Time is a Factor

Global Warming Roundup

2006-11-15T07:46:00.000-05:00

Some inconvenient truths:

Christopker Monckton in The Sunday Telegraph: The sun is warmer now than for the past 11,400 years discusses the shoddy science behind the UN's 2001 report on climate change, including:

The Disappearing Medieval Warm Period

Monckton also points out a number of quetionable assumptions, all of which work in favor of global warming:

• They gave one technique for reconstructing pre-thermometer temperature 390 times more weight than any other (but didn't say so).

• The technique they overweighted was one which the UN's 1996 report had said was unsafe: measurement of tree-rings from bristlecone pines. Tree-rings are wider in warmer years, but pine-rings are also wider when there's more carbon dioxide in the air: it's plant food. This carbon dioxide fertilisation distorts the calculations.

• They said they had included 24 data sets going back to 1400. Without saying so, they left out the set showing the medieval warm period, tucking it into a folder marked "Censored Data".

• They used a computer model to draw the graph from the data, but scientists later found that the model almost always drew hockey-sticks even if they fed in random, electronic "red noise".

• The UN dated its list of "forcings" (influences on temperature) from 1750, when the sun, and consequently air temperature, was almost as warm as now. But its start-date for the increase in world temperature was 1900, when the sun, and temperature, were much cooler.

A Sobering Look at Demographics

2006-11-10T19:53:00.000-05:00

This got me:
As I say, this isn't a projection: it's happening now. There's no need to extrapolate, and if you do it gets a little freaky, but, just for fun, here goes: by 2050, 60 per cent of Italians will have no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts, no uncles. The big Italian family, with papa pouring the vino and mama spooning out the pasta down an endless table of grandparents and nieces and nephews, will be gone, no more, dead as the dinosaurs.
It's in The Future Belongs to Islam, an excerpt from Mark Steyn's new book "America Alone" at Macleans.ca. Some other depressing facts:
Greece has a fertility rate hovering just below 1.3 births per couple, which is what demographers call the point of "lowest-low" fertility from which no human society has ever recovered. And Greece's fertility is the healthiest in Mediterranean Europe: Italy has a fertility rate of 1.2, Spain 1.1.
What are the consequences? We're seeing them in Japan:
In The Children Of Men, P. D. James' dystopian fantasy about a barren world, there are special dolls for women whose maternal instinct has gone unfulfilled: pretend mothers take their artificial children for walks on the street or to the swings in the park. In Japan, that's no longer the stuff of dystopian fantasy. At the beginning of the century, the country's toy makers noticed they had a problem: toys are for children and Japan doesn't have many. What to do? In 2005, Tomy began marketing a new doll called Yumel -- a baby boy with a range of 1,200 phrases designed to serve as companions for the elderly. He says not just the usual things -- "I wuv you" -- but also asks the questions your grandchildren would ask if you had any: "Why do elephants have long noses?" Yumel joins his friend, the Snuggling Ifbot, a toy designed to have the conversation of a five-year old child which its makers, with the usual Japanese efficiency, have determined is just enough chit-chat to prevent the old folks going senile. It seems an appropriate final comment on the social democratic state: in a childish infantilized self-absorbed society where adults have been stripped of all responsibility, you need never stop playing with toys. We are the children we never had.
Steyn attributes the "enervated state of the Western world" to the nanny state:
The state has gradually annexed all the responsibilities of adulthood -- health care, child care, care of the elderly -- to the point where it's effectively severed its citizens from humanity's primal instincts, not least the survival instinct. In the American context, the federal "deficit" isn't the problem; it's the government programs that cause the deficit. These programs would still be wrong even if Bill Gates wrote a cheque to cover them each month. They corrode the citizen's sense of self-reliance to a potentially fatal degree. Big government is a national security threat: it increases your vulnerability to threats like Islamism, and makes it less likely you'll be able to summon the will to rebuff it. We should have learned that lesson on Sept. 11, 2001, when big government flopped big-time and the only good news of the day came from the ad hoc citizen militia of Flight 93.
I think this was borne out in New Orleans when Katrina hit. Read it all. Read the book.

Victor David Hanson on the Rumsfeld Resignation

2006-11-09T09:46:00.000-05:00

Writing in The Corner:

I don't see how removing the Secretary of Defense helps either the country
or the Republicans, especially given the pre-election vote of confidence in
his full tenure. He was on the right track reforming the military; the
removal of the Taliban and the three-week victory over Saddam were inspired.

So we are down to his supposed responsibility for the later effort to stop
the 3-year plus insurgency, whose denouement is not yet known. Rumsfeld's
supposed error that drew such ire was troop levels, i.e., that he did not wish
to repeat a huge presence in the manner of Vietnam, but sought to skip the
1964-1971 era morass, and go directly to the 1972-5 Vietnamization strategy
of training troops, providing aid, and using air power.

The Clinton Terrorism Record

2006-09-27T13:45:00.000-04:00

Byron York over at National Review disputes President Clinton's claim to have left the incoming Bush administration an anti-terror strategy in Did Clinton Really Give Bush A “Comprehensive Anti-Terror Strategy?”. Most tellingly, he relies on the words of Clinton's point man on terror, Richard Clarke as he discussed this issue following a 2002 pro-Clinton story that appeared in Time Magazine (They Had a Plan) :

Finally, Richard Clarke himself debunked the story in a background briefing with reporters. He said he presented two things to the incoming Bush administration: “One, what the existing strategy had been. And two, a series of issues — like aiding the Northern Alliance, changing Pakistan policy, changing Uzbek policy — that they had been unable to come to any new conclusions from ‘98 on.”

A reporter asked: “Were all of those issues part of an alleged plan that was late December and the Clinton team decided not to pursue because it was too close to — ”

“There was never a plan, Andrea,” Clarke answered. “What there was was these two things: One, a description of the existing strategy, which included a description of the threat. And two, those things which had been looked at over the course of two years, and which were still on the table.”

“So there was nothing that developed, no documents or no new plan of any sort?

“There was no new plan.”

“No new strategy? I mean, I mean, I don’t want to get into a semantics — “

“Plan, strategy — there was no, nothing new.”

“Had those issues evolved at all from October of ‘98 until December of 2000?”

“Had they evolved? Not appreciably.”
Doesn't sound like one, which is in-line with President Clinton's record of not responding to terrorist attacks, a record Richard Miniter recalls at the Wall Street Journal in What Clinton Didn't Do... which is worth quoting at length:
With that in mind, let us examine Mr. Clinton's war on terror. Some 38 days after he was sworn in, al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center. He did not visit the twin towers that year, even though four days after the attack he was just across the Hudson River in New Jersey, talking about job training. He made no attempt to rally the public against terrorism. His only public speech on the bombing was a few paragraphs inserted into a radio address mostly devoted an economic stimulus package. Those stray paragraphs were limited to reassuring the public and thanking the rescuers, the kinds of things governors say after hurricanes. He did not even vow to bring the bombers to justice. Instead, he turned the first terrorist attack on American soil over to the FBI.

In his Fox interview, Mr. Clinton said "no one knew that al Qaeda existed" in October 1993, during the tragic events in Somalia. But his national security adviser, Tony Lake, told me that he first learned of bin Laden "sometime in 1993," when he was thought of as a terror financier. U.S. Army Capt. James Francis Yacone, a black hawk squadron commander in Somalia, later testified that radio intercepts of enemy mortar crews firing at Americans were in Arabic, not Somali, suggesting the work of bin Laden's agents (who spoke Arabic), not warlord Farah Aideed's men (who did not). CIA and DIA reports also placed al Qaeda operatives in Somalia at the time.

By the end of Mr. Clinton's first year, al Qaeda had apparently attacked twice. The attacks would continue for every one of the Clinton years.

• In 1994, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who would later plan the 9/11 attacks) launched "Operation Bojinka" to down 11 U.S. planes simultaneously over the Pacific. A sharp-eyed Filipina police officer foiled the plot. The sole American response: increased law-enforcement cooperation with the Philippines.

• In 1995, al Qaeda detonated a 220-pound car bomb outside the Office of Program Manager in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing five Americans and wounding 60 more. The FBI was sent in.

• In 1996, al Qaeda bombed the barracks of American pilots patrolling the "no-fly zones" over Iraq, killing 19. Again, the FBI responded.

• In 1997, al Qaeda consolidated its position in Afghanistan and bin Laden repeatedly declared war on the U.S. In February, bin Laden told an Arab TV network: "If someone can kill an American soldier, it is better than wasting time on other matters." No response from the Clinton administration.

• In 1998, al Qaeda simultaneously bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224, including 12 U.S. diplomats. Mr. Clinton ordered cruise-missile strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan in response. Here Mr. Clinton's critics are wrong: The president was right to retaliate when America was attacked, irrespective of the Monica Lewinsky case.

Still, "Operation Infinite Reach" was weakened by Clintonian compromise. The State Department feared that Pakistan might spot the American missiles in its air space and misinterpret it as an Indian attack. So Mr. Clinton told Gen. Joe Ralston, vice chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, to notify Pakistan's army minutes before the Tomahawks passed over Pakistan. Given Pakistan's links to jihadis at the time, it is not surprising that bin Laden was tipped off, fleeing some 45 minutes before the missiles arrived.

• In 1999, the Clinton administration disrupted al Qaeda's Millennium plots, a series of bombings stretching from Amman to Los Angeles. This shining success was mostly the work of Richard Clarke, a NSC senior director who forced agencies to work together. But the Millennium approach was shortlived. Over Mr. Clarke's objections, policy reverted to the status quo.

• In January 2000, al Qaeda tried and failed to attack the U.S.S. The Sullivans off Yemen. (Their boat sank before they could reach their target.) But in October 2000, an al Qaeda bomb ripped a hole in the hull of the U.S.S. Cole, killing 17 sailors and wounding another 39.

When Mr. Clarke presented a plan to launch a massive cruise missile strike on al Qaeda and Taliban facilities in Afghanistan, the Clinton cabinet voted against it. After the meeting, a State Department counterterrorism official, Michael Sheehan, sought out Mr. Clarke. Both told me that they were stunned. Mr. Sheehan asked Mr. Clarke: "What's it going to take to get them to hit al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon?"

Plame Kerfuffle Round-up

2006-09-19T09:19:00.000-04:00

Victoria Toensing in the WSJ's OpinionJournal asks "What did Patrick Fitzgerald know, and when did he know it?" - What a Load of Armitage:

What Mr. Fitzgerald knew, and chose to ignore, is troublesome. Despite what some CIA good ol' boys might have told Mr. Fitzgerald, he knew from the day he took office that the facts did not support a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act; therefore, there was no crime to investigate. Although he claimed in Mr. Libby's indictment that Ms. Plame's employment status was "classified," Mr. Fitzgerald refuses to provide the basis for that fact and, even if true, can point to no law that would be violated by revealing a "classified" (not covert) employment. It was this gap in the law that created the need to pass the act in the first place.

She also has questions for Armitage and Wilson as well:

Mr. Armitage also knew he had met with Bob Woodward on June 13, 2003, telling him about Mr. Wilson's wife's CIA employment and her role in her husband's trip to Niger. But when the FBI interviewed Mr. Armitage on Oct. 2, he admitted to the Novak conversation only, notably forgetting meeting with one of our country's premier investigative reporters. By attributing his longtime silence to Mr. Fitzgerald's request, Mr. Armitage must have forgotten Mr. Fitzgerald was not appointed until Dec. 30, 2003. If Mr. Armitage had come forward during those three months, there might never have been a special counsel.

Joseph Wilson. In July 2003, when he demanded an investigation of a White House cabal for violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by "outing" his wife, Mr. Wilson knew Ms. Plame did not meet the factual requirements for covert status under the act. She was neither covert at the time of publication nor had a covert foreign assignment within five years. He acknowledged so in his book: "My move back to Washington [in June 1997] coincided with the return to D.C. of a woman named Valerie Plame." As the Senate negotiator for this 1982 act, I know a trip or two by Ms. Plame to a foreign country while assigned to Langley, where she worked in July 2003, is not considered a foreign assignment. I also know covert officers are not assigned to Langley.
David Corn was not happy with Ms. Toensing's charge that he was the first to reveal Valerie Plame's covert status, presumably based on information provided by her husband, Joe Wilson. Ms. Toensing replies in National Review - Hubris and Cliff May, who originally suggested that Corn exposed Plame's "covert" status backs her up with links to the primary documents in The Corner.

Assessing the Islamist Threat, Circa 1946

2006-09-16T14:43:00.000-04:00

A precient analysis of the threat from Islam, prepared by the intelligence division of the U.S. War Department in 1946 and available at The Middle Eastern Forum - Assessing the Islamist Threat, Circa 1946 :
The Moslems remember the power with which once they not only ruled their own domains but also overpowered half of Europe, yet they are painfully aware of their present economic, cultural, and military impoverishment. Thus a terrific internal pressure is building up in their collective thinking. The Moslems intend, by any means possible, to regain political independence and to reap the profits of their own resources, which in recent times and up to the present have been surrendered to the exploitation of foreigners who could provide capital investments. The area, in short, has an inferiority complex, and its activities are thus as unpredictable as those of any individual so motivated.

"Those Crafty Hebrews..."

2006-09-13T16:50:00.000-04:00

Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online on the prevalence and danger of conspiracy theories - America the Treacherous:

This rough beast slouches toward sedition because it assumes not that our leaders are knaves or even mere criminals, but that they are murderous Supermen with no loyalty to nation, decency or law. Our Constitution is a fraud, a charade for the rubes some of us naively call citizens. If you disagree, you’re either fool or “in on it.” In his 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Richard Hofstadter demonstrated that this fever of the mind is as old as America itself and its outbreaks flare up across the ideological landscape. What is so sad and frightening is that this diseased thinking is reaching epidemic proportions. More than a third of Americans believe the U.S. government was likely to have been involved in 9/11.

In the past, when these outbreaks occurred on the political right, liberal hand-wringers fretted about incipient fascism and rising McCarthyism. Today, the best we get from them is a bemused and sterile chuckle.

Pardongate

2006-07-23T23:26:00.000-04:00

With all the talk of Hillary's Presidential bid, Classical Values reminds us of the baggage she's carrying: Pardon Hillary Now?:
The Pardongate scandal is an oldie but a goodie. It never got the play it should have, because the pardon fire sale happened at the last possible minute -- during the lamest lame duck days of the nearly extinct Clinton administration.

Not only had George W. Bush just been elected, the unsuspecting country was in the last stages of its naive, pre-9/11 days.

And now that I think about it, the country was still in its pre-blogosphere days! That means there were no hordes of bloggers to scrutinize the pardons. There were a lot of them, and as pure corruption goes, this was the worst scandal of the Clinton administration, and possibly any administration.
Read it all for a link-fest of sordid details.

Those enlightened Europeans - Happiness by Decree

2006-07-23T23:10:00.000-04:00

From the Independent on Sunday by way of The Brussels Journal (Happiness by Decree), the UK is going to pilot test a program to teach happiness:

Lessons in happiness are to be introduced for 11-year-olds in state schools to combat a huge rise in depression, self-harm and anti-social behaviour among young people.

The sad thing is that its an import from the U.S.

When you think about it, its a natural outgrowth from lessons in self esteem - if self esteem leads to happier lives, why not dispense with the intermediary step and just teach happiness.

Brilliant.

Ideas of God and America

2006-07-20T23:47:00.000-04:00

Joshua Trevino, writing at The Brussels Journal, looking at the results of a demographic survey of the "netroots" from DailyKos, comes up with a great line:
Tellingly and predictably, many of these horrors have re-emerged in the post-Christian Europe of today, where we see all the casual murderousness of antiquity, without the good art.
The quip is prompted by what the survey reveals:
Have we mentioned that they are mostly enclaved, wealthy, angry and old? Add to that descriptor: "and probably not even monotheist". A more complete alienation from the average American could hardly be conceived.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, but as Trevino points out:
Is the “netroots” mostly Christian? Mostly left-wing Protestant? Mostly Jewish? No, no, and no. They cannot even muster a majority for simple monotheism. And the preponderance of them – roughly 40% - simply have no faith at all, identifying as either atheist or agnostic. How does this look like America? It doesn’t: this proportion in the nation at large is between 1% and 14%, depending on the survey. The “netroots” is barely one-quarter Christian; America is roughly three-quarters Christian. Within the “netroots,” the proportion of self-identified practitioners of “Wicca, Shinto,” “animist/shamanist” faiths, and adherents of “one of the ancient Greek, Nordic, Egyptian or Meso-American religions” outstrips that in America at large by nearly thirtyfold.
Not exactly typical. Whereas de Tocqueville saw religious belief as an imAmerica'sart of Ameroca's political institutions:

[T]he revolutionists of America are obliged to profess an ostensible respect for Christian morality and equity, which does not permit them to violate wantonly the laws that oppose their designs; nor would they find it easy to surmount the scruples of their partisans even if they were able to get over their own. Hitherto no one in the United States has dared to advance the maxim that everything is permissible for the interests of society, an impious adage which seems to have been invented in an age of freedom to shelter all future tyrants. Thus, while the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving, and forbids them to commit, what is rash or unjust.

This post-Christian modernism seeks to do away with tradition and restraint:

Their abandonment of the permanent things must and will have its nevitable effect: in the absence of faith, the old horrors rush to fill the void. The glorification of the self and the fetishism of the will resurrect the things that died with the old paganism: the killing of the young, the useless, and the suffering.

Read the whole thing here: Ideas of God and America

John Kerry's Skimmer Scam

2006-06-27T23:14:00.000-04:00

With John Kerry's allies working on a dossier to refute claims made by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in time for his 2008 run, Thomas Lipscomb looks at one particular incident in detail over at Real Clear Politics:
Kerry's summary of the mission? Here is what he told Tim Russert on "Meet the Press":
"We were in combat. We were in a very, very--probably one of the most frightening--if you ask anybody who was with me, the two guys who were with me, was probably the most frightening night that they had that they were in Vietnam... ."
Kerry in TOUR OF DUTY:
"It was a half-assed action that hardly qualified as combat, but it was my first... . ... [A] minor skirmish, but since I couldn't put my finger on what we really accomplished or on what had happened, it was difficult to feel satisfied. "
Finally, Kerry in TOUR OF DUTY a la recherche... from his "journal" nine days after "whatever" happened in Na Trang Bay:
"A cocky feeling of invincibility accompanied us up the Long Tau shipping channel because we hadn't been shot at yet, and Americans at war who haven't been shot at are allowed to be cocky."
Take your pick.
Poor Schachte, who had had a boring evening ending in a blown mission - somehow in the same time and place in that parallel universe to Kerry's "frightening" magical mystery tour - got debriefed by the Coastal Division 14 commander Hibbard, filed no after action report since there was no enemy action, told Hibbard Kerry wanted a Purple Heart, and hit the sack, mildly disgusted.
Kerry got back in the same time and same place, and filed no after action report. Neither did Mike Voss, despite an action as described by Kerry that certainly merited one and would have guaranteed him an automatic purple heart with no problems with either Hibbard or Schachte had he filed one. In fact, according to Hibbard, it would have been the only after action report filed on one of Schachte's skimmer missions which weren't as effective as he and Schachte had hoped. Schachte disagrees and is convinced there must have been "one or two."
Kerry reported to Navy doctor Louis Letson the next morning after duty hours began at 8 AM. Schachte had told him, "No enemy action, no purple heart." Kerry's appeal to Hibbard brought the rejoinder "I have seen rose thorn injuries worse than that. No enemy action, no purple heart." Surely a doctor would be more understanding, not that it mattered. Only Kerry's direct commanders could approve the award.
Kerry lay down on Letson's examination table and told Letson: "We were involved in a fire fight and we received fire from shore." One of the four or five men hanging around the dispensary out of Kerry's sight lowered his head and began to wag an emphatic "no" and stifle a laugh. Letson found ¼ inch fragment sticking out of Kerry's upper arm. It looked like wire about the diameter of a toothpick, he pulled it out with his forceps and flipped it with a tiny "klink" into a steel basin held by his Hospitalman, Jesus Carreon, to the applause of the appreciative audience. Letson was so amused he took a photo of Carreon holding the basin with the ½ inch fragment barely visible in the bottom of it.

An Inconvenient Truth for Gore

2006-06-27T23:05:00.000-04:00

Scientists are skeptical on the claims in Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth:

"Scientists have an independent obligation to respect and present the truth as they see it," Al Gore sensibly asserts in his film "An Inconvenient Truth", showing at Cumberland 4 Cinemas in Toronto since Jun 2. With that outlook in mind, what do world climate experts actually think about the science of his movie?

Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many Canadians, is a surprising assessment: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."

But surely Carter is merely part of what most people regard as a tiny cadre of "climate change skeptics" who disagree with the "vast majority of scientists" Gore cites?

No; Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change. "Climate experts" is the operative term here. Why? Because what Gore's "majority of scientists" think is immaterial when only a very small fraction of them actually work in the climate field.

Even among that fraction, many focus their studies on the impacts of climate change; biologists, for example, who study everything from insects to polar bears to poison ivy. "While many are highly skilled researchers, they generally do not have special knowledge about the causes of global climate change," explains former University of Winnipeg climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball. "They usually can tell us only about the effects of changes in the local environment where they conduct their studies."

This is highly valuable knowledge, but doesn't make them climate change cause experts, only climate impact experts.

Read the whole story: Scientists respond to Gore's warnings of climate catastrophe - "The Inconvenient Truth" is indeed inconvenient to alarmists as reported in the Canada Free Press.

Screwtape on Embryonic Stem Cell Research

2006-06-21T13:31:00.000-04:00

Reading Party of Death reminded me of this:
"It is true," Screwtape continues with a shrug, "that much of the groundwork was already laid. We had already convinced people of the rightness of destroying inconvenient life. Now they talk quite coolly of "blastocysts," and "clumps of cells" and "surplus embryos." My genius was to recognize that they needed just a little push to be convinced, with their mania for recycling, that by harvesting something that would otherwise be chucked out, they are doing a positive good! Think of it: They believe they occupy "the moral high ground." Oh, the profits for us — "
From Screwtape Revisited by Meghan Cox Gurdon on National Review last year.

The "Reality Based Party" on 9-11

2006-06-20T20:04:00.000-04:00

The "9-10 Democrats" are now joined by the "9-11 Morning" academics - The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on college professors sunk in the swamp of 9-11 conspiracy theories - Professors of Paranoia? :
Nearly five years have gone by since it happened. The trial of Zacarias Moussaoui is over. Construction of the Freedom Tower just began. Oliver Stone's movie about the attacks is due out in theaters soon. And colleges are offering degrees in homeland-security management. The post-9/11 era is barreling along.

And yet a whole subculture is still stuck at that first morning. They are playing and replaying the footage of the disaster, looking for clues that it was an "inside job." They feel sure the post-9/11 era is built on a lie.
For some sanity, see 911myths.com.

Democrats Keep Betting on Failure in Iraq

2006-06-20T11:48:00.000-04:00

From John Fund at the WSJ: Trying to Get Even:

During last week's congressional debate over the war in Iraq, critics of the Bush administration's policy made three arguments: that President Bush more or less lied when claiming Saddam Hussein was a threat to the U.S., there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and that no progress is being made in the war there.

All three assumptions rest on shaky ground, so it is remarkable how much critics have seized on them with such fervor and certainty--the very vices of which they accuse the war's supporters. Indeed, one wonders how Democrats would react if real evidence of weapons of mass destruction, say the discovery of chemical weapon shells, surfaced. Would they step back and re-evaluate their assumptions, or would they accuse the Bush administration of planting the evidence as part of a Karl Rove-inspired pre-election dirty trick?
Fund analyzes all three assumptions of the "reality based" party and they don't exactly look like chalk. Marc Cooper sees the same losing bets in Electoral Roulette:
What does the Democratic Party and loser-gamblers have in common? Well.....

Last week when I was in the Sandia Canyon casino outside of Albuquerque, I was watching a mark play the roulette wheel in the most bizarre fashion. He had bet just about everything available. He was sure to get paid off each pass of the wheel. And just as sure to lose a small percentage of his stake each time. I noticed, for example, that he had put $10 on each of the three columns of 12 numbers each. Because every number on the board is in one or the other of the columns, the winning bet pays only 2 to 1. If you bet all three, you will get paid every turn of the wheel but you will only make back your bet. You will put $30 down on the table. And you will collect $30. You can't win. But if a 0 or 00 comes up -- a one-in-nineteen chance-- you lose everything. Only a fool would take that tack.

Yet, that's exactly the "strategy" the Democrats are using now on the issue of the war. It dawned on me today that the Dems are hedging their bet in the same exact manner. I listened very carefully today to two separate interviews DNC Chair Howard Dean gave on cable news stations. And it matched up perfectly with what Harry Reid told me a week ago when I interviewed him in Nevada. The Democrats do have a position on the war; in fact, they have three. Or is it four?

Tax and Spending Round-up

2006-05-21T14:21:00.000-04:00

Willisms updates a graphic on Federal spending to reflect entitlements:

Federal Spending

A frequent complaint of the Left is that U.S. military spending is greater than the rest of the world's combined, but our GDP is also far and away the biggest. To put it in perspective:

According to the CIA World Factbook, the United States spent roughly 4% of GDP on the military, which positioned America in 26th place in the world in military spending as a percentage of its economy. Despite that relatively low level of spending (the U.S. spent in the double-digits throughout much of the 20th century), the United States still spent more than six times more than second place China in actual dollars. That's, perhaps, one reason why many left-wingers at home and abroad want to destroy America's economy with high taxes, overzealous environmental and labor regulations, and other Marxist ideology-in-action. America's enormous, booming economy allows for substantial force projection in the world, all at a relatively low cost.

The truth is "entitlements" (a politically correct term for "hand-outs") represent the majority of Federal outlays and dwarf military spending.

On the other side, Tax Prof Blog picks up on a WSJ editorial pointing out the rise in tax revenues following the capital gains cut - Tastes Great, More Filling:

Well, what do you know. The latest statistics on capital gains tax collections were recently released by the Congressional Budget Office, and receipts are not down but way up. By 45% to be exact. As part of President Bush's 2003 investment tax cut package, the capital gains tax rate was reduced to 15% from 20%. Opponents predicted, as ever, that this would reduce tax revenue.

Not even close. Here's what actually happened. This 25% reduction in the tax penalty on stock and other asset sales triggered a doubling of capital gains realizations, to $539 billion in 2005 from $269 billion in 2002. One influence was the increase in stock values over that time, thanks in part to the higher after-tax return on capital induced by the tax cuts.

But another cause for the windfall was almost certainly the "unlocking" effect from investors selling their existing asset holdings in order to realize some of their profits and pay taxes at the lower rate. They could then turn around and buy new assets, hoping for higher rates of return. This "unlocking" promotes the efficiency of capital markets by redirecting investment into new and higher value-added companies. It also yields a windfall for the Treasury. In 2002, the year before the tax cut, capital gains tax liabilities were $49 billion at the 20% rate. They rose slightly to $51 billion in 2003, then surged to $71 billion in 2004, and were estimated by CBO to have reached $80 billion last year -- all paid at the lower 15% rate. In short, the lower rate yielded more revenue.

Capital Gains Tax Revenues

What's in Store for France?

2006-05-18T19:13:00.000-04:00

Fjordman has some thoughts on possible scenarios at The Gates of Vienna: The Fall of France and the Multicultural World War:

"Muslim blogs are calling for violence against the Jews, the whites and the well-to-do. They say, “We must burn France, as Hamas will burn Israel.” The growth of the Islamic population is explosive. According to some, one out of three babies born in France is now a Muslim. Around 70% of French prisoners are Muslims. Hundreds of Muslim ghettos are already de facto following sharia, not French law. Some have pointed out that the French military are not always squeamish, but there are estimates that 15% of the armed forces are already made up of Muslims, and rising. How effective can the army then be in upholding the French republic? At the same time, opinion polls show that the French are now officially the most anti-capitalist nation on earth. France has chosen Socialism and Islam. It will get both, and sink into a quagmire of its own making. Some believe France will quietly become a Muslim country, others believe in civil war in the near future:"

He lists the possibilities as Eurabia, War and a Western Rebirth. I'm not too optimistic about the last one - I think the Eurabia/Pakistanization of Europe scenarios look a lot more likely.

Darfur - Another Opportunity to Bash Bush

2006-05-02T13:23:00.000-04:00

Nina Shea on National Review Online writes about George Clooney's apparent partisan motivations for his recent Darfur activism:

"Clooney, as well as other Save Darfur leaders, also agrees that the Bush administration has done more for Darfur than any other government. (snip)

So when Clooney urges a “multi-national” peace keeping force going into Darfur, he must be envisioning a large and powerful army legitimized by the inclusion of troops from other Muslim and Arab nations and sanctioned by the United Nations’ Security Council. And Bush would then have to be blamed for failing to persuade the Arab League and China to vote against their own economic interests in order to defend the human rights of insignificant, impoverished African tribes against the oil-rich Khartoum regime. (snip)

Yet Clooney does not seem to have any intention of criticizing these countries—in his view, attribution of blame is to be reserved almost exclusively for the Bush administration. Rarely does he criticize any other government by name—not even the government of Sudan, the author of the genocide. His discussion of the facts of Darfur focuses on the victims and on the United States, not on the perpetrators in Sudan and their abettors in China, the Arab League, and the U.N.

Since seizing power in 1989, Sudan’s President Omar al Bashir has led a regime responsible for the deaths of at least two and a quarter million people, making him the bloodiest dictator alive. It is important not to forget that Darfur is Bashir's second genocidal campaign against his countrymen. He waged the first against the African traditional believers and Christians of south Sudan, resulting in two million deaths, with most occurring over the period of a decade, beginning in the early nineties. Elie Wiesel characterized this as "genocide in slow motion." Employing similar tactics to those now used in Darfur, the government, and the Bagarra tribal militias it armed, regularly bombed, burned, and looted southern villages, schools, hospitals, and food distribution centers; they enslaved and raped thousands of women and children; and they relocated entire villages into refugee camps. As in Darfur, deliberate mass starvation, accomplished in part by banning international relief, was the regime's most lethal weapon.

The death toll in the South from a conflict that ended only last year represented ten times the number dead so far in Darfur. Clooney’s voice was nowhere to be found when this was happening. But still, why doesn’t he ever talk about it now and relate its many obvious similarities to Darfur? Mentioning Bashir’s role in the southern genocide would be an important means of pressuring the regime. Could it be that, since most of those deaths occurred during the Clinton administration, and President Bush took the lead in successfully ending it, Clooney sees no political gain in bringing it up? Could it be that he is more interested in shaming Bush than Bashir?"

Read the whole thing here: Clooney Does Darfur

French Job Law Protests & the Free Market

2006-04-03T19:59:00.000-04:00

A lack of belief in the free-market system lies behind the French job law protests. World Public Opinion points out that only 36% of the French polled believe that the free-market system is "the best system on which to base the future of the world". This is the lowest result of any of the countries listed and far behind the 70%+ results in China, the US, the Philippines and Korea. Who says communism is dead?

Tax Facts Roundup

2006-02-07T13:00:00.000-05:00

Tax revenues have grown since the 2003 tax cuts. FY 2005 tax receipts hit $2.15 trillion - the highest level in history.

Taxes are still disproportionately paid by the wealthy:

The top 20% of earners account for 60.3% of taxable income and pay 71.9% of total personal income taxes collected. Every group below them pays proportionately less.
The same holds true within the top 20% - the top 5% earn 33.5% and pay 43.9%

On the spending side, Angry Bear looks at major categories of federal spending and argues that President Bush has held back discretionary spending. You wouldn't think so from all of the new projects he's outlined, but facts are facts.

Trees, Methane and Global Warming

2006-01-24T12:57:00.000-05:00

The BBC reports that scientists have just discovered that trees produce methane, a major greenhouse gas:
Scientists in Germany have discovered that ordinary plants produce significant amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas which helps trap the sun's energy in the atmosphere.

The findings, reported in the journal Nature, have been described as "startling", and may force a rethink of the role played by forests in holding back the pace of global warming.
This came as something of a shock:
To their amazement, the scientists found that all the textbooks written on the biochemistry of plants had apparently overlooked the fact that methane is produced by a range of plants even when there is plenty of oxygen.

The amount of the gas produced increased when the air was warmer, and when there was more sunlight. The paper estimates that this unexplained phenomenon could account for 10-30% of the world's methane emissions.

The possible implications are set out in Nature by David Lowe of New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, who writes: "We now have the spectre that new forests might increase greenhouse warming through methane emissions rather than decrease it by sequestering carbon dioxide."

Researchers warn it is too early to make assumptions
If this turned out to be true, it would have major implications for the rules of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which allows countries and companies to offset emissions from the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil by funding the planting of new forests or the restoration of deforested areas.
This should be a warning to those who think that "global warming" is settled science. The earth's environment is a complicated system that is not easily reducible to a powerpoint presentation. Politicized scientists have time and again issued dire warnings about the latest and greatest calamity to befall mankind, only to have those claims look irresponsible a few years later (see Michael Crichton's piece, Fear, Complexity, & Environmental Management in the 21st Century). We should try to understand things a little better before we jump to conclusions.

President Bush and Religion - 2

2006-01-24T12:35:00.000-05:00

From the WSJ's review of Fred Barnes' new book Rebel-in-Chief:

In the course of Mr. Barnes's narrative, we learn some interesting tidbits about the Bush White House. Mr. Bush, contrary to media hysteria on the subject, mentions Jesus Christ less often than Bill Clinton did.
Of course, critics aren't concerned when Bill mentions God, or when John Kerry gives a speech at a Black Church because they know its just a sop to the rubes who actually believe that stuff. See my earlier post here: President Bush and Religion

Another insightfull point from the review:

As a result, Mr. Barnes argues, Mr. Bush's "rebel in chief" style has brought Republicans to the political mountaintop. In 2004, Mr. Bush beat John Kerry 51% to 48% in an unusually large turnout--historically a sign that a political realignment may be at hand--and helped congressional Republicans achieve a majority as well. "Clinton got what he worked diligently for: personal popularity," sums up Mr. Barnes. "Bush was willing to surrender personal popularity to get what he sought: a transformation of American politics that made Republicans the majority party."
Bush could have pulled a Clinton after 9/11 and lobbed a few cruise missiles, but he took a long hard road instead. Long wars are never popular, but sometimes they're necessary.

A Round-up of MSM Bias in 2005

2006-01-18T20:49:00.000-05:00

A listing of MSM Lies in 2005 from The Cassandra Page You might quibble with some of them, but you can't argue with the conclusion:

"Their power of illusion is so great we can't be sure of anything we do . . . anything we see."

Ignoring the Real Threat

2006-01-10T23:42:00.000-05:00

James Lileks on what he fears:

I do not worry about libertinism. I worry about libertines who think the greatest threat to the imminent Utopia is a Wal-Mart exec who refuses to stock a CD because the lyrics celebrate shooting cops in the head, or who think that uptight repressed Christers are six inches and five days away from replacing the Constitution with the plot of “A Handmaiden’s Tale.”
I think he nails it. With all of the real causes of concern available to worry about, the Left focuses on Bush and Wal-Mart. Why aren't feminists overjoyed about the liberation of millions of women in Afghanistan? Because they don't care about them. What they do care about is abortion here and that's why they take the side of islamofacsists who who stone them to death as whores over a President who wants to curb abortion rights. Better millions suffer overseas than Bush claims a victory.

The problem with the Left is that they can't see anything good in the culture that produced them. Everything Western is inherently tainted and evil and everything "other" is inherently pure and good. Just ignore the fact that their culture oppresses women, enslaves minorities and judicially murders homosexuals. The Left is so guilt-ridden about being born into a prosperous civilization that they magnify every fault of their own culture while turning a blind eye to much greater problems in others.

Guilt is a problem, but it’s not the entire enchilada. It’s guilt married to a peculiar belief that Western Civilization is unique only in its sins. The only thing Western Civ really gave the world was slavery, imperialism, war, and capitalism; the fact that we have eliminated or diminished or abbreviated those sins is due not to anything inherent in Western Civ but some overarching, free-floating Enlightenment unmoored from the cultures that produced it. The world began in 1968, and owes nothing to what came before; if we wish to combat the regrettable enthusiasms of some other cultures whose animus appears religious, we should deconsecrate the cathedrals in order to set an example and light the way.
We're not perfect, but as of now, Western Civilization is just about the best system of living that humans have come up with. It's brought undreamed of prosperity to billions and is holding out the welcome sign for the rest of the planet to join us. The Left doesn't think so, and maybe neither does Europe. Its ironic that with so many people in India, China, etc. striving to join the global cultural-economic system - Thomas P.M. Barnett's "functioning core", so many who have enjoyed its benefits don't think its worth saving.

Invade Canada!

2006-01-02T09:58:00.000-05:00

Given the state of the Canadian military, the Mounties would probably be their best defence.

Never let a slow news day prevent you from finding a reason for bashing America. The Washington Post ("Raiding the Icebox") digs up a War Department contingency plan for invading Canada (then a colony of Great Britain)from the 1930's ( "The whole brouhaha made the front page of the New York Times on May 1, 1935.")that's been public since the 1970's and uses it to get some digs in on the U.S.

Invading Canada is an old American tradition. Invading Canada successfully is not. (snip)After that, Americans stopped invading Canada and took up other hobbies, such as invading Mexico, Haiti, Nicaragua, Grenada and, of course, Iraq.
Notice a couple of countries omitted from the list? Say France, Germany, Italy, etc.? Don't let something as trivial as WWII get in the way of presenting America in the worst possible light.

FISA vs. the Constitution

2005-12-29T22:55:00.000-05:00

FISA vs. the Constitution

Can Congress usurp the Constitutional powers of the President? The answer is "No" barring a Constitutional amendment. Have they tried anyway? Robert F.Turner, writing in the WSJ, says the answer is "Yes":

Space does not permit a discussion here of the congressional lawbreaking that took place in the wake of the Vietnam War. It is enough to observe that the Constitution is the highest law of the land, and when Congress attempts to usurp powers granted to the president, its members betray their oath of office. In certain cases, such as the War Powers Resolution and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, it might well have crossed that line.

Turner argues that the delegation of war powers to the President is clear and cannot be overridden by any law passed by Congress, even though signed by the then-sitting President:
Keep in mind that while the Carter administration asked Congress to enact the FISA statute in 1978, Attorney General Griffin Bell emphasized that the law "does not take away the power of the president under the Constitution." And in 1994, when the Clinton administration invited Congress to expand FISA to cover physical as well as electronic searches, the associate attorney general testified: "Our seeking legislation in no way should suggest that we do not believe we have inherent authority" under the Constitution. "We do," she concluded.
Intelligence gathering is implicitly a part of these powers and the need for secrecy, including secrecy from Congress, was noted by Benjamin Franklin "
In 1776, Benjamin Franklin and his four colleagues on the Committee of Secret Correspondence unanimously concluded that they could not tell the Continental Congress about covert assistance being provided by France to the American Revolution, because "we find by fatal experience that Congress consists of too many members to keep secrets."
Turner concludes as follows:
Our Constitution is the supreme law, and it cannot be amended by a simple statute like the FISA law. Every modern president and every court of appeals that has considered this issue has upheld the independent power of the president to collect foreign intelligence without a warrant. The Supreme Court may ultimately clarify the competing claims; but until then, the president is right to continue monitoring the communications of our nation's declared enemies, even when they elect to communicate with people within our country.

The CIA's Not-So-Secret War with George Bush

2005-12-07T19:44:00.000-05:00

John Hinderaker in the Weekly Standard - Leaking At All Costs:

THE CIA'S WAR against the Bush administration is one of the great untold stories of the past three years. It is, perhaps, the agency's most successful covert action of recent times. The CIA has used its budget to fund criticism of the administration by former Democratic officeholders. The agency allowed an employee, Michael Scheuer, to publish and promote a book containing classified information, as long as, in Scheuer's words, "the book was being used to bash the president." However, the agency's preferred weapon has been the leak. In one leak after another, generally to the New York Times or the Washington Post, CIA officials have sought to undermine America's foreign policy. Usually this is done by leaking reports or memos critical of administration policies or skeptical of their prospects. Through it all, our principal news outlets, which share the agency's agenda and profit from its torrent of leaks, have maintained a discreet silence about what should be a major scandal.
The article focuses on the CIA leaks behind stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post about secret CIA renditions of terror suspects. Unlike the Plame Kerfuffle where the leak had little consequence to either the safety of Ms. Plame or national security, these stories clearly put people in danger - the Post said "is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials.". As Mr. Hinderaker notes:

The twin leaks to the Times and the Post have severely impaired the agency's ability to carry out renditions, transport prisoners, and maintain secret detention facilities. It is striking that top-level CIA officials are evidently willing to do serious damage to their own agency's capabilities and operations for the sake of harming the Bush administration and impeding administration policies with which they disagree.
With respect to the Plame affair, Cliff Kincaid, writing for Accuracy in Media notes two columns on the same topic:
In a November 3 column in the Washington Post, Jim Hoagland confirmed that the Joseph Wilson affair was a CIA plot against President Bush.
Also writing about the Plame Kerfuffle that day was Victoria Toensing in the Wall Street Journal:
Toensing said that "The CIA conduct in this matter is either a brilliant covert action against the White House or inept intelligence tradecraft." The latter was a reference to the fact that Valerie Wilson could not possibly have been a true undercover CIA operative, and if it was the CIA position that she was, then the agency's methods for concealing its agents are laughable or incompetent.
Hinderaker's colleague at Powerline, Scott Johnson, had also written about the CIA-leak aspects of Plame back in early November - Three Years of the Condor:
THE SENATE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE REPORT on pre-war intelligence devotes 45 pages to intelligence on Saddam Hussein's possible efforts to acquire uranium yellowcake from Niger; of these, roughly 8 pages are devoted to events relating to Wilson's trip to Niger in February 2002. The report rebuts the claims Wilson peddled--first on background to Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, and others, in May and June of 2003, and then publicly under his own name, beginning with his Times op-ed column in July 2003.

According to Wilson, the oral report he made to the CIA discredited the evidence of any Iraq-Niger yellowcake deal and showed related documents might have been forged. Wilson to the contrary notwithstanding, the Senate Intelligence Committee report concluded that, "For most analysts, the information in the report [of Wilson's trip to Niger] lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal"--although the State Department disagreed.

In any event, Vice President Cheney had not been advised of Wilson's findings. As for the forged documents, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee Report, the intelligence community didn't acquire them until October 2002, long after Wilson's oral accounting on his trip. According to the "additional views" section of the Senate report (written by Senator Pat Roberts), Wilson had baldly fabricated his alleged disclosure of the forged documents:

On at least two occasions [Wilson] admitted that he had no direct knowledge to support some of his claims and that he was drawing on unrelated past experiences or no information. For example, when asked how he knew that the Intelligence Community had rejected the possibility of a Niger-Iraq uranium deal, as he wrote in his book, he told Committee staff that his assertion may have involved "a little literary flair."

Mr. Johnson asked the CIA why Mr. Wilson was not required to sign a standard non-disclosure agreement regarding his work and why CIA Analyst Michael Scheuer was granted permission to publish his anti-Bush tract "Imperial Hubris".

If Plame is old news, Thomas Joscelyn, also writing in the Weekly Standard, looks at some anti-Bush CIA spin - Anatomy of a Leak - How anonymous CIA sources spun the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah :
IN THE CIA's continuing campaign against the Bush administration, the agency has found the leaking of classified information to be a potent weapon. This is especially true with regard to the spinning of intelligence connecting Saddam's Iraq and bin Laden's al Qaeda. Consider, for example, the case of Abu Zubaydah, a top al Qaeda operative captured in March 2002.
(snip)

despite the fact that the CIA had circulated the debriefing of Zubaydah "within the American intelligence community last year . . . his statements were not included in public discussions by administration officials about the evidence concerning Iraq-Qaeda ties."

And then we get this whine from an anonymous intelligence official:
". . . things pointing in one direction were given a lot of weight, and other things were discounted."
So let me get this straight - you have two pieces of intelligence - one says one thing and the other says the opposite - and you have to ...(this is tough)...to...choose one as more likely than the other? You just can't say both are true just because they're contradictory? Isn't this the job of the CIA - to look at sometimes contradictory intelligence reports and decide which is more likely? Yet the CIA is complaining that this is being done - and by non-professionals! But what are they doing? Are they spinning things the way they want it to be?
IT TOOK MORE THAN A YEAR to learn the answer. On July 7, 2004 the Senate Intelligence Committee published its "Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq." Many of the report's passages, including those related to Abu Zubaydah's debriefings, were ignored. Here is the complete passage regarding Zubaydah's testimony:

The CIA provided four reports detailing the debriefings of Abu Zubaydah, a captured senior coordinator for al-Qaida responsible for training and recruiting. Abu Zubaydah said that he was not aware of a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida. He also said, however, that any relationship would be highly compartmented and went on to name al-Qaida members who he thought had good contacts with the Iraqis. For instance, Abu Zubaydah indicated that he had heard that an important al-Qaida associate, Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi, and others had good relationships with Iraqi intelligence. [Redacted sentence(s)] During the debriefings, Abu Zubaydah offered his opinion that it would be extremely unlikely for bin Ladin to have agreed to ally with Iraq, due to his desire to keep the organization on track with its mission and maintain its operational independence. In Iraqi Support for Terrorism, Abu Zubaydah's information is reflected as:

[Redacted] Abu Zubaydah opined that it would have been "extremely unlikely" for bin Laden to have agreed to "ally" with Iraq, but he acknowledged it was possible there were al-Qaida-Iraq communications or emissaries to which he was not privy. [emphasis added]

Abu Zubaydah's denial was, therefore, not nearly as clear cut as the Times's anonymous sources would have had us believe. (snip)
Zarqawi would, of course, go on to become the face of al Qaeda in Iraq and Zubaydah was in a position to know him well. Just a few years prior to his capture, at the turn of the new millennium, Zubaydah planned attacks with Zarqawi against targets in Jordan.

Cool Facts about Dick Cheney

2005-12-06T23:06:00.000-05:00

From Ace of Spades HQ - some little known facts about Vice President Dick Cheney. Some good ones:

On his first interview as Vice President of the United States, he was asked what his leadership qualifications were. He answered, "My pimp hand is strong!"

When a new senator places his hand on the book to be sworn in, very few realize it is actually the Necronomicon until Cheney laughs and tells them "you're mine now".

Best ones are here.

Rumsfeld Fighting Technique

2005-12-06T22:40:00.000-05:00

Fist of the West Side

See them all here.

Did Bush Lie about WMDs?

2005-11-29T21:19:00.000-05:00

Or was he just following the conventional wisdom?

Did Bush Lie?

From Michelle Malkin

The link to the search is:

http://www.google.com/search?q=clinton+iraq+1998

The GOP strikes back (with the Dem's own words)on the WMD question here and here.

Meanwhile in France...

2005-11-04T00:29:00.000-05:00

Meanwhile in France...

Paris Riots Spread to 20 Suburbs - "A week of riots in poor neighborhoods outside Paris gained dangerous new momentum Thursday, with youths shooting at police and firefighters and attacking trains and symbols of the French state."

Distinguishing Roe from Griswold

2005-11-04T00:20:00.000-05:00

Interesting thought posted as feedback from a Corner reader by Ramesh Ponnuru today on distinguishing Roe from Griswold:

"It seems to me that Roe and Griswold can be distinguished on grounds short of 'constitutional personhood,' but rather simply on the nature of the state interest involved. All the Court would have to do is recognize that a state legislature might have a reasonable belief that an unborn child is a human person in a moral sense to find that the protection of that person's life is a state interest of the highest magnitude. Certainly if racial diversity in public post-secondary education is a compelling state interest, preventing the killing of those who might possibly be people should qualify. And if we apply strict scrutiny, then it would be a narrowly tailored approach to preventing the killing of those who might possibly be considered humans to ban that killing."
Also see Robert George's comments on framing the abortion debate (also from the Corner):

A Root Cause of Islamic Fascism? Follow-up

2005-11-03T23:53:00.000-05:00

Andrew McCarthy in NRO commenting on Fukuyama's piece (discussed below) - Islam, Democracy and Assimilation:

First, Fukuyama rightly contends that this assimilation must begin with an end to fractious multiculturalism. He concludes, however, that this means the societies themselves must change, if not fundamentally than at least significantly. Countries, he declares, "need to reformulate their definitions of national identity to be more accepting of people from non-Western backgrounds."

I'm all for acceptance, but I respectfully disagree. Immigrants presumably come to a new place because it is attractive to them as is, not because they seek to reform it. More desirable would be real gate-keeping immigration policies that admitted only those of a mind to assimilate to the home culture, not the other way around. If that means people who would otherwise emigrate end up remaining in their home countries, is that such a bad thing?
McCarthy has it right. Why is it always that Western culture needs to adapt? I don't see a lot of people arguing that third world cultures need to adapt to the cultures of 1st world immigrants. Part of this is the fact that immigration is overwhelmingly one-way. People from the Middle East and the third world are drawn to the West because of opportunity. These opportunities are a direct result of Western "global" culture.

It doesn't make sense for France or any other western culture to try to adopt non-western ways because that is exactly what those 1st generation immigrants were fleeing. They're not moving to France to recreate their home culture, they're moving there because France gives them opportunities that their home culture can't. It's when the children of these immigrants grow up without the knowledge of the hardships left behind that you have trouble.

For better or worse, France is the country of the French, Germany is the country of the Germans, etc. The whole history of these nation-states is invariably tied up in the history of their people; in a sense, the country is the people. This isn't true of the U.S., which is a country as an idea. Anyone can become an American. You may become a French citizen, but you can't become French.

What we're seeing here isn't so much immigration as conquest. David Frum, also in NRO, quotes from "Islam in Britain,” a report of the UK Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, available from http://www.isic-centre.org:

The report quotes Zaki Badawi, president of London’s Muslim College, holder of the Order of the British Empire, and the widely recognized “unofficial leader, representative, and advocate of Britain’s mainline Muslims”:

”A proselytizing religion cannot stand still. It can either expand or contract. Islam endeavors to expand in Britain. … Islam is a universal religion. It aims at bringing its message to all corners of the earth. It hopes that one day the whole of humanity will be one Muslim community, the Umma. As we know the history of Islam as a faith is also the history of a state and a community of believers living by divine law. The Muslims, jurists and theologians, have always expounded Islam as both Government and a faith. This reflects the historical fact that Muslims, from the start, lived under their own law. Muslim theologians naturally produced a theology with this in view – it is a theology of the majority. Being a minority was not seriously considered or even contemplated. … Muslim theology offers, up to the present, no systematic formulation of the status of being in a minority.”

The report’s authors cite similar views from authoritative spokespeople, and conclude:

”Muslims find it difficult to assume minority status in a majority non-Muslim society. More than other minority communities, they constantly, sometimes subconsciously, strive to redress the balance and assume an expanding and dominant position in their host countries.”

For more on the roots of Islamic Terror see: Understanding Jihad

A Root Cause of Islamic Fascism?

2005-11-02T23:43:00.000-05:00

Is Western Europe itself a root cause of Islamism? That's what Francis Fukuyama, argues in the Wall Street Journal on the first anniversary of the murder of Theo van Gogh: A Year of Living Dangerously:

There is good reason for thinking, however, that a critical source of contemporary radical Islamism lies not in the Middle East, but in Western Europe. In addition to Bouyeri and the London bombers, the March 11 Madrid bombers and ringleaders of the September 11 attacks such as Mohamed Atta were radicalized in Europe. In the Netherlands, where upwards of 6% of the population is Muslim, there is plenty of radicalism despite the fact that Holland is both modern and democratic.

This isn't a case of blaming the victim though. Fukuyama contends that Europe's lazy embrace of multiculturalism and its inability to absorb muslim immigrants is a contributing factor:

Contemporary Europeans downplay national identity in favor of an open, tolerant, "post-national" Europeanness. But the Dutch, Germans, French and others all retain a strong sense of their national identity, and, to differing degrees, it is one that is not accessible to people coming from Turkey, Morocco or Pakistan. Integration is further inhibited by the fact that rigid European labor laws have made low-skill jobs hard to find for recent immigrants or their children. A significant proportion of immigrants are on welfare, meaning that they do not have the dignity of contributing through their labor to the surrounding society. They and their children understand themselves as outsiders.

It is in this context that someone like Osama bin Laden appears, offering young converts a universalistic, pure version of Islam that has been stripped of its local saints, customs and traditions. Radical Islamism tells them exactly who they are--respected members of a global Muslim umma to which they can belong despite their lives in lands of unbelief. (snip)

If this is in fact an accurate description of an important source of radicalism, several conclusions follow. First, the challenge that Islamism represents is not a strange and unfamiliar one. Rapid transition to modernity has long spawned radicalization; we have seen the exact same forms of alienation among those young people who in earlier generations became anarchists, Bolsheviks, fascists or members of the Bader-Meinhof gang. The ideology changes but the underlying psychology does not.
And much like the Luddites at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Jonah Goldberg had previously compared Islamism to Bolshevism here.

If Fukuyama is right, then, as he points out, bringing Democracy to the Middle East will not help the problem currently. There is an argument however, that it will over time. If Middle Eastern societies move closer to global norms (i.e., as Thomas Barnett would say, they start integrating into the core) then not only will there be more opportunity at home, but Western Europe will seem less alien.

The problem is unique to Western Europe and not the US:

Contemporary Europeans downplay national identity in favor of an open, tolerant, "post-national" Europeanness. But the Dutch, Germans, French and others all retain a strong sense of their national identity, and, to differing degrees, it is one that is not accessible to people coming from Turkey, Morocco or Pakistan. (snip)

Many Europeans assert that the American melting pot cannot be transported to European soil. Identity there remains rooted in blood, soil and ancient shared memory. This may be true, but if so, democracy in Europe will be in big trouble in the future as Muslims become an ever larger percentage of the population. And since Europe is today one of the main battlegrounds of the war on terrorism, this reality will matter for the rest of us as well.
Anyone though can be an "American" - we're a self-selected country. Given the ongoing riots in France, this warning is very timely.

National Review's 100 Best Non-Fiction Books Of The Century

2005-10-31T13:30:00.000-05:00

A list put together back in 1999. Number 1? The Second World War by Winston S. Churchill. See the whole thing here.

Political Books -- Polarized Readers

2005-10-31T11:39:00.000-05:00

An interesting graphic from orgnet.com showing the commonality of readership among the top 100 political books at Amazon as of May 2004: Political Books -- Polarized Readers -- May 2004 .

With the exception of a dozen or so books read on both the Right and the Left, most political books are read solely by those who agree with them.

The President's Speech on the War on Terror

2005-10-31T11:17:00.000-05:00

What we're fighting - from the President's October 7th speech to the National Endowment for Democracy:
Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant Jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism. Whatever it's called, this ideology is very different from the religion of Islam. This form of radicalism exploits Islam to serve a violent, political vision: the establishment, by terrorism and subversion and insurgency, of a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom. These extremists distort the idea of jihad into a call for terrorist murder against Christians and Jews and Hindus -- and also against Muslims from other traditions, who they regard as heretics.

Many militants are part of global, borderless terrorist organizations like al Qaeda, which spreads propaganda, and provides financing and technical assistance to local extremists, and conducts dramatic and brutal operations like September the 11th. Other militants are found in regional groups, often associated with al Qaeda -- paramilitary insurgencies and separatist movements in places like Somalia, and the Philippines, and Pakistan, and Chechnya, and Kashmir, and Algeria. Still others spring up in local cells, inspired by Islamic radicalism, but not centrally directed. Islamic radicalism is more like a loose network with many branches than an army under a single command. Yet these operatives, fighting on scattered battlefields, share a similar ideology and vision for our world.

We know the vision of the radicals because they've openly stated it -- in videos, and audiotapes, and letters, and declarations, and websites. First, these extremists want to end American and Western influence in the broader Middle East, because we stand for democracy and peace, and stand in the way of their ambitions. Al Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden, has called on Muslims to dedicate, quote, their "resources, sons and money to driving the infidels out of their lands." Their tactic to meet this goal has been consistent for a quarter-century: They hit us, and expect us to run. They want us to repeat the sad history of Beirut in 1983, and Mogadishu in 1993 -- only this time on a larger scale, with greater consequences.
Michael Barone thought it was the first time the Ptresident has clearly nemed our enemy in this struggle. Read his comments here.

The Claremont Institute: Resenting the Heartland's Success

2005-10-31T11:09:00.000-05:00

What's the Matter with Kansas? What's the matter with author Thomas Frank asks Kimberly Shankman in her review:

However, it is not entirely accurate to say that Frank sees only economic motives as real. There is one more "real" motive he acknowledges—resentment. He believes that almost all socially conservative positions—what he calls the "backlash"—regardless of the religious or theoretical rhetoric they are garbed in, arise from the fact that lower middle-class Midwesterners resent the cultural elite, and therefore oppose their cultural policies to demonstrate that they don't have to accept their moral leadership.

This envious opposition to cultural elitism reveals itself foremost in a fundamental anti-intellectualism. Thus, Frank argues, the fervor of the anti-abortion movement arises not from a legitimate conviction that innocent life is being sacrificed; rather, it is "its power as an anti-intellectual rallying point" that accounts for the centrality of the pro-life cause among social conservatives. So convinced is he that only class resentment can explain the strength of the movement that he finds it difficult even to comprehend how pro-lifers can equate their movement to the anti-slavery movement of the 1850's.

Now, for most people, this is not too hard to understand: in both movements, those who sought to protect innocent human life from a culture that devalued it were considered beyond the pale of political discourse because they disturbed the court-mandated compromise with evil that allowed politics as usual to continue. Although this parallel has been drawn by a number of people—most famously, perhaps, by George McKenna in a cover article in the Atlantic in 1995—Frank just doesn't get it. At first, he decides that it's just a way for pro-lifers to call pro-choicers names. But then he applies his construct that resentment is the key to everything. Doing this, he finds a way to reclaim the historical high ground from the pro-life movement and to link them, not with the abolitionists, but with the backwoods pro-slavery "Bushwackers" of Missouri who violently opposed the settlement of Kansas as a free state. According to Frank, both contemporary pro-lifers and the Bushwackers felt themselves to be despised by the cultural elite of the day; therefore, they're both the same.

It actually is this focus on resentment that is the key to unlocking Thomas Frank's entire understanding of politics. After all, his focus on economics doesn't really make too much sense. It's based on the premise that conservative policies actually are bad for ordinary people, and the evidence just isn't there to support that argument. In fact, Kansas, that reddest of red states, is doing better than the rest of the country on most major economic indicators. So, Frank has constructed a paradigm so powerful that he can't see beyond it even when it is directly contrary to fact, all to explain the solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Why?

The answer comes in the book's autobiographical section. As a true-believing conservative in high-school and young adulthood, Frank's conversion to liberalism came about, not through seeing for himself the effects of poverty, nor through economic arguments that convinced him of the error of his ways, but rather as the result of being snubbed by former high-school classmates, who came from wealthier families than his, who wouldn't talk to him after they pledged the elite fraternities at the University of Kansas. When he realized that he was not going to be selected to a leadership position among the college Republicans at KU: "I did a very un-Kansan thing: I started voting Democratic." In other words, and by his own admission, because young Frank's political identity sprang from his resentment of the popular kids, he has decided that everybody else must also make their political choices on the same basis.
Some people really carry grudges.

Plame Gate Round-up

2005-10-18T19:46:00.000-04:00

From Winds of Change on what the Senate Intelligence Committe Report said about Joe Wilson:

I see Instapundit as well as both the Associated Press and the Washington Post has already beaten me to the punch on this one, but it's a point that needs to be made. Joe Wilson is a liar and not a particularly good one at that. As the report, starting on p. 39 and going through p. 47 very carefully explains, the claims that Wilson during his media blitz and subsequent canonization as a representative of all that is righteous and pure within anti-war circles were every bit as misleading if not factually inaccurate as anything that one may charge that the administration had done. Even more so, I would argue, if only for the fact that he was making claims about a number of issues, for example the forged documents referring to Niger, of which he had no actual knowledge - a very polite way of saying that the man was blowing smoke out his ass.

National Review's Media Blog on the highs and lows of the New York Time's reporting on its own Judith Miller's involvement:

In what has been one of the most infuriating aspects for conservatives of the Times coverage of the Plame leak, editors and reporters have consistently avoided reporting the fact that Joseph Wilson lied on a number of key points after he became an outspoken critic of President Bush. Stephen Hayes highlighted one NYT whitewash from earlier this summer:

ON JULY 22, 2005, the New York Times published a lengthy, front-page article detailing the work of two senior Bush administration officials, Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, on the Niger-uranium story. A seemingly exhaustive timeline ran alongside the piece. In 19 bullet points, the Times provided its readers in considerable detail with what it regarded as the highlights of the story. The timeline traces events from the initial request for more information on the alleged Iraqi inquiries in Africa to Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger; from the now-famous "16 words" in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union to the details of White House telephone logs; from Bush administration claims that Karl Rove was not involved in the leak to the naming of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, and on from there to the dates that White House officials testified before the grand jury.As I say, seemingly exhaustive. But there is one curious omission: July 7, 2004. On that date, the bipartisan Senate Select Intelligence Committee released a 511-page report on the intelligence that served as the foundation for the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq. The Senate report includes a 48-page section on Wilson that demonstrates, in painstaking detail, that virtually everything Joseph Wilson said publicly about his trip, from its origins to his conclusions, was false.

Well, the Times also included a timeline in its online package today, and guess which event got whitewashed out again? Judith Miller, in a first-person account of her testimony to the grand jury, explains why this constant whitewashing is such a problem: The Times has been Wilson’s biggest cheerleader:

Mr. Fitzgerald asked whether I ever pursued an article about Mr. Wilson and his wife. I told him I had not, though I considered her connection to the C.I.A. potentially newsworthy. I testified that I recalled recommending to editors that we pursue a story.Mr. Fitzgerald asked my reaction to Mr. Novak's column. I told the grand jury I was annoyed at having been beaten on a story. I said I felt that since The Times had run Mr. Wilson's original essay, it had an obligation to explore any allegation that undercut his credibility. At the same time, I added, I also believed that the newspaper needed to pursue the possibility that the White House was unfairly attacking a critic of the administration.

The reason Wilson’s wife was even an issue is because he lied when he said she had nothing to do with sending him to Niger, and definitely didn’t recommend him for the job, but the Senate report proved that she did exactly that. Why didn’t the Times let Miller write the story? The independent team tries to answer:

It is not clear why. Ms. Miller said in an interview that she "made a strong recommendation to my editor" that an article be pursued. "I was told no," she said. She would not identify the editor.Ms. Abramson, the Washington bureau chief at the time, said Ms. Miller never made any such recommendation.

Katrina Round-up

2005-10-07T00:10:00.000-04:00

Some random items:

Michael Fumento rounds up some of the media's Katrina scare stories and comments on their true cost - Katrina and the Price of Panic:

Yet for all of the talk about violent deaths that never materialized, it appears that the talk itself led to real deaths.

For example, efforts to evacuate by helicopter some of the 200 patients at New Orleans' Charity Hospital were halted for a day because of reports of sniper fire. According to CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta, two patients died awaiting evacuation. "The inability to get people out of these hospitals is frightening," he said.

Could he have known false reporting from his own employer had contributed to this nightmare?

The evacuation of the Superdome, where conditions may not have been as bad as described but were bad enough, was also halted because of unconfirmed reports of shooting at military helicopters.
Deaths from Katrina in all of Louisiana - 1,003
Deaths from the European heatwave in 2003 - 35,000

English Prime Minister Tony Blair on the BBC's anti-American bias in covering Katrina:

Tony Blair has re-opened the government's long-standing row about BBC bias by describing the corporation's coverage of the aftermath of the havoc caused to New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina as being "full of hatred of America".

The UK Prime Minister's comments on the BBC's coverage have been revealed by Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of News Corporation. Murdoch also claims that Blair thought the BBC was "gloating" at the slow response of the federal and local authorities in helping and evacuating the hundreds of thousands of victims made homeless and the dead who were left lying uncollected where they had fallen for days.
Bill Clinton and former CBS News head Sir Howard Stringer also detected bias:

Former US president Clinton said the corporation's coverage, while factually accurate, had been "stacked up" to criticise the federal government's slow response to the catastrophe without focusing on any of the other relief efforts or the magnitude of the task.

Sir Howard Stringer, a former head of CBS News, said he had been "nervous about the slight level of gloating" in the BBC's coverage of the devastation caused by the hurricane and the response from the federal authorities to the plight of the victims. But he noted that the tone changed after two days and that other news outlets and the government had underestimated the effects of Katrina.

From Real Clear Politics - Katrina, What Went Right:

Largely invisible to the media's radar, a broad-based rescue effort by federal, state and local first responders pulled 25,000 to 50,000 people from harm's way in floodwaters in the city. Ironically, FEMA's role, for good or ill, was essentially non-existent, as was the Governor's and the Mayor's. An ad-hoc distributed network responded on its own. Big Government didn't work. Odds and ends of little government did.
From Powerline - Thomas Friedman's solution to hurricane woes? Totalatarianism!

In Tom's view we should be emulating Singapore, a state ruled by wise leaders who know how to get things done. He quotes approvingly a Singapore newspaper columnist who states that today's American conservatives "believe in no government, and therefore conclude that there is no need for [the] country to pay for even the government that it has".

So let me get this straight. Tom wants us to be more like Singapore, an authoritarian state where voting is compulsory but there is only one candidate for President. That candidate is selected by a ruling party which has ruled the nation since its founding. How orderly compared with our messy process where candidates who fail to receive the support of the MSM still get elected.

September 11, 2001 - Never Forget

2005-09-11T22:36:00.000-04:00

September 11, 2001

September 11, 2001 - Never Forget

2005-09-11T22:35:00.000-04:00

September 11, 2001

Bush Haters of the World Unite!

2005-09-08T23:45:00.000-04:00

We will bury you!
Communists for Kerry - still semi-active.

Cindy Sheehan Comments the MSM Didn't Report

2005-09-08T23:30:00.000-04:00

A sample from Dave Koppel at RockyMountainNews.com - Sheehan's Radical Views Little Noted:

For example, on Aug. 16, Sheehan held a media conference call during which she declared "The person who killed my son, I have no animosity for that person at all." Yet her statement was reported only in the National Review Online weblog. In an interview with Mark Knoller of CBS News, she explained that the foreigners who have to come to Iraq to battle the U.S. military are "freedom fighters." (Video at the anti-war Web site dc.indymedia. org/usermedia/video/2/cindyon bus.mov). Conversely, she described last January's vote in Iraq as a "sham election," in her Tuesday entry on her weblog on Michael Moore's Web site (http:// michaelmoore.com/mustread/ index.php?id=465).

via the Corner

Other Scandals at the UN

2005-09-07T09:39:00.000-04:00

Claudia Rosett, writing at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies website with George Russell from Fox News, reports on how the investigation into the oil for food program has turned up more corruption in the UN's everyday operations:
How widespread is the corruption at the United Nations? The multibillion-dollar Iraq Oil-for-Food scandal was just the beginning.

Now the issue is becoming the scale of corruption in the U.N.'s normal operations — and which individuals and corporations are reaping the benefits of a network of bribery and conspiracy that investigators have just begun to uncover. So far, those identities are still a mystery — but perhaps not for much longer.

Last Friday, federal prosecutors in Manhattan indicted the head of the U.N.'s own budget oversight committee, a Russian named Vladimir Kuznetsov, on charges of laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bribes paid by companies seeking contracts with the United Nations.

Kuznetsov, who has pleaded innocent, allegedly took a cut so openly that he had part of it deposited into the United Nations' own staff credit union in New York.

Kuznetsov's arrest is the latest twist in the scandal involving the U.N. procurement department, which was the longtime post of Alexander Yakovlev (search), another Russian U.N. official recently fingered by U.S. federal investigators.

On Aug. 8, Yakovlev pleaded guilty to federal charges of corruption, wire fraud and money laundering, after a FOX News investigation revealed his unauthorized ties with a U.N. contractor, IHC Services, and details leading to his secret offshore bank account. Federal investigators have now alleged that from 2000 on, Yakovlev did at least some of his grafting in partnership with Kuznetsov, transferring bribe money to him via the Antigua Overseas Bank in the West Indies. Allegedly the bribe money was obtained in exchange for providing inside information to companies seeking U.N. contracts.

The Yakovlev-Kuznetsov scandal joins a growing list of cases of U.N. misconduct, waste, theft and abuse. They include bribe-taking under Oil-for-Food, sexual abuse of minors by peacekeepers in West Africa, sexual and financial misconduct — including outright larceny — at U.N. offices in Geneva, and business ties between the son of Secretary-General Kofi Annan and one of the Oil-for-Food inspection firms hired with Yakovlev's input, Swiss-based Cotecna Inspection (Cotecna has denied any wrongdoing).

The Link Between Iran and al Qaeda

2005-09-06T20:32:00.000-04:00

Dan Darling at Winds of Change sums up the links between the two here: "Iran & al-Qaeda: Pretty Thin!?! "

This is just a short sprinkling and I can certainly go on, but to say that the evidence is pretty thin when you have not only US officials (whose claims to this effect I mostly omitted) but also Spanish, Saudi, French, Turkish, and Jordanian law enforcement and intelligence agencies all saying the same thing strikes me as wildly implausible.

Katrina Response Timeline

2005-09-06T20:26:00.000-04:00

What happened when, via Right Wing Nuthouse.

Griswold - "penumbras formed by emanations"

2005-08-29T23:59:00.000-04:00

Rich Lowry in National Review Onlineon the cornerstone of the Left's jurisprudence:

The mischief began 40 years ago in the case Griswold v. Connecticut, when the Court struck down a prohibition on contraceptives on the basis of a "right to marital privacy." The bit about "marital" was quickly dropped, and the new discovery became a general right to privacy.

In Griswold, the Court suggested the right might be found in the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth and/or Ninth Amendments. In other words, it must be there somewhere, anywhere. But since the right to privacy is nowhere mentioned, the Court had to contend that it resides in "penumbras formed by emanations." In layman's terms, that means in partial shadows formed by emissions, which it doesn't take a constitutional scholar to conclude sounds pretty vaporous.

If Connecticut's contraceptive law was outdated and purposeless, the answer was simple: for voters to overturn it. Both the dissenters in the case, Justices Hugo Black and Potter Stewart noted that they opposed the Connecticut policy, but that didn't make it unconstitutional.

Roe v. Wade relied on the same amorphous right to privacy and featured the same tenuous or nonexistent constitutional reasoning. In his decision, Justice Harry Blackmun cited the American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, the American Bar Association and - but, of course - the "Ephesian, Soranos, often described as the greatest of the ancient gynecologists."
Griswold was also the subject of "The Bad Decision that Started it All" by Robert P. George and David L. Tubbs in the July 18th edition of National Review. In that article (reprinted here on the Catholic Educators Resource site, the authors track the line of cases leading from the constitutional right of "marital privacy" found in Griswold, through the constitutional right to abortions found in Roe v. Wade to the constitutional right to same sex marriage found in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health in Massachusetts.

The authors argue that whether or not you believe abortions should be regulated, Griswold was bad law and a shaky foundation on which to build your case. Regarding this, the authors cite the dissenting opinions:

In fact, two widely respected and sensible jurists, Justices Hugo Black and Potter Stewart, dissented in Griswold. Black was a noted liberal and, like Stewart, recorded his opposition to Connecticut's policy as a political matter. Yet both jurists insisted that the policy was a valid exercise of the state's power to promote public health, safety, and morals.

To Justices Black and Stewart, the "right to privacy" cloaked a naked policy preference. Justices in the majority were, without constitutional warrant, substituting their own judgments for those of the elected representatives in Connecticut. This, according to jurists across the political spectrum, is precisely what had brought shame on the Court during the "Lochner era", from roughly 1890 to 1937, when in the name of an unwritten "liberty of contract" the justices invalidated state social-welfare and worker-protection laws.
The article is invaluable in dispelling other myths about the decsion as well.

Overturning Roe v. Wade will not make abortion illegal. Instead, since the Constitution is silent on the matter, it will put the decision back under the purview of state legislatures where it should be.

All Cultures Are Not Equal - New York Times

2005-08-28T19:46:00.000-04:00

Will Globalization lead to a single culture? Maybe not - David Brooks in the New York Times looks at the puzzle of why cultures seem to be diverging as global economies converge - All Cultures Are Not Equal :

Not long ago, people said that globalization and the revolution in communications technology would bring us all together. But the opposite is true. People are taking advantage of freedom and technology to create new groups and cultural zones. Old national identities and behavior patterns are proving surprisingly durable. People are moving into self-segregating communities with people like themselves, and building invisible and sometimes visible barriers to keep strangers out.

If you look just around the United States you find amazing cultural segmentation. We in America have been "globalized" (meaning economically integrated) for centuries, and yet far from converging into some homogeneous culture, we are actually diverging into lifestyle segments. The music, news, magazine and television markets have all segmented, so there are fewer cultural unifiers like Life magazine or Walter Cronkite.

Forty-million Americans move every year, and they generally move in with people like themselves, so as the late James Chapin used to say, every place becomes more like itself. Crunchy places like Boulder attract crunchy types and become crunchier. Conservative places like suburban Georgia attract conservatives and become more so.

In Power, Terror, Peace, and War : America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk, Walter Russel Meade argued that we're seeing a move away from a statist "Fordist" systems that arose after WWII to more entrepreneurial, market-driven views of the role of government driven in part by the rise of consumerism - just as people want a choice in the products they buy, they now want choice in their retirement plans, etc.

Maybe what we're seeing here is that consumerist ethos at work in cultural issues as well - rising prosperity has given people exposure to different cultural values and the means to adopt them. As Brooks points out:
The members of these and many other groups didn't inherit their identities. They took advantage of modernity, affluence and freedom to become practitioners of a do-it-yourself tribalism. They are part of a great reshuffling of identities, and the creation of new, often more rigid groupings. They have the zeal of converts.
Brooks also points out groups that reject Globalization: Meanwhile, if you look around the world you see how often events are driven by groups that reject the globalized culture. Islamic extremists reject the modern cultures of Europe, and have created a hyperaggressive fantasy version of traditional Islamic purity.
In The Pentagon's New Map, Thomas P.M. Barnett described a worldview that included a "functioning core" and a "non-integrating gap" and discussed efforts by totalitarian governments to take their countries "offline", which is exactly what Brooks describes.

I enjoyed both books and thought that they were describing the same phenomenon through two different perspectives. Brooks seems to be tackling the same issues when he asks why certain cultural traits endure and why others (like Arab nationalism) fade. Is there a Darwinian "market" for cultures and ideas and is there more movement in that market lately?

Al Qaeda's Woes

2005-08-28T19:17:00.000-04:00

Amir Taheri:

Al-Zawahiri spells out their strategy in Iraq with chilling simplicity. He brushes aside the fact that Iraq now has a free elected government that represents the will of its people. He demands that the United States and its allies abandon the Iraqi people so that the terrorists can seize control in Baghdad and continue their massacre on a grander scale.

This shows that the Arab terrorist movement associated with the al Qaeda brand knows that it has absolutely no chance of winning power in Iraq or any other Muslim country through normal political means.

More importantly, al-Zawahiri acknowledges the fact that the terrorists have no chance of winning a straight military victory over the U.S.-led Coalition in Iraq. He clearly shows that his only hope of victory lies in the belief that the terrorists could turn American and British public opinion against support for building a new and democratic Iraq.

Al-Zawahiri 's entire analysis on that score is based on al Qaeda's single victory so far: the changing of the Spanish government under the pressure of the March 2004 Madrid bombings.

Islamist terrorist circles have already woven quite a few myths around what they describe as their "victorious ghazva" (raid) in Madrid. "We taught the Spaniards a lesson," says Shamsul Dhoha, who runs a pro-al Qaeda Web site from Pakistan. "Our heroes struck, and the Spaniards scattered like hens. This is the way to deal with [all other] infidel [enemies]."

Yet what is perceived as Spain's surrender to al Qaeda has so far proved to be the exception rather than the rule. Other members of the coalition in Iraq — President Bush himself, plus Prime Ministers John Howard (Australia), Tony Blair (Britian) and Anders Fogh Rasmussen (Denmark) — have been re-elected, often with increased majorities. Meanwhile, almost all those who opposed the liberation of Iraq have suffered losses in all subsequent elections — most notably France's Jacques Chirac and Germany's Gerhard Schroeder.

The Air America Scandal

2005-08-25T00:21:00.000-04:00

IBD on the Silence of the MSM on the Air America Scandal

Public funds used to prop up a business! Just the kind of scandal that left-leaning media would die for. Yet for some reason they're giving this one a pass.
Is it because there are no mean ol' conservatives to blame?
When Limbaugh's problems with painkillers came to light, the mainstream media could hardly contain themselves. They called him a "pill popper" and hypocrite and cheered for release of his medical records. And when he returned to the air, they couldn't talk enough about his stay in rehab.
Al Franken, Air America's featured host, seized the moment and labeled Limbaugh a "drug addict" — after calling him a "Big Fat Idiot" in the title of his book years before.
Nothing wrong, mind you, with reporting on Limbaugh's woes. Nothing, that is, as long as the media cover flaws of those on the left with equal enthusiasm.

Mark Steyn on Cindy Sheehan

2005-08-24T23:57:00.000-04:00

On the Left's efforts to portray the troops in Iraq as children incapable of making their own decisions...

They're not children in Iraq; they're grown-ups who made their own decision to join the military. That seems to be difficult for the left to grasp. Ever since America's all-adult, all-volunteer army went into Iraq, the anti-war crowd have made a sustained effort to characterize them as "children." If a 13-year-old wants to have an abortion, that's her decision and her parents shouldn't get a look-in. If a 21-year-old wants to drop to the broadloom in Bill Clinton's Oval Office, she's a grown woman and free to do what she wants. But, if a 22- or 25- or 37-year-old is serving his country overseas, he's a wee "child" who isn't really old enough to know what he's doing.

I get many e-mails from soldiers in Iraq, and they sound a lot more grown-up than most Ivy League professors and certainly than Maureen Dowd, who writes like she's auditioning for a minor supporting role in ''Sex And The City.''

The infantilization of the military promoted by the left is deeply insulting to America's warriors but it suits the anti-war crowd's purposes. It enables them to drone ceaselessly that "of course" they "support our troops," because they want to stop these poor confused moppets from being exploited by the Bush war machine...
Casey Sheehan was a 21-year old man when he enlisted in 2000. He re-enlisted for a second tour, and he died after volunteering for a rescue mission in Sadr City. Mrs. Sheehan says she wishes she'd driven him to Canada, though that's not what he would have wished, and it was his decision.
Read the whole thing here.

The troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are not children and are not dupes. They are brave and responsible men and women who have made the decision to serve and protect their country. Many of them have enlisted or reenlisted since the beginning of the fighting in Iraq and even more have done so since September 11th. This effort to portray them as children to be protected rather than as adults protecting their fellow citizens does them a disservice.

Islamism - the New Marxism?

2005-08-08T23:11:00.000-04:00

Is the growth of Islamism due in part to its replacement of Marxism as the standardbearer of ant-Western animosity? Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online: "I Have Rights!":
Osama bin Laden's prattling about the Crusades, for instance, merely shows how poisoned Islamism is by Western Marxism and anti-imperialism. Muslims used to brag about winning the Crusades. It was only after the West started exporting victimology that Islamic and Arab intellectuals started to whine about how poorly they'd been treated.

To a certain extent, radical Islam in Europe has taken the place of third-world Marxism — hardly a big leap when you think about how many Vietnamese "revolutionaries" were trained in Parisian salons. It's all about fighting capitalism, American "imperialism," modernism, etc. Marxism no longer provides a workable model, but the Islamists think sharia might. At the same time, like fascism and Communism before it, radical Islam provides a sense of purpose and meaning for losers and misfits who blame their misfortunes on "the system" (variously defined as the ruling class, the Jews, the capitalists, Col. Sanders, etc.). In this sense, Islamism is less about religion than ideology, and less about ideology than it is about alienation and low self-esteem.

Framing the Abortion Debate

2005-08-08T22:58:00.000-04:00

Robert George in The Corner on National Review Online:
There are three positions that can be defended without quickly falling into logical inconsistency. The first is that human beings are in no morally relevant way different from other creatures and therefore have no special dignity. The second is that human beings have an inherent and equal dignity; each and every human being possesses it simply by virtue of his or her humanity. The third is that some, but not all, human beings have dignity; those who have it possess it by virtue of some quality or set of qualities that they happen to possess that other human beings do not possess (or do not yet possess, or no longer possess).

Multiculturalism

2005-08-03T00:01:00.000-04:00

From Cox & Forkum

Joe Wilson's Top Ten Worst Inaccuracies And Misstatements

2005-07-19T23:35:00.000-04:00

The Joe Wilson-Valerie Palme affair (or kerfuffle) has been back in the news. Here is a list from GOP.com of "Joe Wilson's Top Ten Worst Inaccuracies And Misstatements". Given Wilson's track record, you'd think that the Dems would be a little hesitatnt to follow him down this road again, but Rove must die! More links to come. Older posts here and here.

How Britain Harbours Terror

2005-07-19T23:28:00.000-04:00

A piece by Daniel Pipes writing in The Australian on how London has become a center for jihadists:

Thanks to the war in Iraq, much of the world sees the British Government as resolute and tough, the French one as appeasing and weak. But in another war, the one against terrorism and radical Islam, the reverse is true: France is the most stalwart nation in the West, even more so than the US, while Great Britain is the very most hapless. Consider:

Counterterrorism. UK-based terrorists have carried out operations in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kenya, Tanzania, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Israel, Morocco, Russia, Spain, and the US. Many governments - Jordanian, Egyptian, Moroccan, Spanish, French and American - have protested London's refusal to shut down its Islamist terrorist infrastructure or extradite wanted operatives. In frustration, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak publicly denounced Britain for "protecting killers". One American security group has called for Britain to be listed as a terrorism-sponsoring state.

Pipes attributes the disparity to multiculturalism - the UK has embraced it while the French cling to their own culture.

Gitmo Grovel: Enough Already

2005-06-08T23:29:00.000-04:00

Charles Krauthammer: Gitmo Grovel: Enough Already
The self-flagellation has gone far enough. We know that al Qaeda operatives are trained to charge torture when they are in detention, and specifically to charge abuse of the Koran to inflame fellow prisoners on the inside and potential sympathizers on the outside.

French "Non" Round-up - Update

2005-06-06T23:23:00.000-04:00

More reaction:

Claire Berlinski, writing from Istanbul for the Washington Post - It's History That's Tearing the E.U. Apart : Deep down, the ordinary Frenchman doesn't believe that Turks, or Eastern Europeans for that matter, cherish the values he holds most dear. Nor do the French much trust that the Germans and the British have French interests at heart. Given European history -- and given what I see around me -- I can't say I blame them.

Over the past few weeks, the pro-Europe talking heads on French television have been busy poking fun at French fears of the "proverbial Polish plumber" who is ready to steal jobs from the locals. But how the pundits can argue that he is only proverbial is beyond me. If you want to test the theory, try living in a Paris apartment that needs repainting, as mine did a few weeks ago. Get estimates. French workmen will propose to do the job for 10,000 euros. The Polish painter? He can do it for 800 euros. Tomorrow. He doesn't ask for health insurance or social security, either. And this in a country where there is already 10 percent unemployment.

If I were a French house painter or plumber, I would have voted non, too...

In all the millions of words recently written in opinion pieces in France, uttered by French television pundits and spoken by French politicians, no one has said the most obvious ones: To hell with Europe. That's right, to hell with Europe -- to hell with integration; to hell with the super-state; to hell with playing a role like the United States' on the international stage. No one has said, "It's a nutty idea. It will never work. It would put us in contact with people we've hated for thousands of years."

Intellectuals and public figures in France, from left to right, explain their votes by first expressing boundless devotion to the ideal of Europe itself: The people's vote against the constitution, they say, reflects only a tactical readjustment in the great vision. The fantasy of Europe has adopted so prominent a role in the consciousness of French intellectuals that no one will speak plainly of it. No one is prepared to express what the majority of French voters really feel.

But ask a French farmer or factory worker. You'll hear it: To hell with Europe.

David Brooks in the NY Times commenting on the economics behind the rejection - Fear and Rejection:
Forgive me for making a blunt and obvious point, but events in Western Europe are slowly discrediting large swaths of American liberalism.

Most of the policy ideas advocated by American liberals have already been enacted in Europe: generous welfare measures, ample labor protections, highly progressive tax rates, single-payer health care systems, zoning restrictions to limit big retailers, and cradle-to-grave middle-class subsidies supporting everything from child care to pension security. And yet far from thriving, continental Europe has endured a lost decade of relative decline.

Western Europeans seem to be suffering a crisis of confidence. Election results, whether in North Rhine-Westphalia or across France and the Netherlands, reveal electorates who have lost faith in their leaders, who are anxious about declining quality of life, who feel extraordinarily vulnerable to foreign competition - from the Chinese, the Americans, the Turks, even the Polish plumbers...

The Western European standard of living is about a third lower than the American standard of living, and it's sliding. European output per capita is less than that of 46 of the 50 American states and about on par with Arkansas. There is little prospect of robust growth returning any time soon...

The core fact is that the European model is foundering under the fact that billions of people are willing to work harder than the Europeans are. Europeans clearly love their way of life, but don't know how to sustain it.

This Polish plumber pops up a lot. More economic analysis of France from Anne Dumas in The Washington Post - What's American and Envied by France?: It's not exactly haute culture , but these days this is a vital topic here in France, where the unemployment rate has been stuck between 9 and 10 percent for a quarter of a century and where not a single enterprise founded here in the past 40 years has managed to break into the ranks of the 25 biggest French companies. By comparison, 19 of today's 25 largest U.S. companies didn't exist four decades ago. That's why France is looking to the United States for lessons. And it's why it was meant as a compliment when the French media dubbed the former finance minister, newly appointed interior minister and potential president Nicolas Sarkozy "the American."

For years, France has been pouring bad old economic policy into new bottles. "France has not solved the crises of the 20th century, including rampant unemployment, and it has to face the challenges of the next one: globalization and a new kind of world terrorism. The country has lost 2 million industrial jobs in the last 25 years," explains Nicolas Baverez, a talented historian, lawyer and op-ed writer, who wrote a book on the decline of France. Although the situation is dire, France lingers in what is matter-of-factly branded "French immobilism."

French "Non" Round-up

2005-06-05T23:29:00.000-04:00

George Will - A Reverberating French "non" - Europe's elites, nearly unanimous in their desire to "pool" nations' sovereignties in EU institutions responsive only to those elites, warned that a French rejection might plunge Europe into bloody chaos akin to the dissolution of Yugoslavia -- perhaps even another Holocaust. Such synthetic hysteria revealed the elites' contempt for, and fear of, the European publics that the constitution was designed to further marginalize.

The so-called constitution is actually just an incoherent jumble of policies -- see above, and don't miss the protocol concerning the Sami people's reindeer husbandry -- for an incoherent jumble of vastly different nations. Supposedly, a single nation's rejection prevents the constitution from coming into effect. But some EU officials, with characteristic mendacity, hope to press on, get 24 ratifications, then force the French to keep revoting until they produce the politically correct answer. Fortunately, as this is written Tuesday morning, the Dutch seem about to render an even more emphatic "no" today.

French "no" voters were surly about their surly president, Jacques Chirac, who favors admitting Turkey to the EU. Worried about their sluggish economy, the French fret that after last year's eastward expansion of the EU by the admission of 10 low-wage countries, French jobs will move east and low-wage workers -- the dreaded "Polish plumber" -- will move to France. The cognitive dissonance of the French is striking: They wish to lead a Europe from which they are effectively insulated.

It is fine for people who are not French to admire from afar how "civilized" the French are in cherishing their "way of life" -- short workweeks, many weeks of vacations, laws "protecting" labor by making it difficult to fire people. But those laws, by making employers reluctant to hire, help explain France's double-digit unemployment.

Cast a cold eye on this way of life -- this amalgam of desires for increasing affluence and leisure and weight in the world -- and "civilized" looks like a euphemism for "childish." Children are unaware of the costs of things, and the incompatibility of many desires.

Gerard Baker in the London Times - European civilisation has sown the seeds of its own decline and fall -

These twin threats — the economic challenge of fiercely competitive globalisation and a political challenge to the culturally deracinated, splintering societies — are driving Europe into debilitating turmoil.

Interestingly, these threats converge again today in modern Turkey, an economically dynamic nation of 70 million Muslims, whose hopes of ending centuries of geographical ambivalence and joining the European club were dealt a final shattering blow this week. More important, though, it was these two forces, which lay directly behind respectively the French and Dutch “no” votes, that have intensified the mood of crisis.

In their different ways, the two referendums were surely symbolic events, marking the culmination of a decade or more of European disintegration and decline

It is probably no accident that this process began just as Europe reached the pinnacle of its achievements. Forty-five years after the Second World War, continental Western Europe could plausibly claim to have created a kind of postmodern nirvana — a half-continent-wide zone of unparalleled prosperity, cushioned by an apparently permanent peace among some of the most historically murderous peoples on Earth.

Under its expensive welfare programmes, paid for by a high level of productivity in traditional manufacturing industries, Europeans enjoyed a pampered life. With the Soviet threat gone, this accelerating prosperity further encouraged them to renounce the idea of war and military coercion, and they settled down to enjoy an assured future ascendancy.

By the beginning of the 1990s, with America in apparent decline, it seemed a reasonable bet that this extraordinary model of economic and political success would become an example to the world. But external and internal forces were already undermining this paradise.

In economics, the forces of globalisation unleashed by an emergent Asia and an information technology revolution were reviving the American eco-nomy and giving birth to new, dynamic competitors. This speed-of-light competitive world of the microchip and flexible capital markets would require nimbleness, and an end to the protections that seemed to have helped Europe to become the success story of the 1980s. The Anglo-Saxon economies, in response to their own economic crises of the 1970s, had prepared themselves for this new world with painful but necessary reforms.

But Europe looked inward, not outward. Instead of focusing on what was needed – American and British-style labour reforms, tax cuts and deregulation — Europe embarked on a quix- otic exercise. It sought to weld a dozen or more disparate countries into an unbreakable economic union, all settled snug and warm under the fraying comfort blanket of expensive welfare systems.

In the political field too, even at its zenith, Europe had been surrendering the tools that had given it peace and harmony. It owed its years of peace not to some solemn intra-European comity but to the hard steel of US firepower, primed to defend Europe from the Soviet Union. But by the early 1990s, having shed its bloody past, Europe had lost the moral will as well as the capacity to face down new threats at home and abroad to the freedoms it cherished. European governments cut defence budgets and embraced peace as a strategy. This malaise was clearly evident in the Balkans in the early 1990s, where murderous inter-ethnic strife was cheerfully tolerated for years.

When its American ally was attacked in September 2001, Europe gamely offered to reciprocate for US protection in the Cold War, but most European nations lacked the military resources to turn that promise into anything more than tokens.

Then in Iraq in 2003, confronted with a tyrant who had repeatedly thumbed his nose at the international system that Europe supposedly revered, it instinctively recoiled, and a softened-up intellectual elite turned on the Americans instead.

At home, the same moral relativism, bred by years of pampered prosperity, was creating its own destructive forces. Again, egged on by intellectual elites, Europeans were encouraged to despise the civilisation that had nurtured them. The nation state was pronounced a hateful anachronism that had to be replaced by a pan-European superstate. The West’s defining values of enlightened tolerance and freedom were not superior to anyone else’s. Crime was the fault of its own unfair societies.

Immigrants who came to its countries were not to be forced to live by its own rules but by theirs, even if that meant “honour” killings and jihad. The effort to produce tolerant, multicultural societies resulted in the paradox of radical liberal democracies such as the Netherlands enthusiastically nurturing forces at home that sought to destroy the freedoms in which they were being incubated.

This week, voters in France and the Netherlands sounded the alarm. Characteristically, while the Dutch seem to have got the message about the social costs of its ruinous ultra-liberalism, the French have got the wrong end of the stick and want to escape from globalisation behind high walls of social protection.

But the challenge is now upon Europe. The longer it puts off the inevitable reforms — economic, social and political — the harder it will get. And if it chooses to defer a real response for ever, the greatest civilisation in the history of the planet will simply continue to sink beneath the waves of its own economic irrelevance and moral ennui.

Victor David Hanson writing in the Washington Post - Death throes . . . : The EU constitution -- and its promise of a new Europe -- supposedly offered a corrective to the Anglo-American strain of Western civilization. More government, higher taxes, richer entitlements, pacifism, statism and atheism would make a more humane and powerful new Continent of more than 400 million to outpace a retrograde United States.

Instead, Europe faces a declining population, unassimilated minorities, low growth, high unemployment and an inability to defend itself, militarily or morally. Somehow the directorate of the European Union has figured out how to have too few citizens while having too many of them out of work...

In fact, 2005 is a culmination of dying ideas. Despite the boasts and threats, almost every political alternative to Western liberalism over the last quarter-century is crashing or already in flames.

French Democracy in Action

2005-05-23T22:25:00.000-04:00

The London Sunday Times uncovers Chirac's secret weapon in assuring a "Oui" vote on the EU Constitution: Chirac counts on jungle tribes to swing EU vote:

AMONG the Wayampi Indians it is not uncommon for children to give birth at 10 and become grandparents in their twenties. They hunt and fish in red loincloths. Their favourite food is smoked alligator. They are also among Europe’s most civic-minded citizens.

Apparently, Chirac and the EU are courting nominal European voters in the French overseas territories in a frantic attempt to get the draft constitution passed:

The Wayampi are among the most pampered “Europeans” anywhere. Their new landing stage on the river Oyapock was paid for by Brussels. The EU also funded the school in Comapi, whose big moment was a visit in 1997 from President Jacques Chirac to inaugurate the local dirt airstrip.

Chirac no doubt wishes the unpredictable French could be more like the Wayampi. They are expected to turn out in big numbers to vote “yes”.

Pampered, yes, but qualified to vote?

Many speak only rudimentary French and have little understanding of qualified majority voting, but an election is always a welcome occasion for a gathering in this alligator-infested corner of French Guiana in South America...

...in a television message to the Dom Toms, broadcast from the Elysée Palace, he (Chirac)reminded voters how much they benefit from EU money: Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana and La Réunion received £2.2 billion in aid between 2000 and 2006 and the £34m received by French Guiana in the past year amounts to about £650 a voter.

And its not just French Guiana. There are 1.4m voters in France's overseas territories, including those in the "...Wallis and Futuna islands in the Pacific, where three kings rule by fiat..."

According to the Times, overwhelming support in these territories helped the Maastricht treaty gain a slim margin of 540,000 votes back in 1992. With so many in France claiming that Bush stole the 2000 election, wouldn't it be ironic if victory for a united Europe came from the swamps of South America?

Chirac is leaning on the foreign territories since polls at home are showing the "Non" vote running at 53% despite a heavy media campaign in favor of the constitution, a campaign that has drawn criticism from some French reporters: "This is a grotesque situation," says Jacques Cotta, a well-known TV correspondent for France 2 who is one of the leaders of the campaign for fair coverage in the lead-up to the referendum.

"Publicly-owned media in France are broadcasting sheer propaganda to the public, and this absence of any pluralism or any attempt to represent and discuss the point of view of those who want to vote No to the Treaty is profoundly undemocratic"
As the BBC reports, over 15,000 people have signed an on-line petition protesting the biased coverage. France's best-known Eurosceptic MP, Philippe de Villiers, has warned his supporters that they face what he called an "incredible bludgeoning" by the political and media elite.

Move Over Keith Olbermann!

2005-05-11T22:32:00.000-04:00

Another sportscaster-turned-political-pundit has joined the tinfoil hat brigade. Jim Lampley says George Bush's theft of the 2004 election is The Biggest Story of Our Lives! Bigger than the theft in 2000? Bigger than ESPN's Biggest Sports Controversies? Wow - that is big! Lampley can't believe that the exit polls were wrong and sees the sinister handiwork of Karl Rove (or is this more appropriate):

Karl Rove isn't capable of conceiving and executing such a grandiose crime? Wake up. They did it. The silence of traditional media on this subject is enough to establish their newfound bankruptcy. The revolution will have to start here.

(Don't worry Jim... there is another.)

Luckily Byron York is around to point out some facts, including the admission by head pollster Warren Mitofsky that the exit polling was seriously flawed. As Mr. York points out from the Washington Posts' coverage:

Interviewing for the 2004 exit polls was the most inaccurate of any in the past five presidential elections as procedural problems compounded by the refusal of large numbers of Republican voters to be surveyed led to inflated estimates of support for John F. Kerry, according to a report released yesterday by the research firms responsible for the flawed surveys.

If Mr. Lampley is looking for voter fraud, Mr. York points to Wisconsin, a state John Kerry won by only 11,384 votes - less than a tenth of Bush's margin in Ohio. As Powerline documents, the hijinks there include Democratic dirty tricks, 4,609 "extra" ballots in Milwaukee and 70,000 election day voter registrations. Nothing suspicious there.

Hardly "Fearless"

2005-05-10T01:21:00.000-04:00

Harry Stein on comedian Jon Stewart in The Wall Street Journal: Laugh Winger:

...the fair-minded viewer might find the half-hour show intermittently humorous, but he won't detect anything "fearless" or even especially original in it. In truth, Mr. Stewart's elevation to near-iconic status says more about those doing the elevating than about the comedian himself. His "bravery" and much-vaunted grasp of political nuance consists mostly of his embrace of every reflexive assumption shared by every litmus-tested liberal holding forth at every chic Manhattan dinner party.

Those assumptions cover everything from the religious right (scary) to easy sex (yummy), but Mr. Stewart's No. 1 obsession, like that of many of his fans, is George W. Bush. Almost every major event Mr. Stewart deals with, foreign or domestic, is an excuse for Bush derision. Depending on the story at hand, the president is a reckless cowboy or a devious schemer, an inept fool or an immoral knave. Pressed, Mr. Stewart would probably be comfortable with all of the above. Often he will simply show a brief clip of the president speaking, then silently react, his look showing bewilderment or dismay, as his audience, their own contempt for all things Bush once again confirmed, erupts in laughter.

I'd have to agree with this. The Daily Show can be very funny at times, but making fun of President Bush is hardly an act of courage. Bring back Craig Kilborne!

One interesting fact: according to Mr. Stein, Frank Rich has written 16 stories on Jon Stewart. He only joined the show in 1999, so that's almost three stories a year. A quick Google search seems to miss most of them, but the earliest date found is 2003. You'd figure an important writer like Mr. Rich would be able to come up with some new material.

George Will on America's Therapeutic Culture

2005-04-28T00:14:00.000-04:00

In the Scottsdale, Ariz., Unified School District office, the receptionist used to be called a receptionist. Now she is "director of first impressions." The happy director says, "Everyone wants to be important." Scottsdale school bus drivers now are "transporters of learners." A school official says such terminological readjustment is "a positive affirmation." Which beats a negative affirmation.

Manufacturers of pens and markers report a surge in teachers' demands for purple ink pens. When marked in red, corrections of students' tests seem so awfully judgmental. At a Connecticut school, parents consider red markings "stressful." A Pittsburgh principal favors more "pleasant-feeling tones." An Alaska teacher says substituting purple for red is compassionate pedagogy, a shift from "Here's what you need to improve on" to "Here's what you have done right."
Read about this menace here: Have a Nice Day, or Else

Facts Behind the Filibuster Debate

2005-04-28T00:12:00.000-04:00

Wendy E. Long provides some background on the judicial filibuster debate (the problem the "nuclear option" is aimed at) in a Washington Times Op Ed piece: Filibuster Myth-Busters. Among the facts Ms. Long points out: the filibuster is nowhere in the Constitution.

Other Commentary

Blogs for Bush

Understanding Jihad

2005-04-27T23:28:00.000-04:00

Mark Gould, writing in Policy Review, looks at the theological underpinnings of "holy war" in Understanding Jihad. Mr. Gould contrasts Islam's focus on eschatology, or final judgment, with Christianity's focus on soteriology, or salvation.

This difference, and Islam's legalistic structure, emphasizes external actions, rather than internal beliefs, as the basis for achieving paradise: According to some Muslims, including Maududi, while Christians have the obligation to believe, Muslims have, as an aspect of their belief, the obligation to act, to impose and live in terms of shari'ah, which, they believe, frees all to believe what they will, but most important, frees them to believe what is true, Islam. Thus, freedom of religion for many Muslims requires the imposition of shari'ah in an Islamic state, both of which are necessary for correct practice. Freedom of religion for Christians, in contrast, requires only that the Koranic injunction not to coerce belief be implemented. While from a Christian perspective the asymmetry seems outrageous, from within a Muslim perspective, there is no inconsistency.
Gould argues that Jihad is not, as some suggest, an aberration but rather is a true tradition within Islam and is understandable within its structure as a "short-cut" to their eternal reward:

Those in the 'subculture of Islamism' might not participate in 'jihad', but persons within a 'subculture of Islamism' are not hostile to it.

Islamists share the conviction that they know how they must act to garner God's favor. One obligation, the neglected obligation that they assume, is jihad, war to impose shari'ah, first on their own societies and then on other societies. This obligation stems from an authentic tradition within Islam. They have not hijacked Islam; instead, they are working out their convictions, convictions with a history that reaches into Islam's formative years.

Their motivation stems from the eschatological premises of their religion, from their certainty that God has laid down for them a straight path and that if they follow that path they will, at the Last Judgment, be deemed worthy of everlasting life in paradise. The promise of an immediate entrée into heaven for the martyrs of jihad reinforces their motivation to comply with their understanding of God's will. They may not know whether God has predetermined them to die or to gain victory in jihad, but they know that in the first instance their reward is immediate, while in the second instance they have enhanced their chances of being rewarded at the Day of Judgment.

Other Commentary on this Article

One Hand Clapping

What's the Point of Rules if You Can Simply Say You Forgot Them?

2005-04-17T18:08:00.000-04:00

Earlier this month, the NY Times ran an exclusive on Columbia University's internal report on anti-semitism. Columbia passed an early copy to the Times on the condition that it not follow-up with the school, a journalistic no-no. The Times' excuse: "Under The Times' policy on unidentified sources, writers are not permitted to forgo follow-up reporting in exchange for information. In this case, editors and the writer did not recall the policy and agreed to delay additional reporting until the document had become public."
I'm told that this rule is a basic of journalism, so is the excuse believable?
(Hattip: Best of the Web Today)

Europe's Demographic Destiny

2005-04-16T22:59:00.000-04:00

Pavel Kohout's Where Have All the Children Gone? at Tech Central Station, takes a look at the policies that are partially behind Europe's falling birth rates:

"State pensions systems eliminated the natural economic incentive to have children. At the same time, the welfare state is an enormously costly luxury that has to be financed from taxes. High payroll-tax and social security contributions reduce the earning capacity of people in fertile age. Thus, they push down birth rates as well...Today, children no longer represent investments; instead, they have become pets - objects of luxury consumption."

Gay Marriage and Unintended Consequences - addendum

2005-04-15T22:17:00.000-04:00

One great quote that I overlooked from Asymmetrical Information's "really, really, really long post about gay marriage that does not, in the end, support one side or the other": "Indeed, to this day, I find the reformist side much more persuasive than the conservative side, except for one thing, which is that the conservatives turned out to be right."
The same can be said about music. I always loved The Clash and Rage Against the Machine even though I thought they were commies. In fact, I'd bet that a lot of people that became communists around the turn of the century did so because of "The Internationalle" - that's still a pretty good song for riling people up.

Gay Marriage and Unintended Consequences

2005-04-15T21:57:00.000-04:00

There's a very thoughtful post about the unintended consequences of meddling with complex systems at Asymmetrical Information:. The author warns that its long and doesn't reach a conclusion, but is one of the better posts I've seen on the subject. The bottom line: some things are very complex and before we start messing around with them we should make sure we understand the consequences. One very appropriate example for Tax Day: "
However, I am bothered by this specific argument, which I have heard over and over from the people I know who favor gay marriage laws. I mean, literally over and over; when they get into arguments, they just repeat it, again and again. "I will get married even if marriage is expanded to include gay people; I cannot imagine anyone up and deciding not to get married because gay people are getting married; therefore, the whole idea is ridiculous and bigoted."

They may well be right. Nonetheless, libertarians should know better. The limits of your imagination are not the limits of reality. Every government programme that libertarians have argued against has been defended at its inception with exactly this argument.

Let me take three major legal innovations, one of them general, two specific to marriage.

The first, the general one, is well known to most hard-core libertarians, but let me reprise it anyway. When the income tax was initially being debated, there was a suggestion to put in a mandatory cap; I believe the level was 10 percent.

Don't be ridiculous, the Senator's colleagues told him. Americans would never allow an income tax rate as high as ten percent. They would revolt! It is an outrage to even suggest it!

Many actually fought the cap on the grounds that it would encourage taxes to grow too high, towards the cap. The American people, they asserted, could be well counted on to keep income taxes in the range of a few percentage points.

Oops."
Read the whole thing - it's well worth the time. (Hattip: Instapundit)

If Not Vast, Then at Least Well Funded

2005-04-07T23:44:00.000-04:00

One more factoid from Jacob Laskin's review of Byron York's new book "The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy": "Mr. York puts paid to the meme that Republicans are the party bankrolled by the rich. Mr. York records that 92% of contributions of $1 million or more went to Democrats."
So much for Republicans being the party of the rich.

The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy...well not that vast

2005-04-05T23:21:00.000-04:00

Byron York has a new book out titled "The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy", about "the biggest, richest, and best organized movement in American political history". Jacob Laskin reviews it today in the WSJ:

"All the usual suspects are here: Bush-bashing billionaire George Soros; politicos like Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean; squadrons of Democratic strategists and spin-men; left-wing luminaries like Michael Moore and Al Franken...
Beneath the patina of confidence, however, the left-wing conspiracy often seems pitiable, as desperate as it is determined. Above all, its members are angry--at the perceived injustice of the 2000 presidential election, at the prospect of long-term Republican governance, at John Kerry's inept campaigning. Even, it appears, at being called angry."

Elsewhere at OpinionJournal, John Fund points out that the left wing conspiracy isn't that vast, or at least not as vast as it was, electorally: "In 2000, Mr. Bush carried 228 congressional districts to Al Gore's 207 on his way to one of the closest victories in American history. This year Mr. Bush carried 255 congressional districts, nearly six in 10."
While David Brooks in the NY Times posits the cause for the growth in the vast right wing conspiracy: "Conservatives have not triumphed because they have built a disciplined and efficient message machine. Conservatives have thrived because they are split into feuding factions that squabble incessantly. As these factions have multiplied, more people have come to call themselves conservatives because they've found one faction to agree with."
The times they are a'changing...

Why the Left Loves Canada

2005-04-05T22:37:00.000-04:00

How about government censorship of the press and speech for a start? No wonder the socialist utopia to the North is attracting so many disenchanted Kerry voters - it's the next best thing to Harvard! Actually, its probably better since Larry Summers would have been jailed up there.

The Left's Culture of Death

2005-04-04T23:38:00.000-04:00

In the period leading up to Terri Schiavo's death there's been a lot of talk about the Right's "Culture of Life" and the Left's "Culture of Death". Most of it is overblown rhetoric caused by the polarization in America today, but I can't help thinking that there's an element of truth to it.

Back in the beginning of March, the NY Times ran a review of a special on the National Geographic Channel called "In the Womb", a technologically updated version of one of those "miracle of birth" shows that have been around for years. Ordinary enough, but here's how Times critic Virginia Heffernan describes it:

Full-frontal images of a vagina are available on cable Sunday night, but they come at a price. You have to watch a bloody, hairy baby burst through that vagina, and before that you have to watch the little creature in utero, growing in all its Operation Rescue propaganda detail, in the National Geographic Channel's latest unveiling of the hideous miracle of life.

(emphasis added)

Isn't this language a little extreme? And this is a favorable review of the special. The animosity toward birth is palpable and is to be expected if one views the process, as Ms. Heffernan (and a good portion of the Left) clearly does, through the prism of abortion. In this twisted view, the birth of a child isn't something to be marveled at, but rather some hideous mistake - isn't this what abortion is around to prevent?

Proponents of abortion raise many justifications, but those dealing with "a woman's right to choose" somehow ring hollow - one person's rights end where another's begin and if a fetus is a human being then it has the same rights as its mother and clearly its right to life trumps its mother's right to choose.

So other justifications are needed; that a fetus isn't human; it's not aware; that it has no separate existence; that's its continued survival depends on another and that other had the right to terminate that existence.

These are the same justifications that, in turn, required abortion proponents to argue for Terri Schiavo's death; she wasn't human any longer; she was in a persistent vegetative state; her continued survival depended on another and he had a right to terminate it.

I'm not inventing this perspective out of nothing; Ms. Heffernan makes it clear in her second paragraph:

It exhibits a minimum of politics, probably because it appears to have been made in England, where the acknowledgement that humans in the womb are complex, dreaming, pain-experiencing, memory-having, walk-practicing, music-enjoying entities does not instantly put you in the same camp as doctor assassins and purveyors of ''The Silent Scream.''

And there's the rub. This is why this show elicited such a reaction; because it shows what "humans in the womb", not fetuses, not parasitic clumps of cells but humans, experience before they're born. Simply admitting this strikes a blow against the justifications for abortion.

The tool used to elicit this response is the new generation of "4D" Ultrasound:

The ultrasounds are in four dimensions, meaning that they show not only shaded, nuanced, highly detailed images of the fetus, but also her (it's female) moving in real time. The downside is that the images on the fancy ultrasounds look kind of warty and off-color, not like the cute black-and-white blurs on regular ultrasounds.

Here again, we see the perspective imposed by abortion: blurry black and white images on regular ultrasounds are better than "warty and off-color" images on the new 4D ultrasounds. How could that be? Because regular ultrasound dehumanizes the fetus - it's not a human being, just a cute blur. For abortion proponents, less is more.

George Will on Justice Kennedy

2005-03-08T22:58:00.001-05:00

George Will on Justice Kennedy's opinion on the death penalty for minors:

While discussing America's "evolving standards of decency," Kennedy announces: "It is proper that we acknowledge the overwhelming weight of international opinion against the juvenile death penalty." Why is that proper when construing the U.S. Constitution? He is remarkably unclear about that. He says two international conventions forbid executions of persons who committed their crimes as juveniles. That, he thinks, somehow illuminates the meaning of the Eighth Amendment.

Kennedy evidently considers it unimportant that the United States attached to one of the conventions language reserving the right "to impose capital punishment . . . for crimes committed by persons below eighteen years of age." The United States never ratified the other convention Kennedy cites. Kennedy the roving moralist sniffily disapproves of that nonratification as evidence that America is committing the cardinal sin of being out of step with "the world community."
Regardless of your feelings on the decision reached, Justice Kennedy's use of "international opinion" in reaching it was inappropriate. Using French law as precedent is no different than using Saudi Arabian law. And as for "international opinion" back in the 30's the world was sliding towards fascism, in the 60's it was communism. Do we really want that as the basis for Supreme Court decisions?

Read the whole thing here: Wrong on All Counts (washingtonpost.com)

Revolution

2005-03-03T19:13:00.000-05:00

Michael Ledeen has always taken the long view of things, tracing the events of 9/11 back to the mullah's takeover of Iran back in the 70's. Now, writing in National Review Online, he identifies a second sweeping trend that dates back to the same time, an "Age of the Second Democratic Revolution", that began with the death of Franco, swept through Portugal and Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union and now, after smoldering for 12 years under the indifference or hostility of the first President Bush and President Clinton, has burst out in Georgia, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Palestinian Authority and Lebanon. He urges us to seize the opportunity in Revolution: Our most lethal weapon against the tyrants is freedom, and it is now spreading on the wings of democratic revolution. It would be tragic if we backed off now, when revolution is gathering momentum for a glorious victory. We must be unyielding in our demand that the peoples of the Middle East design their own polities, and elect their own leaders. The first step, as it has been in both Afghanistan and Iraq, is a national referendum to choose the form of government. In Iran, the people should be asked if they want an Islamic republic. In Syria, if they want a Baathist state. In Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Libya, if they want more of the same. We should not be deterred by the cynics who warn that freedom will make things worse, because the ignorant masses will opt for the fantasmagorical caliphate of the increasingly irrelevant Osama bin Laden. Mubarak and Qadaffi and Assad and Khamenei are arresting democrats, not Islamists, and the women of Saudi Arabia are not likely to demand to remain shrouded for the rest of their lives.

Faster, please. The self-proclaimed experts have been wrong for generations. This is a revolutionary moment. Go for it.

Iowahawk on The Supreme Court

2005-03-02T23:42:00.000-05:00

Iowahawk takes the recent trend by the Supreme Court to its logical conclusion:

In a far-reaching decision that will likely create complicated consequences for the American livestock and wedding-planning industries, the Supreme Court this morning ruled 5-4 that all US marriage dowries "must include three non-diseased oxen."

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy cited "the weight of the expansive penumbra surrounding the historically emerging and prevailing opinions of tribal shamans from Lesotho to Myanamar" in issuing the historic ruling in American Cattleman Association vs. Modern Bride, Helverson, et al.

In a scathing and sometimes caustic dissent, Judge Antonin Scalia wrote that "Holy. Freakin'. Shit."

The best thing President Bush could do to alert people to the threat of both radical Islam and and out-of-control judiciary that, having exhausted the possibilities in the penumbra of the US Constitution, is now cherry-picking foreign laws, is to recess-appoint a wahabbi inman to the Court to fill the next vacancy.

Not that I'm conflating the two threats, but having a Supreme Court Justice who decides cases based on European law is little different in theory from having one who decides cases based on Sharia. Not only would such an appointment point out the perils of such jurisprudence, it would shed some light on the "religion of peace".

"My theory of the Cold War is that we win and they lose."

2005-03-02T23:13:00.000-05:00

Steve Conover at The Skeptical Optimist, writing about Democratic efforts to avoid giving the Bush administration any credit for the anti-Syrian protests in Lebanon, likens it to similar efforts to not give President Reagan credit for the fall of the Soviet Union, and comes up with a great Reagan Quote:

"My theory of the Cold War is that we win and they lose. What do you think about that?"
Ronald Reagan in 1977, to his future national security advisor Richard Allen

Mr. Conover's piece is here:The Skeptical Optimist: Face it, Ed: It's a Duck (hattip: Instapundit). The quote is drawn form a longer piece in the Wall Street Journal by Peter Robinson on the occassion of President Reagan's death this past Summer, which can be found here: 'Morning Again in America'.

Six months ago, the Left was warning that Bush was a wild-eyed optimist with some kind of messianic vision that elections in Iraq would lead to the spread of democracy in the Middle East. Now that's it's actually beginning to happen, he had nothing to do with it. With luck like that, the President should give up his day job and move to Vegas.

...but don't expect to see the tape!

2005-02-12T00:43:00.000-05:00

Jim Geraghty at TKS has been all over the Eason Jordan story and has a good round-up here.

Mr. Geraghty posts a question from Sisyphus asking why Jordan didn't simply ask for the tape of his comments to be released, on the theory that"there was always a chance that the public reaction would be, "oh, it's not bad as I thought it would be.", and then answers it: UPDATE: Well, that didn't take long. William Boykin, on the discussion board of Jay Rosen's blog: "Eason Jordan has just been tire-necklaced by a bloodthirsty group of utopian, bible-thumping knuckledraggers that believe themselves to be bloggers but are really just a streetgang. Time Warner/CNN is spineless if not completely corrupted by its shareholders' thirst for petro-dollars. It is now clear that all pretenses to journalistic 'objectivity' benefit the torturing, gulag-building blood-cult known Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld's Republican Party."
The reason the tape hasn't been released, and is unlikely to be released, is that it would threaten Mr. Jordan's status as a Martyr of the Left. Without the tape, Jordan is a victim of the VRWC and its latest weapon the blogosphere. If the tape is released, and Mr. Jordan's comments are as reported he loses his martyrdom. Instead, he'd be just another Euro-wannabe, another America-hating American currying favor from the international elite and the enemies of his country by defaming those brave enough to fight for it. With the tape released, Mr. Jordan is a Dixie Chick.

Eason Jordan is Out at CNN

2005-02-11T23:50:00.000-05:00

Fox News is reporting that Eason Jordan has resigned. Chalk up another scalp for the blogosphere, which has been the main source of coverage on the controversy.

In his column posted at National Review Online today, Larry Kudlow, one of the few MSM figures who have given the story play, gave kudos to the blogosphere. Kudlow had Senators George Allen, Jeffrey Sessions, and Norman Coleman on his show discussing Jordan's comments at Davos and attributed their awareness of the comments to blog coverage:

Importantly, each was aware of the story.This tawdry tale has been reported, for the most part, only on the blogosphere, again pointing out just how strong this alternative Internet medium has become. The blogosphere is relentless: It rightfully hammered Eason Jordan and CNN from day one and refuses to stop. We’ve seen this before, of course. Easongate comes only a few months after Rathergate, the blogosphere-led campaign that ensured the dismissal of producer Mary Mapes from CBS and Dan Rather’s hasty departure.The blogosphere has gained near immediate influence and credibility with its ability to widely disseminate alternative media coverage. (These days, “alternative” more often than not means “true.”) Powerhouse bloggers such as John Hinderaker, Glenn Reynolds, and Hugh Hewitt, among many others, have flexed their muscles and badly bruised CNN on this story.
Instapundit has numerous links to comments here. Powerline has further comments and links here, including a nice recap by Michele Malkin.

North Korea - Fast Enough?

2005-02-04T17:17:00.000-05:00

A story in the Sunday Times takes a look inside North Korea and suggests that Kim Jong-il's regime may be in its death throes:
Some of those interviewed believe the “Dear Leader”, Kim Jong-il, has already lost his personal authority to a clique of generals and party cadres. Without any public announcement, governments from Tokyo to Washington are preparing for a change of regime.

The death of Kim’s favourite mistress last summer, a security clampdown on foreign aid workers and a reported assassination attempt in Austria last November against the leader’s eldest son, Kim Jong-nam, have all heightened the sense of disintegration...

The dictator’s favoured heir apparent, his son Kim Jong-chol, 23, who was educated in Geneva, is reported to have staged a shoot-out inside a palace with Kim Jang-hyun, 34, an illegitimate son of Kim Il-sung, father of the dictator and founder of the dynasty.

Rumours of rivalry and bloodshed have multiplied since the Dear Leader’s last meetings with dignitaries from Russia and China last September. Since then Kim has vanished from view.

Analysts in Seoul say that in recent propaganda pictures the bouffant-haired dictator is wearing the same clothes as in photographs from two years ago, suggesting that they may have been taken then. Observers await Kim’s official birthday, February 16, to see if the state media accord him the usual fawning adulation.

The article offers a glimpse inside one of the most isolated societies on earth, one dominated by the cult of Kim's father "The Great Leader":
Fifty miles south of the border we watched as schoolchildren obediently filed out in a shrieking gale to follow their teachers in pilgrimage along the seashore to a shrine to Kim Il-sung, who is still revered as the “Great Leader”. Lined up outside a fisherman’s cottage where the Great Leader stayed in 1953, they listened to a revolutionary harangue by a woman teacher with more attention than most seven to 12-year-olds might muster. They had marched two miles, wrapped up like small bundles against a wind that blew off the Sea of Japan so bitterly that the spray froze on the lines of the fishing boats. It was –15C that day.
These are children whose average weight and height after years of malnutrition are 20% less than those of their equals in South Korea, according to the United Nations. Their rations were recently cut from 300g to 250g of staple food a day.
The article attributes the turmoil in part to President Bush's re-election:

"Bush’s re-election dealt a blow to Kim, 62, who had gambled on a win by John Kerry, the Democratic candidate. Kim used a strategy of divide and delay to drag out nuclear talks with the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea through 2004.

Kim lost his bet and now faces four more years of Bush, who says that he “loathes” the North Korean leader and has vowed to strip him of atomic weapons."

The end can't come soon enough.

Give 'em Hell General Mattis

2005-02-04T15:34:00.000-05:00

Speaking during a panel discussion hosted by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association on Tuesday, decorated Marine Corps General James Mattis reportedly said the following:

"Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. ... It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling."

He added, "You go into Afghanistan (news - web sites), you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."

The remarks have created a minor kerfuffle among the politically correct, but isn't this the type of guy we want out there - someone willing and eager to kill bad guys? From the General's remarks, its seems he's clearly speaking about Taliban thugs, not innocent civilians and don't we want those thugs dead? The left seemed pretty enthusiastic about John Kerry's "heroics" in Vietnam and I didn't see much hand wringing over the account of his leaping from his boat to gun down a wounded enemy combatant.

As Jonah Goldberg, writing in The Corner, points out, its not as if soldiers (and marines) never spoke like this before. General Mattis has a long way to go before matching General Patton, who once told his troops in a speech:

"We'll win this war, but we'll win it only by fighting and by showing the Germans that we've got more guts than they have; or ever will have. We're not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we're going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We're going to murder those lousy Hun cocksuckers by the bushel-fucking-basket. War is a bloody, killing business. You've got to spill their blood, or they will spill yours. Rip them up the belly. Shoot them in the guts. When shells are hitting all around you and you wipe the dirt off your face and realize that instead of dirt it's the blood and guts of what once was your best friend beside you, you'll know what to do!"

AP's story on the comments comes with the typical left-wing, anti-American slant that would make Reuters proud. Take their headline for example "General Counseled Over 'Fun to Shoot' Talk". What does "counseled' imply? Psychiatric counseling? Sensitivity counseling? No. He is "being counseled to watch his words more carefully".

The story also contains the disingenuous remark that General Mattis "also made fun of the manhood of Afghans". Again, its clear from the comments quoted that the reference was to thugs "who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil". Nice to see AP standing up for the abuse of women. Look for them to defend the stoning of an adulteress any day now.

Finally, to put a bow on it, the story concludes with the mandatory quote from a CAIR spokesman: "We do not need generals who treat the grim business of war as a sporting event," said the council's executive director, Nihad Awad. "These disturbing remarks are indicative of an apparent indifference to the value of human life." This coming from a man who's coreligionists blow themselves up and say they pray for death. AP identifies CAIR as a "Muslim civil liberties group" - funny I don't recall seeing any CAIR condemnations of the human rights abuses that occur every day in the Muslim world.

Other Commentary

Blogs for Bush said the same thing a day earlier.

Macubin Thomas Owens has some good comments up on the Ashbrook Center's No Left Turns posting, citing General Mattis' message to his troops as they prepared to cross over into Iraq which included this passage: Our fight is not with the Iraqi people, nor is it with members of the Iraqi army who choose to surrender. While we will move swiftly and aggressively against those who resisit, we will treat all others with decency, demonstrating chivalry and soldierly compassion for people who have endured a lifetime under Saddam’s oppression.
Best of the Web picked up the item today and has a link to the Reuters story on the comments, which, surprisingly, is much more balanced than AP's. You guys at Reuters need to stay on your toes - if this keeps up AP might replace you as Taranto's "news service" of choice.

And in other news, OJ is still searching for the real killers

2005-02-04T13:46:00.000-05:00

Via Reuters:

Annan Pledges to Get to Truth in Oil-For-Food Scandal

"Obviously there were some hard knocks in the report and we are concerned about it," Annan said. "This is why we intend to take action promptly."

Those "hard knocks" would involve allegations that UN personnel aided Saddam in the theft of billions from the Oil for Food Program they were supposedly administering.

I guess its the fact that this theft led to the suffering and deaths of perhaps thousands of Iraqis who were deprived of the food an medicine those stolen dollars were intended to supply that makes them so "hard".

Still no word from Annan regarding the unkind words directed at the UN for turning a blind eye to the genocide in Rwanda and the Sudan.

Faster, please.

2005-01-20T17:31:00.000-05:00

Headline from The Scotsman:

CIA gives grim warning on European prospects

THE CIA has predicted that the European Union will break-up within 15 years unless it radically reforms its ailing welfare systems.

The report by the intelligence agency, which forecasts how the world will look in 2020, warns that Europe could be dragged into economic decline by its ageing population. It also predicts the end of Nato and post-1945 military alliances.

In a devastating indictment of EU economic prospects, the report warns: "The current EU welfare state is unsustainable and the lack of any economic revitalisation could lead to the splintering or, at worst, disintegration of the EU, undermining its ambitions to play a heavyweight international role."

It adds that the EU’s economic growth rate is dragged down by Germany and its restrictive labour laws. Reforms there - and in France and Italy to lesser extents - remain key to whether the EU as a whole can break out of its "slow-growth pattern".

Reflecting growing fears in the US that the pain of any proper reform would be too much to bear, the report adds that the experts it consulted "are dubious that the present political leadership is prepared to make even this partial break, believing a looming budgetary crisis in the next five years would be the more likely trigger for reform".

The EU is also set for a looming demographic crisis because of a drop in birth rates and increased longevity, with devastating economic consequences.

The report says: "Either European countries adapt their workforces, reform their social welfare, education and tax systems, and accommodate growing immigrant populations [chiefly from Muslim countries] or they face a period of protracted economic stasis."

(Hat-tip - Instapundit)

Headline from Reuters:

Thousands March in Growing French Protests

Some 210,000 public sector workers marched through French cities on Thursday in widening protests over pay, reforms and job cuts that have sent a sharp warning to President Jacques Chirac's conservative government...

"I'm protesting against the quasi-reforms the government is carrying out. They're killing the public services. It has to stop. Soon there'll be nothing left," said Lionel Reinisch, 35, a civil servant from the Paris suburb of Creteil.
The rest of the CIA report is equally grim, predicting "Europe’s Muslim population is set to increase from around 13% today to between 22% and 37% of the population by 2025" (guess the "Eurabia" tag is right) and forecasting an economic eclipse by China and India.

By comparison, the Reuters report includes the following item on those industrious French; "Some workers oppose reforms and many reject planned changes to the law governing the 35-hour working week which the government says will make it more flexible and make French industry more competitive."

Radical Environmentalism from the NY Times

2004-12-29T13:55:00.000-05:00

I'd like to attribute it to poetic license, but I can't help sensing a touch of radical environmentalism in the NY Time's slapping a headline, The Year the Earth Fought Back, on an otherwise sober and thoughtful op-ed piece on the earthquake off Sumatra.

I assume the Times came up with the headline since it is my understanding that authors do not write their own. The underlying commentary, written by Simon Winchester (author of Krakatoa : The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883, which I highly recommend) is not, as the title might suggest, a screed on how the human race reaping the results of its crimes against the environment. Instead, it pairs the Sumatran earthquake with one in Iran a year earlier (and a number of other geological events in between) and compares it to the rash of earthquake activity in 1906 (including the Great San Francisco Quake that leveled the city).

The question Mr. Winchester asks is whether these events are related, i.e., did the earlier earthquake in Iran, through some as yet unknown mechanism of plate tectonics, contribute to the quake off Sumatra a year later? To support his supposition, Mr. Winchester points out that the science of plate tectonics is less than 40 years old and, as additional support, points to the discovery that the geysers in Yellowstone National Park started to erupt much more frequently in the days immediately following a huge earthquake in central Alaska in 2002.

Mr. Winchester raises these questions in the hope that an understanding of such connections, should they exist, would provide warnings and allow us to prepare for events such as Sumatra. The Time's headline anthropomorphizes the connectedness of the quakes and implies that the "Earth" was responding to prior attacks against itself. Not only is this sentiment New Age occultism at its worst, it is highly offensive when applied to an event that may have killed 100,000 people. This thinly veiled glee at the "comeuppance" dished out to humanity for its eco-crimes is the same that motivates radical environmental groups who want their policies followed regardless of the cost in human life. Its surprising to see it on the pages of the Times.

UN delenda est!

2004-12-29T09:36:00.000-05:00

That's my take at least. It's hard to see what purpose the UN serves when you try to find common cause between democracies like the United States, Poland and Australia on one side and tyrannies like Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia on the other. Shouldn't we, the democracies be trying to effect regime change in those places?

Strike that, I do see a purpose the UN serves. It serves to enrich amoral bureaucrats and evil dictators (the oil-for-food scandal), gloss over genocide (in the Sudan and give France a world stage on which to play act that its still a world power. France's military might (such as it ever was) has long been in eclipse, its economic power is waning and its moral authority never existed. It's permanent seat on the UN Security Council is a joke. It's ludicrous to argue that France deserves a status denied to countries more important to global matters such as India and Brazil. The seat was meant as a balm to wounded gallic pride after WWII, as a pretense that somehow France was on the allied side rather than an eager collaborator with Germany.

Writing in the WSJ, Claudia Rossett, who's been tireless in her coverage of the oil for food scandal, doesn't go quite that far, merely calling for Ukraine-style regime change - Blue: The Next Orange?:

But to suppose that the United Nations will reform itself from within is to miss the eerie unreality of the place. It is not simply changes in some of the staffing that are needed, or U.N. commissioned reports recommending that the U.N. "reform" by way of doing even more of whatever it does already. What's needed is something that among sovereign states we have come to call regime change--the basic alteration of a system that in its privileges, immunities and practices resembles rather too closely some of the dictatorships that still pack its ranks.
Ms. Rossett lays out a laundry list of charges against the current regime that makes Castro look like a slacker:

- The theft of billions of dollars from the UN administered Oil for Food program intended for the aid of sick and hungry Iraqis.
- The bribery and collusion of UN staff, including Kofi Annan's son Kojo, in the theft.
- The stonewalling of investigations into the scandal, including attempts to silence contractors.
- Reports of rape and child molestation committed by U.N. peacekeepers in Africa.
- Allegations of sexual harassment involving senior UN officials.
- Toleration of genocide in Rwanda and the Balkans.

I don't know if regime change is worth pursuing. The UN was an embodiment of the post-WWII world order - its a survivor of a world that no longer exists. Perhaps it is time for the UN to fade away, to be replaced by something newer and more meaningful.

WORLD ENDS - Women, Minorities Hardest Hit

2004-12-22T15:38:00.000-05:00

Since Best of the Web is on vacation this week, someone has to take up the slack on stories like this (as an added bonus, you could also file it under Homeless Rediscovery Watch):

AP's report from Honolulu on that city's observation of National Homeless Persons' Memorial Day (I think it replaces Christmas) includes this startling fact:
The homeless coalition (the Washington-based National Coalition of Homeless - seems to be missing a "the") estimates there are more than 3.5 million homeless Americans nationwide. An estimated 3,000 died last year, and the homeless coalition expects that figure to rise this year.
The startling figure isn't the number of homeless persons, but their mortality rate. 3,000 deaths among 3.5 million people works out to a mortality rate of 85.71 deaths per 100,000, which seemed kind of low. My two minute search for national mortality figures on Google yielded Deaths: Preliminary Data for 2002 from volume 52, number 13 of the CDC's National Vital Statistics reports which puts the age-adjusted death rate for the U.S. in 2002 at 846.8 per 100,000 population.

Assuming that these figures are roughly comparable, a non-homeless person is nearly ten times as likely to die in a given year than a homeless person. Maybe there's something to all that talk of healthy outdoor living!

Not to make light of the plight of the homeless, but clearly the stats quoted are wrong. Not only that, even if you accepted them, they disprove the case the coalition is trying to make, i.e., that the homeless endure lives that are, to quote Hobbes "nasty, brutish and short". Throwing bogus statistics around doesn't help.

President Bush and Religion

2004-12-22T13:02:00.000-05:00

In A hot line to heaven, the Economist looks at President Bush's use of religion and asks whether it is outside the mainstream of presidential history. Their conclusion:

Mr Bush is in fact in the mainstream of recent presidents. As Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Centre points out, Jimmy Carter taught Sunday school while president. Bill Clinton talked about Jesus more often than Mr Bush and has spoken in more churches than Mr Bush has had rubber-chicken dinners.

If this is the case, why all the uproar on the Left? Partially, its due to the increasing stridency of those militant secularists who believe that putting up a Christmas tree in a town square is equivalent to the establishment of a state religion and there in violation of the Constitution, but I think there's a more fundamental cause.

The reason the Left objects to President Bush's religious references, while ignoring those of Bill Clinton or, more recently, John Kerry, is that they know Bush actually believes in this stuff. The self-styled elites who lead the charge on this give Democratic candidates like Clinton and Kerry (and lately Nancy Pelosi) a pass on this because they know that the candidate is just playing it up for the less enlightened rubes in the fly-over states that matter so much during elections but who can be ignored and laughed at the rest of the time. A politician who actually means what he says when he quotes the Bible (an who doesn't need to be coached on the difference between the old and new testaments) is a whole other matter.

Hat tip - Katherine Lopez at The Corner.

The Jacksonian Tradition

2004-12-16T23:49:00.000-05:00

It's a little dated, having been published back in May, but in The Jacksonian Tradition and the War in Iraq , John Moser of the Ashbrook Center looks at a strain of U.S. foreign policy dubbed "Jacksonianism" by Walter Russell Mead.

Mead, author of Power, Terror, Peace, and War, has identified Jacksonianism as one of four major schools of thought that have dominated American foreign policy thinking along with the more elitist strains of Hamiltonianism (economic nationalism), Jeffersonianism (isolationalism) and Wilsonianism (idealistic interationalism). As described by Mead, Jacksonianism is characterized by popular nationalism, self reliance and "rugged" individualism which he traces back to the Scotts-Irish who settled the early American frontier (this same group is the subject of Born Fighting : How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, James Webb's well received new book, which seems to come to the same conclusions regarding their cultural characteristics).

The other defining trait of Jacksonianism, and the wellspring of Moser's piece, is the streak of "near savagery" evidenced in war:

Jacksonians, according to Mead, are not automatic supporters of intervention abroad. In the 1990s the Clinton administration's efforts in Somalia and Eastern Europe, having little to do with tangible American interests, left them cold. However, once they are convinced that war is justified on grounds of national interest or national honor, their sole concern is achieving victory at the lowest cost to American forces. They have little patience for diplomacy, and none whatsoever for the notion of "limited war." They find it difficult to understand why humanitarian concern for the enemy should be allowed to trump the lives of U.S. soldiers and other personnel.

The fiercest Jacksonian outrage is reserved for enemies who are deemed to be dishonorable - that is, those who fight contrary to the recognized rules of war. Ordinary opponents, who honor longstanding traditions such as the flag of truce, and who treat prisoners humanely, are entitled to be treated in the same fashion. On the other hand, terrorists who target women and children, kidnap and execute journalists and other civilians, and commit similar atrocities deserve whatever they get. The Geneva Convention, they believe, exists to protect civilization, not the barbarians who seek to bring it down.
This rejection of "limited war" and desire for achieving "decisive" victory has deep roots in Western culture. In Carnage and Culture : Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power, Victor Davis Hanson identifies this desire for "decisive battles" as one of the contributors to Western military dominance. Hanson traces this desire back to the short sharp wars between the city states of ancient Greece. The hoplite armies of these city states were made up of free landholding farmers who wanted to resolve the conflict and get back home as soon as possible:

In the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. if a small Greek community was self-supporting and governed by its surrounding private landowners, then hoplite warfare, far better than fortification or garrisoning passes, made perfect sense: muster the largest, best-armed group of farmers to protect land in the quickest, cheapest, and most decisive way possible.
Hanson argues that it was certain facets of Western culture, such as consensual government, free inquiry and innovative enterprise, as first expressed by the Greeks, that enabled it to wage war so effectively.

Europe, especially "old Europe" is in the process of losing the very characteristics that allowed its culture to survive and flourish. Taking Hanson's argument forward, given the shift of Europe's political institutions toward an unelected transnational government under the EU, its culture toward moral relativism and its economies toward cradle to grave socialism, its little wonder that the what was once a common attribute of Western culture now seen as predominantly an American characteristic.

The Religion of the Left - The Liberals' Creed

2004-12-16T23:38:00.000-05:00

Another in the string of commentaries finding elements of "religion", i.e., a reliance in faith rather than facts, in the Left's core beliefs.

For all the talk about a widening religiosity gap between the right and the left, sentiment from the left indicates a certain religious fervor about the war in Iraq. A string of recent letters and articles from those of a more liberal persuasion suggest that they choose to ignore or simply do not believe information which is inconsistent with their basic tenets.
Robert Alt brings us The Liberals' Creed:
We believe that the Iraq war was unilateral.
We believe that the participation of Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Estonia, Georgia, Honduras, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Thailand, United Kingdom, and Ukraine does not change the fact that the war was unilateral;
We believe that multilateralism can only be achieved with the participation of France and Germany;
We believe in multilateralism.
The entire piece is hilarious. It was originally published back in May, but looking at it post-election, it seems ancient. Still, I don't think you'll find a single contradiction that doesn't still apply.

MoveOn to Democratic Party: 'We Own It'

2004-12-09T23:54:00.000-05:00

This is the result of McCain-Feingold:

A scathing e-mail from the head of MoveOn's political action committee to the group's supporters on Thursday targets outgoing Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe as a tool of corporate donors who alienated both traditional and progressive Democrats.

"For years, the party has been led by elite Washington insiders who are closer to corporate lobbyists than they are to the Democratic base," said the e-mail from MoveOn PAC's Eli Pariser. "But we can't afford four more years of leadership by a consulting class of professional election losers."

Under McAuliffe's leadership, the message said, the party coddled the same corporate donors that fund Republicans to bring in money at the expense of vision and integrity.

"In the last year, grass-roots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the party doesn't need corporate cash to be competitive," the message continued. "Now it's our party: we bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back."
(From AP via Yahoo! News)

Rather than limit special interest groups as intended, the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill has magnified their influence, in the form of 527 groups, exponentially. Shackled under that legislation, the DNC can't match the fundraising firepower of groups like MoveOn. Since money is the key to power within the party, MoveOn and their ilk are now in defacto control.

Dean 2008 begins now.

Other Commentary

From Powerline:
I like it. It's the first glimmer of respect for property rights we've seen from the Dems in a long time.

Liberal Hypocrisy

2004-12-09T16:53:00.000-05:00

Over the weekend on NBC's Meet the Press, new Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid disparaged Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, calling him an "embarrassment" and saying that his opinions were "poorly written".

The comments, which came in response to host Tim Russert's question about prior anti-Thomas comments Reid had made, were widely reported. A number of conservative commentators, including James Taranto in his OpinionJournal - Best of the Web column for Monday the 6th, accused Reid of making (at best) racially insensitive comments or, at worst, engaging in racial stereotyping due to Reid's generalizations.

These comments have drawn a number of responses from liberal pundits which Mr. Taranto has rounded-up and responded to in his column today:

This, along with the racist attacks on Condoleezza Rice we noted last month, got us to thinking about the relationship between the Democratic Party and black Americans. Some have likened it to a plantation, but it seems to us that a better analogy is a protection racket. The deal is that the Dems will protect blacks from racism and blacks will give their political support to Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry and the like. But the most blatant racism in America today comes from Democrats and is directed against black politicians and public servants who opt out of this arrangement.
I think this is a fair assessment. Black Americans who don't agree with liberal ideology are routinely belittled in the MSM and branded "Uncle Toms" or "Oreos" in its most partisan reaches. Comments far worse than those that led to the removal of Trent Lott as majority leader are routinely bandied about by those on the Left without the slightest objection. Liberals push for affirmative action and then use it as a smear against any black American they disagree with (if Justice Thomas is an "embarrassment" as Senator Reid claims, then surely he means to imply that it was his race which secured him his position).

This hypocritical behavior isn't limited to matters of race; after the election there were plenty of commentators on the Left who groused that most Blue States "paid" more in taxes than they received back from the government while the reverse was true of Red States (based on an opinion piece by Daniel Pink in the New York Times back in January - no longer available for free). The sentiment was either that this should stop (in order to punish the Red States for voting Republican) or derision that Bush was supported by "welfare" states.

It's funny that the Left doesn't apply this same reasoning to individuals; those in the top tax brackets pay more to the government in taxes than they receive in benefits while a large percentage of Americans pay nothing or in fact receive a net payment through the mis-named earned income tax credit. In fact, I seem to recall Hillary Clinton telling a gathering of wealthy donors that they would in fact pay even more if the Democrats had their way because they could afford to.

The Democrats see an onerous tax burden, like affirmative action, not as a something that is justified in and of itself, but merely as a means to reward those who agree with them. When those same benefits go to their opponents, they change their tune.

Michael Ledeen - Man of the World

2004-12-08T18:31:00.000-05:00

An interesting biographical piece on Michael Ledeen, author of The War against the Terror Masters, which appeared in the Boston Globe back in October. Interesting trivia, Ledeen wrote a book, "The First Duce", on Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, who is mentioned in Thomas Pynchon's novel "V". D'Annunzio led a military coup to capture the Italian port city of Fiume in 1919 because he feared that it would be ceded to Yugoslavia in the aftermath of WWI.

More on Arafat and the Palestinian Movement

2004-12-02T23:42:00.000-05:00

Steven Plaut, writing in FrontPage magazine.com reviews the history of the Palestinian movement and sees anti-semitism in Europe's embrace of it:
The simple fact of the matter is that there is no such thing on the planet as sympathy for and identification with Palestinians. There is no such thing as pro-Palestinianism. Period. When Palestinians, or when Arabs in general, are mistreated, repressed, and tormented by any Arab regime, no one cares. When Palestinians were mass murdered by Syria and Jordan, no one cared. When more than 100,000 Arab civilians are massacred in Algeria, it does not even make the evening news. When Asad or Saddam Hussein carry out mass murders of Arabs, the “Human Rights” lobby never looks up from its cinnamon latté.

The pro-Palestinian movement is nothing more than the 21st century’s reincarnation of medieval anti-Semitism, complete with medieval anti-Jewish blood libels. People who claim to feel empathy for Palestinians are typically motivated by hatred of Jews. The reason the pro-Palestinian movement wants the Palestinians to have a state is because it understands that such a state will operate as an instrument to attack Israel, murder Jews, and seek the annihilation of the Jewish state.
Plaut asks why no one, especially in Europe, was seeking a Palestinian state before Israel's conquest of Gaza and the West Bank in 1967:
The world actually understands that there is no such thing as a Palestinian “nation.” Palestinians are just Arabs who happen to live in the western section of Palestine, differing little from Syrians or Lebanese. Most of them are from families who migrated into Palestine from the time of the beginning of modern Zionism, when Jewish capital and human skills were making western Palestine a much more comfortable place to live for Arabs from the neighboring lands. To describe them as a “nation” is as persuasive as describing Michigan’s Arabs as a new “Detroitian” nation in need of self-determination.

In 1948, the entire West Bank and the Gaza Strip were seized by Arab states, (illegally) occupied by Jordan and Egypt, in their war to extinguish the newly created state of Israel. The Arab countries could have unilaterally erected a Palestinian state any time between 1948 and 1967 had they wished to do so, and Israel could have had nothing to say about it. There was no Palestinian national movement at all demanding statehood in these areas. In the entire world, there was no demand for a right of the Palestinian “people” to erect a state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Neither was there any demand for Palestinian self-determination east of the Jordan river. Transjordan was always as much “Palestine” as was the land west of the river, and the Palestinians have always been a demographic majority in Jordan (since its independence after World War I.) So why have these East Bank Palestinians never felt the need for “self-determination”? Why have none of the caring supporters of Palestinians ever come out for a Palestinian state at least partly east of the Jordan River? Surely, establishing a state there, at least initially, must be much easier than doing so west of the Jordan. There would be no pesky Israelis around to deal with!
and questions the common assumption that the "Palestinian Issue" lies at the heart of today's mideast crisis:
What exactly were the Fatah and the PLO (taken over by the Fatah faction in 1967) supposed to be “liberating”? After all, this was back before Israel’s victories in the 1967 Six Day War, during which Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza in its counterattack. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip were there for the Palestinian plucking, had they wished to have their own state. There were no “Palestinian occupied territories” at all to liberate. The West Bank and Gaza were not “occupied,” at least not by Israel.

The answer is that these Palestinian “liberation” movements were launched in the mid-1960s to liberate the Middle East from Israel’s existence. From Arafat’s viewpoint and that of his apologists, Tel Aviv and Haifa were and are just as much “illegal settlements on Palestinian soil” as anything later constructed by Israel in the Gaza Strip.

On the day before the outbreak of the 1967 Six Day War, no one on earth, and certainly no Palestinians, were expressing the belief that Palestinians needed self-determination in the West Bank, on the East Bank, or in Gaza. Yet six days later, according to decades of historic revisionism ever since, the Palestinians are supposed to have morphed into a nation, desperately in need of their own state, unlike – say – the Kurds or Berbers, whose statelessness has never raises an eyebrow among the world’s compassionate classes. Indeed Palestinian statelessness was pronounced the nucleus of the entire Middle East conflict. But was it? Just what was the nucleus during the 20 years of conflict before 1967?

Arafat's Legacy for Europe

2004-12-02T15:32:00.000-05:00

Bat Ye'or looks at the history of Europe's accommodation of Palestinian terrorism: Europeans, in the tradition of dhimmitude, purchased their security by devising an alliance with the Arab League and the PLO against Israel.
Europe's long history of anti-semitism continues unabated and, increasingly, undisguised.

Veterans Day

2004-11-11T16:51:00.000-05:00

The torch is passed.

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place: and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from falling hands we throw
The torch: be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
A heartfelt thank you to all of those who have served.

To our troops serving in Iraq and around the world, and to all our allies, both old an new, our thoughts and prayers are with you.

To those former allies who have broken faith, remember those of yours who gave their all and think of what you owe them.

More Debunking

2004-11-09T22:30:00.000-05:00

Josh Levin, writing in Slate, also debunks the Olbermann conspiracy theories in Still Raging Against the Machines - Debunking another election conspiracy theory:

The big problem with this theory is that this year's results match those from 2000. (And with the exception of Dixie, which used punch cards in 2000, all of these counties used optical-scan machines four years ago.) In 2000, Baker County had 83 percent registered Democrats, and 69 percent of the county's voters went for Bush. Dixie County had 86 percent registered Democrats, and 58 percent went for Bush. Franklin County: 81 percent registered Dems, 53 percent for Bush. Holmes County: 83 percent registered Dems, 68 percent for Bush. (For complete 2000 results in Florida by county, look here. For 2000 results as compared to voter registrations, look here.)

While each of these counties had a lower percentage of Bush voters in 2000 than in 2004, the 2000 election was much closer than this one. Each of these counties also appears to be moving toward the GOP. In all four, there is a lower percentage of registered Democrats and a higher percentage of registered Republicans in 2004 than in 2000.
Of course, you could argue that this similarity to the 2000 results just points to an even bigger conspiracy. But that's a bit, well, crazy. Take a look at the geography: All four counties are either in Florida's panhandle—known by some as the Redneck Riviera—or the northern part of the state. Like their neighbors in Georgia and Alabama, northern Florida voters tend to be very conservative. Baker, Dixie, Franklin, and Holmes counties are represented in the House by two Republicans and a Blue Dog Democrat who lists his No. 1 issue as "Second Amendment rights." Democratic registrations here are more an artifact of history than evidence of massive fraud.
This article was a follow-up to Levin's earlier round-up of election conspiracy theories inspired by electronic voting, Rage Against the Machines , which is well worth reading.

Keith Olbermann Loses It

2004-11-09T22:20:00.000-05:00

In the spirit of Yogi Berra's "It ain't over till its over!", former humorous sportscaster turned deranged political pundit Keith Olbermann refuses to concede defeat:

Here's an interesting little sidebar of our system of government confirmed recently by the crack Countdown research staff: no Presidential candidates concession speech is legally binding. The only determinants of the outcome of election are the reports of the state returns boards and the vote of the Electoral College.

Thats right. Richard Nixon may have phoned John Kennedy in November, 1960, and congratulated him through clenched teeth. But if the FBI had burst into Kennedy headquarters in Chicago a week later and walked out with all the file cabinets and a bunch of employees with their raincoats drawn up over their heads, nothing Nixon had said would've prevented him, and not JFK, from taking the oath of office the following January.

This is mentioned because there is a small but blood-curdling set of news stories that right now exists somewhere between the world of investigative journalism, and the world of the Reynolds Wrap Hat. And while the group's ultimate home remains unclear - so might our election of just a week ago.

That post, from November 7th, Olbermann's first since the early hours of November 3rd, apparently marks his descent into "Reynolds Wrap" territory.

The focus of Mr. Olbermann's rant is the fact that certain counties in Florida where the majority of registered voters are Democrats, went for Bush. Evidence of the vast right wing conspiracy at work? Were voters intimidated? Were electronic voting machines rigged?

Only in Keith's fevered dreams. As the Yale Free Press Blog points out in Vast. Right. Winged., these same counties went for Bush over Gore in 2000 and for Dole over Clinton in 1996:

The reason these counties have such high Democratic registrations is because they likely still have traditional Southern loyalties to the Democrats, but being in Northern Florida and the Panhandle, they are all very very conservative. No wonder, they even voted for Dole!
The discrepancy is merely a reflection of the solidification of the South as a Republican bastion - voting habits have changed faster than party registrations. I can understand that journalists can't be experts in every field, but can they at least do a bare minimum of research before airing crackpot theories?

King of the Hill

2004-11-08T13:42:00.000-05:00

Wolf Blitzer on CNN just segued into a report on Arafat with a line that the Palestinian people are asking themselves "What now? Who takes over?"

That's part of the problem with the Palestinian "State" - it's not one. It's an enclave ceded to and controlled by a gang of ruthless terrorists. Isn't there an "elected" Prime Minister? Shouldn't he have some role? No, instead it will be a dog-eat-dog struggle to see who ends up sitting on top of the ruins at Ramallah.

A Win Over Media Bias

2004-11-08T09:55:00.000-05:00

Michael Barone in U.S. News & World Report explains Bush's win as a victory of love over hate: Millions of Democrats and leftists have been seething with hatred for George W. Bush for years, and many of them lined up before the polls opened to cast their votes against him--one reason, apparently, that the exit poll results turned out to favor Democrats more than did the actual results. But Republicans full of love, or at least affection, for George W. Bush turned out steadily later in the day or sent in their ballots days before.
Barone argues that the current electoral results, not just for the presidency, but for Congress as well, following on the heels of similar results in 2002 indicate that this is now a "51 percent nation" with the majority leaning Republican.

Barone also turns his eye on those who aided and abetted the "anyone but Bush" crowd, the MSM:
He has been the target all year of vicious and biased coverage from old media, many if not most of whose personnel saw their job as removing this scourge from the presidency. The 60 Minutes story about Bush's Air National Guard service, which was based on obviously forged documents, is only the most egregious example. Old media have headlined violence in Iraq and reported almost nothing about positive developments there; they highlighted the charges of self-promoter Joseph Wilson and spoke nary a word when they were proved bogus; they have given good economic news far less positive coverage, studies show, than they did when Bill Clinton was in office.
The handicap provided by the negative drumbeat of the MSM makes Bush's victory all the more impressive.