if I slip a few jokes in it (and a few rude words) it can be a stand-up comedy routine. With a camera, it can be a blockbuster film.

Just ask Michael Moore, a baseball-cap-wearing comedian who has turned his hand to literature and made Stupid White Men - an anti-Bush polemic - a worldwide bestseller in an era when people were supposedly fed up with politics.

The secret of his success: his books are billed as fact, but contain myths woven together with conspiracy theory. [...]

Spurned by his success, Mr Moore has swapped his luxury Manhattan flat for the Cannes Film Festival this week to preview Fahrenheit 9/11 [...] It’s a work intended to expose links between Bush’s allies and the Saudi royal family and, to be fair to Mr Moore, it concludes on a staggering event. In the days after the 11 September terrorist attacks, President Bush allowed his friends in the Saudi Arabian royal family to flee America when a no-fly ban was firmly in place.

Mr Moore takes up the story: "Nobody could go up in the sky. Except the administration allowed a private Saudi jet to go to five American cities and pick up 20 members of the bin Laden family and get them out of the country. And the FBI was very upset that they didn’t get to interrogate them."

This is truly remarkable. But it is also flatly untrue - as proven by the bipartisan 9/11 Committee, which found that the planes with Saudis took off only after airspace reopened and the FBI had interviewed 22 of the 26 suspects. The White House was not involved.

This is, sadly, by no means the only myth masquerading as fact in Moore’s bestselling books. There are entire websites devoted to nailing down the parts where he’s dressed up gossip as gospel, or concocted entire arguments.

Take Bowling for Columbine, his Oscar-winning documentary about the massacre five years ago at Columbine High School in Colorado. Its title is based on the "fact" that the murderers went bowling before starting the slaughter. Except they were nowhere near a bowling alley, as is now proven. This is just the start of the little deceptions which routinely "sex up" Moore’s work. It is not sloppiness. He being deliberately loose with the facts, and it pays.

A while ago, he was challenged by CNN about "glaring inaccuracies" in Stupid White Men. "This is a book of political humour. So, I mean, I don’t respond to that sort of stuff, you know ... How can there be inaccuracy in comedy?"

A wonderful caveat. Mr Moore makes his money from people who think the facts he presents are true. His Oscar was for documentary, not fiction. Yet his policy, it seems, is to make ’em laugh - even if that means bending the truth. [...]

[T]he lure of Moore-style fortune has bent several serious commentators who have found they can treble their sales with a few salacious details. Serious economists such as Paul Krugman and former ministers such as Paul O’Neill, President Bush’s first Treasury secretary, have been on the same money trail discovered by Mr Moore. Noam Chomsky, the linguist and conspiracy theorist, has long been churning out books blaming the US and Israel for everything that’s wrong in the world - backed up by footnotes often found to be spurious. His reward: a poll last week found him to be the US commentator most read by Europeans.

Why should we take Europe seriously when they aren't serious?

Dying to Join

2004-04-22T18:11:00.000-05:00

The Emperor Misha (who first brought the cartoon in the post directly underneath this one to my attention) provides a link to this help-wanted ad posted by one of his readers. I am not responsible for any ruined keyboards.

"Leftists Love Their Country, Too" Files

2004-04-22T18:01:00.000-05:00

Dumber-Than-Dirt Alert!

2004-04-22T17:48:00.000-05:00

Welcome to the first edition of my blog's Numskull News™, designed to keep you informed about the hair-brained schemes of the world's idiots, gasbags, and hot-air artists. Today's guest is acclaimed director Oliver Stone, who has just traveled from the Cuban workers' paradise (by plane, of course -- all other travelers had better pack shark-repellant) to share his thoughts on his new hagiography of Fidel Castro, Looking for Fidel.

Numskull News™ will typically feature commentary by Cato the elder, who damn well deserves to give his opinion after wading through this tripe and extracting the juicy bits. For our first installment, however, it seems appropriate to simply let Stone's responses to his interviewer's questions (that would be Ann Louise Bardach -- may we have pity on her soul, amen) go uncommented upon. It seems almost profane to interrupt Stone's stupefying string of stupidity, which begins to acquire an awe-inspiring quality by dint of sheer repetition. We are in the presence of a master:

ALB: Do you know that the Cubans are refusing visas to virtually all reporters and not allowing them back in the country?

OS: You know, the advantage I have is to be a filmmaker. [Castro] seemed to love my movies. Apparently he liked my presence, and he trusted that I wouldn't edit him in a way that would be negative from the outset. But I did tell him, the second trip, that I would try to be tougher, not disrespectfully so. As you see, several times [in the film] he does get upset.

ALB: I gather you rejected the idea of demonizing him.

OS: Of course. My role here was not as a journalist. It really was as a director and filmmaker. In my job, I challenge actors. I provoke them.

ALB: Let me ask you about the part [in the film] where Castro's in front of eight prisoners charged with attempting to hijack a plane [to Miami]. He says to them, "I want you all to speak frankly and freely." What do you make of that whole scene, where you have these prisoners who happened to be wearing perfectly starched, nice blue shirts?

OS: Let me give you the background. He obviously set it up overnight. It was in that spirit that he said, "Ask whatever you want. I'm sitting here. I want to hear it too. I want to hear what they're thinking." He let me run the tribunal, so to speak.

ALB: But Cuba's leader for life is sitting in front of these guys who are facing life in prison, and you're asking them, "Are you well treated in prison?" Did you think they could honestly answer that question?

OS: If they were being horribly mistreated, then I don't know that they could be worse mistreated [afterward].

ALB: So in other words, you think they thought this was their best shot to air grievances? Rather than that if they did speak candidly, there'd be hell to pay when they got back to prison?

OS: I must say, you're really picturing a Stalinist state. It doesn't feel that way. You can always find horrible prisons if you go to any country in Central America.

ALB: Did you go to the prisons in Cuba?

OS: No, I didn't.

ALB: So you don't know if they're any different than, say, the prisons in Honduras then?

OS: I think that those prisoners are being honest.

ALB: What about when you ask them what they think is a fair sentence for their crimes, and one of them starts to talk about how he'd like to have 30 years in prison?

OS: I was shocked at that. But Bush would have shot these people, is what Castro said. … I don't know what the parole system is.

ALB: There is none unless Fidel Castro decides to give you clemency. [...] I'm suggesting that they had no choice but to appear there, and that in some ways it was a bit of a mini-show-trial, sort of "Look how well we treat our prisoners."

OS: It does have that aura, absolutely. But I do maintain that if it were a Stalinist state … they certainly do a great job of concealing it. [...] [Castro] was a huge part of the state, and now, as he points out, he has less power. … There is a functioning congress.

ALB: Do you really think that anything happens in Cuba without his approval?

OS: I don't know. [...]

ALB: [...] As far as I know, Comandante has the first footage of Fidel with his son Fidelito and grandson, aside from formal receptions, etc. How did they respond to each other?

OS: I think Fidel said something to the effect that, at the end, he could have been a better father. [...]

ALB: How did you end up in a hospital with him getting an EKG?

OS: I went with him to see a functioning hospital in the heart of the city. Spontaneously, he took his shirt off, and said, "Well, I need one. Give me one." The [EKG results] looked good.

ALB: In other words, he's saying to you, "All these rumors about me dying and my poor health, let me dispel them once and for all"?

OS: No, he didn't say that.

ALB: But by doing this, in essence, he's saying that?

OS: In essence. But I had not heard these rumors about him dying. In the first documentary he showed us his exercise regime in the office, pacing back and forth. He walks three miles in his office.

ALB: Did it strike you as interesting that at one point in the scene with the prisoners, Castro turned to the prisoners' defense lawyers, who just happened to be there, and he says, "I urge you to do your best to reduce the sentences"?

OS: I love that. I thought that was hilarious. Those guys just popped up.

ALB: Is there a show-trial element here?

OS: Yeah. I thought that was funny, I did—the prosecutor and Fidel admonishing them, to make sure they worked hard. There was that paternalism. I mean "father knows best," as opposed to totalitarianism. It's paternalism, that's what I meant. It's a Latin thing.

ALB: So after 60 hours with Castro, what do you make of this man?

OS: I'm totally awed by his ability to survive and maintain a strong moral presence [...] Fidel is not the revolution, believe me. Fidel is popular, whatever his enemies say. It's Zapata, remember that movie? He said, "A strong people don't need a strong leader."

ALB: So you think that if he went off the scene the revolution would continue?

OS: If Mr. Bush and his people have the illusion that they're going to walk into an Iraq-type situation, and people are going to throw up their arms and welcome us, [they are] dead wrong. These people are committed. Castro has become a spiritual leader. He will always be a Mao to those people.

ALB: Did you ask him about his relationship with Juanita in Miami?

OS: God, I don't remember. There were so many women.

ALB: Juanita is his sister.

OS: Juanita's his sister? ... He seemed to be a very straight-shooter, very kind of shy with women.

ALB: I've called him the movie star dictator. Did you get that sense about him?

OS: Totally. I think it would be a mistake to see him as a Ceausescu. I would compare him more to Reagan and Clinton. … They were both tall and had great shoulders, and so does Fidel. [...]

ALB: Did you ever think to bring up why he doesn't hold a presidential election?

OS: I did. He said something to the effect, "We have elections."

ALB: Local representative elections. But what about a presidential election?

OS: We didn't talk about it, especially in view of the fact that our own 2000 elections were a little bit discredited.

ALB: In the first film, Comandante, he asked you, "Is it so bad to be a dictator?" Did you think you should have responded to that question?

OS: I don't think that was the place to do it. … You know, dictator or tyrant, those words are used very easily. In the Greek political system, democracy didn't work out that well. There were what they called benevolent dictators back in those days.

ALB: And you think he might be in that category?

OS: Well, not benevolent to everybody, no.

ALB: Can't it be said in fact that Castro is quite cynical—the master debater, master lawyer?

OS: Well, nobody's perfect.

Somebody get me a drink and some Tylenol, quick.

Hmmm...

2004-04-22T16:35:00.000-05:00

The Vote that Dare Not Speak Its Name
The Weekly Standard
Fred Barnes
(04/19/04)

Bobby Jindal led polls in the Louisiana governor's race last fall right up to Election Day. And for good reason: He was one of the most impressive candidates either party had fielded in any election in any state in recent years. Then he lost. A 32-year-old Republican from Baton Rouge, Jindal is the son of emigrants from India. Because he is dark-skinned, there was a worry he would lose the so-called Bubba vote--code for the racist vote. Now it's clear that that's exactly what cost him the governorship.

Two political scientists from Hamilton College in New York compared the areas where David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klansman, ran well in 1991 with the vote for Jindal's Democratic opponent, Kathleen Blanco, in 2003. There was a remarkable correlation. Where Duke did well, Blanco did well.

Blanco, who'd served as lieutenant governor before being elected governor, did not make any racial appeals in the campaign. Yet she benefited enormously from race-influenced voting. "Our results indicate that a significant number of those who voted for David Duke, the most racist statewide candidate of the post-civil rights era, contrary to previous elections and even after controlling for other factors, swung their support from the non-white Republican to the white Democrat," Richard Skinner and Philip A. Klinkner concluded in their study. [...]

In circumstances similar to those in Louisiana, Republicans are blamed by Democrats and the media for winning by attracting racist votes. The conservative appeal is said to send a favorable signal to bigots.

But Jindal's fervent conservatism certainly didn't. He ran as an economic and social conservative with a strong Christian faith. The 2003 results, said Skinner and Klinkner, "indicate that racial divisions in Louisiana are not limited to the black-white divide and that the racial conservatism of many Louisiana whites extends to other racial groups."

Jindal has never attributed his loss to race. [...]

The two researchers also compared Blanco's vote with that of other statewide Democrats. Both Blanco and Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu, re-elected in 2002, won with 52 percent of the vote. "The geographic pattern of the Landrieu vote was very typical for a Democrat with a correlation of .98 with the average Democratic vote in the1996 and 2000 presidential elections," Skinner and Klinkner found. For Blanco, the correlation was .60, "indicating that Blanco was drawing support from a different set of voters."

Indeed, she was. In the 26 parishes where Duke won a majority, Blanco averaged 10 points better than Landrieu, who defeated a white Republican. The pattern was especially striking in northern Louisiana, Bubba country. In parishes where Duke got more than 55 percent, Blanco averaged 17 percentage points more than Landrieu.

Question: Should Republicans adopt the tactics of the Democrats by charging certain electoral losses to racial animosity, even when those charges happen to be true?

You Can Either Be "The Stupid Party" Or...This

2004-04-22T16:11:00.000-05:00

Hey, everyone! The Pollys have arrived! Sit back and take a whiff:

What college takes the top award for the most shocking example of political correctness in higher education? According to the Collegiate Network's 7th annual Campus Outrage Awards, also known as the "Polly Awards," two schools are tied for first place.

At Yale University, a student-sponsored "Sex Week at Yale" used school funds, facilities and the help of school faculty and administrators. The events were co-sponsored by an adult film company and even included a porn star as a keynote speaker.

At the University of California, Santa Barbara, a student received kudos from professors and administrators for his Chicano Studies thesis, "Gay Men of Color in Porn," a project that was presented as part of the UCSB Multicultural Center's tax-payer funded "Race Matters Series" in an effort to legitimize pornography as an academic pursuit.

Number two on the list goes to The University of California, Berkeley, where the Associated Students of the University of California and the Graduate Assembly illegally spent $31,000 of mandatory student fees on a campus campaign to defeat Proposition 54, a racial privacy initiative to ban the state from collecting race data on school admissions forms.

Although the Associated Students of the University of California violated its own spending rules forbidding use of student funds for off-campus political activities, the administration granted ASUC and the Graduate Assembly a "one-time exception."

Coming in third is Northwestern University where a student filed a false police report claiming racial slurs were written on his door and claiming he was later attacked at knifepoint by thugs who called him a "spic." [...]

The school has yet to take disciplinary action against him, despite the fact the police charged him with disorderly conduct for filing fake police reports.

In fourth place is Duke University where the chair of the Philosophy Department justified the 17-1 Democrat to Republican ratio among the school's professors by claiming conservatives are not smart enough to teach at Duke.

"We try to hire the best, smartest people available. If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire," said Robert Brandon.

And the fifth place winner is Georgetown University where Nigerian Cardinal Francis Arinze, as commencement speaker, reiterated the church's teaching on sexual ethics, claiming "the family is...mocked by homosexuality."

His remarks led some students and faculty to walk off stage, followed by an e-mail apology from the Dean of Georgetown College, Jane McAuliffe, and an offer for counseling session to those students who suffered psychological trauma from the speech.

A few impressions: First of all, I have come to expect much higher standards of degeneracy from the Left Coast. If California colleges can't even place three top-finishers in the Polly Awards, then we'd all better prepare ourselves for the End Times plague of boils and the Second Coming. Second, some readers of this blog might be shocked by the mention of Georgetown, since it is a Catholic institution. Do not be fooled! Georgetown is run by the Jesuits, not by any breed of Catholics.

Frankly, I thought Berkeley's offense was a bit tame -- I was expecting something about edible phallus-symbol mood rings being distributed during Bulimia Awareness Decade by the People's Society of Feminist Co-ops. Northwestern, meanwhile, can both retaliate for its Polly Award and honor its old football coach by inaugurating the First Annual Gary Barnett Sensitivity Hugfest -- to be sponsored by the campus GOP, which would lure the perjurious Hispanic student to the event before descending on him with plastic baseball bats. As for the Duke professor...well, let's just say he's a "Cameron Crazy."

And Yale? Well, I suspect William F. Buckley would be turning over in his grave if he weren't still alive.

Take Out Toby Keith, Put In Richard Harris

2004-04-20T17:45:00.000-05:00

'Blender' Names 50 Worst Songs
MSN Entertainment -- AP
(4/20/04)

According to Blender Magazine, "Don't Worry, Be Happy," and "Dancing on the Ceiling," may have been catchy tunes and big hits, but they still stink.

The music magazine is publishing its list of the 50 worst songs in its May issue. The songs were selected for "crap-tastic melodies," were poorly performed, or just didn't make any sense to the folks at the magazine.

Starship's "We Built This City," from 1985 topped the list.

"The truly horrible sound of a band taking the corporate dollar while sneering at those who take the corporate dollar," the magazine said of the tune.

Billy Ray Cyrus' "Achy Breaky Heart" was second, followed by Wang Chung's "Everybody Have Fun Tonight." "If this song was a party, you'd lock yourself in a bathroom and cry," quipped Blender. [...]

The post-Sept. 11 anthem "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue," by Toby Keith was Number 22. The magazine says Keith's song was "so vengeful, it makes 'The Star-Spangled Banner' sound like 'Give Peace a Chance.'"

Even The Beatles made the list with "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da," which the magazine said sounded like "the desperately chirpy songs Cockneys used to sing to keep their spirits up while the Luftwaffe rained death on them during the Blitz."

No Macarthur Park?

Next Up: Impeach the Interviewer

2004-04-20T16:48:00.000-05:00

The New York Times conducts an interview with Kenneth Starr, now the head of Pepperdine's law department. Check out some of the questions they asked him (I've put in his unitalicized responses when it is the only way to make sense of a question):

Do you feel your work as an independent counsel helped the country in any way or just added to cynicism about government? [...]

At the moment, you are representing the mother of the 9-year-old girl whose father wants the Supreme Court to strike the words ''under God'' from the Pledge of Allegiance. [...]

Do any other countries have a pledge of allegiance to their flags? [...]

[T]he phrase ''under God'' wasn't initially part of the pledge, was it?

No. Congress added the words ''under God'' in 1954. The American political philosophy was viewed in the 1950's as standing in sharp contrast to the political philosophy of the other side of the cold war.

But don't you think it trivialized religious belief to evoke God that way, as a handy weapon against Communism? [...]

Do you pray every night? [...]

I am going to decline to get into that.

Do you believe that atheists go to hell? [...]

I am not going to get into theology.

You're impeding my investigation. You won't answer anything, although you investigate everyone else. [...]

And are you reading anything interesting now?

I am rereading Dickens's ''Bleak House.''

Now that is a book that certainly explains how getting obsessed with legal procedure can cause one to lose sight of the larger issues, namely justice.

One of my favorite quotes is from Justice Frankfurter, who said, ''The history of liberty has largely been the history of procedural safeguards.''

Back during the whole Monica business, my brother -- then in the eighth grade -- spotted an A&E special on Ken Starr. He laughed when he told me of how A&E had noted Starr's reputation for honesty during his high school days. He seemed genuinely surprised when I asked how he knew that Starr was a dishonest man. Not overly interested in politics at that time, my brother had simply gone with the endlessly-reiterated media storyline on Starr, which depicted him as a corrupt, sexually-repressed Inspector Javert. Plenty of other people did the same: his approval rating throughout the impeachment was in the mid-20s. Rarely have I seen a defamation campaign as revolting as the cavalcade of Clinton administration lies and media deceit that forever destroyed this brave man's shot at a seat on the Supreme Court.

That said, with the exception of the SCOTUS, Starr clearly does not belong in government. I listened to part of a speech he gave at the Heritage Foundation, and I remember being struck by how unusually nice he was. I always thought he was utterly clueless about the ferocity of his enemies (this was perhaps a blessing in some ways; it hurts to know how much people hate you), and he has an almost supernatural gift for walking into political ambushes.

He was a perfect target for the Democrats because he didn't have the anger or the political acumen to fight back against their vicious slanders (it didn't help that some of the records he could have used to defend himself were under seal). Let's hope he didn't expect anything less than vituperation when he agreed to be interviewed by the New York Times.

Oh, and Time magazine still ought to be ashamed of itself. Not that I expect better from the magazine that gave us this.

We've Got a Friend in Pennsylvania

2004-04-20T15:03:00.000-05:00

Congressman Pat Toomey, who is doing his level-best to persuade Pennsylvania voters to dump The Worst Republican Senator (that would be National Review lingo for Arlen Specter), may be about to drop gigantic cans of whup-ass on the country-club GOP establishment. And if you think Toomey can't get elected, please pick up a copy of The Almanac of American Politics and check out who the other Pennsylvania senator is.

As if the poll numbers weren't good enough, Toomey has just been endorsed by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in an article posted on his campaign website. Newspaper op-eds tend to mimic the views of their readers -- a professor of mine once told me of a socialist friend who was required to write pro-Republican pieces for the Omaha World-Herald -- and so we can possibly get a clue as to what Pennsylvania voters are thinking by reading them:

[...] Three-term U.S. Rep. Patrick Toomey, 42, who represents the Lehigh Valley, is challenging four-term incumbent Sen. Arlen Specter, 74, of Philadelphia. Mr. Toomey is a Reagan Republican, a rock-ribbed conservative unfairly smeared as an "extremist" by his opponents. Specter is a Rockefeller Republican, a weaselly liberal implausibly promoted as a "moderate" by his supporters.

We have spent time with Toomey, locally and in Washington. And we like what we see. No, we don't agree with his every position. But if a Republican Party that has degenerated into a phylum of profligates on par with Democrats ever is to be returned to its principles, it will be because of sound fiscal stewards such as Toomey.

From matters constitutional to those fiscal, Specter is a twisting, porking, Scottish law-invoking wild-card sophist whom Republicans serious about reforming government can no longer afford or trust. Specter as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee? Horrors!

A quarter-century of Arlen Specter, who has had as many positions as the JFK assassination "magic bullet" he invented had trajectories, is enough. Pennsylvanians deserve better. That's why we wholeheartedly endorse Patrick Toomey for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate.

I'm sure that most fellow Republicans will agree with me when I say, with only a hint of hyperbole, that a Specter chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee would be the end of life on earth as we know it.

"Byrd-Brain" and the "Dodd-ering Fool"

2004-04-15T18:03:00.000-05:00

"The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth in West Virginia...It is necessary that the order be promoted immediately and in every state in the Union. Will you please inform me as to the possibility of rebuilding the Klan realm of W. Va?"
-- letter to Ku Klux Klan's Imperial Wizard from Robert Byrd, 1946.

"[I will] never submit to fight beneath that banner [the American flag] with a Negro by my side. Rather would I die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds."
-- Robert Byrd, 1947 letter

"I've seen a lot of white niggers in my time. I'm gonna use that word. But we all just need to work together to make our country a better country."
-- Robert Byrd to Tony Snow, Fox News Sunday, 2001

David Lightman of the Hartford Courant has penned an informative but absurdly-slanted article on the uproar over Sen. Chris Dodd's comments about Robert "Sheets" Byrd during his 17,000th vote as a Senator. There's a good chance you haven't heard about this story, since the corporate-owned, vicious, right-wing lap-dog media of Eric Alterman's imagination isn't much covering it, but here's the lowdown: Sen. Dodd publicly praised former KKK Grand Kleagle Byrd for his legislative accomplishments (i.e., keeping the streets of West Virginia paved with bacon), and said he would have been right for the country "at any time," including the Civil War.

Not that you'd know that from scanning this article; it takes Lightman 20 paragraphs to finally specify just what the hell all the uproar is over, most of it spent making the Republicans look like vicious bastards for supposedly not accepting Dodd's "apology" for praising a former Klan member (who incidentally had a cameo role as a Confederate soldier in Gods and Generals). After quoting Dodd's words, for example, Lightman darkly writes: "Conservatives were still not satisfied"; not "Conservatives remained unsatisfied" or some variant of that phrase. No, they're still not satisfied.

Lightman also informs us that Dodd, who is "a savvy politician," has "a long history of good relations with the black community" -- which is liberal-speak for "the NAACP likes him." And indeed, the NAACP does like him: when Dodd called NAACP official Hilary Shelton to apologize, he was told that no apology was necessary. Try to imagine Trent Lott wiggling off the hook that easily.

Lightman also takes Dodd at his word, saying that he "felt he should say he was sorry so there would be no misunderstandings." If this were a Republican speaking, Lightman surely would have written "According to Senator X, he felt he should say..."

To heighten the hypocrisy charge, Lightman mentions that a number of senators, including some Republicans, praised Byrd prior to his vote, and then quotes effusive praise from three senators, all Republicans, before mentioning Dodd, who merely "joined the chorus." All of those GOP senators did indeed say nice things about the West Virginia senator. What none of them said was this:

"I do not think it is an exaggeration at all to say to my friend from West Virginia that he would have been a great senator at any moment [...] [s]ome were right for the time. Robert C. Byrd, in my view, would have been right at any time.

"He would have been right at the founding of this country. He would have been in the leadership crafting this Constitution. He would have been right during the great conflict of civil war in this nation." [my emphasis]

He would have been right at Jefferson Davis' side, too, but somehow Dodd skipped that part.

Anyway, let's forget about Dodd for a moment, since Lightman's psychological profile is so much more entertaining. He clearly suffers from paranoic obsession with conservatives:

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, under relentless conservative fire for his remarks [...]

Conservatives were still not satisfied. [...]

Ian Walters, American Conservative Union communications director, agreed [...]

What's inciting Dodd critics, and has become a favorite topic in the conservative media [...]

"What Lott said was hurtful, and he paid a price at Sen. Dodd's urging," said Kevin Martin, a spokesman for Project 21, another conservative group. [...]

Other conservatives have weighed in. [...]

Conservatives maintained those are fine points. [...]

But let some scholar at a liberal think-tank pipe in, and Lightman's political-labeling fixation goes out for a bathroom break:

Stephen Hess, an analyst at Washington's Brookings Institution [...]

Lightman, to his credit, does quote Bryd's now-infamous "white niggers" remark (I'm sure every conservative he talked to exhorted him to mention it), but he goes on to basically absolve Bryd of any wrongdoing by mentioning his remorse over his past. I don't remember anybody defending Trent Lott because Strom Thurmond repented from his racism and became one of the first senators to hire black staffers. I guess liberals play by different rules.

Actually, there's no "guess" about it: the article naturally assures us that the Lott and Dodd imbroglios are quite dissimilar:

There are some differences between the Dodd and Lott flaps. No colleague from either party has publicly criticized Dodd, and Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle last week said there was "no parallel" between the two cases.

Hmmm. Comments praising a one-time racist. Check. Comments saying he'd have been a great statesman during a time of racial strife. Check. Comments saying he'd be a wonderful leader during the time when said senator was a racist (remember that Dodd said Byrd would be "a great senator at any moment"). Check.

But of course there's no parallel. Byrd, after all, is a Democrat. And that's enough to take him off-limits to the infamously-spineless GOP senators.

Oh, and did you know that Dodd has a great civil rights record? You do? Lightman already mentioned it? Well, in case you need a reminder:

Dodd has a strong civil rights record [...]

Oh, and Trent Lott is racist slime on legs:

[...] whereas Lott had come under fire for his civil rights sympathies even before the Thurmond comments.

In other words, he supported having state institutions treat people equally, rather than pigeonholing them on the basis of race. The colorblind position is "racism"; the discriminatory view is a "strong civil rights record." Freedom is slavery, after all. Arbeit macht frei!

Here's a disturbing thought: How many similar stories did the press manage to bury back when conservatives only had the David Lightmans of the world to rely on? Fox News, I salute thee.

Uh, Maybe We Just Made a Rotten Movie?

2004-04-13T21:03:00.000-05:00

Ben Domenech points out this USSR Today review that says The Alamo has received "mixed reviews." Let's count up the excuses:

•It assumed audiences knew the story. The studio may have overestimated the public's knowledge of the 1836 Texas battle, says Brandon Gray of BoxOfficeMojo.com. [...]

•No big-name stars. Ron Howard and Russell Crowe were once attached to the film, but backed out. [...]

•The John Wayne factor Older moviegoers, who were the target audiences for TheAlamo, still probably remember the famous John Wayne epic The Alamo from 1960. "Substituting Billy Bob Thornton for John Wayne is going to be a turn-off unless you've something else big to offer," [movie critic Brandon] Gray says. "This movie didn't."

"That movie took a lot of possible people out of the theater" for The Alamo.

But "if there's good word of mouth, The Alamo may have a chance to stick around," says Paul Dergarabedian of box office tracker Exhibitor Relations. "Word of mouth is particularly effective with historical epics." Reviews of the film were mixed.

Question: Do these reviews look "mixed" to you?

Personally, I Always Figured He Preferred Crepes...

2004-04-13T20:54:00.000-05:00

Hey, guess what? John Kerry enjoys waffles. Lots and lots of waffles. Like Weird Al Yankovic, he's the waffle king!

Don't miss out. We're gonna "leggo' his ego" -- his big ego -- on November 2nd. Pass the syrup.

Blast from the Past -- Sedition Version

2004-04-08T17:36:00.000-05:00

David Cohen of Brothersjudd.com has posted this picture of John Kerry shaking hands with Daniel Ortega, the leader of the Nicaraguan Sandanistas during the 1980s. Notice how Tom Harkin looks on in awe at the disgusting old commie. I assume this was taken during Harkin and Kerry's mid-80s trip to Nicaragua, after which they returned to America and vocally opposed all funding for the Contras. Harkin was also a "good friend" of the Nicaraguan defense minister.

In brief: Kerry and Harkin were chumming around with people who would most certainly have replaced American democracy with rank totalitarianism if they had had the choice. Since that option was closed to them, they chose to stomp their boots on the neck of Nicaragua and were stopped only when voters told them to get lost (an election result that infuriated Jimmy Carter, by the way).

Remind me again why it's wrong to question Kerry's patriotism?

The Online Standard-Bearer for the Democrats Speaks!

2004-04-06T21:35:00.000-05:00

And let me tell you, it's not pretty. Here is what Marcos Zuniga, who runs the hugely-popular Daily Kos blog, had to say about the recent deaths of Americans in Fallujah.

If you chose not to click on the above link, perhaps anticipating its horrid contents, I'll give you the lowdown: Kos states that he feels no sympathy -- none -- for the dead American workers. After all, they weren't soldiers, like he once was. No, they were mercenaries for the greedy capitalist system that sought to leech off Bush's imperialist, fascist, unilateral, "insert-your-own-pejorative-here" war.

For the information of readers who may be unaware of the blogging universe, Daily Kos isn't a nobody blogger with only a few demented daily readers. Far from it: he may be the most popular blogger with a liberal viewpoint in the nation today -- according to Republican writer Bobby Eberle, he averages over 2.5 million unique visits every month. And, as Eberle points out, he has connections. Lots of connections. To a certain major political party, for example.

Kos is already feeling the heat -- the Kerry campaign has dropped his link from their website, and conservative blogger Michael Friedman has already persuaded some advertisers to drop their support. Even Ben Domenech has called him a "pathetic bastard" -- which is about as profane as Mr. Domenech ever gets.

Kos has already lost the courage of his deplorable convictions: he has issued a "non-apology apology" (A "non-apology apology" is a statement in which the transgressor backs off a bit but uses his putative confession to score further political points -- a method perfected by Paul Krugman, to name one odious practitioner of this method). Kos now says he really did feel sympathy for the workers -- so much of it, in fact, that he explicitly denied feeling any sympathy at all.

If you believe that, then I've got an old joint Bill Clinton didn't inhale from to sell you.

When you think about it, what is the necessity for an apology? Mr. Kos gave voice to sentiments that millions of Democrats probably harbor but are too scared to articulate. Is it truly plausible to think that the man with perhaps the most popular liberal blog around today is really very far out of step with his fellow ideological soulmates on this one issue? If he is, how out of step is he? How many liberals privately share his feelings?

I'm not sure I want to know the answer.

Soon To Be Worst Republican Ex-Senator

2004-04-06T20:29:00.000-05:00

Specter faces primary trouble in Northeast, poll says
by Brett Marcy
www.timesleader.com
(3/31/04)

HARRISBURG - U.S. Rep. Pat Toomey has plenty of political watchers doing a double-take these days.

The Allentown Republican has gained substantial ground statewide on U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter in the Senate primary race - even passing him in Northeastern Pennsylvania, according to a recent poll.

Toomey leads Specter, R-Philadelphia, by 4 points in the northeast, the only area of the state where he leads the incumbent less than a month before the April 27 primary election.

The same poll shows Specter with a 9 percent lead statewide.

Another poll conducted in January showed Specter with a commanding 23 percent lead.

Local officials say Catholics and social conservatives in Northeastern Pennsylvania have latched onto Toomey's candidacy because of his Catholic background and conservative stances.

On abortion - among the nation's most divisive issues - Toomey is anti-abortion and Specter advocates abortion rights.

With at least one, and possibly two U.S. Supreme Court justices expected to retire soon, Specter could play a key role in the judicial nominating process because of his position as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"We're comin' to take you away, uh-huh, we're comin' to take you away..."

It's Like Clockwork...

2004-04-01T15:48:00.000-06:00

The New York Times once again runs one of their "the guy in the street hates/distrusts/plans to vote against Bush" stories. They also toss in a couple of pro-Bush quotes at the end, in the hopes that the "nonpartisan" makeup will make everybody forget their political whoring, but they ain't foolin' anyone -- except the already foolish.

COLUMBUS, Ohio, March 31 —From the beginning, Judy Pappas questioned the quickness with which the Bush administration went to war in Iraq.

She voted for President Bush, and considers herself a lifelong Republican. But by the time Mr. Bush's former counterterrorism chief, Richard A. Clarke, appeared on television last week saying that the administration had focused too much on Iraq and not enough on terrorism, she was doubting that she could vote for Mr. Bush again.

"It's a tough call, it's just one man," said Ms. Pappas, 58, a legal secretary, as she bought her morning coffee across from the Capitol here. "But I feel we were set up. Do I believe Clarke? Yes, I do."

Still, Ms. Pappas is not convinced she wants to vote for John Kerry, the likely Democratic candidate. "He's not a proven entity in my book," she said. "Not yet."

In three dozen interviews this week in this swing state, a number of undecided voters sounded the same note as Ms. Pappas, saying they were growing ever more undecided the more they heard from Washington.

Among partisan Democrats and Republicans, the testimony from Mr. Clarke and the Bush administration's reaction to it has only reinforced partisan feelings: those who firmly oppose Mr. Bush said they saw Mr. Clarke's testimony as confirmation that the president could not be trusted. Those who firmly support the president said Mr. Clarke was shifting his story to sell books.

"Clearly, he's got his own agenda," said Bill Gibson, 50, an investment banker. "When he says the book has nothing to do with his timing, it's just absurd.`

Jonathon Alexander, 39, walked into an upscale gym proclaiming: "It's the first time I'm really excited to vote. I can't wait to get this guy out of office."

Of course he was walking into an upscale gym. And what's this stuff about how "quickly" Bush went into Iraq? The words "quick" and "eighteen months" don't exactly go together most of the time.

Rush Limbaugh recently told Jay Nordlinger of National Review that he quit reading the New York Times when he noticed that they were, like most of the media, a gigantic cliche -- and that he knew them like his knew his entire naked body, head to toe. This article does not, to say the least, dispel that impression.

Don't Worry, Sharon -- They Do This to George Bush, Too

2004-03-30T20:26:00.000-06:00

On the campus front, one lucky journalist has found that the best alternative to looking things up is making things up:

The University of Illinois newspaper, the Daily Illini, is making a dubious name for itself as one of America’s more recklessly anti-Israel student publications. Flouting journalistic norms that mandate accuracy, ethics and responsible sourcing it has repeatedly run false, anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic commentaries.

“Stop turning a blind eye” (Dec 11, 2003) is on this unfortunate list. Written by Mariam Sobh, a journalism student and regular Illini columnist, the op-ed contained a grotesque, invented quote attributed to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as well as a spurious reference to another non-existent quote by another Israeli official supposedly from the New York Times. This is a pattern with the Illini columnist. In her zeal to vilify Israel, Sobh consistently turns to unreliable sources to prove her point.

I won't even bother posting the rest of this here; the sport of libelling Israel has gotten entirely too predictable. I would expect people to be more careful when they claim to quote a world leader (in all fairness to Ms. Sobh, she appears to have gotten this from a disreputable source, rather than making it up out of whole cloth), but I long ago gave up on expecting liberals to talk sense when the subject is Israel. The standard rationale for this sort of thing normally runs: "Well, this is the sort of thing he would say, anyhow."

The University of Illinois is reputed to have been taken over by radical leftists many years ago, and it employs babble-brigade senior member Stanley Fish, so it is probably a lost cause, unfortunately. Still, when the public learns about things like this, hope is never lost. Most professors might think their paychecks come from nowhere, but chancellors are paid to know better.

"Guitar Groups Are On the Way Out"

2004-03-30T20:13:00.000-06:00

The Contra Costa Times, after paragraphs of detailed information on the success of Mel Gibson's Passion film, includes the following amazing passage:

Mandalay Entertainment chairman Peter Guber doesn't discount Gibson's initiative.

"Hollywood operates by the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rule," said Guber, who interviewed Gibson twice on AMC's "Sunday Morning Shootout." "You'll see plenty of imitators and hangers-on -- success makes strange bedfellows.

"I give Gibson credit for using his resources to present his vision, which he has every right to express. But what dogs will be fed by Gibson's Last Supper? The movie is a two-hour primer on how to do a crucifixion, lacking layers and context, that caught the Zeitgeist of the time. It was an egregious mistake for a person living in a multicultural society to present that effort to the world community."

And the article concludes with this:

Gibson will have no trouble getting a mainstream picture off the ground, predicts Guber, a former chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment. But whether he -- or anyone else -- will be able to sell the industry another faith-based movie is open to question.

Just in case you thought the skulls of Hollywood executives were getting a little less thick.

Odd How "The People" Never Elect Leftists

2004-03-25T19:48:00.000-06:00

Howard Zinn's History Lessons
Michael Kazin
Dissent
(Spring 2004)

Every work of history, according to Howard Zinn, is a political document. He titled his thick survey "A People's History" (A People's History of the United States, 1492-Present [NY: Perennial Classics, 2003]) so that no potential reader would wonder about his own point of view: "With all its limitations, it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance."

That judgment, Zinn proudly announces, sets his book apart from nearly every other account of their past that most Americans are likely to read. "The mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction-so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people's movements-that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission."

His message has certainly been heard. A People's History may well be the most popular work of history an American leftist has ever written. First published in 1980, it has gone through five editions and multiple printings, been assigned in thousands of college courses, sold more than a million copies, and made the author something of a celebrity-although one who appears to lack the egomaniacal trappings of the breed. [...]

But Zinn's big book is quite unworthy of such fame and influence. A People's History is bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions. Zinn reduces the past to a Manichean fable and makes no serious attempt to address the biggest question a leftist can ask about U.S. history: why have most Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic in which they live? [...]

Zinn's conception of American elites is akin to the medieval church's image of the Devil. For him, a governing class is motivated solely by its appetite for riches and power-and by its fear of losing them. Numerous historians may regard George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton as astute, if seriously flawed, men who erected a structure for the new nation that has endured for over two centuries. But Zinn curtly dismisses them as "leaders of the new aristocracy" and regards the nation-state itself as a cunning device to lull ordinary folks with "the fanfare of patriotism and unity." [...]

The ironic effect of such portraits of rulers is to rob "the people" of cultural richness and variety, characteristics that might gain the respect and not just the sympathy of contemporary readers. For Zinn, ordinary Americans seem to live only to fight the rich and haughty and, inevitably, to be fooled by them. They are like bobble-head dolls in work-shirts and overalls-ever sanguine about fighting the powers-that-be, always about to fall on their earnest faces. [...]

From the 1960s onward, scholars, most of whom lean leftward, have patiently and empathetically illuminated such topics-and explained how progressive movements succeeded as well as why they fell short of their goals. But Zinn cares only about winners and losers in a class conflict most Americans didn't even know they were fighting. Like most propagandists, he measures individuals according to his own rigid standard of how they should have thought and acted. Thus, he depicts John Brown as an unblemished martyr but sees Lincoln as nothing more than a cautious politician who left slavery alone as long as possible. To explain why the latter's election in 1860 convinced most slaveowners to back secession, Zinn falls back on the old saw, beloved by economic determinists, that the Civil War was "not a clash of peoples…but of elites," Southern planters vs. Northern industrialists. Pity the slaves and their abolitionist allies; in their ignorance, they viewed it as a war of liberation and wept when Lincoln was murdered. [...]

The latest edition of the book includes a few paragraphs about the attacks of September 11, and they demonstrate how poorly Zinn's view of the past equips him to analyze the present. "It was an unprecedented assault against enormous symbols of American wealth and power," he writes. The nineteen hijackers "were willing to die in order to deliver a deadly blow against what they clearly saw as their enemy, a superpower that had thought itself invulnerable." Zinn then quickly moves on to condemn the United States for killing innocent people in Afghanistan.

Is this an example of how to express the "commonality" of the great majority of U.S. citizens, who believed that the gruesome strike against America's evil empire was aimed at them? Zinn's flat, dualistic view of how U.S. power has been used throughout history omits what is obvious to the most casual observer: al-Qaeda's religious fanaticism and the potential danger it poses to anyone that Osama bin Laden and his disciples deem an enemy of Islam. Surely one can hate imperialism without ignoring the odiousness of killers who mouth the same sentiment. [...]

"The American system is the most ingenious system of control in world history," writes Zinn. It uses wealth to "turn those in the 99 percent against one another" and employs war, patriotism, and the National Guard to "absorb and divert" the occasional rebellion. So "the people" can never really win, unless and until they make a revolution. But they can comprehend the evil of this four-hundred-year-old order, and that knowledge will, to an extent, set them free.

Thus, a narrative about demonic elites becomes an apology for political failure. By Zinn's account, the modern left made no errors of judgment, rhetoric, or strategy. He never mentions the Communist Party's lockstep praise of Stalin or the New Left's fantasy of guerilla warfare. Radical activists simply failed to muster enough clear-eyed troops to pierce through the enemy's mighty, sophisticated defenses. [...]

No work of history can substitute for a social movement. [...] Howard Zinn is an evangelist of little imagination for whom history is one long chain of stark moral dualities. His fatalistic vision can only keep the left just where it is: on the margins of American political life.

According to an adoring biography of Zinn written by a fellow professor, Howard Zinn came about his radicalism when he was beaten up by cops at a left-wing rally as a youngster (or he watched other people get beat up -- I forget). Since then, he has been of the opinion that something is fundamentally rotten with American society -- yes, a society that just sent sales of his book over the one-million mark last year. He also recently opined that George W. Bush is as much of a terrorist as Osama bin Laden, which makes him sound like...well, like a regular college professor, actually.

Let's see if you can spot the statement in the following passage from Zinn's book that sent my jaw crashing through the floor at warp speed when I first read it:

[A]lmost all Americans were now in agreement -- capitalists, Communists, Democrats, Republicans, poor, rich, and middle class -- that [World War II] was indeed a people's war.

Was it?

By certain evidence, it was the most popular war the United States had ever fought. Never had a greater proportion of the country participated in a war: 18 million served in the armed forces, 10 million overseas; 25 million workers gave of their pay envelope regularly for war bonds. But could this be considered a manufactured support, since all the power of the nation -- not only of the government, but the press, the church, and even the chief radical organizations -- was behind the calls for all-out war? Was there an undercurrent of reluctance; were there unpublicized signs of resistance?

It was a war against an enemy of unspeakable evil. Hitler's Germany was extending totalitarianism, racism, militarism, and overt aggressive warfare beyond what an already cynical world had experienced. And yet, did the governments conducting this war -- England, the United States, the Soviet Union -- represent something significantly different, so that their victory would be a blow to imperialism, racism, totalitarianism, militarism, in the world?

Would the behavior of the United States during the war -- in military action abroad, in treatment of minorities at home -- be in keeping with a "people's war"? Would the country's wartime policies respect the rights of ordinary people everywhere to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? And would postwar America, in its policies at home and overseas, exemplify the values for which the war was supposed to have been fought?

These questions deserve thought. At the time of World War II, the atmosphere was too dense with war fervor to permit them to be aired.

You have to harbor an almost pathological hatred for America to postulate that the United States did not represent something "significantly different" from the Nazis.

Only In America Can People This Stupid Earn Assloads of Money

2004-03-25T18:10:00.000-06:00

Hoo boy, here he goes again:

Billionaire market player George Soros has claimed that the US Government is currently in the hands of extremists.

In lecture delivered in Dublin last night, he claimed that they were now pursuing a policy of American supremacy.

Soros told the Institute for International Integration Studies that he was himself spending millions of dollars of his own money to persuade voters not to re-elect George W. Bush as president.

So what's it gonna be, America? You can live in the hands of "extremists" or die under the feet of terrorists.

Not In Her Name

2004-03-24T17:08:00.000-06:00

Saddam, women's rights
Nat Hentoff
Washington Times
(03/22/04)

At the Brookings Institution in Washington on Feb. 25, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton charged that, with Saddam Hussein gone, there have been "pullbacks" in the rights Iraqi women enjoyed under his rule. Not even such bellicose critics of the war as Sen. Ted Kennedy have claimed that the regimechangehascost women in Iraq the leading defender of their rights.

Mrs. Clinton did try to qualify her softening of the dictator's horrific image by noting that these women's rights were "on paper." However, she went on to give substance to the rights on paper: "They went to school; they participated in the professions. They participated in government and in business; as long as they stayed out of his way, they had considerable freedom of movement."

John Burns -- who reported for the New York Times from Iraq before, during the war and since -- wrote of a paramilitary group once led by Saddam's oldest (since forcibly deceased) son, Uday: "Masked and clad in black, (the men) make the women kneel in busy city squares, along crowded sidewalks, or in neighborhood plots, then behead them with swords." The women's crime, said their families, was having criticized Uday's benevolent father.

When the dictator's prisons were briefly opened before the war, Mr. Burns reported on the "raping of women in front of their husbands, from whom the torturers wanted to extract information."

This year, in the March 9 New York Sun, Tamara Chalabi -- currently working on civil society projects in Iraq -- noted that some of the Arab press had gleefully mentioned Mrs. Clinton's roseate version of women's rights under Saddam. And the BBC quoted a headline of the Baghdad edition of Al-Sharq al-Awsat, a Saudi-owned newspaper: "Hillary Clinton: 'Iraqi women were better off under Saddam's reign.' "

Responding to Mrs. Clinton's exculpatory view of Saddam, Miss Chalabi -- a writer on Middle East issues -- described "the many raped women whose children are from three different soldiers; how is it for them to live every day raising these children that are an eternal reminder of their violent rape? What is being done for these women today?"

Mrs. Clinton, in being introduced for her speech at Brookings, was described as "one of the most powerful analysts, advocates and speakers on a broad range of issues that face our country."

She's certainly one of the most powerful analysts, advocates, and speakers for her own electoral prospects.

Asking Questions, Telling Lies

2004-03-24T16:42:00.000-06:00

The brilliant Mansoor Ijaz has a list of questions for Richard Clarke -- except that they're not really questions so much as a litany of "gouge-out-your-eyes-and-eat-your-heart-right-in-front-of-you-like-that-badass-from-Last-of-the-Mohicans"-style allegations. Not that I have a problem with that, since Clarke has just replaced Paul O'Neill as the world's foremost whopper-telling former Bush bureaucrat with a Kleenex in one hand and a stiletto in the other, but the reader ought to know what he's getting into before going forward.

Ijaz is particularly good at this sort of thing; he has an encyclopedic knowledge of national security issues and he's still righteously steamed that the Clinton administration rejected his carefully-brokered deal with the Sudanese that would have brought Osama bin-Laden under our thumb. I'm not going to excerpt Ijaz's comments, since they really ought to be read in their entirety, but this item from CNN tells you absolutely everything you need to know:

During the Clinton administration, [former White House counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke] said, al Qaeda was responsible for the deaths of "fewer than 50 Americans," and Clinton responded with military action, covert CIA action and by supporting United Nations sanctions.

"They stopped al Qaeda in Bosnia," Clarke said, "They stopped al Qaeda from blowing up embassies around the world."

"Contrast that with Ronald Reagan, where 300 [U.S. soldiers] were killed in [a bombing attack in Beirut,] Lebanon, and there was no retaliation," Clarke said. "Contrast that with the first Bush administration where 260 Americans were killed [in the bombing of] Pan Am [Flight] 103, and there was no retaliation."

"I would argue that for what had actually happened prior to 9/11, the Clinton administration was doing a great deal," Clarke said.

Orrin Judd says he posted this article on his website "[j]ust in case there was any doubt that this is merely partisan bitching."

There's not.

"Ugly Canadians"

2004-03-24T15:52:00.000-06:00

Appalling treatment
Toronto Star
(03/23/04)

Is it fair to boo a U.S.-born Grade 9 girl for carrying an American flag across a stage during a school multiculturalism parade?

Is it fair to insult and use obscene gestures against 11-year-old peewee hockey players from the Boston area because you don't like the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq?

Is there no limit to some Canadians' anti-American anger?

Those questions are being asked again on the one-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq after a teenager was in tears after being loudly booed as she carried the American flag in a parade of 39 flags representing every nationality in the school. [ . . . ]

Canadians upset with the U.S. role in Iraq should target their protests at the Bush administration.

But targeting young children, or any individual American, is just plain wrong and insulting — and shows a level of disrespect that should be appalling to all Canadians.

When I was in Washington, D.C., last October, a tiny pro-war contingent tried to set up shop at the humongous antiwar rally held near the Washington Monument. They never had a chance -- the protestors physically harassed them and they were forced to retreat behind a police cordon. I joined the rally after all of this had occurred, and stood with about 35 other people as hysterical left-wing banshees hurled epithets in our direction, calling us Klansmen, corporate lackeys, and so forth. There was quite a bit of obscene language used. I reflected on the irony of being so appallingly treated by the kind of people who post "Think Peace" bumper stickers on their cars.

And now these junior high kids are being treated in the same way, although they did even less to invite an attack than I did; I was intentionally displaying a provocative sign in a hostile environment, after all -- they were just playing hockey or holding flags.

There are some people who become acquainted with leftist ideas early in life and develop -- either immediately or with time -- a dislike of them. Some folks do this through reading (that is what happened to me), some are born into a left-wing environment and rebel (NRO's Jay Nordlinger is one), and some have a bad experience that sours them (David Horowitz, with the murder of Betty van Patten). Andrew Sullivan has described his youthful confusion at seeing "caring" liberals try to shut down the excellent school where poor kids like himself were trying to get an education -- it was too "elitist," they said (Sullivan was thus exposed early on to the left-wing tendency to drag everybody down to a low level rather than allow some people to rise above others).

If there is anything positive to come from a story like this, it is that these kids -- and hopefully some other people as well -- may understand the difference between action and talk, and the occasionally awful consequences that flow from seemingly humane ideas.

And that a lot of pacifist rhetoric is simply garbage.

The Humiliating Litany of Truth

2004-03-18T17:34:00.000-06:00

'Why do they hate us?'
Thomas Sowell
Townhall.com
(03/17/04)

The idea that what goes around comes around applies not only to individuals but to nations and whole civilizations. It was just a few centuries ago -- not long, as history is measured -- that China had the highest standard of living in the world and the Dutch were the world's largest exporters, while North Africans were enslaving a million Europeans.

Nowhere have whole peoples seen their situation reversed more visibly or more painfully than the peoples of the Islamic world. In medieval times, Europe lagged far behind the Islamic world in science, mathematics, scholarship, and military power.

Even such ancient European thinkers as Plato and Aristotle became known to Europeans of the Middle Ages only after their writings, which had been translated into Arabic, were translated back into European languages.

Today that is all reversed. The number of books per person in Europe is more than ten times that in Africa and the Middle East. The number of books translated into Arabic over the past thousand years is about the same as the number translated into Spanish in one year.

There are only 18 computers per thousand persons in the Arab world, compared to 78 per thousand persons worldwide. Fewer than 400 industrial patents were issued to people in the Arab countries during the last two decades of the 20th century, while 15,000 industrial patents were issued to South Koreans alone.

Human beings do not always take reversals of fortune gracefully. Still less can those who were once on top quietly accept seeing others leaving them far behind economically, intellectually, and militarily.

Those in the Islamic world have for centuries been taught to regard themselves as far superior to the "infidels" of the West, while everything they see with their own eyes now tells them otherwise. Worse yet, what the whole world sees with their own eyes tells them that the Middle East has made few contributions to human advancement in our times. [ . . . ]

What will happen in the meantime? Are millions of proud human beings supposed to quietly accept inferiority for themselves and their children, and perhaps their children's children?

Or are they more likely to listen to demagogues, whether political or religious, who tell them that their lowly place in the world is due to the evils of others -- the West, the Americans, the Jews?

If the peoples of the Islamic world disregarded such demagogues, they would be the exceptions, rather than the rule, among people who lag painfully far behind others. [ . . . ]

Against this background, we may want to consider the question asked by hand-wringers in the West: Why do they hate us? Maybe it is because the alternative to hating us is to hate themselves.

This is arguably Sowell's best column since last year's insightful piece on why liberals are so unpopular.

It's Quittin' Time!

2004-03-17T03:16:00.000-06:00

The incomparable Orrin Judd writes a column for Enter Stage Right that certainly leaves John Kerry grasping for breath in the gravitas sweepstakes:

In the varied analyses of John Kerry's prospects this Fall, there has been much comment about the fact that no sitting Senator has been elected president since John F. Kennedy, forty-plus years ago. Less frequently mentioned is that Senator Kerry's most recent predecessor in this unusual role, Bob Dole, thought it necessary to resign his Senate seat in order to wage a serious campaign.

Mr. Judd goes on to quote the beautiful words spoken by Sen. Dole upon announcing his resignation (actually penned for him by novelist Mark Helprin, who I hadn't known had written this speech, but should have guessed after reading the stirring language) before quoting a tepid editorial of support for John Kerry penned by the editors of the New York Times. More Judd:

If that's the most passion his amen corner can muster, he's in trouble already.

Just imagine what will be left of his public persona once the Bush campaign begins running a series of ads that shows him voting for things like the Iraq war resolution, the Patriot Act, No Child Left Behind, NAFTA, etc., and then criticizing them in the Democratic primaries, as Howard Dean dragged the race to the Left. The new campaign finance laws, which require that annoying little break for the candidate whose campaign is running the ad to accept responsibility for it, held down the amount of negative campaigning in the primaries, but with Senator Kerry you can just pit his own record against his subsequent rhetoric. Is it really a negative ad when you show the other candidate denouncing himself? At the very least, President Bush certainly shouldn't have to worry about taking credit for just showing footage of Senator Kerry essentially criticizing himself. In his first campaign speech he even showed a willingness to talk full ownership of this line of attack, doing so with sufficient humor that it's not likely to work against him, when he referred to the Democratic field as : ."..an interesting group, with diverse opinions: They're for tax cuts and against them. They're for NAFTA and against NAFTA. They're for the Patriot Act and against the Patriot Act. They're in favor of liberating Iraq, and opposed to it. And that's just one senator from Massachusetts."

Ouch. But Mr. Judd is just beginning: he proceeds to run through the myriad reasons why we can expect Sen. Kerry to resign his post in Congress, which includes the expectation that he will have to show up to vote on contentious issues like a gay marriage amendment that will be the last things he wants voters connecting him with right now (While he's trying to present himself as a "normal guy" fighting the "corporate interests," he'll meanwhile be photographed in his pinstripe suit casting votes on divisive issues -- thus reinforcing his reputation as an "insider"!).

Kerry could avoid this by doing one of two things. Option number one: He could refuse to show up for votes, which is a tactic he has pursued so far but will begin to get hammered for as time wears on; even his allies may be critical if he misses a key vote and the favored Democratic position is defeated in a close tally. His second option is simply to resign his position in the Senate.

That may very well be what he does. But, in a delicious bit of happenstance perfectly suited to make the infamously back-and-forth Kerry look like an even more ideal spokesman for Waffle House, the governor of Massachusetts is a Republican. Since Governor Mitt Romney gets to choose Kerry's successor, the current ideological imbalance in the Senate will likely swing to 52 Republicans versus 47 Democrats (and one Jim Jeffords, currently holding office on the Weasel ticket). Orrin Judd goes on to highlight the obvious: Since Romney will probably choose William Weld or Paul Cellucci for the office (both of them popular former governors), the GOP may hold this seat for a while. Meanwhile, the impending retirements of certain Senate Democrats may well push the imbalance further in the direction of the GOP.

Heh, heh, heh.

PS In a separate matter, Orrin Judd links to this article on his blog, which is a report from the New York Times analyzing polling data (link requires registration). Check out how many paragraphs you have to wade into this thing before the Times gets around to noting that, in a three-way, Bush-Kerry-Nader race, Bush beats Kerry like a drum.

Spanish Elections and the Evil Men Who Want to Kill Us

2004-03-16T18:24:00.000-06:00

In the interests of saving space, I will avoid "blockquoting" in the following articles. Thanks are due to Real Clear Politics for the links. -- Cato

The Spanish dishonoured their dead
Mark Steyn
Daily Telegraph (U.K.)
(03/16/04)

"When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, naturally they will like the strong horse." So said Osama bin Laden in his final video appearance two-and-a-half years ago. But even the late Osama might have been surprised to see the Spanish people, invited to choose between a strong horse and a weak horse, opt to make their general election an exercise in mass self-gelding.

To be sure, there are all kinds of John Kerry-esque footnoted nuances to Sunday's stark numbers. One sympathises with those electors reported to be angry at the government's pathetic insistence, in the face of the emerging evidence, that Thursday's attack was the work of Eta, when it was obviously the jihad boys. One's sympathy, however, disappears with their decision to vote for a party committed to disengaging from the war against the jihadi. As Margaret Thatcher would have said: "This is no time to go wobbly, Manuel." But they did. And no one will remember the footnotes, the qualifications, the background - just the final score: terrorists toppled a European government. [ . . . ]

At the end of last week, American friends kept saying to me: "3/11 is Europe's 9/11. They get it now." I expressed scepticism. And I very much doubt whether March 11 will be a day that will live in infamy. Rather, March 14 seems likely to be the date bequeathed to posterity, in the way we remember those grim markers on the road to conflagration through the 1930s, the tactical surrenders that made disaster inevitable. All those umbrellas in the rain at Friday's marches proved to be pretty pictures for the cameras, nothing more. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the slain. In the three days between the slaughter and the vote, it was widely reported that the atrocity had been designed to influence the election. In allowing it to do so, the Spanish knowingly made Sunday a victory for appeasement and dishonoured their own dead.

And, if it works in Spain, why not in Australia, Britain, Italy, Poland? In his 1996 "Declaration of War Against the Americans", Bin Laden cited Washington's feebleness in the face of the 1992 Aden hotel bombings and the Black Hawk Down business in Somalia in 1993: "You have been disgraced by Allah and you withdrew," he wrote. "The extent of your impotence and weaknesses became very clear." To the jihadis' way of thinking, on Thursday, the Spaniards were disgraced by Allah; on Sunday, they withdrew. The extent of their impotence and weaknesses is very clear. [ . . . ]

Last Friday, for a brief moment, it looked as if a few brave editorialists on the Continent finally grasped that global terrorism is a real threat to Europe, and not just a Bush racket. But even then they weren't proposing that the Continent should rise up and prosecute the war, only that they be less snippy in their carping from the sidelines as America gets on with it. Spain was Washington's principal Continental ally, and what does that boil down to in practice? 1,300 troops. That's fewer than what the New Hampshire National Guard is contributing.

The other day, the editor of Le Monde, writing in the Wall Street Journal, dismissed as utterly false the widespread belief among all Americans except John Kerry's campaign staff that France is a worthless ally: "Let us remember here," he wrote, "the involvement of French and German soldiers, among other European nationalities, in the operations launched in Afghanistan to pursue the Taliban, track down bin Laden and attempt to free the Afghans."

Oh, put a baguette in it, will you? The Continentals didn't "launch" anything in Afghanistan. They showed up when the war was over - after the Taliban had been toppled and the Afghans liberated. And a few hundred Nato troops in post-combat mopping-up operations barely registers in the scale against the gazillions of Americans defending the Continent so that EU governments can blow their defence budgets on welfare programmes that make the citizens ever more enervated and dependent.

The only fighting that there is going to be in Europe in the foreseeable future is civil war, and when that happens American infantrymen will want to be somewhere safer. Like Iraq. There are strong horses and weak horses, but right now western Europe is looking like a dead horse.

Time to Save an Alliance
Robert Kagan
Washington Post
(03/16/04)

The unhappy reality is that a significant number of Spanish voters seem to have responded to the attacks in Madrid exactly as al Qaeda hoped they would. They believed their government's close cooperation with the United States, and specifically with the Bush administration in Iraq, had brought the wrath of the terrorist organization on them, and that the way to avoid future attacks was to choose a government that would withdraw from Iraq and distance itself from the United States. Other European peoples and governments have quietly flirted with this kind of thinking in the past, and not just recently but throughout the 1990s. But Spaniards have now made this calculus public. If other European publics decide that the Spaniards are right, and conclude that the safer course in world affairs is to dissociate themselves from the United States, then the transatlantic partnership is no more. [ . . . ]

The Bush administration needs to recognize it has a crisis on its hands and start making up for lost time in mending transatlantic ties, and not just with chosen favorites. [ . . . ] The American task now is to address both governments and publics, in Old and New Europe, to move past disagreements over the Iraq war, and to seek transatlantic solidarity against al Qaeda. [ . . . ]

[T]he problem is not all on the American side, and neither is the solution. Responsible heads in Europe must understand that anything that smacks of retreat in the aftermath of this latest attack could raise the likelihood of further attacks. Al Qaeda's list of demands doesn't end with Iraq. The attack in Madrid was not just punishment for Spain's involvement in Iraq but for involvement with the United States in the war on terrorism. Al Qaeda's statement taking credit for the bombings in Madrid condemned Spain's role in Afghanistan, too. Al Qaeda seeks to divide Europe and the United States not just in Iraq but in the overall struggle. It seeks to convince Europeans not only that the use of force in Iraq was mistaken but that the use of force against terrorism in general is mistaken and futile -- just as Prodi is arguing. Are Europeans prepared to grant all of al Qaeda's conditions in exchange for a promise of security? Thoughts of Munich and 1938 come to mind.

The incoming Spanish government has declared its intention to move away from the United States and back to the "core of Europe," meaning France and Germany. Presumably Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder will welcome their new ally in Old Europe. But presumably they also know that dissociation from the United States in the wake of the Madrid bombings will be a disaster for Europe. If the United States cannot fight al Qaeda without Europe's help, it is equally true that Europe can't fight al Qaeda without the United States. If Europe's leaders understand this, then they and Bush should recognize the urgency of making common cause now, before the already damaged edifice of the transatlantic community collapses.

Spain's vote against mendacity
Thomas Oliphant
Boston Globe
(03/16/04)

In an atmosphere of horror and anger, Spanish voters managed to sort through their emotions over the weekend to deliver a surprisingly clear message to their government. Perhaps we should listen in the United States.

Governments that lie and cover up on matters not only central to national security but also to the commitment of armed forces abroad are inviting rejection.

Governments that seek to use events as unspeakable as mass murder for political purposes are doing the same. It was clear something was wrong within hours of last Thursday's bombings in Madrid. Virtually all of the sketchy information being gathered by US officials here and abroad pointed in the direction of Al Qaeda and away from the Basque terrorist group known as ETA.

But all the Spanish government's statements pointed in ETA's direction, and the Bush administration decided to suppress its own knowledge and evidence-based suspicions to the contrary in order to support one of its few unquestioning allies in the occupation of Iraq virtually on the eve of the national elections the bombings were obviously timed to influence.

From the outset, however, clues that led away from ETA and toward Al Qaeda registered with increasing force on Spanish public opinion. The result was revulsion and anger on a scale sufficient to sweep away the preelection polls and predictions. The government fell, and the Bush administration will have difficulty deflecting suspicion that it was complicit in a coverup.

The initial near-insistence by officials of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's government that this was Basque and not fanatical Islamist terrorism now appears based less on evidence and more on the fact that such a theory of the crime best fit Aznar's Popular Party election chances.

However, the evidence was flimsy. Not only did the coordinated commuter train bombings not fit ETA's profile; there was a steady stream of information pointing in Al Qaeda's direction. There were repeated denials of complicity by ETA and its above-ground supporters, clashing with the group's consistent pattern in the past of claiming responsibility when it was involved, and there were repeated statements of complicity in domestic and international channels linked to Al Qaeda. As doubts and evidence accumulated, public opinion took an astonishingly rapid turn toward the Socialist candidacy of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero -- not only an opponent a year ago of the US invasion of Iraq but an advocate of the withdrawal of Spain's token 1,300-member force from the US-led coalition. [ . . . ]

The most important lesson, however, is that in a time of national shock only truth is acceptable. Bush might want to remember that before he makes his next use of 9/11 imagery in his campaign commercials or digs his hole deeper with more manufactured descriptions of the "threat" Iraq posed a year ago that required a near-unilateral invasion and occupation in haste.

Spanish Flu
Doug Bandow
Reason
(03/15/04)

When the U.S. assembled its international coalition, ranging from Great Britain to Micronesia, to topple Iraq's Saddam Hussein, it relied on governments willing to override their people's wishes. America's war received popular support in no countries other than Kuwait and Israel.

Now Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's Popular Party may have paid the ultimate political price for backing the Bush administration, losing an election that it long was expected to win. Other American allies, most notably John Howard in Australia, Tony Blair in Great Britain, and Junichiro Koizumi in Japan, might eventually meet the same end.

Only Britain and Australia offered serious military aid in the war; Poland provided 300 soldiers but begged Washington not to mention its contribution publicly. Most nations—Slovakia, Norway, and scores of others—simply wrote letters of support. [ . . . ]

The failure to find any weapons of mass destruction buried the claim that Iraq threatened world peace and stability. The failure to establish an alliance with al-Qaeda voided the promise that overthrowing Saddam Hussein would weaken Islamic terrorism. [ . . . ]

The reaction of Spanish voters was hardly surprising. Many complained that the government had manipulated the investigation, attempting to blame the Spanish separatist group ETA, against which the Aznar government had run a sustained campaign. Officials in Washington played along, in a desperate attempt to aid a friendly government in need.

With evidence suggesting an al-Qaeda connection, however, Spaniards blamed the government for turning them into a target. It is bad enough to take a nation into war based on a mistake or lie. It is horrific to do so when the result is to bring war back to the homefront. [ . . . ]

Already American hawks are decrying alleged allied weakness. Not only did Prime Minister Aznar's party lose, but incoming Socialist Party Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero announced that he plans to withdraw Spain's 1,300 troops from Iraq when their tour ends in July.

It was bad enough that the French and Germans opposed the U.S. Now, America' paper warriors complain, Washington's few friends are fleeing.

For instance, Rod Dreher, columnist for the Dallas Morning News, calls the Spanish election result, "terrible news. It shows that the Europeans are willing to be cowed by terror into voting for appeasers. Message to terrorists: commit terrorism on the eve of elections, say you're doing it to punish the government for standing by the United States, and you can drive a wedge between Western allies."

However, the real wedge is Washington's demand that allied states act contrary to allied interests. Spain—along with Australia, Britain, Japan, Poland, South Korea, and the rest of the civilized world, in fact—often have cause to work with America. [ . . . ]

[F]oreign peoples obviously do not feel blind loyalty to every administration that holds power in Washington. Especially when that administration sacrifices facts for ideology and presses their governments to act against their own wishes.

Al Qaeda's Wish List
David Brooks
New York Times
(link requires registration)
(03/16/04)

I am trying not to think harshly of the Spanish. They have suffered a grievous blow, and it was crazy to go ahead with an election a mere three days after the Madrid massacre. Nonetheless, here is what seems to have happened:

The Spanish government was conducting policies in Afghanistan and Iraq that Al Qaeda found objectionable. A group linked to Al Qaeda murdered 200 Spaniards, claiming that the bombing was punishment for those policies. Some significant percentage of the Spanish electorate was mobilized after the massacre to shift the course of the campaign, throw out the old government and replace it with one whose policies are more to Al Qaeda's liking.

What is the Spanish word for appeasement? [ . . . ]

Many Americans and many Europeans will stare at each other in the weeks ahead with disbelieving eyes. For today more than any other, it really does appear that Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus.

If a terrorist group attacked the U.S. three days before an election, does anyone doubt that the American electorate would rally behind the president or at least the most aggressively antiterror party? Does anyone doubt that Americans and Europeans have different moral and political cultures? Yesterday the chief of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, told Italy's La Stampa, "It is clear that using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists." Does he really think capitulation or negotiation works better? Can you imagine John Kerry or George Bush saying that?

Nor is America itself without blame. Where was our State Department? Why hasn't Colin Powell spent the past few years crisscrossing Europe so that voters there would at least know the arguments for the liberation of Iraq, would at least have some accurate picture of Americans, rather than the crude cowboy stereotype propagated by the European media? Why does the Bush administration make it so hard for its friends? Why is it so unable to reach out?

This is a watershed event. It will change how Al Qaeda thinks about the world. It will change how Europeans see the world. It will constrain American policy for years to come.

Rotten Europe
David Warren
Ottawa Citizen via David Warren Online
(03/16/04)

Three days after the worst terror attack in continental Europe since World War II, Spain voted to capitulate. In compliance with the demands made in an Al Qaeda videotape, the Socialist prime minister elect, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, announced yesterday that Spain would withdraw its 1,300 troops from Iraq -- unless, of course, the U.S. turns over the whole operation to the incompetent United Nations. We have seen the spectacle of nine million Spaniards, demonstrating their grief in the streets, their hands raised and painted white in a poignant gesture of mass surrender.

This quotation, to a New York Times correspondent in Madrid by "David", a 26-year-old window frame maker who would not give his surname, tells the whole story. He explained why, at the last minute, he had changed his vote from Popular to Socialist: "Maybe the Socialists will get our troops out of Iraq, and Al Qaeda will forget about Spain, so we will be less frightened."

It should be juxtaposed with this quotation from Mark Steyn, in Britain's Daily Telegraph: "So the choice for pluralist democracies is simple: You can join Bush in taking the war to the terrorists, to their redoubts and sponsoring regimes. ... Or you can stick your head in the sand and paint a burqa on your butt. But they'll blow it up anyway."

For Al Qaeda, it is a huge victory after 30 months of continuous setbacks. They have tried a new tactic, and it works. They have shown that by massacring large numbers of innocents on the eve of a Western election, they may persuade the survivors to vote as they wish. Count on it: they will not now abandon this tactic. And they are likely to try it in the United States as well, to defeat President Bush in November, thanks to that Spanish capitulation. [ . . . ]

The Spanish Socialists exploited the shock and grief of last Thursday's murderous attacks on Madrid's transit rail system, with demonstrations on the eve of the election. The outgoing government of Prime Minister José María Aznar was accused of "lying to the Spanish people" by suggesting that the attack might have been mounted by the Basque ETA, and thus have nothing to do with Iraq. In defiance of Spanish electoral law, and disregarding the period of mourning that had been agreed by all parties, the Socialist partisans shouted that the blood of Spain was on Aznar's hands.

Let what it did stand to the eternal credit of Mr. Aznar's government. In the early morning of Sunday before the polls had yet opened, and in the full knowledge of what the consequences might be to its electoral prospects, it released information about the capture of Moroccan and Indian Jihadists, and the receipt of the videotape, that left no doubt about the authorship of the carnage.

To Die in Madrid
Christopher Hitchens
Slate
(03/15/04)

[ . . . ] [I]t seems that some Spaniards, and some non-Spanish commentators, would change on a dime if last week's mass murder in Madrid could be attributed to the Bin-Ladenists. In that case not only would there be a root cause—the deployment of 1,300 Spanish soldiers in the reconstruction of Iraq—but there would also be a culpable person, namely Spain's retiring prime minister. By this logic, terrorism would also have a cure—the withdrawal of those Spanish soldiers from a country where al-Qaida emphatically does not desire them to be.

Try not to laugh or cry, but some spokesmen of the Spanish left have publicly proposed exactly this syllogism. I wonder if I am insulting the readers of Slate if I point out its logical and moral deficiencies:

Many Spaniards were among those killed recently in Morocco, where a jihadist bomb attack on an ancient Moorish synagogue took place in broad daylight. The attack was on Morocco itself, which was neutral in the recent Iraq war. It seems a bit late to demand that the Moroccan government change sides and support Saddam Hussein in that conflict, and I suspect that the Spanish Communist and socialist leadership would feel a little sheepish in making this suggestion. Nor is it obvious to me that the local Moroccan jihadists would stop bombing if this concession were made. Still, such a concession would be consistent with the above syllogism, as presumably would be a demand that Morocco cease to tempt fate by allowing synagogues on its soil in the first place.

Democracy and terrorism
Tod Lindberg
Washington Times
(03/16/04)

A terror attack in Spain on the eve of national elections was the primary reason for the defeat of the party of Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar. Polls before the attack favored the ruling party. In its wake, some Spaniards apparently chose to blame Mr. Aznar's support for the United States in Iraq for bringing on the attack — enough to tip the balance to the opposition Socialists, whohave promised the withdrawal of Spain's 1,300 troops in Iraq at the end of their tour in July.

There are a few complexities here, naturally. First among them is responsibility for the attack itself. Although evidence of an al Qaeda connection has been mounting, in the initial hours, the government laid the blame at the door of the ETA, the home-grown Basque separatist terror organization. The haste with which Mr. Aznar's government pointed a finger at the ETA, rather than waiting for more complete information, was likely a factor in voters' revising their views. The Iraq war was no more popular in Spain than it was throughout Europe. One can understand why the Aznar government would prefer to think that the Madrid attack was something other than reprisal for support for the United States. But it was unwise to act on its preference by blaming the ETA before the facts were in.

One shouldn't get lost in the nuances, however. If it's al Qaeda, then clearly, Spaniards are hardly crazy to wonder if a different position on Iraq might have spared them the carnage. And that, in turn, is going to make no end of trouble going forward. Meanwhile, al Qaeda has just bagged its first Western government. That's not good, either.

My friend Lee Harris wrote a prescient piece on the Web site Tech Central Station in the aftermath of the attack last week. He notes, "We may be on the verge of a frightening new development — the emergence of catastrophic terror as a deliberate tool for manipulating, or even subverting, the democratic process in European nations, and potentially in our own as well."

Writing prospectively, he continued, "If the Spanish people vote against Aznar's party, then it will appear to the terrorists that they have succeeded in manipulating the domestic policy of an independent nation." Since nothing succeeds like success, we can accordingly expect more such attempts. It matters not that Mr. Aznar might have handled matters better; the conclusion al Qaeda and its friends will draw is that enough bodies can make a decisive difference. [ . . . ]

Of course the more nations that try to opt out, the more heavily the burden falls on the United States. The spirit of appeasement is loose. Whether it will spread and how quickly and with what encouragement from al Qaeda, in the form of how many more bombs going off, we don't know. But we are likely to find out.

The answer to terror is plain
James Pinkerton
Newsday
(03/16/04)

Are the Spanish cowardly for tossing out their pro-Iraq intervention government? Or are they wise?

Hawks in America were quick to embrace Spain in the wake of the terror bombings in Madrid last week. "We Are All Spaniards Now," proclaimed the lead editorial in The New York Sun. The goal of such punditry, of course, was to keep Spaniards - and Americans - from grasping the full downside of the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive strikes on other countries, notably Iraq.

But now that the pro-intervention Popular Party (PP) has been defeated, to be replaced by the anti-intervention Socialists, American hawks are reversing course, accusing Spain of "appeasing" terror. Peter Robinson, writing in Nationalreview.com, lamented, "Terrorists have now succeeded in producing a change in government in a major Western European nation."

Not exactly. What happened was that Spaniards went to the polls and rejected the PP's pro-Bush policy. Intervention in Iraq was a "disaster," declared newly elected Socialist leader Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

To be sure, the PP said it went to Iraq to help promote peace, but Spain's intervention had "war of civilizations" written all over it. Many Spanish troops serving in Iraq, for example, wore an arm patch depicting the Cross of St. James of Compostela. That insignia commemorates the Battle of Clavijo in 844. According to legend, the Apostle St. James the Elder came down from the sky and killed every Moor - as Muslims were then called - in his path. Ever since, St. James has been called "Santiago Matamoros," St. James the Moor Killer.

In July, the Madrid newspaper El Mundo warned: "To put the Cross of St. James of Compostela on the uniforms of Spanish soldiers demonstrates an absolute ignorance of the psychology of the society in which they will have to carry out their mission." [ . . . ]

The lesson of Madrid was clear enough. Those Spanish troops currently hunkering down in Iraq, dodging snipers, could have been used instead to secure "soft targets" on the homefront, guarding Spain's borders and transport system.

So what will the incoming Zapatero government do in regard to security policy? Here's a prediction: Even as he honors his campaign promise to withdraw his country's troops from Iraq, Zapatero will take obvious and commonsensical measures to improve Spain's homeland security. That is, he will tighten up on border enforcement, scrutinize aliens more closely and improve security around public places. And he will even work closely with allies in "Old Europe." [ . . . ]

Finally, Americans might ask themselves the most basic question of all: Has the invasion of Iraq really made the United States safer?

A Rush to Judgment
George Will
New York Post
(03/16/04)

Measured by the immediacy and importance of their political effect, the train bombs in Madrid were the most efficient explosions in the history of terrorism. Detonated 74 hours before polls opened in a national election, the reverberations toppled a U.S. ally.

Seven decades ago Spain became a cockpit for the 20th century's contending totalitarianisms - fascism and communism. Its 1936-39 civil war, a witches' brew of political and religious passions, was exceptionally savage, even for a civil war. Last Thursday this century's passions exploded in Spain.

Perhaps Sunday's election, which removed the leadership that took Spain into the war against Islamic terrorism, means that after the home-grown terrors of the 20th century, Spain, like much of the rest of Europe, wants only peace, and at any price. But Americans should be tentative about extracting lessons from all this. Spain can be confusing. [ . . . ]

The terrorists may draw an erroneous conclusion. They may conclude that that the reaction of the Spanish electorate - cashiering the government that supported regime change in Iraq - would be replicated in the United States in response to a terrorist attack on the eve of the presidential election.

It is likely that an attack would trigger a reflex to rally 'round the government. Public support even soared for President Kennedy in the immediate aftermath of the Bay of Pigs debacle, perhaps the most feckless use of power in American history. [ . . . ]

On Sunday, when the Spanish election was going badly for U.S. interests, so, too, was Russia's presidential election - if it can be dignified as such. Vladimir Putin used bribery and intimidation to pull people to the polls after a campaign in which the state apparatus propagandized for him and marginalized his competitors. In the process, Putin managed to further delegitimize himself with a 71 percent landslide.

This was a large milestone on Russia's rapid slide back into authoritarianism. [ . . . ]

Also on Sunday, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the deposed president of Haiti, accompanied by one of the shrillest members of Congress, California Democrat Maxine Waters, flew, against the wishes of the Bush administration, from his brief exile in the Central African Republic to Jamaica. Although it is uncertain what Aristide's return to the Caribbean portends, it cannot be counted as helpful to U.S. "nation-building" in Haiti. But, then, what could be?

Monday morning's headlines suggested a loss of U.S mastery of events. But, then, belief that events can be mastered is the root of most political misfortunes.

Rewarding Terror in Spain
Edward N. Luttwak
New York Times
(03/16/04)

It must be said: Spanish voters have allowed a small band of terrorists to dictate the outcome of their national elections. This is not how democracies are supposed to react when they are attacked by fanatics. Americans were visibly united and hardened by Sept. 11; the Italians overcame deep political differences to unify in their determination to crush the Red Brigades; Israeli cohesion has only been increased by decades of terrorism. When threatened by a violent few, democratic political communities will normally react by enforcing the will of the many.

For many years, this has been the Spanish answer to the Basque separatist movement. But it was not the response to last week's bombings.

Before the attacks, the polls forecast a victory for Mariano Rajoy of the Popular Party, for the very good reason that he was the chosen successor of Prime Minister José María Aznar, who has led Spain on the path of modernization and prosperity with almost universally acknowledged success. Three days before the elections, Mr. Rajoy seemed to be headed for victory over José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, who campaigned on a pledge to withdraw the 1,300 Spanish troops stationed in Iraq if the United Nations did not assume control of the occupation. Mr. Zapatero's call was not merely to avoid more casualties, but to affirm that the Iraq war was an act of imperialist aggression that Spain should never have supported.

Even those who view the Iraq war as a strategic error for the United States — and I'm one of them — cannot take seriously the Zapateros of Europe, who seem bent on validating the crudest caricatures of "old European" cowardly decadence. It was an act of colossal irresponsibility for the Socialists and the Spanish news media to excoriate the Aznar government for asserting that ETA, the Basque separatist movement, was probably behind the attacks. [ . . . ]

Whatever their motivation, the Socialists' argument was fundamentally flawed. Osama bin Laden and other Islamists had identified Spain as a priority target years before the Iraq war. Under Muslim law, no land conquered by Islam may legitimately come under non-Muslim rule. For the fanatics, Spain is still Al Andalus of the Middle Ages, which must be re-claimed for Islam by immigration and intimidation. Even if the bombs were placed by Islamists, the idea that Spain was attacked solely because of Mr. Aznar's support for the Iraq war is simply wrong.

And even if ETA is found to be responsible — something that seems increasingly unlikely given the direction of the investigation — the damage has been done. The Spanish political community has failed the test of terrorism — it has bowed to the violence of the few. Weakness tends to invite further attack. In this regard, Spain is vulnerable. It still rules the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the North African coast, which Islamists view as Christian colonies on Muslim soil. Having seen what bombs can do, they might be tempted to see if a few more explosions can induce the Spanish to withdraw. Similarly, ETA may well decide that another massacre or two will persuade the Spanish government to accept its demands.

Paradoxically, Mr. Zapatero can redeem Spanish democracy only if he repudiates the popular mandate he received and announces that there will be no withdrawal from Iraq because of any act of terrorism, Muslim or Basque.

What will the rest of Europe do? For politicians in countries like Italy, with both strong anti-American movements and troops in Iraq, the risks are obvious. Any politician who invokes Madrid to demand a withdrawal from Iraq will be inviting terrorist attacks to prove his point. What's more, it's unlikely that this strategy will work politically. The Spanish literally had no time to reflect between the Madrid bombings and the election. With more time, other nations are more likely to react as democracies usually do: by rejecting terrorists and their deluded causes.

Spaniards ignore logic in caving to al-Qaida
John O'Sullivan
Chicago Sun-Times
(03/16/04)

[ . . . ] The People's Party lost for one reason only: The police investigation increasingly suggested that the Madrid bombs were the work of al-Qaida. Hence they were seen as retaliation for the Aznar government's support of the U.S. war in Iraq. And a majority of Spaniards decided by their votes to blame not al-Qaida but Aznar's party for the 201 deaths.

By any test this result is a catastrophe. In the short term the new socialist government in Madrid is likely to withdraw the 1,700 Spanish troops in Iraq. That will slightly weaken the multinational force, make other governments reluctant to commit their troops, and encourage anti-U.S. parties throughout Europe to press for the withdrawal of national contingents already there. All of this will make it much harder to establish and protect a genuine democratic government in Iraq.

But that scarcely begins to exhaust the dangerous and damaging consequences of this election result.

In the first place Osama bin Laden will conclude, not unreasonably, that Zapatero won in coalition with himself. Al-Qaida as a whole will reckon that its bombs were the main factor in handing the election to an unworthy Zapatero. And that victory will instill the forces of Islamo-fascism worldwide with the belief that the people of Spain, Europe and the West are decadent -- just as the 1930s Oxford Union refusing "to die for King and Country" convinced Hitler that the democracies then were decadent. Like Hitler they will then be emboldened by this belief to strike further -- both against Spain and against other nations where resistance to Islamo-fascist terrorism is weak and uncertain. And the terrorist war on civilization will last longer and kill more people.

Second, Zapatero's arrival in power will strengthen the anti-U.S. coalition in European politics. [ . . . ]

Third, this anti-American victory was a wake-up call to the State Department and foreign policy establishment. They have paid too little attention to the rise of an anti-American Europe. So they have carried on automatically doing what they had done for the previous 50 years -- consistently encouraging the construction of "Europe" while occasionally bitching about its ingratitude. [ . . . ]

In the meantime, of course, al-Qaida will be preparing to determine the results of other elections -- notably those of the powers most active in Iraq, namely, the United States, Britain, and Poland. It is very unlikely that a terrorist bomb, however murderous, would help Sen. John Kerry. Quite the contrary.

If it seemed designed to help Kerry, it would re-elect Bush. Al-Qaida will find both Britain and Poland similarly difficult nuts to crack. In both countries the main opposition party is even more pro-American than the government. Not until the Italian elections come along will Osama find another Zapatero in the person of Romano Prodi, who is currently president of the European Commission but who seems likely to lead another anti-American leftist coalition against pro-American Prime Minister Berlusconi. And that is not until 2006.

Until then, however, Spain's election will hang over Europe like a mist of fear and forgetfulness. Spaniards in particular should have recognized the family resemblance between the Islamo-fascist boast, "You love Pepsi Cola, we love death" and the Falangist slogan, "Down with Intelligence, Long live Death." They in particular should have remembered that fascism under any cultural guise can be neither appeased nor bargained with. If Spain's participation in Iraq had not been available as an excuse, the Reconquista would have served as equal justification -- indeed Osama himself cited Islam's loss of Andalusia as reason for his terror campaign.

Nations that did refuse to help America in Iraq, such as Turkey, have nonetheless suffered bombings as heartless as those in Madrid. Unless Zapatero is prepared to convert himself and Spain to Islam, Spanish cities will continue to be targets for bombs at the whim of our enemies.

A moment's intelligent reflection would have told the Spanish people these truths. But they discarded intelligence and gave death its first election victory.

Cato the elder: It seems to me that a simple question can help cut through all the rhetoric. We should ask ourselves whether or not the terrorists were happy with the results of the Spanish election. Were they happy that one of the nations ranged against them no longer will be? (A question like this is similar to the one that Americans should ask themselves before the November elections: Do the terrorists want John Kerry or George Bush to win this contest?) If the answer is "yes," then the election results in Spain were almost certainly a regrettable outcome.

The Sweet, Sweet Smell of Failure

2004-03-16T16:24:00.000-06:00

Paul Starr of The American Prospect liberally fantasizes about the new left-wing talk-radio network. Let's humor him for a minute:

This spring, if all goes according to plan, a new radio network with programs modeled after Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart will make its debut. The viewpoint of the venture is the big news. Air America Radio, as it's now being called, promises to be the first commercial network with a liberal political outlook in a medium that for years has been dominated by conservatives.

Of all the media, radio has undergone the most decisive shift to the right during the past two decades. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and other conservative talk-show hosts do not merely outdraw and outnumber liberals; they have hardly any progressive competition at the national level. [ . . . ]

Two aspects of radio make it difficult today to redress the political balance. People generally listen to stations for their format -- Top 40, country, rock, news, talk -- rather than a specific program. Radio stations are "mood buttons," as Martin Kaplan, associate dean at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communications, calls them. Once Limbaugh and others established the conservative talk format, other shows along similar lines fit readily into that model and mood. But liberal talk shows on the same buttons haven't succeeded -- the audience wasn't theirs. [ . . . ]

But getting this new lineup on the air is also harder today than it was even a decade ago because of the changed structure of the industry. Since Congress eliminated limits on station ownership in 1996, large chains with centralized decision making have taken over a growing share of commercial stations, including many of the strongest and most desirable ones in top markets. "You can't rely on a syndication strategy because of central decisions about programming," argues Kaplan, who has been involved in Air America's development. National distribution, in this view, requires full control of a network's major-market stations by leasing them or buying them outright. That means a liberal network has to jump over an even higher investment hurdle.

And so on. This article is comical in the degree to which it avoids confronting the major problem of liberal talk radio: nobody wants to listen to liberals. Actually, that's not quite true: there's precisely one paragraph on the matter:

Conservative domination of talk radio seems so well entrenched that many take it as an unalterable part of the political landscape. To conservatives themselves, it's proof of popular support, as if the country weren't split nearly down the middle in elections and opinion surveys. And even some liberals wonder whether there isn't something about radio as a medium that lends itself to the right.

Later on, Starr unknowingly enunciates precisely what that factor is: most talk radio listeners are males, and they naturally have no desire to listen to hours of liberal whining on the way home from work. And while the country may be "split down the middle" politically, this should be no consolation to liberals: a huge portion of their support comes from scaring people (old folks, minorities, gays, etc.) into voting for them, which is why the GOP has been successful in keeping black voters away from the polls when it runs ads in black neighborhoods: every second a liberal spends debating issues is one less second he has available to paint the GOP as a party of well-dressed Klansmen. While this sort of thing may work for elections, it will not work for talk radio, which thrives on actual ideas rather than scare tactics. In addition, as Thomas Sowell has pointed out, liberal talk show hosts aren't going to have free goodies to pass out.

The very unpopularity of liberal ideas is testified to by any number of factors, not the least of which is that liberal politicians are scared to death of being called liberals; even liberal writers have taken to calling themselves "progressives." There is no word in the American political vocabulary more akin to "wimp" than "liberal," and there's a reason for it: liberals are widely known to be soft on groups of people Americans dislike (criminals, trial lawyers), and tough on those Americans admire (religious people, the military). Consider this: When a rival Republican politician accuses his opponent of being a "liberal," the Democrat in question usually spouts off about "negativity" entering the race!

Liberal politicians are even afraid to vote their consciences once they've gained elective office: they rely instead on judges to enact their agenda for them. American liberalism -- the real kind rather than the cheap imitation -- is almost a dictionary definition of an unpopular political movement. Any radio network that identifies with it will likewise find itself epitomizing the concept of the station that nobody listens to.

The Plot Thickens...

2004-03-16T15:30:00.000-06:00

There's no way I can adequately summarize the information in this Wall Street Journal column, except to note that if these allegations are true, somebody -- and I'm looking here in David Bonior's direction -- ought to be in prison.

Haven't They Been Listening to the Democrats?

2004-03-16T14:57:00.000-06:00

Majority of Iraqis See Life Better Without Saddam
Reuters
(03/16/04)

LONDON (Reuters) - A majority of Iraqis believe life is better now than it was under Saddam Hussein [ . . . ] according to a poll released on Tuesday.

A total of 2,500 Iraqis were quizzed for a group of international broadcasting organizations including the BBC in a poll to mark the first anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion.

Almost half (49 percent) of those questioned believed the invasion of their country by U.S. and British troops was right, compared with 39 percent who said it was wrong, the poll commissioned by the BBC and other broadcasters found.

Some 57 percent said that life was better now than under Saddam, against 19 percent who said it was worse and 23 percent who said it was about the same.

Iraqi people appeared optimistic about the future, with 71 percent saying they expected things to be better in a years time, six percent predicting it will be worse and nine percent the same.

Overall, 70 percent said that life was good now, compared with 29 percent who said it was bad.

I am simply astonished that Roto-Reuters chose to cover this poll, even though they have made sure to include the bad news along with the good in this article -- which is, I suppose, exactly what they should be doing. The article mentions that a significant portion of Iraqis feel humiliated by the U.S. presence in Iraq -- a sentiment that any reader of David Pryce-Jones's excellent book on the Arabs will find familiar.

The most difficult thing about this occupation, I think, is simply getting the local Iraqis to trust us. There is already a certain native distrust of foreigners rooted in Arab culture, and readers of this blog who have studied totalitarian dictatorships may recognize the inherent difficulties of getting a local populace to trust democratic newcomers when they have known nothing but oppression their entire lives.

A similar attitude manifested itself in certain Eastern European countries during the American defense of Kosovo: although the people of those countries had many positive impulses towards the United States, they largely opposed American interference because they could not imagine the U.S. attacking a Slavic nation out of anything other than self-interested motives; a humanitarian mission was quite outside their normal frame of reference. When your own government has treated you like garbage for so long, it is only natural that you will ascribe cynical motives to nearly any endeavor. Predictably, a number of conspiracy theories arose to "explain" the "real" reasons (always bad) for American action.

Nobody said this was going to be easy. And it hasn't been.

Don't Touch That Dial!

2004-03-16T14:15:00.000-06:00

Hooray! Spike TV, the network for men that specializes in testosterone-laced fare like Monday Night Raw, has just debuted a new animated comedy that appears to represent the significant majority of men who have voted Republican during almost every election since World War II ended. The American Spectator's Kelly Jane Torrance lets us know what's up:

You might not expect the cable network that broadcasts Stripperella, featuring a crime-fighting peeler voiced by Pamela Anderson, and Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, a program for those who "enjoy broken bones, splattering spleens, high impact hematomas, and watching people get them," to be a place where old-school conservatives might feel at home. But This Just In, which debuted Sunday night on Spike TV, is a surprisingly fun cartoon about an unabashedly conservative syndicated columnist from San Diego.

"If it's in his head, it's out of his mouth," reads Spike's description of lead character Brian Newport. From that, you might expect more conservative bashing from the Left Coast. But you'd be disappointed. "Most of the time you see a conservative on a TV show, he's played as a zealot or a boob," comedian and This Just In co-creator Steve Marmel told the Houston Chronicle. "I wanted to do a show where the conservative wasn't the idiot."

The show is made using the digital Flash animation system. This bare-bones technique, widely used on the Internet to create everything from punk rock kittens to fake political ads, allows the creators to write and produce each episode the very week it airs, thus giving the show a just-torn-from-yesterday's-headlines feel.

I realized this isn't your typical political satire just a few minutes into the premiere episode when Brian's best friend Jimmy Townhouse, a black schoolteacher and moderate Democrat, laughs, along with everyone else in the bar, at the current crop of black leaders. "Al Sharpton doesn't scare just white people," Jimmy says. "He scares everybody." [ . . . ]

The cartoon [ . . . ] allows for wonderful "guest stars." The first episode of This Just In features Ted Kennedy. It re-creates the scandal that sank Ted's presidential aspirations -- with a happy ending this time. Kennedy helps Brian escape from a sunken car using the bottle-opener he carries with him everywhere. Imagine making fun of Chappaquiddick! Sacrilege!

But there's more to This Just In than satire. It has something like a core, and deals with real issues, albeit in a slightly off-kilter fashion. The column Brian writes in the first episode is on voter apathy and ignorance. "Everybody's vote shouldn't be equal," Brian argues. "Idiots making decisions for the rest of us is why Bruce Almighty won a People's Choice Award, why there are 100 episodes of Becker, and why guys keep marrying Liza Minnelli." [ . . . ]

[T]he creators have so far have resisted most of the easy right-wing sink holes. "I don't care how hot she is," Brian says of Sami, the attractive, left-wing Latina waitress at his favorite watering hole. "She's a Nader supporter. I'd rather sleep with a six I agree with than a ten I don't." It comes off as a sweet and unexpected thought. [ . . . ]

This Just In doesn't raise sacred cows, on the Left or the Right. A newscast from CNN ends with the anchor deadpanning, "We're just like Fox News, but without the hot female anchors." [ . . . ]

This Just In isn't perfect. A subplot in the first episode, in which Jimmy and Craig get the black former talk show host Wayne Brady to run for president, is far too inside baseball, and inside the Beltway. However, a wickedly funny show about politics that doesn't hate the Red States of America? Spike TV just won itself this female viewer.

I suspect that Brian Anderson, the writer for City Journal who says that conservatives aren't losing the culture wars anymore, is doing handstands over this new comedy (as he must have been when "Doonesbury" alternative Day by Day premiered). The good news isn't even confined to just the show itself: "Brian Newport" operates a "Republicans for Ralph" website (that would be "Nader," for those of you unaware that Ralphie is an apparent RNC plant), and recently began writing a blog, so you don't even have to wait until the next episode to find out what he's thinking. Here's one example of his writing style:

Exiled leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide stated in a press conference that he still rules the country of Haiti. Look, it’s Haiti. Everyone gets a turn to be president. You had yours, now move over and give the next man, woman, witch doctor or goat the chance to have indoor plumbing for six months while they live in the presidential hut.

Besides, you should be focusing on your more immediate problem which is trying to get a job at Outback Steakhouse with the words “President of Haiti” on your resume.

Mr. Newport, like any good conservative, also thinks Hillary Clinton is a first cousin of the Prince of Darkness, and a condescending fool into the bargain:

Hillary Clinton wants to set up a system so that anyone using an electronic voting machine will get a receipt so they know who they voted for. This is yet another attempt by her to treat voters like children. Why don’t you have my mom stand behind me in the booth so she can check my ballot?

And everybody can have their grandparents go to the polling place with them. That way, when people vote for Nader, they can take their vote and use it to wipe!

Jesus Christ woman, get over it. You lost in 2000. Walk it off and run a decent campaign for President, you’re making Rosie O’Donnell seem chipper and accessable.

Who you vote for is supposed to be confidential and nobody is supposed to know including the machine. You think Howard Dean’s supporters want people going to back to New Hampshire and Iowa and outing them for voting for that idiot?

Here’s how democracy works: you get one vote. You screw it up. Too bad. If you are too stupid to figure out how to vote then your vote shouldn’t count. If you punched the wrong chad then you will just have to live with whatever candidate you voted for. You made a mistake, now you have to learn from it.

Speaking of learning from your mistakes, how’s your marriage working out, Hillary?

I would be remiss if I didn't list some of the "Do's and Don'ts" from the "Republicans for Ralph" homepage:

DO go to Nader's website and stroke his ego with e-mails of encouragement. Every day somebody supports him, they aren't supporting Kerry. [ . . . ]

DO put a "Nader for President" bumper sticker on your car, but DON'T put it on a part with paint, because you're peeling it off on November 2. Also, since you're a Republican, people will be impressed that someone with a nice car supports Ralph.

DON'T attend Nader rallies in the clothes you wear every day. Dress down or his supporters might suspect. [ . . . ]

DO inform Nader supporters that you went to a green party rally and they were talking smack about Ralph. If you find yourself around Green party members, tell them you were with a bunch of Nader people the other day, and they were making fun of their body odor. Divide and Conquer! [ . . . ]

DON'T actually vote for Nader on election day! Remember, it's all about bait and switch. We bait, then switch! We're supporting Nader all the way up to November 1, 2004. And then, cast your vote for President Bush.

Sundays at 10:30 PM EST, 9:30 Central. Be there.

Compassionate Rich People Who Think You Have Too Much Money

2004-03-11T20:39:00.000-06:00

Professor Don Hickey, a former history professor of mine at Wayne State College and the author of the first full treatment of the War of 1812 (covering both military affairs and domestic issues) since Henry Adams penned his famous work, Emailed me asking for a copy of an article I once mentioned to him. Dr. Hickey -- who will henceforth be known as "The Professor" on this blog -- found himself on the receiving end of some laughter when he claimed to a close acquaintance that the Democratic party receives more money from millionaires than do the Republicans. He is looking for the article that can back this up.

Man, did he come to the right place:

A Campaign Reformers Should Love — But Don’t
Byron York
National Review Online
(7/07/03)

[ . . . ] A new study by the Center for Responsive Politics found that in the last election cycle, people who gave less than $200 to politicians or parties gave 64 percent of their money to Republicans. Just 35 percent went to Democrats. On the other hand, the Center found that people who gave $1 million or more gave 92 percent to Democrats — and a whopping eight percent to Republicans. [ . . . ]

Big-Time Donors Small in Number
Center for Responsive Politics
Press release
(12/11/02)

Less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the U.S. population gave 83 percent of all itemized campaign contributions for the 2002 elections, an analysis of campaign giving by the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics has found. [ . . . ]

The study also found that Republicans raised more than Democrats from individuals who contributed small and medium amounts of money during the 2002 election cycle, but Democrats far outpaced Republicans among deep-pocketed givers.

Republican candidates and parties topped their Democratic counterparts, $68 million to $44 million, in fundraising from individuals who contributed under $1,000 in itemized contributions for the 2002 elections. Among donors giving $1,000 or more, Republicans again beat out Democrats, $317 million to $307 million.

But the trend was reversed among individuals at higher giving levels, from whom Democrats raised far more money than Republicans. Among donors of $10,000 or more, Democrats out-raised Republicans, $140 million to $111 million. Among donors of $100,000 or more, Democrats raised $72 million to the Republicans' $34 million. And among the most generous givers - those contributing $1 million or more - Democrats far outdistanced Republicans, $36 million to just over $3 million.

Granted, a few caveats are in order here, not the least of which is that the Center for Responsive Politics meant for this study to highlight the absence of political donors relative to the size of the population at large -- indeed, it makes much of the fact that only "one-tenth of one percent" of the American population gave enough money ($200 or more) to a political campaign or political party for it to be itemized on their taxes. Broadly speaking, not enough people contribute to political campaigns to entirely dispel the silly notion that a group of fat capitalist overlords are sitting in a room somewhere pulling strings.

In addition, there aren't that many millionaires who gave to political campaigns in the first place, so the numbers at the really high end of the scale should perhaps be treated with some skepticism. Still, as we can see, the amount of money given by well-off individuals (many of whom are doubtlessly trial lawyers) to the Democratic party ought to make the "usual suspects" do a double-take.

It is rather shocking to see this finding emanate from the Center for Responsive Politics, an organization that has sometimes been accused of being biased against conservatives -- and not entirely without cause. This research strongly jibes with my "hunch" on these matters, which is that the Left talks a good game on class warfare but is largely composed of wealthy individuals -- indeed, people like Paul Sweezy and Corliss Lamont (born rich, talk left) are not that different from past bourgeois revolutionaries like Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx.

I happen to think that people gifted in articulation naturally go into occupations that suit their interests, and then seek to expand the influence of those occupations. Areas such as law, academia, and journalism are more impervious to common sense than the average profession, since their denizens never face a bottom line they can't talk their way out of. Not only do they propose schemes in which their kind of skills can be utilized -- more rules requiring more bureaucrats, more regulations requiring detailed explanation, a more-regulated society they can oversee, etc. -- but they seem to make quite a bit of money doing it. Ka-ching!

Surely, If We Can Put a Man On The Moon, We Can Make Snotty Leftism Popular Again!

2004-03-11T19:26:00.000-06:00

Liberal Talk Radio Network to Start Up in Three Cities
Jacques Steinberg
New York Times
(link requires registration)
(3/11/04)

The creators of a fledgling liberal talk radio network who hope to challenge the dominance of conservative voices on the nation's airwaves said yesterday that its programming would make its debut on March 31 on low-rated stations in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.

The network, known as Air America Radio, said its hosts would include Al Franken, the comedian and political satirist, whose program will be broadcast from noon to 3 p.m.; Janeane Garofalo, an actress whose program will be on from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m.; Chuck D, a hip-hop artist, who will be a co-anchor of a morning program; and Martin Kaplan, a media analyst who has previously appeared on National Public Radio.

Mr. Franken's program will be called "The O'Franken Factor,'' in a barb aimed at Bill O'Reilly, the host of "The O'Reilly Factor'' on the Fox News Channel. [ . . . ]

For all Air America's relative star power and connections - Mark Walsh, the network's chief executive, has donated more than $100,000 to the Democratic Party and has served as an adviser to the presidential candidate John Kerry on Internet issues - the network faces enormous hurdles. They include making money for its investors and unseating the biggest conservative voices in talk radio, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, whose programs appear on hundreds of stations.

While we all wait to see the results of this exercise in flushing money down a toilet, it may be worthwhile to place bets on just how long this radio "nutwork" will be around. I'll be generous and say six months. Readers of my blog who remember other talk-radio "stars" who were going to bedazzle us with their "quick-witted" leftism (Donahue, Hightower, Mario Cuomo, Mario Cuomo, Mario Cuomo) may choose to bet the under. The winner gets a candy bar. Since you won't be here to accept it, I will eat it on your behalf.

The Joys of Intestinal Fortitude

2004-03-11T19:07:00.000-06:00

'Memogate': GOP amoebas
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
editors
(3/11/04)

Republicans either get a spine today or continue their Academy Award-winning performance as amoebas in a continuing role.

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee are scheduled to meet behind closed doors to decide their next step in the "Memogate" scandal. At least two GOP committee staffers accessed Democrat committee memos through a shared filed server. And that's where the investigation has concentrated. Was the "accessing" -- a click of the mouse that was not "hacking" -- criminal?

But lost in the incident is the content of the memos. Fourteen of what now turns out to be nearly 5,000 memos have been made public. They suggest Democrats and liberal special interest groups conspired to obstruct justice and/or violate civil rights in delaying several of President Bush's federal court nominees.

According to a recent blurb in National Review, one of the memos says quite explicitly that the Democrats did not wish to confirm Miguel Estrada to a judicial seat because of his Hispanic origin -- i.e., "If we don't stop him now, there'll be no way we can oppose him for a Supreme Court seat."

I'll give you three guesses as to why the media is not covering this story. The first two don't count.

Just a Reminder...

2004-03-11T18:43:00.000-06:00

Purported Qaeda Letter Claims Spain Bombings-Paper
Reuters
(3/11/04)

DUBAI (Reuters) - A letter purporting to come from Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network claimed responsibility for the train bombings in Spain on Thursday, calling them strikes against "crusaders," a London-based Arabic newspaper said.

"We have succeeded in infiltrating the heart of crusader Europe and struck one of the bases of the crusader alliance," said the letter which called the attacks "Operation Death Trains." There was no way of authenticating the letter, a copy of which was faxed to Reuters' office in Dubai by the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper.

There's still a war on.

Too Bad the U.S.A. Wants Bush to Win

2004-03-08T22:23:00.000-06:00

Kerry claims world leaders want him to beat Bush
Rupert Cornwell
The Independent (U.K.)
(3/9/04)

John Kerry dropped an early bombshell into the US election campaign yesterday by claiming some foreign leaders have already told him they want him to beat President George Bush in November.

His remark, at a fundraiser, drew a mocking response from the White House, where officials pointed out that "US voters, not foreign leaders, decide who becomes President." But it shows how foreign policy - usually a low ranking election issue here - may be front and centre of the battle this time around.

Mr Kerry named no names when he addressed a fundraiser in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. But said: "I've met foreign leaders who can't go out and say this publicly but, boy, they look at you and say, 'you've got to win this, you've got to beat this guy, we need a new policy.'"

Foreign leaders haven't come out and said this publicly? Have I missed something?

Jimmy "Gin In My Cornflakes" Breslin Speaks!

2004-03-07T22:29:00.000-06:00

Congratulations, dear reader -- you are about to read the very first "fisking" I have ever posted on my blog! This post has been brought to you by Jimmy Breslin -- a famously obnoxious, old, crotchety wreck of a man who writes for New York Newsday and gets up every morning at 4 a.m. to down a half-bottle of Jack Daniels before barfing his daily column into the morning paper. Breslin's mind retreated into a booze-soaked grave long ago, but his ravings present a suitable target for a new blogger wishing to start off with something easy. So sit down, stretch your feet, and try to follow the tortuous nonlogic. And at least consider grabbing an alcoholic drink of your own. You're going to need one:

In his first campaign commercial. George Bush reached down and molested the dead.

Nice opening there, Grampycramps. You don't ever wanna lose that gift for composing the appropriate allusion, I see. This is reminiscent of an old P.J. O'Rourke line: "If meat is murder, does that mean eggs are rape?"

But this only in keeping with both Bushes. George Bush Sr., had the badge of Officer Eddie Byrne, who was gunned down in South Jamaica, and he stood up at Christ the King High School in Middle Village and held it up and said he would have this badge on him forever. Some chance. Bush then led high school girls into insane cheers for the death penalty.

We should all be so lucky as to have a relative expert enough in mental deficiencies to point out insanity when it occurs, but I suppose we'll have to settle for Breslin in the meantime.

Now, right off, this second George Bush came up with the badge of a Port Authority cop, George Howard, who died. He was from Hicksville. His mother gave Bush the son's badge. When Bush came back to the trade center a year later, he reached into his pocket and whipped out that badge and he had a tear in his eye. What makes it worse is that this George W. Bush acts like he's entitled to treat the remains of a dead man like a souvenir.

Uh, the mother gave it to Bush as a "souvenir" -- that is, as a way of helping to remember and honor the awful events of September 11th. Bush, in his State of the Union speech shortly thereafter, vowed to carry the badge with him everywhere he went. So far, he has been as good as his word. Jimmy Breslin, by contrast, would have quickly bartered the item on Ebay for a twelve-pack of Pabst.

Now he shows a commercial with dead bodies, or body parts, covered with an American flag being taken through the smoke and flames of the World Trade Center attack. It caused people who had lost family members in the attack to complain about using the dead or parts thereof being used for a politician's gain.

Watch the Democrat Liberal-O-Matic™ at work: Bush criticized Democratic legislators? "Unpatriotic!" Bush sheds light on Kerry's voting record? "Doesn't he know Kerry served in Vietnam?" Bush uses campaign commercials to highlight his impressive response to global terror? "Scandalous!"

Granted, liberals like Breslin don't have a choice here: they are rightly afraid that the GOP will point out that they attach more value to France's opinion than that of their own countrymen, and that their idea for fighting terrorists is to increase funding to the United Nations. So they are reduced to quoting a few family members of 9/11 victims, most of whom belong to an openly-pacifist group called Peaceful Tomorrows, and whose members are consistently portrayed by the media as representing a significant chunk of opinion among those touched by this tragedy -- even though they almost surely don't. I'll bet if a poll were commissioned among "9/11 families" asking them what to do with the Taliban, more than three-quarters would be in favor of nuking them off the face of the earth, preferably in the most painful way possible.

"Bush is afraid to let us see the dead being brought back from Iraq," one firefighter said Friday.

Notice that this is, indeed, the opinion of one firefighter. There are a number of other firefighters, and their families, who feel differently.

The ad is nothing more than another George W. Bush fraud. First, arriving at the trade center, he was led by a flunky to a retired firefighter, Bob Beckwith, who had come down three days after the attack to take a look. Bush's flacks had Beckwith stand on a destroyed fire engine and Bush came up next to him and Bush put an arm around him and, two heroes, Bush called out "we're tough" to the television cameras.

He is tough, Breslin. He has spent two years using the world's most powerful military to liberate 50 million people and institute self-government among any number of warring ethnic groups -- all without having a nervous breakdown or becoming so overcome by stress that he felt a compulsive need to boink an intern. When was the last time you liberated anything, Breslin -- other than a Metamucil-laced vodka bottle from your refrigerator?

He had all he wanted out of the place. A picture.

Having seen the snapshot of you accompanying this article, Breslin, I can understand your animosity towards photographs.

You all saw Bush play dress-up and land on the aircraft carrier and stand there, the helmet under his arm just like an Ace from the top of a bloody sky. The aircraft carrier had to be turned around so the skyline of San Diego wouldn't be seen.

It's called imagery, Jimmy -- you need it in order to be a successful leader. You need the right look. Just ask Churchill.

Now he has his World Trade Center commercial out there and a lot of decent people regard it as an insult.

Let's switch from questioning Breslin to questioning you, dear reader. Are you a decent person? Do you consider this ad insulting? Has Breslin ever asked you for your opinion? Do you think Breslin even cares to hear your opinion, since you're probably not a member of the New York hoi polloi?

Right away, Rudolph Giuliani came out to defend him to the death. He said the commercial was true and right to put on because it was "appropriate." He was a nobody as a mayor and in one day he became a hero.

A "nobody" -- that's how Breslin describes the man who cleaned up New York City after the city's crime rate had reached levels unseen since Ted Kennedy last paid a visit. I know for a fact that lots of New Yorkers considered Giuliani a hero way before the term "9/11" became as instantly recognizable as "Pearl Harbor." But, again, Breslin doesn't get out among the masses -- he's surely much more comfortable in his safe liberal neighborhood where everybody cares about "the people."

This sudden career, this door opening to a room of gold, all started for Rudolph Giuliani when his indestructible bunker in a World Trade Center building blew up. He had personally selected it, high in the sky, and with tons of diesel fuel to give emergency power.

Giuliani "personally selected" this site to be blown up? Have you been toking up with Oliver Stone, Breslin? Or do you just need an editor that badly?

And Guiliani walks on. He walks from his bunker, up Barclay Street and went on television. Went on and announced his heroism and then came back every hour or so until he became a star, a great figure, a national hero, the mayor who saved New York.

That would be what a leader does, Breslin -- he leads. He makes himself look good, but it's not just himself he represents: it's an entire community, or a nation, or a people. But I know you don't much care for that sort of thing. Turn that aircraft carrier back towards the San Diego skyline, and so on.

Nice job spelling "Giuliani," by the way. I know, I know -- it's your cataracts. That and the way an overdose of Tylenol blurs your vision.

Most of this comes from these dazed Pekinese of the Press. Giuliani was a hero with these news people. He did not pick up a piece of steel or help carry one of the injured off.

Maybe not, but there were plenty of other people to do that -- people who were trained in disaster cleanup operations. Giuliani did, however, attend over 100 funerals and wakes for people who died that day. Hillary Clinton attended one.

He made the trade center his private cathedral. Police commanders were terrified of letting you in. There was only Rudy, who flew his stars, Oprah and the like, down to see it. Now he says a Bush ad is "appropriate."

Ah, so we get to the root of the matter: Breslin is mad because "police commanders" wouldn't let him (and, presumably, his fellow journalists) into the scene of the greatest American massacre since Antietam. Awwwwwww.

That's Giuliani's word. As the mayor, he had a detective driving one of his girlfriends out of the Gracie Mansion driveway while another detective was arriving with another girlfriend and was waved off to prevent a domestic riot.

All the while upstairs there were his wife and children.

Giuliani then showed appropriate behavior by walking in a parade on Fifth Avenue with his girlfriend and all the while his children could sit and watch him on television.

Okay, so Giuliani is a cad in his private life, but it's pretty funny to hear Breslin intoning about "the children." Breslin is infamously hostile to children: he's written columns about his dislike for them -- about how, for example, he is always yelling and cursing at his grandkids. I guess "the children" are beyond reproach only when a Republican politician is not.

How marvelous! It was appropriate to humiliate his children, and now it is appropriate to molest the dead.

Geez, you think this guy could learn a new allusion to express his hatred? Why the unhealthy focus on molestation? Other possible words include "annoy," "bother," "abrade," "bug," "chafe," "exercise," "fret," "irk," "provoke," "ruffle," and "vex" -- to borrow a couple of examples from Merriam-Webster.

Giuliani also had a flunky, Bernard Kerik, rush on television and say, so earnestly, that the Bush commercial was appropriate. Kerik was a Giuliani campaign chauffeur who became police commissioner. How marvelous! At the World Trade Center, Kerik was in the back of his car dictating the last part of a book that was going to appear under his name. It had him writhing with delicious excitement. It was about his mother being a prostitute.

"How marvelous," again. Once more: Does this guy pick and choose from a word bank of roughly three expressions? He's a writer! And what does this story have to do with anything?

That's what you expect from the lackeys. Already we know that George Bush has miles to go in his campaigning, has plenty of money and unlimited cheapness.

Actually, we know that Jimmy Breslin has eight excruciating months left to go before November, with a daily column on his hands and an endless supply of unsupported, anti-Bush invective. Why must he "molest" us so?

Not-So-Useful Idiot

2004-03-07T17:09:00.000-06:00

The Los Angeles Times, in an article that could surely get printed in Pravda, enlightens its readers with an article on the career of Paul Sweezy, who is probably the most influential Marxist economist alive today -- except that he's not alive today. Sweezy, who died of heart failure on February 28, did many things during his lifetime: he chaired Henry Wallace's 1948 presidential campaign, had nice things to say about Fidel Castro, and worked for the commie-infested Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA) during World War II. Here's how the Los Angeles Times began its article on him (link requires registration):

The possibility that Paul Sweezy would one day be recognized as America's leading radical economist seemed unlikely early in his life: His father was a Wall Street investment banker whose income afforded Sweezy a privileged education at such bastions of the ruling class as Philips Exeter Academy and Harvard University. But his family wealth, he would later acknowledge, was what gave him the freedom to spurn capitalism and carve a path to its polar opposite.

Sweezy, 93, who died of congestive heart failure Feb. 28 in Larchmont, N.Y., went on to write "The Theory of Capitalist Development," an introduction to Marxist economics published in 1942 and still used in many college courses. At the end of that decade, he co-founded Monthly Review, the nation's most influential socialist journal for more than 50 years.

The man John Kenneth Galbraith called the "most noted American Marxist scholar" of the second half of the 20th century conceived the Monthly Review at a particularly inauspicious time — the late 1940s, when McCarthyism was heating up the political climate. The first issue featured an article by Albert Einstein titled "Why Socialism?" Subsequent issues relied on equally well-known left-leaning authors, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Jean-Paul Sartre and Fidel Castro and Malcolm X.

Through more than 100 articles and 20 books, Sweezy became the defining voice of Marxism in North America, revered by several generations of leftists as "the living proof," The Nation's Daniel Singer once wrote, "that, even in the very heart of imperialism it was possible to resist and to stick to one's principles."

De mortuis nil nisi bonum, right? Well, I'll try to stay away from unsupported criticisms, but it's hard not to notice some of the things Sweezy said during his lifetime, which are recorded in Paul Hollander's book on the incredible gullibility of Western intellectuals towards Communist regimes. Here's one gem from Sweezy, written after he traveled to Cuba and got taken on a Potemkin village tour by the Communists:

To be with these people, to see with your own eyes how they are rehabilitating and transforming a whole nation, to share their dreams of the great tasks and achievements that lie ahead -- these are purifying and liberating experiences. You come away with your faith in the human race restored.

Here's another quote Sweezy wrote with Leo Huberman, his longtime partner-in-crime, in their 1961 book Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution:

First and foremost, Fidel [Castro] is a passionate humanitarian . . . in the meaningful sense that he feels compassion for human suffering, hates injustice because it causes unnecessary suffering, and is totally committed to building in Cuba a society in which the poor and the underprivileged shall be able to hold up their heads. . . . He treats people within this framework -- kindly, sternly, inplacably, according to their actual or potential role in creating or hindering the creation of the good society.

And, of course, Sweezy had no compunction about signing a 1977 New York Times advertisement (along with leftists like Richard Barnett, David Dellinger, Richard Falk, Corliss Lamont, and Cora Weiss) that blamed the United States for the humanitarian catastrophe then occuring in Vietnam:

The present suffering of the Vietnamese people is largely a consequence of the war itself for which the United States bears the continuing responsibility. . . . We have examined these charges [of human rights abuses] and find them to be based on distortion and exaggeration. True, some Saigon collaborationists have been detained in re-education centers, perhaps 40,000 at present. But such number is surprisingly small . . . Many of those detained engaged in crimes against their own people. . . . The present government in Vietnam should be hailed for its moderation and for its extraordinary effort to achieve reconciliation among all its people. . . . In fact almost all the Vietnamese who worked for the Saigon regime, and who remained have by now returned to their families and are pursuing normal lives.

For those of you thinking "this guy was a smug leftist asshole," keep reading: it gets worse. Sweezy was born to a rich Wall Street banker whose very lifestyle was a testament to the power of American income mobility: he had started out as a sweeper in another bank but rose to become vice-president of New York's First National Bank. As the LA Times article makes clear, the younger Sweezy was unembarrassed by his lavish lifestyle, even as he trashed the system that made it possible:

[Sweezy] had a home in Larchmont, within commuting distance of Monthly Review's Manhattan offices, as well as a 25-acre farm in New Hampshire that he inherited from his parents. They also left him a trust fund that freed him from trying to get by on Monthly Review's meager salary.

"I don't live like a proletariat and I don't pretend to," he once told the Los Angeles Times. "I think I am lucky to be able to devote a piece of the economic surplus [to] fighting the system."

Kind of puts J.K. Galbraith's line about how conservatives are always "search[ing] for a superior moral justification for selfishness" in a whole new light, huh?

Megalomaniacal Dictators for Kerry

2004-03-06T00:41:00.000-06:00

Orrin Judd links to this interesting but somehow not surprising article on John Kerry's recent popularity with the North Korean government (which must be particularly concerned now that President Bush appears uncowed by their terror threats). Let's just say John Kerry is a dead-ringer for Menta Lee-Ill:

North Korea's state-controlled media are well known for reverential reporting about Kim Jong-il, the country's dictatorial leader.

But the Dear Leader is not the only one getting deferential treatment from the communist state's propaganda machine: John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic candidate, is also getting good play in Pyongyang.

In the past few weeks, speeches by the Massachusetts senator have been broadcast on Radio Pyongyang and reported in glowing terms by the Korea Central News Agency (KCNA), the official mouthpiece of Mr Kim's communist regime.

The apparent enthusiasm for Mr Kerry may reflect little more than a "better the devil you don't know" mentality among the North Korean apparatchiks. Rather than dealing with President George W. Bush and hawkish officials in his administration, Pyongyang seems to hope victory for the Democratic candidate on November 2 would lead to a softening in US policy towards the country's nuclear weapons programme.

It can't be said often enough: America's enemies would like nothing better than for President Bush to lose in November.

Fish-Face

2004-03-06T00:15:00.000-06:00

Stanley Fish, the infamously-offputting postmodernist professor whose magazine Social Text once ran a purposely-spurious article by physicist Alan Sokal (who simply wanted to see if Fish was stupid enough to accept it as authentic), thinks that his fellow professors should start telling the populace to shut the hell up:

In the past few months I have been saying nasty things in these columns (and also on radio and television) about members of Congress, Illinois state representatives and senators, the governor of Illinois, the governor's budget director, and the governor-appointed Illinois Board of Higher Education. I have called these people ignorant, misinformed, demagogic, dishonest, slipshod, and have repeatedly suggested that when it comes to colleges and universities either they don't know what they're talking about or (and this is worse) they do know and are deliberately setting out to destroy public higher education.

In response they have sent me nice notes, trekked across the state to visit me in my office, invited me to talk with their colleagues, gone out and bought my books (and actually read them), taken me to lunch, and promised to arrange a dinner with the governor. (Not likely to happen, for, as far I can see, there's nothing in it for him.)

What's going on here? Why have people of whom I have been unfailingly (and acerbically) critical responded by being unfailingly nice and even, on occasion, deferential?

I got the hint of an answer from the first state representative who came to see me. As she walked through the door, she said, "Well, I managed to find your office, so we all can't be as dumb as you say we are." Two things were obvious: She had certainly gotten the message. And it was the message -- harsh, accusatory, scornful -- that had gotten her to come. [...]

[C]ampus administrators have been diplomatic, respectful, conciliatory, reasonable, sometimes apologetic, and always defensive, and they would have done much better, I think, if they had been aggressive, blunt, mildly confrontational, and just a bit arrogant. When I've talked to university officials and suggested that they go on the offensive when faced with budget cuts, threats of new control, baseless accusations of waste, etc., they have demurred and said, "It wouldn't be good to irritate them."

Well "irritate" is not quite what I had in mind. "Get their attention" is more in the right direction, "make them uncomfortable" would be better, and "cause them pain" would hit the mark. [...]

[M]y experience suggests that it might just be worth a try to stand up for ourselves unapologetically, and to comport ourselves as if we were formidable adversaries rather than easy marks.

This would mean allowing no false statement by a public official to pass uncorrected and unrebuked. (Not only must the record be set straight; those who have gotten it wrong must be made to feel bad if only so that they will think twice before doing it again.) It would mean embracing the fact that few nonacademics understand what we do and why we do it, and turning it into a weapon. Instead of saying, "Let me tell you what we do so that you'll love us," or "Let me explain how your values are our values too," say, "We do what we do, we've been doing it for a long time, it has its own history, and until you learn it or join it, your opinions are not worth listening to."

Fish has so much respect for the university's mission, he advocates the squashing of free speech and once denied tenure to a professor whose political views did not jibe with his.

And if you live in Illinois, you're contributing to his paycheck. But he doesn't think your opinions should count.

Bleat, Bleat Baby

2004-03-05T23:22:00.000-06:00

The folks at Lucianne.com are talking about a great post on James Lileks' blog about the recent George Soros ad (scroll down about one-third of the page). The post is so good I can't even justly excerpt it, but the short entry underneath it is worthy of a read. Here it is, in its entirety:

A few days before the Minnesota caucuses a flier was stuck in my door. It was from “Peace in the Precincts,” an organization that wanted five planks inserted into the laundry list of caucus resolutions. Number four caught my eye:

Be it resolved, that the US should renounce the doctrine of preemptive war and promote the rebuilding of the international community through the United Nations to track down and incapacitate international, terrorist organizations, and to intervene to stop genocides, tyrannical regimes, and international armed conflicts through diplomacy, the promotion of democracy, focused and forceful nonviolent intervention, and peaceful conflict resolution.

Okay. A simple quiz.

1. We should promote the rebuilding of the international community through the UN to stop tyrannical regimes through forceful nonviolent intervention.

Or:

2 "You’re either with us, or with the terrorists."

Imagine a bomb just went off in your local mall. Choose one.

When The Guardian Speaks, We Yawn

2004-03-04T15:01:00.000-06:00

Here are two rather interesting paragraphs from a recent Guardian editorial on John Kerry's election prospects:

Mr Kerry's unequivocal win provides him with the best possible platform from which to unify his party for the contest against George Bush in November. He won this week in states in the east, the west, the north and even the south, where Mr Edwards had hoped to slow his opponent's momentum. Mr Kerry's wins in Georgia and Ohio were particularly telling, since these two very different states are among the handful that may be truly competitive in November. [...]

The free world has never had a stronger interest in the result of a US election than it has in the defeat of Mr Bush. Senator Kerry carries the hopes not just of millions of Americans but of millions of British well-wishers, not to mention those of nations throughout Europe and the world.

The comment about Kerry's performances in Georgia and Ohio is most amusing: the Guardian, along with many American liberals, is going to discover just how wide a gulf there is between Democratic primaries in a Republican state and election results in a Republican state. As for paragraph number two, if it is so important for the European half of the "free world" to deny freedom to others, should we Americans really give a hoot what they have to say about anything?

Bush: "Dumb" Like a Fox

2004-03-03T20:01:00.000-06:00

David Cohen at the Brothers Judd Blog wonderfully analyzes the news that President Bush called John Kerry after it was clear he had wrapped up the Democratic nomination:

Here are three not-mutually exclusive possible states of the world. I am delusional. The President and/or his advisers are competent politicians. National political reporters are incompetent even at reporting the process stories they love so much.

I have heard or read about this call, usually presented with affectionate bemusement, on NPR and Imus, many weblogs and in newspaper stories from all the major outlets, inserted into almost every story about Senator Kerry's great victory on Super Tuesday. On Senator Kerry's big day, I keep hearing about the President acting like a decent human being. Political commentators are constantly mentioning the President and his five minute phone call when reporting on Senator Kerry securing the Democratic nomination.

And they're all wondering why he did it?

I have come to believe that this president can reasonably be called a political genius.

Sayonara

2004-03-03T19:38:00.000-06:00

Man Arrested For Allegedly Having Sex With 2-Month-Old
Associated Press
(3/2/04)

SACRAMENTO -- An El Dorado Hills man is being held without bond on federal child pornography charges after agents on Monday said they seized images from his home showing him performing sexual acts with a 2-month-old girl.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents said the girl is one of the youngest sexual assault victims they have ever encountered.

Larry Michael Jeffs, 41, was arrested at his home Thursday after the agents said they found explicit video images showing him engaging in sexual acts with the infant, who is now 8 months old.

Jeffs is alleged to have distributed the images over the Internet, where they were recovered during a child pornography investigation in Detroit. The agents said they traced the images to Jeffs' e-mail. [...]

Jeffs remains in the Sacramento County Jail, charged with producing and distributing child pornography, which carry a maximum prison term of 50 years.

Assuming that this pile of human sewage is found guilty, does anybody care to place bets on how long he will survive in prison? I'm guessing two weeks, tops.

Nothing to Offer

2004-03-03T16:39:00.000-06:00

Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Bush critic Brendan O'Neill poses a question for the inveterate Bush-bashers who currently plague American political discourse:

LONDON - Walking through north London recently, I noticed that the spray-painted slogan on the side of a railway bridge that once said "Don't attack Iraq" has been replaced with: "Bring down Bush."

In my local bookstore, a display of books on "American Politics" offers up Michael Moore's "Dude, Where's My Country?" alongside "Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush's America," by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, "The Lies of George W. Bush," by David Corn, and two titles that make fun of President Bush's incoherent speaking style. The British media, meanwhile, revel in claims that Mr. Bush was a "coward" and a "chicken" for not serving in Vietnam.

The buildup to the US presidential election may not have the same urgency here as it does in New York or Los Angeles, but the sport of "bashing the president" is proving to be a hit among Brits. As someone who opposes just about everything Bush stands for - in particular his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - I might be expected to relish this Bush-bashing. In fact, it leaves me cold.

Election-watching from this side of "the pond," I feel that the bashers have no political alternative to offer that the American electorate might vote for, fight for, or get excited about. Instead, they poke fun at the president, scaremongering and questioning his integrity. This is the politics of the schoolyard, with namecalling and snitching taking the place of a proper political debate. [...]

Some of these anti-Bush books have big, bright photos of the president looking silly and lists of the idiotic statements he has made (printed in big, bold type, no doubt to help the "stupid white men" of America get the message). But in their rush to proclaim their hatred for Bush, they fail to outline their own vision for America.

Could it be that they don't have one?

The short answer, Mr. O'Neill, is "yes."

Pay No Attention to Those Judges Behind the Curtain

2004-03-03T16:20:00.000-06:00

McAuliffe’s Strict Constructionism
Jonah Goldberg
National Review Online
(3/3/04)

Don't worry, this isn't another column about gay marriage. But let me briefly refer to noted constitutional scholar and historian, Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe. Here's his view on amending the Constitution to bar gay marriage: "Our Constitution, a sacred document — you know, our forefathers knew what they were doing. This wasn't a rough draft. And let's not try to continually do amendments to it as we move forward. I would like the states to make the decisions on what they think is right in their individual state. It shouldn't be up to the federal government."

Wow.

Did we know that Terry McAuliffe was even more of a strict constructionist on the Constitution than Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Robert Bork? Did I simply miss the DNC press release reporting that the Democratic party officially opposes all of the amendments since the Bill of Rights? Actually, if we are to read McAuliffe literally, I suppose he's against the Bill of Rights, too — after all, the Constitution "wasn't a rough draft" and our forefathers "knew what they were doing."

I assume McAuliffe knows what he's getting his party into. After all, the original version of the Constitution provided that only three out of five blacks should count in elections. The Democratic party already counts on a high turnout of the black vote to stay competitive. Making 40 percent of African Americans ineligible to vote won't help much.

O.K., enough about McAuliffe. But there's a larger point here. Liberal opponents of the Federal Marriage Amendment insist constantly that they consider the Constitution a "sacred document" that shouldn't be "tinkered" with. I'm very sympathetic to this view, but, frankly, I don't really believe them.

You'd have to be an idiot to believe them, and Jonah Goldberg is certainly not an idiot.

"Servitude of the Regular, Quiet, and Gentle Kind"

2004-03-02T00:24:00.000-06:00

Catholic Group Must Provide Birth Control
Paul Elias
Associated Press
(3/1/04)

SAN FRANCISCO - In a precedent-setting decision, the California Supreme Court ruled Monday that a Roman Catholic charity must offer birth-control coverage to its employees even though the church considers contraception a sin.

The 6-1 decision marked the first such ruling by a state's highest court. Experts said the ruling could affect thousands of workers at Catholic hospitals and other church-backed institutions in California and prompt other states to fashion similar laws.

California is one of 20 states to require that all company-provided health plans must include contraception coverage if the plans have prescription drug benefits.

The high court said that Catholic Charities is no different from other businesses in California, where "religious employers" such as churches are exempt from the requirement. Catholic Charities argued that it, too, should be exempt.

But the Supreme Court ruled that the charity is not a religious employer because it offers such secular services as counseling, low-income housing and immigration services to people of all faiths, without directly preaching Catholic values.

In fact, Justice Kathryn Werdegar wrote that a "significant majority" of the people served by the charity are not Catholic. The court also noted that the charity employs workers of differing religions.

The California Catholic Conference, which represents the church's policy position in the state, said it was disappointed with the ruling and feared that it could open the door to mandated insurance coverage of abortion.

"It shows no respect to our religious organizations," said spokeswoman Carol Hogan.

The American Civil Liberties Union (news - web sites) applauded the ruling and called it "a great victory for California women and reproductive freedom."

Justice Janice Rogers Brown was the lone dissenting judge. Brown wrote that the Legislature's definition of a "religious employer" is too limiting if it excludes faith-based nonprofit groups like Catholic Charities.

"Here we are dealing with an intentional, purposeful intrusion into a religious organization's expression of its religious tenets and sense of mission," Brown wrote. "The government is not accidentally or incidentally interfering with religious practice; it is doing so willfully by making a judgment about what is or is not a religion."

The thing I find most saddening about judicial decisions of this kind is that most people line up on one side or the other based on their views of the socially-contentious topics being addressed: birth control, abortion, prayer in schools, the pledge of allegiance, etc. A matter of primary -- almost monumental -- urgency meanwhile goes undiscussed and neglected: Who is to make these decisions? And with that question comes a second: Why do we accept that robed judicial dictators are to impose their values and their preferences on people who may harbor totally different objectives?

This sort of damnable intrusion on the right of a religious institution to set its own guidelines according to its own values reminds me of a line Charlton Heston spoke to a group of law students at Harvard. After telling them about how Second Amendment scholars were expected to uphold politically-correct shibboleths or face the wrath of their leftist bosses, he told the students that, frankly, he didn't care what they thought about firearms issues. What he did care about was their opinions on the stories he had just related: Did this bother them? Were they troubled? And if they were not shocked to hear these stories, Heston informed them, then he was shocked at them.

The same is true of this news. You may consider the Catholic Church's teachings on contraception to be either salutary or stupefying; you may praise them as visionary, mock them as superstitious, or ignore them completely. But if you are not shocked that a private organization can have its values superseded in this matter by judges who -- let's be honest -- did this simply because they could, then what right have you to complain when the government lifts its gaze from your enemies and sets its eyes on you -- as it surely will in a democratic republic with a fluctuating power system?

So it goes. Day by day, judicial ruling after judicial ruling, we further grasp the meaning of Alexis de Tocqueville's warning of the America he feared was coming: A country composed of "timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." I am far from thinking of Americans as a flock of timorous sheep, but the government has given every indication of viewing itself as the shepherd. If there are countries in the world where people can be legally murdered for opposing the commands of the shepherd -- and there are -- then we should be reminded of our own good fortune: We are alive; we are free; we have access to instruments of mass communication unthinkable only 20 short years ago. If we don't buck the expectation that we will submit to this "quiet servitude," then what else will our "robed masters" try to pull past us? If we don't stand up to this nonsense, then who will?

There's No Reason to Question My Patriotism Just Because I Hate My Country!

2004-02-29T19:26:00.000-06:00

Ex- Navy Lt. John Kerry is no brother of mine
John Regal
Amarillo Globe News
(2/29/04)

I am a Vietnam veteran and retired Marine. I served as a rifle company commander in Vietnam in 1966, 1967 and 1968, and I know I can speak for the majority of the Marines with whom I served.

Most of these guys are now in their 50s and well integrated into all walks of society. Most also spent complete 13-month tours in Vietnam unless they came home on stretchers or in caskets. And many did.

Presidential candidate John Kerry's service in Vietnam is not the issue. It is his anti-war activities after he came home that, to this day, sticks in the craw of most Vietnam vets - at least the ones I know. [...]

Recently, I heard a Democrat say, ". . . (P)ersonally, I don't much like Kerry, but I don't doubt what he did in Vietnam. . . ." He obviously was referring to Kerry's honorable and heroic service. I, too, do not doubt what Kerry did while in Vietnam. But can we separate John Kerry the war hero from John Kerry the Vietnam Veterans Against the War protester? In other words, can we mention one without mentioning the other?

Well, let's look at it this way. If we had a hero in our local fire department who left that service and became an arsonist, would we refer to this person as a hero or an arsonist or both?

Benedict Arnold was first a hero, then a traitor. How do we remember him now?

John Kerry's America
William F. Buckley Jr.
Commencement Address to United States Military Academy, West Point
June 8, 1971

I read ten days ago the full text of the quite remarkable address delivered by John Kerry before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. It was an address, I am told, that paralyzed the committee by its eloquence and made Mr. Kerry — a veteran of the war in Vietnam, a pedigreed Bostonian, a graduate of Yale University — an instant hero.

After reading it I put it aside, deeply troubled as I was by the haunting resonance of its peroration, which so moved the audience. The words he spoke were these:

"[We are determined] to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our hearts, to conquer the hate and fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more, so that when, thirty years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say 'Vietnam!' and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning."

"Where America finally turned." We need to wonder: where America finally turned from what?

Mr. Kerry, in introducing himself to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, made it plain that he was there to speak not only for himself, but for what he called "a very much larger group of veterans in this country." He then proceeded to describe the America he knows, the America from which he enjoined us all to turn.

In Southeast Asia, he said, he saw "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."

A grave charge, but the sensitive listener will instantly assume that Mr. Kerry is using the word "crime" loosely, as in, "He was criminally thoughtless in not writing home more often to his mother." But Mr. Kerry quickly interdicted that line of retreat. He went on to enumerate precisely such crimes as are being committed "on a day-to-day basis, with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." He gave tales of torture, of rape, of Americans who "randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravages of war." [...]

Are there extenuating circumstances? Is there a reason for our being in Vietnam?

"To attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom . . . is . . . the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart." It is then, we reason retrospectively, not alone an act of hypocrisy that caused the joint chiefs of staff and the heads of the civilian departments engaged in strategic calculations to make the recommendations they made over the past ten years, to three Presidents of the United States: it was not merely hypocrisy, but criminal hypocrisy. The nature of that hypocrisy? "All," Mr. Kerry sums up, "that we were told about the mystical war against Communism."

The indictment is complete.

It is the indictment of an ignorant young man who is willing to condemn in words that would have been appropriately used in Nuremberg the governing class of America: the legislators, the generals, the statesmen. And, reaching beyond them, the people, who named the governors to their positions of responsibility and ratified their decisions in several elections.

The point I want to raise is this: If America is everything that John Kerry says it is, what is it appropriate for us to do? The wells of regeneration are infinitely deep, but the stain described by John Kerry goes too deep to be bleached out by conventional remorse or resolution: better the destruction of America, if, to see ourselves truly, we need to look into the mirror John Kerry holds up for us. If we are a nation of sadists, of kid-killers and torturers, of hypocrites and criminals, let us be done with it, and pray that a great flood or fire will destroy us, leaving John Kerry and maybe Mrs. Benjamin Spock to take the place of Lot, in reseeding a new order.

Gentleman, how many times, in the days ahead, you will need to ask yourselves the most searching question of all, the counterpart of the priest's most agonizing doubt: Is there a God? Yours will be: Is America worth it?

John Kerry's assault on this country did not rise fullblown in his mind, like Venus from the Cypriot Sea. It is the crystallization of an assault upon America which has been fostered over the years by an intellectual class given over to self-doubt and self-hatred, driven by a cultural disgust with the uses to which so many people put their freedom. The assault on the military, the many and subtle vibrations of which you feel as keenly as James Baldwin knows the inflections of racism, is an assault on the proposition that what we have, in America, is truly worth defending. The military is to be loved or despised according as it defends that which is beloved or perpetuates that which is despised. The root question has not risen to such a level of respectability as to work itself into the platform of a national political party, but it lurks in the rhetoric of the John Kerrys, such that a blind man, running his fingers over the features of the public rhetoric, can discern the meaning of it:

Is America worth it?

That is what they are saying to you. And that is what so many Americans reacted to in the case of Lieutenant Calley. Mistakenly, they interpreted the conviction of Calley as yet another effort to discredit the military. And though they will not say it in as many words, they know that if there is no military, it will quickly follow that there will be no America, of the kind that they know, that we know. The America that listens so patiently to its John Kerrys, the America that shouldered the great burden of preserving oases of freedom after the great curtain came down with that Bolshevik subtlety that finally expressed itself in a Wall, to block citizens of the socialist utopia from leaving, en route even to John Kerry's America; the America that all but sank under the general obloquy, in order to stand by, in Southeast Asia, a commitment it had soberly made, to the cause of Containment — I shall listen patiently, decades hence, to those who argue that our commitment in Vietnam and our attempt to redeem it were tragically misconceived. I shall not listen to those who say that it was less than the highest tribute to national motivation, to collective idealism, and to international rectitude. I say this with confidence because I have never met an American who takes pleasure from the Vietnam War or who desires to exploit the Vietnamese.

So during those moments when doubt will assail you, moments that will come as surely as the temptations of the flesh, I hope you will pause. I know, I know, at the most hectic moments of one's life it isn't easy — indeed, the argument can be made that neither is it seemly — to withdraw from the front line in order to consider the general situation philosophically. But what I hope you will consider, during these moments of doubt, is the essential professional point: Without organized force, and the threat of the use of it under certain circumstances, there is no freedom, anywhere. Without freedom, there is no true humanity. If America is the monster of John Kerry, burn your commissions tomorrow morning and take others, which will not bind you in the depraved conspiracy you have heard described. If it is otherwise, remember: the freedom John Kerry enjoys, and the freedom I enjoy, are, quite simply, the result of your dedication. Do you wonder that I accepted the opportunity to salute you?

Vets rally outside Kerry's city HQ
Wil Cruz
New York Newsday
(2/28/04)

With only three days to go before Tuesday's Democratic primary, Vietnam veterans rallied Saturday outside Sen. John Kerry's campaign headquarters in Manhattan — but a Band of Brothers they were not.

Side by side with a coalition of Vietnamese-Americans from across the country, members of the Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry chanted "Commander-in-Chief Kerry? No Way!" under banners and signs decrying the Democratic front-runner as a traitor.

"He betrayed us. He stabbed us in the back," Jerry Kiley, 57, co-founder of the ad hoc group, screamed to the crowd of about 400 people packed on Park Avenue South. "We will never allow him to be our commander-in-chief. Ever!"

Veteran after veteran passionately lambasted Kerry, a decorated veteran of the Vietnam war, for, among other things, his testimony to Congress in 1971 that detailed alleged atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. Kiley said his group, which was formed three weeks ago, plans to rally at the Democratic convention in Boston in July if Kerry wins the nomination.

Equally fervent in their disdain for Kerry were the Vietnamese-Americans, who hold the senator from Massachusetts responsible for thrice blocking a bill in 2001 and 2002 that would have tied U.S. aid to Vietnam to that country's human rights record.

"Sen. John Kerry has been working with the dictatorship in Vietnam," said Nam Pham, 48, a banker from Boston who is working with the Massachusetts Human Rights Commission for Vietnam. "He lost the moral authority to lead the free world."

A Vet Questions John Kerry's Military Service
Frontpagemag.com
(2/20/04)

I was in the Delta shortly after John Kerry left. I know that area well. I know the operations he was involved in well. I know the tactics and the doctrine used, and I know the equipment. Although I was attached to CTF-116 (PBRs) I spent a fair amount of time with CTF-115 (swift boats), Kerry's command.

Here are my problems and suspicions:

(1) Kerry was in-country less than four months and collected a Bronze Star, a Silver Star and three Purple Hearts. I never heard of anybody with any outfit I worked with (including SEAL One, the Sea Wolves, Riverines and the River Patrol Force) collecting that much hardware that fast, and for such pedestrian actions. [...]

2) He collected three Purple Hearts but has no limp. All his injuries were so minor that he lost no time from duty. Amazing luck. Or he was putting himself in for medals every time he bumped his head on the wheel house hatch? Combat on, the boats were almost always at close range. You didn't have minor wounds, at least not often. Not three times in a row. Then he used the three Purple Hearts to request a trip home eight months before the end of his tour. Fishy.

(3) The details of the event for which he was given the Silver Star make no sense at all. Supposedly, a B-40 was fired at the boat and missed. Charlie jumps up with the launcher in his hand, the bow gunner knocks him down with the twin .50, Kerry beaches the boat, jumps off, shoots Charlie, and retreives the launcher. If true, he did everything wrong.
(a) Standard procedure when you took rocket fire was to put your stern to the action and go balls to the wall. A B-40 has the ballistic integrity of a frisbie after about 25 yards, so you put 50 yards or so between you and the beach and begin raking it with your .50's.
(b) Did you ever see anybody get knocked down with a .50 caliber round and get up? The guy was dead or dying. The rocket launcher was empty. There was no reason to go after him (except if you knew he was no danger to you just flopping around in the dust during his last few seconds on earth, and you wanted some derring-do in your after-action report). And we didn't shoot wounded people. We had rules against that, too.
(c) Kerry got off the boat. This was a major breach of standing procedures. Nobody on a boat crew ever got off a boat in a hot area. EVER! The reason was simple: If you had somebody on the beach, your boat was defenseless. It coudn't run and it couldn' t return fire. It was stupid and it put his crew in danger. He should have been relieved and reprimanded. I never heard of any boat crewman ever leaving a boat during or after a firefight.

Something is fishy.

Here we have a JFK wannabe (the guy Halsey wanted to court martial for carelessly losing his boat and getting a couple people killed by running across the bow of a Japanese destroyer) who is hardly in Vietnam long enough to get good tan, collects medals faster than Audie Murphy in a job where lots of medals weren't common, gets sent home eight months early and requests separation from active duty a few months after that so he can run for Congress. In that election, he finds out war heroes don't sell well in Massachsetts in 1970, so he reinvents himself as Jane Fonda, throws his ribbons in the dirt with the cameras running to jump start his political career, gets Stillborn Pell to invite him to address Congress and has Bobby Kennedy's speechwriter to do the heavy lifting. A few years later he winds up in the Senate himself, where he votes against every major defense bill and says the CIA is irrelevant after the Berlin Wall came down. He votes against the Gulf War (a big political mistake since that turned out well), then decides not to make the same mistake twice so votes for invading Iraq -- but that didn't fare as well with the Democrats, so he now says he really didn't mean for Bush to go to war when he voted to allow him to go to war.

I'm real glad you or I never had this guy covering out flanks in Vietnam. I sure don't want him as Commander-in-Chief. I hope that somebody from CTF-115 shows up with some facts challenging Kerry's Vietnam record. I know in my gut it's wildy inflated.

Mackubin Thomas Owens wrote an article for National Review about three weeks ago in which he related an Email he received from a man whose father watched Kerry give a speech: "The look on [my father's] face was one I hadn't seen since he picked me up from the Boston police station ten years ago."

If the RNC actually has the spine to ask Vietnam vets to go on record with their feelings towards John Kerry (doubtful), then a situation may arise where Kerry's Vietnam War one-upmanship on President Bush is neutralized, or even becomes a liability. The best way to fight John Kerry is simply to quote him, and to remind people of all the disgraceful things he has said about both America and the military which guarantees our freedoms.

Sophisticated Delusions

2004-02-29T16:56:00.000-06:00

Chicken Hawke Celebrities
James Bowman
American Spectator Online
(2/27/04)

Not long ago I read that Ethan Hawke -- who is a movie actor, for those of you fortunate enough not to have had to witness, as I have had to do, any of his characteristically hang-dog appearances on the silver screen -- said that President Bush was "probably the least prepared person to be president of the United States that's been elected in a long time, if not ever." The quotation speaks for itself. As does the fact that the Washington Post reported it with a straight face, demonstrating no apparent shame for citing as an authority on the President's preparedness for office a man who has never in his life done anything but impersonate other people in front of a camera.

Well sure, you may say, but we ought to be used to it by now. If we can suffer Barbra Streisand or Richard Dreyfuss or Janeane Garofalo or any of dozens of other "stars" to pronounce on matters of state, why not Mr. Hawke? He may be a self-important little nincompoop, but no more of one than most of those in a profession for which both self-importance and nincompoopery are positive qualifications. At least he's well-prepared to do his job! All true, of course, but the problem isn't so much that the Hollywood airheads are piping up, it's what they are piping up to say. It's one thing to assert that, say, the Prescription Drug bill is too favorable to the pharmaceutical industry; it's quite another to say, as Ms. Garofalo did recently, that the Prescription Drug bill was effectively a "you-can-go-f***-yourself-Grandma bill." The one is a political argument, however defective; the other is -- well, to call it wrong would be to dignify it as at least making sense. It is not attached to the world of reasonable discourse at any point. [...]

A couple of months ago, I noticed something [...] in a review by Ben Brantley in the New York Times of a new production Pirandello's Right You Are -- which, by the way, leaves off what in the circumstances would seem to be the significant subtitle: If You Think You Are. "This," wrote Mr. Brantley, "is the Italy of Benito Mussolini, a time in which civil liberties were, to put it mildly, under siege. Draw whatever parallels you like with contemporary life in the United States." As it happens, I don't like to draw any parallels with contemporary life in the United States. Nor, I would think, would anybody else with a modicum of respect for either history or civility. But it occurred to me that a comment like this tossed off in the middle of a theater review -- or an architecture review -- can hardly be intended as serious analysis. It is, rather, a kind of marker of the author's solidarity with his imagined audience, a kind of secret handshake to be understood within the fraternity that identifies itself by Bush-hating -- just as it used to identify itself by Reagan- or Nixon-hating.

The amusing thing is that most of these people -- snotty book-reviewers, Hollywood celebs, and New Class denizens -- like to think of themselves as separate and thus virtuously distinct from the general American scene: they define themselves by how different they are from ordinary people. They take pride in appealing to a "higher discourse": listening to NPR, disdaining conservative talk radio, reading avant-garde books. They are contemptuous towards capitalism and bourgeois values while enjoying the fruits of a free society they disdain.

These individuals may strive to attain an Olympian outlook, and their overweening intellectual hubris may cause them to look with neutrality on the vicious war now being played out between civilization and its enemies, but they are hilariously unaware of a single, simple truth that Ann Coulter spelled out in her book Treason: If America is attacked again by terrorists, these people "are in it with the rabble this time."

Coming Soon To a Bargain Bin Near You

2004-02-29T16:06:00.000-06:00

Barrage of Bush Books
Katrina vanden Heuvel
The Nation -- Editor's Cut
(2/25/04)
(scroll down)

When White House spokesman Scott McClellan was asked recently about The Price of Loyalty, the best-seller about former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill's disillusionment with the Bush Administration, he replied, "I don't do book reviews."

If he did, it would be a new full-time job, as a recent survey of anti-Bush books by Bob Minzesheimer in USA Today makes clear. The Price of Loyalty is just one in a wave of new titles, including Nation columnist Eric Alterman and Mark Green's The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America, Nation Washington Editor David Corn's The Lies of George W. Bush and The Bush-Haters' Handbook, published by Nation Books.

Andrew Ferguson has already written the definitive article on hatchet jobs such as these, and it pays to read it again.

I can hardly wait for the schizophrenic, five-alarm meltdown that will ensue when these authors realize -- sometime in early November -- that all their efforts have been for naught.

Next Stop After Gay Marriage

2004-02-29T15:50:00.000-06:00

Here's an old ACLU press release we all ought to pay attention to:

SALT LAKE CITY -- In hopes of vanquishing what they consider a 64-year-old injustice, a small but vocal group of polygamous wives and their supporters demonstrated in front of The Salt Lake Tribune, the paper reported today.

The Women's Religious Liberties Union, established in 1998, gathered to protest newspaper and television depictions they say paint all polygamists as incestuous, misogynous and abusive to women and children.

But their real target, said the Tribune, is a 1935 Utah law that turned bigamy into a felony instead of a misdemeanor, and a clause that makes an outlaw of any person who "cohabits with another person."

They are not alone. The American Civil Liberties Union of Utah told the paper that it plans to back the group's challenge to Utah's bigamy law.

"Living arrangements are really the most intimate kinds of decisions people make," said ACLU of Utah Legal Director Stephen Clark. "Talking to Utah's polygamists is like talking to gays and lesbians who really want the right to live their lives, and not live in fear because of whom they love. So certainly that kind of privacy expectation is something the ACLU is committed to protecting."

Don't tell me you weren't warned.

Truth Is Forever, But Nonsense Is Now

2004-02-29T15:29:00.000-06:00

Thomas Sowell is on the warpath again, thankfully:

Some years ago, the distinguished international-trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati was visiting Cornell University, giving a lecture to graduate students during the day and debating Ralph Nader on free trade that evening. During his lecture, Prof. Bhagwati asked how many of the graduate students would be attending that evening's debate. Not one hand went up.

Amazed, he asked why. The answer was that the economics students considered it to be a waste of time. The kind of silly stuff that Ralph Nader was saying had been refuted by economists ages ago. The net result was that the audience for the debate consisted of people largely illiterate in economics and they cheered for Mr. Nader.

Prof. Bhagwati was exceptional among leading economists in understanding the need to confront gross misconceptions of economics in the general public, including the so-called educated public. Nobel Laureates Milton Friedman and Gary Becker are other such exceptions in addressing a wider general audience, rather than confining what they say to technical analysis addressed to fellow economists and their students. By and large, the economics profession fails to educate the public on the basics, while devoting much time and effort to narrower and even esoteric research.

There a funny passage from Milton Friedman's memoirs which relates the story of a journalist who spent some time talking to a group of M.I.T. economists. When he asked them what they thought of minimum wage legislation, he was astonished to find almost all of them agreeing with the notion that minimum wages did more harm than good. When he asked them why they hadn't spoken up about this issue, however, they looked stricken. One of them piped up: "We don't want to sound like Milton Friedman."

Sowell goes on to elaborate on what detailed government regulation of the economy actually means:

Many economic issues are complex, but sometimes a single fact will tell you all you need to know. When you know that central planners in the Soviet Union had to set 24 million prices--and keep adjusting them, relative to one another, as conditions changed--you realize that central planning did not just happen to fail. It had no chance of succeeding from the outset. It is a wholly different ball game when hundreds of millions of people individually keep track of the relatively few prices they need to know for their own decision-making in a market economy.

When the matter is posed in the way Dr. Sowell just presented it, it seems utterly incredible that some people honestly believe they know enough to make these kinds of decisions for us. A humble sense of human limitation is clearly not an attribute that most liberals possess.

We Want Your Face to Continue Looking Like a Map of Mars -- For Your Own Good!

2004-02-29T15:02:00.000-06:00

The New York Times prints an article on the decision of a federal advisory panel to tighten regulations on Accutane, an anti-acne drug. The major charges against the drug are twofold: it is said to lead to depression and stands accused of causing birth defects in women.

Here's what I can tell you about the drug, having taken it for six months during my teenage years: the damn thing works; it clears up acne like a sponge soaks up water. I can't speak for everybody who used it, obviously, but I don't recall experiencing any depressive episodes while taking it -- and as for the charge that it leads to birth defects, there are any number of warnings on the packaging quite clearly delineating the consequences of taking it while engaging in sexual activity without using birth control. This is only applicable to women, of course, but I think most women are more than capable of following instructions.

You wouldn't know it from listening to the blistering armada of "consumer" groups who presume to speak for us, of course:

The panel recommended mandatory enrollment in a single central registry for patients who take the drug and doctors who prescribe it. [...]

The recommendation, approved 16 to 8, stopped short of a proposal by the Health Research Group of Public Citizen, a consumer organization, that Accutane be restricted to people with severe acne that does not respond to other treatments.

I wonder how Public Citizen planned to ascertain cases of "severe" acne: perhaps by sending a bureaucrat to tabulate the number of zits on a person's face? In any event, this probably would have made it impossible for me to take the drug, since my acne was only moderately devastating.

By the way, if you think this drug ought to be restricted because it leads to depression, you've obviously never been a teenager: acne like this can cause serious depression all by itself -- and isn't it at least conceivable that some already-depressed teenagers take the drug and continue to be depressed regardless?

By the way, let's parse an amusing sentence in this article:

The registry would allow the drug's makers to ensure that women taking Accutane or a generic equivalent receive regular pregnancy tests and use two forms of birth control.

When I took this medicine, there were warnings on the package advising that women taking the drug utilize at least two forms of birth control, and a list was printed listing some suggestions. One of them was sexual abstinence.

So, I wondered, if a woman remained sexually abstinent, would she be required to utilize another form of birth control?

Too Funny For Comment

2004-02-29T03:10:00.000-06:00

Common Cause and Brennan Center file comments with FEC regarding 527 advisory opinion
Press release
www.commoncause.org
(2/17/04)

Common Cause and the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law on Tuesday urged the Federal Election Commission to reject an overbroad advisory opinion regarding 527 groups that could significantly expand the scope of political speech subject to regulation by the FEC.

The Brennan Center and Common Cause, both longtime supporters of campaign finance reform and key players in the fight to pass the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), fear that Jan. 29 draft Advisory Opinion 2003-37 could chill the First Amendment rights of activists and non-profit organizations that seek to influence public policy.

Father, Forgive THEM, Too?

2004-02-29T02:59:00.000-06:00

Taming the Vindictive Passions
Daniel P. Maloney
First Things
February 2004

In 1995, at ceremonies marking the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the liberation of Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel made the following prayer: “God of forgiveness, do not forgive those who created this place. God of mercy, have no mercy on those who killed here Jewish children.” Such a prayer makes many people uncomfortable and provokes some thorny theoretical and practical questions: Are there any unforgivable acts? Isn’t there some point after which Germany and the German people can be forgiven? Is hate ever a virtue?

The tensions between justice and compassion, forgiveness and order provide deep conceptual puzzles of the sort that analytic philosophers usually like to tackle, though surprisingly few do so in any depth. Fortunately, among those few is Jeffrie G. Murphy, Regents Professor of Law and Philosophy at Arizona State University, whose Getting Even: Forgiveness and Its Limits is a well-written and accessible yet deeply serious examination of the costs of forgiveness and the dangers of cheap grace. [...]

As the subtitle of the new book suggests, Murphy [...] thinks there ought to be limits to forgiveness, even for Christians. His main argument relies on the idea that too-hasty forgiveness can show a lack of respect for oneself, as in the S. J. Perelman quip, “To err is human; to forgive, supine.” When we are the victims of evil, it is natural and even likely that we will resent, be angry with, and even hate the person or persons responsible. Murphy calls these “the vindictive passions,” and in the first part of the book, he argues that they play a morally valuable role in our laws, our personal relations, and our psyches.

We are usually vindictive when someone fails to grant us the respect or regard that we are due. We are angry at the injustice that their actions represent, and so our vindictiveness reflects an appropriate sense of justice. Aristotle made a similar point in the Nicomachean Ethics: there is a certain sort of anger that, if our passions and desires are correctly ordered, we ought to have towards violations of the good. When someone unjustly attacks our person or our society, we ought not to like it; indeed, not to have these emotions shows an inadequate love of the good.

The vindictive passions go further, though, by demanding vengeance, the infliction of suffering on the offender. A vindictive person is not satisfied until he knows that the person who wronged him has suffered appropriately. Punishment, on this view, is not about deterrence or the chance to rehabilitate the person punished. It’s about making that guy suffer for what he did to me and mine, as in Wiesel’s prayer for divine vengeance.

If we forgive too easily or grow too lenient in our criminal justice system, we may ignore the genuine harm done. Psychotherapists frequently encourage victims of abuse to forgive their abusers rather than hate them, believing that hatred will only eat away at their fragile psyches. Murphy warns that this advice can be dangerous if it encourages such people to lower their guards and allow themselves to be victimized again. Hate and anger can also get out of hand, of course, but they can strengthen us and help us muster the emotional energy to resist evil, thereby recovering our sense of dignity when we are humiliated or treated without respect. And if the vindictive emotions help us to hold on to our innate dignity, then it makes a certain sense to think that the vengeful behavior following on those emotions would also be in the service of justice and human dignity.

Murphy suggests that this account of vengeance explains the otherwise puzzling fact that it seems just for us to punish murder more severely than we punish attempted murder. If our goal in punishing were simply to deter future crimes, it would seem that we should discourage people from attempting crimes, and not just from accomplishing crimes. So it ought to be irrelevant to the sentence that, say, the bullet accidentally missed its target. That we do regard it as relevant suggests that behind our laws there is a spirit of vindictiveness, a desire to pay back the criminal for the damage he actually causes. It is easier to forgive someone if there is no serious harm done.

This is a stellar article on the nature of forgiveness and is well worth reading, but one point in these discussions always seems paramount in my mind: People have to ask for forgiveness first. There is a peculiar tendency in the modern era for people -- especially people not directly harmed by some destructive action -- to offer forgiveness to a transgressor almost immediately after his crime is committed (I remember reading about how a group of students hung up a sign at their school that indicated their forgiveness of a fellow student after he opened fire in a classroom).

I think it is wise for people to keep in mind Christ's axiom about forgiving your brother for seven wrongs if he asks your forgiveness seven times -- while paying plenty of attention to the fact that this proverb enjoins forgiveness for a man who directly asks for forgiveness in the first place. And while forgiveness can indeed be granted, it is entirely appropriate for a person to take steps to ensure that he will not be snookered -- after all, what normal person would not take certain precautions in reaction to someone who repeatedly sins after requesting forgiveness? Like the old Arab proverb says: "Trust in God, but tie your camel."

'A Doll's House' Collapses

2004-02-29T02:20:00.000-06:00

'I am victim'
Anne Applebaum
Washington Post
(2/25/04)

Sometimes in the course of a great American debate there comes a moment when the big battle guns fall silent, the pundits run out of breath, and -- unexpectedly -- the long, bitter argument suddenly turns into farce. In the past two decades, this nation has lived through the spectacle of Anita Hill accusing Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment; the destruction of the career of Sen. Bob Packwood; the ugly drama of Paula Jones, her lawyers and the president; and, as a result, the creation of multiple university and workplace "codes of sexual conduct," which no one dares defy. But now it's as if none of that ever happened: In an extraordinary, several-thousand-word article in New York magazine, Naomi Wolf, the celebrated feminist writer, has just accused Harold Bloom, the celebrated literary scholar, of having put his hand on her thigh at Yale University 20 years ago.

But Wolf's article is not merely about that event (a secret that she "can't bear to carry around anymore"). The article is also about the lasting damage that this single experience has wrought on a woman who has since written a number of bestsellers, given hundreds of lectures, been featured on dozens of talk shows and photographed in various glamorous poses, including a smiling, self-confident head shot on New York magazine's Web site this week. [...]

[I]n the end, what is most extraordinary about Wolf is the way in which she has voluntarily stripped herself of her achievements and her status, and reduced herself to a victim, nothing more. The implication here is that women are psychologically weak: One hand on the thigh, and they never get over it. The implication is also that women are naive, and powerless as well: Even Yale undergraduates are not savvy enough to avoid late-night encounters with male professors whose romantic intentions don't interest them.

The larger implications are for the movement that used to be called "feminism." Twenty years of fame, money, success, happy marriage and the children she has described in her books -- and Naomi Wolf, one of my generation's leading feminists, is still obsessed with her own exaggerated victimhood? It's not an ideology I'd want younger women to follow.

Feminism long ago degenerated into a silly buzzword that most people, including females, find ridiculous -- indeed, it has become something of a pastime to ridicule the ashen-faced seriousness of its adherents. You can read more on this nonstory here.

Let's Rename the Blue States "Kerrystan"

2004-02-29T01:18:00.000-06:00

Ion Mihai Pacepa, former Soviet operative and brilliant scourge of leftist bunk, has just left a delightfully smelly bag of burning dog crap at John Kerry's front door. To be sure, most of the waste deposited therein came directly (okay, metaphorically) from Kerry's own mouth; Pacepa simply re-excavates his words and asks just where the hell they came from:

Part of Senator John Kerry's appeal to a certain segment of Americans is his Vietnam-veteran status coupled with his antiwar activism during that period. On April 12, 1971, Kerry told the U.S. Congress that American soldiers claimed to him that they had, "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned on the power, cut off limbs, blew up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan." [...]

To me, this assertion sounds exactly like the disinformation line that the Soviets were sowing worldwide throughout the Vietnam era. KGB priority number one at that time was to damage American power, judgment, and credibility. One of its favorite tools was the fabrication of such evidence as photographs and "news reports" about invented American war atrocities. These tales were purveyed in KGB-operated magazines that would then flack them to reputable news organizations. Often enough, they would be picked up. News organizations are notoriously sloppy about verifying their sources. All in all, it was amazingly easy for Soviet-bloc spy organizations to fake many such reports and spread them around the free world. [...]

The KGB organized a vitriolic conference in Stockholm to condemn America's aggression, on March 8, 1965, as the first American troops arrived in south Vietnam. On Andropov's orders, one of the KGB's paid agents, Romesh Chandra, the chairman of the KGB-financed World Peace Council, created the Stockholm Conference on Vietnam as a permanent international organization to aid or to conduct operations to help Americans dodge the draft or defect, to demoralize its army with anti-American propaganda, to conduct protests, demonstrations, and boycotts, and to sanction anyone connected with the war. It was staffed by Soviet-bloc undercover intelligence officers and received about $15 million annually from the Communist Party's international department — on top of the WPC's $50 million a year, all delivered in laundered cash dollars. Both groups had Soviet-style secretariats to manage their general activities, Soviet-style working committees to conduct their day-to-day operations, and Soviet-style bureaucratic paperwork. The quote from Senator Kerry is unmistakable Soviet-style sloganeering from this period. I believe it is very like a direct quote from one of these organizations' propaganda sheets. [...]

The Stockholm conference held annual international meetings up to 1972. In its five years of existence it created thousands of "documentary" materials printed in all the major Western languages describing the "abominable crimes" committed by American soldiers against civilians in Vietnam, along with counterfeited pictures. All these materials were manufactured by the KGB's disinformation department. I would print up these materials in hundreds of thousands of copies each.

The Romanian DIE (Ceausescu's secret police) was tasked to distribute these KGB-concocted "incriminating documents" all over Western Europe. And ordinary people often bought it hook, line, and sinker. "Even Attila the Hun looks like an angel when compared to these Americans," a West German businessman reprovingly told me after reading one such report. [...]

Many "Ban-the-Bomb" and anti-nuclear movements were KGB-funded operations, too. I can no longer look at a petition for world peace or other supposedly noble cause, particularly of the anti-American variety, without thinking to myself, "KGB." [...]

As far as I'm concerned, the KGB gave birth to the antiwar movement in America. In 1976, Andropov gave my own Romanian DIE credit for helping his KGB do so.

Now, Pacepa is hardly the first person to note that the Commies were propping up the American antiwar movement from the 1960s onward -- Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky made the same argument in a 1982 essay -- but it's still nice to hear it directly from a man who knows that of which he speaks.

So here's a challenge for the folks at the RNC: A former Romanian official believes that Kerry probably cribbed his words directly from a Soviet propaganda sheet. Surely it can't be that hard to track down an original copy of this thing, right?

Problems Ahead

2004-02-28T18:09:00.000-06:00

David Frum, fresh off reading Andrew Sullivan's opinion that each state can decide for itself whether or not to allow homosexual marriages, asks a few questions worth considering:

1) A Massachusetts man buys a condo in Miami. He marries another Massachusetts man. The condo purchaser dies before he can write a new will. Who inherits the condo?

2) Two Massachusetts women marry. One of them becomes pregnant. The couple split up, and the woman who bore the child moves to Connecticut. The other woman sues for visitation rights. What should the Connecticut courts do?

3) A Massachusetts man is accused of stock fraud. The federal Securities and Exchange Commission subpoenas his spouse. The spouse claims marital privilege and refuses to answer the SEC’s questions. May the SEC compel him to answer anyway?

4) A Massachusetts woman marries another Massachusetts woman. The relationship sours. Without obtaining a divorce, she moves to Texas and marries a man. Has she committed bigamy? [...]

I ask these questions to drive home this point: Americans may live in states, but they conduct their financial and legal lives in a united country bound by interstate institutions.

If a couple gets married in Massachusetts and that marriage goes truly unrecognized by any entity outside the state – well then the Massachusetts wedding ceremony is just a form of words, as meaningless as the illegal weddings now being performed in San Francisco. If you’re not married outside Massachusetts, then you are not really married inside Massachusetts either.

Brilliant. And a little bit further down, Frum subjects Grumpy and Happy (thank God Doc is no longer with us) to a well-deserved pounding:

It might also be wondered where the Democratic candidates' respect for the rights of states to settle controversial social issues goes when the controversial social issue is abortion. And yet the case for state-by-state determination of abortion rights is far stronger than for state-by-state determination of marital status. It’s perfectly possible to imagine how the country would work if abortion were legal in New York and illegal in New Jersey – in fact, that’s the country did work in the early 1970s. But it’s obviously impossible to imagine how the country would work if a couple were regarded as married in some states and not others, or if they were considered married at a state level and not at the federal level. [...]

With marriage, to adapt Lincoln’s words, the country will soon be all one thing or all the other. “Letting the states decide” is code for submitting to a process whereby a few unelected, hyper-liberal judges force their personal preferences upon an entire continental nation. In that one sense, I suppose, Edwards and Kerry are consistent. They are for the rule of judges. With abortion, the most effective way to ensure that the judges rule is to federalize the issue. With same-sex marriage, the most effective way to achieve that same end is to “let the states decide.” In both cases, however, the Democrats’ true allegiance is to the snobbish values of an unelected few – and the unvarying target of their hostility is the democratic many.

Well, that's the way these things usually go, don't they?

Keep Them Away From Sharp Objects

2004-02-28T02:31:00.000-06:00

Words That Don’t Matter
Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
(2/27/04)

’Preemption" is supposed to be the new slur. Its use now conjures up all sorts of Dr. Strangelove images to denigrate the present "trigger-happy" Bush administration. Partly the hysteria is due to the invasion of Iraq. Or perhaps the venom of the Left comes from recent disclosures that, in the post-9/11 era, the United States has publicly proclaimed it may strike terrorists and their sponsors — or indeed rogue nations who have the history, capability, and desire to obtain frightening weapons — before they strike us.

But instead of a rational discussion about the wisdom and feasibility of that logical policy, we have had two years now of national frenzy over a purported new "dangerous departure" in American foreign policy, one that "threatens" to "destabilize" the world order.

Rubbish. Preemption is a concept as old as the Greeks. It perhaps was first articulated in the fourth book of Thucydides's history. There the veteran Theban general Pagondas explained why his Boeotians should hit the Athenians at the border near Delium, even though they were already retreating and posed no immediate threat. The Boeotians did, and won — and were never attacked by the Athenians again. On a more immediate level, preemption was how many of us stayed alive in a rather tough grade school: Confront the bully first, openly, and in daylight — our Texan principal warned us — before he could jump you as planned in the dark on the way home.

Despite the current vogue of questionable and therapeutic ideas like "zero tolerance" and "moral equivalence" that punish all who use force — whether in kindergarten or in the Middle East — striking first is a morally neutral concept. It takes on its ethical character from the landscape in which it takes place — the Israelis bombing the Iraqi reactor to avoid being blackmailed by a soon-to-be nuclear Saddam Hussein, or the French going into the Ivory Coast last year, despite the fact that that chaotic country posed no immediate danger to Paris. The thing to keep in mind is that the real aggressor, by his past acts, has already invited war and will do so again — should he be allowed to choose his own time and place of assault. [...]

The Left's problem is not our embrace of the concept of "unilateralism" per se — or it would have attacked Clinton's U.N.-be-damned use of force in Iraq, Kosovo, and Haiti. No, the rub is something altogether different. A Christian, southern-accented, conservative Republican president, coming off a disputed election, has chosen to preempt. And when you hit first in a therapeutic America, you are at least supposed to bite your lip and squeeze Hillary's hand on national television. You do not dare say, "Bring 'em on" and "Smoke 'em out" — much less fly a jet out to an aircraft carrier.

There are any number of factors that explain President Bush's popularity among American conservatives, but one of the most powerful reasons is normally overlooked: He drives liberals absolutely, irrevocably, delightfully bonkers.

Don't Let the Door Hit You On the Way Out

2004-02-28T02:13:00.000-06:00

Get a load of this.

Karl Rove Has THIS to Work With?

2004-02-28T01:42:00.000-06:00

Here are a couple of interesting paragraphs from Richard Cohen's recent article on Kerry and Edwards from the National Journal. To steal a phrase from George Will, Kerry is "to the left of the salad fork":

Judging by National Journal's congressional vote ratings [...] Kerry and Edwards aren't all that different, at least not when it comes to how they voted on key issues before the Senate last year. The results of the vote ratings show that Kerry was the most liberal senator in 2003, with a composite liberal score of 96.5. But Edwards wasn't far behind: He had a 2003 composite liberal score of 94.5, making him the fourth-most-liberal senator. [...]

Kerry has compiled a generally more liberal voting record. After winning election to the Senate in 1984, he ranked among the most-liberal senators during three years of his first term, according to National Journal's vote ratings. In those years -- 1986, 1988, and 1990 -- Kerry did not vote with Senate conservatives a single time out of the total of 138 votes used to prepare those ratings. [...]

To be sure, Kerry's ranking as the No. 1 Senate liberal in 2003 -- and his earning of similar honors three times during his first term, from 1985 to 1990 -- will probably have opposition researchers licking their chops.

Ya' think? Here's something to ponder: few people get elected to any national office by openly running as liberals -- Bill Clinton, for example, had to run as a moderate, and even then only got elected because Ivan wasn't threatening to bang our doors down anymore. With terrorists openly plotting to kill us all these days, presidential candidates like John Kerry have to at least pretend to care about American national security, even though the Democratic base would rather focus on more pressing issues -- like promoting gay marriages for endangered dolphins.

Thomas Sowell, in one of his most brilliant columns last year, made some stinging points about the general unpopularity of liberalism among Americans:

Conservative politicians may run on their conservative ideas, but liberal politicians do not get elected by running on liberalism. Indeed, a major part of most liberal election campaigns usually consist of trying to appear to be something other than liberals. Then, when their liberal past is exposed, there is great complaint in the media about "negative advertising." [...]

The last Democrat to get elected president on an openly liberal platform was Lyndon B. Johnson, nearly 40 years ago. Since then, both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have won with a pretense of moderation. Walter Mondale lost in a landslide in 1984, when he tried to run as an openly liberal politician -- out of the closet, as it were.

The typical liberal politician is soft on criminals, weak on defense, and ready to tax the daylights out of those who produce, in order to dispense largesse to parasites, rich and poor alike. The public isn't buying it. Indeed, liberal politicians aren't trying to sell it very much.

Instead, they rely on promoting fears and resentments among the elderly, blacks, gays, and others. If they can convince senior citizens that conservatives are going to take away their Social Security or Medicare, they have got a lot of votes.

If they can promote paranoia and resentment among blacks by crying "racism" at every turn, they have the inside track. And if they can keep black voters' attention focused on symbolic issues like confederate flags -- instead of how their children are trapped in failing schools, for the greater glory of the teachers' unions -- then the Democrats can continue to get nine out of 10 black votes.

Meanwhile, in a strange twist of fate that has been repeated roughly a gazillion times before, liberals like John Kerry interpret criticisms of their voting records as attacks on their patriotism. I'm not sure if Kerry genuinely believes this tripe or not, but I do know that Kerry is smart to use this to deflect criticism. There is a name for a politician who runs on an openly liberal platform: Ralph Nader.

Somewhere, Duvalier is Smiling...

2004-02-28T00:58:00.000-06:00

Bush Believes Aristide Should Resign
George Geida
The Guardian
(2/27/04)

The Bush administration believes the best way to avoid an armed rebel takeover in Haiti is for President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to resign and transfer power to his constitutional successor, a senior U.S. official said Friday.

Meanwhile, the Marine Corps indicated that it is preparing a possible mission to waters off the coast of Haiti. Any such deployment would be aimed at deterring a potential refugee crisis and to protect the estimated 20,000 American citizens in Haiti.

Thanks, Bill.

It's True -- I Looked It Up

2004-02-27T02:41:00.000-06:00

Michael Barone's latest column is worth reading in its entirety, but a line he quotes from one of Bush's speeches deserves special attention:

"Our opponents are against the personal retirement accounts; against putting patients in charge of Medicare; against tax relief. They seem to be against every idea that gives Americans more authority and more choices and more control over their own lives.

Make a few structural changes to that last sentence, and you would have almost a dictionary definition of liberalism.

If He Listened to the Democrats, He Would Know He's Supposed to Hate Us

2004-02-27T02:22:00.000-06:00

Georgia leader plans close ties with U.S.
Sharon Behn
Washington Times
(2/26/04)

The Republic of Georgia plans to be a close ally of the United States and its giant neighbor Russia will have to live with that fact, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili said in an interview yesterday.

The newly elected president, who engineered the ouster of former President Eduard Shevardnadze last fall, was in a buoyant mood after what aides described as a "very warm" meeting with President Bush yesterday in the Oval Office.

"The relationship is based on shared values," said the hulking U.S.-trained lawyer, who emphasized the "kinship" and "chemistry" between Georgia and the United States during a meeting at Blair House with editors and reporters from The Washington Times.[...]

Almost every member of the new Georgian government has been trained in the United States, making the new leadership a natural ally of the West and the United States. Defense Minister Gela Bezhuashvili, for example, is a graduate of Southern Methodist University in Dallas and of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

"Basically we speak the same language," Mr. Saakashvili said.

American liberals may claim to be "multilateralists," but the only nation whose opinion really matters to them is France.

"'They' Are Being Divisive; 'I' Am Just Being Right"

2004-02-27T02:03:00.000-06:00

A Move to Satisfy Conservative Base
Dana Milbank
Washington Post
(2/25/04)

With President Bush's embrace yesterday of a marriage amendment, the compassionate conservative of 2000 has shown he is willing, if necessary, to rekindle the culture wars in 2004.

Bush's plan was to run for a second term on the basis of his performance as a war leader and as a tax cutter, eschewing divisive social issues as he did in 2000 while campaigning as "a uniter, not a divider." But in the end, Republican strategists said, Bush had no choice but to change course and add a highly charged cultural issue to the center of the campaign.

Bush's conservative base of support, despite three years of cultivation, had grown restless over the budget deficit, government spending and his plan to liberalize immigration. At the same time, he was on the defensive over the economy and the Iraq war, and facing an uncharacteristically unified Democratic Party.

So when gay marriages advanced in Massachusetts and San Francisco, Bush felt a need to respond to the cries of social conservatives -- even if it meant losing some swing voters he needs in November.

How odd to see people like Milbank acknowledge that this issue has been forced on the White House due to flagrantly illegal acts (San Francisco) or morally-preening judicial activists (Massachusetts), and yet turn around and blame the president for being "divisive."

Meanwhile, University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, whose recent book Republic.com called for flat-out government regulation of political websites (so as to ensure that we stupid sheep aren't led astray by those prophets of hate called "conservatives," don't you know), writes the following:

In declaring his support for a constitutional amendment that would forbid same-sex marriage, President Bush is repudiating more than 200 years of American theory and practice. His proposal is radically inconsistent with the nation's traditions. Whatever it is, there is one thing that it is not: conservative.

Orrin Judd, who is as good as anybody at constructing sharp, pithy responses that demolish the claims of his opponents, rebuts Sunstein's silly premise with the following gem:

The two most hilarious arguments made by gay marriage advocates: (1) Conservatism requires that we stand by while a key social institution of Western civilization is destroyed; (2) It is divisive for the 70% who oppose destroying the institution to try and stop the 30% from exploiting court rulings to do so.

Yep.

Pro and Con

2004-02-27T00:19:00.000-06:00

Although I have not yet seen The Passion of the Christ, I deeply suspect that Leon Wieseltier's condemnation of the film is fundamentally wrongheaded, and I think Ramesh Ponnuru's review of the movie presents an excellent rundown of the case for the defense. Since I've not yet seen the film, I'll refrain from comment. I report. You decide. For now.

Please Pick, Choose a Better Headline

2004-02-26T01:23:00.000-06:00

The AP reports, and the San Francisco Chronicle naturally picks up on, this story that will surely send the "BUSH LIED!!!" crowd into holy raptures. Basically, David Kay is quoted as saying that Bush may have emphasized those facts that supported his conclusions and downplayed those that did not. It's hard to see how this can be equated with lying, since all of us do this every day in our private affairs, but that surely won't stop the peace goons and assorted Sandalistas from bitching loudly about White House mendacity.

One can get a flavor of what Kay meant with his statements by examining them closely -- i.e., actually reading them, rather than skimming the headlines:

"Politicians don't go around picking their weakest arguments," Kay said. "The real charge that deserves careful scrutiny is not whether you picked the best argument out, but whether you actually manipulated and were dishonest about the data."

He added that he's seen no evidence that the Bush administration mischaracterized intelligence from Iraq, "but it is such a serious charge that it deserves investigation."

Kay has been the soul of moderation in all of this, and what he just said here is hardly different from what he's been saying all along. We've got a big nonstory here with a lame-o premise and barely a smidgen of news value. Naturally, the Chronicle picked the following headline for its article: Former U.S. weapons inspector says Bush may have picked, chosen facts in justifying war

Just one more reason to make Chronwatch part of your day.

Bovine Scatology 101

2004-02-26T00:58:00.000-06:00

‘Kingdom Has No Plans to Develop N-Technology’
M. Ghazanfar Ali Khan
Arab News
(2/26/04)

RIYADH, 26 February 2004 — A senior Saudi scientist said yesterday that the Kingdom has no plans to develop nuclear energy or to become a nuclear power. It is, however, working to expand its radiation monitoring capabilities.

Dr. Khaled Al-Eissa, deputy director of the Institute of Atomic Energy Research (IAER) at King Abdul Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), said that fossil fuel will remain the cornerstone of the country’s energy policy for the time being.

He said that peace-loving Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, had never sought to possess nuclear weapons. The Kingdom, he said, had been mainly focusing on applied nuclear research for industrial and health purposes.

Yeah, sure, uh-huh.

I'd Say It Tastes More Like Weasel

2004-02-26T00:39:00.000-06:00

Well, it tastes like chicken -- sort of
Arthur Hirsch
Baltimore Sun
(2/25/04)

If you didn't know better you'd swear you were eating ... something.

Something resembling a creature that once walked the Earth, scratched ground, occasionally clucked. Something like a chicken breast patty in a seasoned bread-crumb coating baked in an oven and served hot.

It's close, really very close. Closer than a veggie burger is to a beef burger. Closer than soy ice cream is to dairy ice cream.

Yet, after a few bites you suspect you have crossed into a parallel, approximate universe. Maybe it's the lack of meaty juice and distinct poultry flavor. The most candid broker might have called the product "Sort of ... "

Instead its British manufacturers called it "Quorn" (pronounced "kworn"), which is also the shortened name of the village of Quorndon in North Leicestershire, England. Today Quorn - made from a fungus originally found in soil and cultivated through fermentation - is the best-selling meat substitute in Europe and is fast gaining on its U.S. competition.[...]

The consumer advocacy group has criticized the FDA for allowing the misleading Quorn label and for not being more rigorous in investigating the safety of the product.

Some people who have eaten Quorn have had adverse reactions ranging from diarrhea to violent vomiting to anaphylaxis, or difficulty breathing. Some folks have rushed to hospital emergency rooms, according to CSPI.

No large-scale study of the effects of Quorn-eating has been done, but CSPI did commission a British agency to conduct a phone survey of 1,000 people, about 400 of whom had eaten Quorn. Of these Quorn eaters, CSPI says, 4.5 percent experienced some adverse reaction.

To put that 4.5 percent in perspective, the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network says roughly 2.5 percent of Americans have some sort of food allergy, about half of those reporting peanut allergies. The American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology says the number rises to a bit more than 4 percent when the calculation includes children.

Marlow Foods, the British manufacturer of Quorn, disputes CSPI's numbers, saying its inquiries show that 1 person in 143,000 reports some adverse effects from Quorn. CSPI's executive director, Michael F. Jacobson, calls that figure "total malarkey." He says Marlow's number is based only on those people who took the initiative to contact the company when they became sick after eating Quorn.

I hold no brief for fungus-foods -- I'll give up my T-bone when they rip it from my cold, dead hands -- but anybody who bothers to learn more about this battle between Quorn and one of the nation's most irritating "scold" groups has got to be rooting for the fungus.

Freaky Friday

2004-02-25T16:59:00.000-06:00

The New Dixiecrats
Best of the Web Today -- Opinion Journal
James Taranto
(2/25/04)

If only Strom Thurmond had lived one more year. In 1948 Thurmond ran for president as a "States' Rights Democrat." The concept of "states' rights" was discredited for generations, linked as it was to the defense of segregation and Jim Crow.

Not anymore. The issue of same-sex marriage has Democrats and liberals talking like Dixiecrats of yore. "For 200 years, this has been a state issue," Democratic front-runner John Kerry said in a statement yesterday, responding to President Bush's endorsement of the Federal Marriage Amendment. "I believe the issue of marriage should be left to the states." In an editorial today, the New York Times takes the same position: "The president, who believes so strongly in states' rights in other contexts, should let the states do their jobs and work out their marriage laws before resorting to a constitutional amendment."

Main Entry: iro·ny
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -nies [...]

(1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity

Better Inside Pissing Out, Than Outside Pissing In

2004-02-25T16:42:00.000-06:00

Tailgunner Ann
by William F. Buckley Jr.
The Claremont Review of Books
Winter 2003

Arrived in montreal, I put aside Ann Coulter's book, and descended the gangway. At the baggage claim area I spotted a newsstand. I was drawn to the headline featuring--Ann Coulter.

That day's copy of the National Post boasted Coulter at the top of the page in full color, her long blond hair southbound, interrupted only by a news headline. Alongside her picture the text was, "ANN COULTER: New York Times publisher is a traitor to U.S. Comment. A10." [...]

She wasted no time passing sentence.

"During my recent book tour, I resisted the persistent, illiterate request that I name traitors. With a great deal of charity—and suspension of disbelief—I was willing to concede that many liberals were merely fatuous idiots. But after the New York Times's despicable editorial on the two-year anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack, I am prepared—just this once—to name a traitor: Pinch Sulzberger, publisher of the Times."

What followed was two ad hominem references to Sulzberger (he allegedly hadn't made it into Columbia University) embedded in a boiling-mad 600-word account of the offending New York Times editorial. She paraphrased its meaning: "When General Pinochet staged his coup against a Marxist strong man [in 1973], the U.S. did not stop him—as if Latin American generals were incapable of doing coups on their own. And—I quote [the editorial]—'It was September 11.' Parsed to its essentials, the Times's position is: We deserved it." [...]

What she wrote was that 1) the publisher of the newspaper that 2) printed an editorial that 3) reiterated the old historical argument that denounced U.S. acquiescence in the removal of Allende, was 4) engaging moral equivalence and therefore, 5) a traitor. We don't need to come up with the weaknesses, or even the depravities, in the Times's reasoning. But even as Ms. Coulter clearly intends to shock, why shouldn't her reader register that shock? By wondering whether she is out of her mind, or has simply lost her grip on language.

Ms. Coulter may be a nut, but she's our nut.