Betsy's Page
Saturday, April 03, 2004
California Yankee's 17-year old son has an eloquent response to the killings and celebration over American deaths in Fallujah.This attack will give new ammunition to many wishing our forces removed from Iraq. I write this imploring them to reconsider. After all I have heard about Iraq, the killings and reconstruction, even the blatant murder of innocents, why do I still support this? Life is supposed to be precious; indeed, what could possibly be more sacred? Why, you may ask, does a teenager support the continued struggle to bring Democracy to the Middle East? My answer is simple, and only three words long:
Freedom. Isn’t. Free.
Live your lives to the fullest; this nation provides you that outstanding opportunity. I believe others should have it as well.
The Organization of American Historians just had a big convention and honored Howard Zinn for his contribution to American history. Gag. I learn from a bulletin board I'm on for teachers of AP US History that many teachers have their students read some or all of Howard Zinn. Some teach it as a way to see bias in historiography. They often pair excerpts from Zinn with excerpts from Paul Johnson's A History of the American People. If you want a very readable narrative of American history from a more conservative point of view, I recommend Johnson's book. Actually, all that makes Johnson's book conservative is that he has an optimistic and admiring view of the United States. I have only looked at portions of Zinn's book, but here is a review of his book from Michael Kazin that sums up how bad this book is.
Check out Outside the Beltway's caption contest.
A political science professor looks at the chances that Bush could end up winning the popular vote and losing the electoral college. While such an outcome would be deliciously ironic, I think the chances are slim to none.
Even in Massachusetts, people don't seem to want to pay higher taxes. Imagine that. What a surprise.New tax data reveal a teeny and shrinking number of taxpayers are checking the box to voluntarily cough up 5.85 percent of their income, rather than the mandatory 5.3 percent.
The state check-off was created two years ago by GOP lawmakers, who were annoyed with liberals' tax-hiking efforts.
Only 510 people have elected to pay higher taxes, out of the 1.6 million taxpayers who have filed to date, or .03 percent of the population - and that's down nearly half from this time last year.
It really is a shame that some Democrats are so dominated by pro-abortion interest groups that they couldn't support a bill to make it a crime of murder to kill a child in utero in an attack on a pregnant woman. And what does it say about John Kerry that he made an appearance for one his few votes this year in the Senate to vote against this bill.Last week, by a vote of 61-to-38, the Senate passed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, also known as "Laci and Conner's Law," which makes the death or injury to a "child in utero" a federal crime when it is committed in the course of another violent federal crime. President Bush immediately applauded: "Pregnant women who have been harmed by violence, and their families, know that there are two victims -- the mother and the unborn child -- and both victims should be protected by federal law. I look forward to signing this important legislation into law."
Abortion, medical treatment, and the acts of the woman herself are specifically exempted. But some people can't get abortion politics out of their heads.
Sharon Rocha, Laci Peterson's mother and Conner Peterson's grandmother, wrote in 2003: "What I find difficult to understand is why groups and senators who champion the pro-choice cause are blind to the fact that these two-victim crimes are the ultimate violation of choice." In a Feb. 26 statement rejecting a substitute bill proposed by Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., Rocha said: "Laci knew that Conner was her son, and I know it too. Two people, Laci and Conner, would be here with us today if they had not been murdered. There were two victims in this crime, not one."
Last week, only 38 senators voted against Laci and Conner's law. Sen. John Kerry was one of them. In a letter to constituents, Sen. Kerry expressed concern that, even though abortion is specifically exempted, recognizing two victims might somehow undermine Roe v. Wade.
Was it a profile in courage? Maybe you think so.
But isn't there something profoundly unattractive about a man who can see a pregnant woman brutally attacked and worry about abortion politics? That's a cold man. Cold, ideological, mechanical, mean.
Germany is very depressed about itself.This is how bad things have become in Germany: at the five-star Adlon hotel, close to the Brandenburg Gate, they dump the laundry into lorries every night and ship it 80 miles to Poland.
There it is washed and the following day it is shipped back to Berlin. Yet even after taking into account drivers' pay and fuel, doing the washing in Poland costs only a fraction of German laundering.
The Adlon is not just any hotel. It is a symbol. The building is Berlin's most prestigious establishment, the place for the wealthy and the powerful to stay.
The hotel is a facsimile of an older version built in 1907 and largely destroyed in the war. It was patronised by Kaiser Wilhelm II and inspired Greta Garbo's 1932 film Grand Hotel.
The story of the Adlon's laundry is just one example cited by Gabor Steingart, the author of a new German bestseller, Germany: Decline of a Superstar, which has the nation hooked with its withering portrait of a country on the brink of failure.
The book shot to the top of the bestseller list three days after its publication largely because, according to its 41-year-old author, he is the first German who has dared to break the taboo and reveal the truth.
"It is simply not profitable or viable to have German workers, who cost considerably more than they produce," Mr Steingart says.
"Our productive core is melting away and Germany is going downhill," he says, drawing on a cigar and leaning back in a leather armchair in his glass-panelled office in central Berlin.
"The GDP of both the British and French is higher than the Germans' and this is a shocking discovery for us. In the 1970s, Britain's GDP was only half of ours."
Norm Scheiber details the bickering over money that split up Kerry's ad team.
Scrappleface has Senator Kerry's reaction to the Pope's position on abortion.Kerry Calls Pope's Abortion Stance 'Not Nuanced'
(2004-03-29) -- The strict anti-abortion stance of Pope John Paul II is "tragically not nuanced," according to U.S. Democrat presidential candidate John Forbes Kerry, a practicing Roman Catholic.
"I pray for an America where rosary beads are sold in abortion clinic gift shops," said Mr. Kerry. "But I won't be a Catholic president, or even, as John F. Kennedy called himself, 'a president who happens to be Catholic'. I will be a president who happens to say he is Catholic but doesn't feel constrained by the black-and-white teachings of a church which is the bedrock of values, of sureness about who I am."
Mr. Kerry made the remarks as he left Sunday Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Flexible Doctrine.
"I dream of a nation that honors people who understand the difference between personal beliefs and public actions," said Mr. Kerry, who just last week hurried back to the Senate chambers to vote against a bill that makes harming a fetus a criminal offense. "All during that Senate vote, I was meditating on the rosary...you know, quietly repeating 'Hail Marys' and 'Our Fathers,' etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum."
Powerline links to this quiz by Michele Catalano to guess which of the following quotes were from Democratic Underground.Guess which quote from Democratic Underground is not real:WHile, we can't condemn an entire party for what some wingnuts write on an Internet bulletin board, it is a depressing look at what some people in this country think. They are happy for Americans to be killed and their corpses desecrated. They prefer Al Qaeda to those who are trying to build a functioning democracy and civil society in one of the most oppressed regions of the world.
[All quotes deal with the death of the four dead American contractors whose bodies were dragged through the streets and hung from a bridge in Fallujah]
Contractors wear hardhats and carry lunch pails - These guys are mercenaries.
Death to ALL mercenaries. The beer is on me.
Sad, if I were the wife I would have said hell no you won't go; the wife must have said great pay-check and the hubby, yeah, can buy a Hummer when I get back.
These swine were MERCENARIES. Paid Hessians. Murderers for hire.
They're worse than Al-Queda. At least Al-Queda is fighting for a cause.
I say "too bad, so sad, bye-bye."
They are Mercenaries - They are in it for the money, they are thugs and hoodlums, working outside the boundaries of the law. And yesterday the Resistance got even with 4 of them in a barbecue ceremony, that alas pushed the bounds of good taste.
mercenaries - These men are just serial killers with a good retirement plan. They deserve what they get.
Answer below.
Suprise! They are all real. Every single one of those comments above were posted by real people on this DU thread.
Powerline also links to the efforts by Michael Friedman to get Democratic politicians to stop advertising on Daily Kos's site after Kos gloried in the death of the men in Fallujah. Friedman has gotten three politicians to pull their ads, but not the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Kos has since taken down his first reaction, but Friedman has a screen capture of his words. Kos is the biggest Democratic/liberal blogger on the web often passing Instapundit in daily hits.
I don't understand why everyone is upset by what Paul Hornung said. Is it that they don't like him exposing the truth behind the arguments for affirmative action in college admissions?Call it a Jimmy the Greek moment. This week it was Paul Hornung's turn. In a radio interview Tuesday with Detroit's WXYT-AM, the former Notre Dame Heisman Trophy winner opined that his alma mater's football team can't afford to "stay as strict as we are as far as the academic structure is concerned because we've got to get the black athlete."
In came the denunciations. Talk radio had a field day. A Notre Dame official called the remarks "generally insensitive and specifically insulting" to all African-Americans who have worn the Irish jersey.
But amid the high dudgeon, it's easy to miss that essentially what Mr. Hornung was making is an affirmative-action argument. As the Manhattan Institute's John McWhorter puts it, "Hornung's statement reminds me of that photo of University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman smiling on the Supreme Court steps after the affirmative-action decision last June, glowing in the assumption that lower standards are OK for black students." Ironically, the Hornung flap comes in the thick of an NCAA basketball tournament that underscores how too many of our colleges and universities already practice what Mr. Hornung preached.
I dislike it when GOP supporters trumpet triumphalism. That usually goes right before a fall. I'd prefer cautious optimism. However, John Podhoretz is willing to go out on a limb celebrating the effect of yesterday's job numbers on the 2004 campaign.If the Democrats also lose the ability to talk about the woeful lack of job creation, which is what yesterday's numbers portend for them, then it's nearly impossible to see what issue John Kerry will have to bash the president with.
Iraq? Doubtful. The disgusting desecrations this week of the bodies of four Americans killed in Fallujah seems only to have stiffened the resolve of the American people to stay the course and get tougher. It will be difficult for Kerry to outflank Bush when it comes to pacifying Iraq and continuing the effort to help build democratic institutions there.
Health care? The numbers do suggest that the American people trust Democrats far more than Republicans. But how many voters actually know that a voluntary prescription-drug benefit was added to Medicare last year? They will know after the Bush campaign gets going in earnest in the fall.
Without job growth as an issue, what do Democrats have to throw at Bush? Economic growth? The U.S. economy is growing at the fastest rate in 20 years - and more quickly than that of any other major industrialized nation.
Oil prices? George W. Bush ran in 2000 on the need to expand domestic oil production by drilling in Alaska, precisely to increase the amount of oil available to the world market and keep prices down. His plan was blocked by Democrats like John Kerry, who have no answer other than yelling at the Saudis.
Maalox may not be enough for Kerry and his campaign staff. They might need cases of Zantac and Tagamet also. These medications won't offer a solution to Kerry's electoral problem, but they will provide temporary relief for stomach upset.
Two researchers conclude that it was racism that cost Bobby Jindal the Louisiana gubernatorial election.White voters who had backed former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke in 1991, and who normally vote Republican, instead turned away from Jindal in the 2003 race, according to the analysis by Richard Skinner and Philip A. Klinkner. “Duke voters,” particularly in north Louisiana, were enough to provide the new governor her margin, Skinner and Klinkner suggest.That's a depressing finding.
John O'Sullivan asks, "What would FDR do?"
Friday, April 02, 2004
Jon Lauck, author of the Daschle v. Thune blog gives some interesting history on Daschle's first run for the Senate.
Robert Guest looks at why so many countries are failing in Africa. He should read Hernando de Soto's book, The Mystery of Capital, to understand the reason.
Oh, what a shame. It sounds like Gore's efforts to have his own cable network has fallen through.
Michael Crowley has a biting article on how Max Cleland became a "mascot" for the Kerry campaign.Cleland is that rarest of breeds in politics: more interesting as a loser than he was as a winner. He was an extremely unimpressive, and extremely dull, politician. He won his Senate seat in 1996 by a mere 30,000 votes, with just 49 percent of the vote. In that campaign, Cleland made up for his lack of political skill—the Atlanta-Journal Constitution noted that he "has never been known as a deep thinker" and was prone to "platitudes" in debates—by harnessing the emotional power of his war injuries, suffered in a noncombat situation when another soldier accidentally dropped a live grenade near him. His campaign ran ads of Cleland fighting his way through everyday tasks, like driving and getting dressed.
There was little reason to expect Cleland to be a star senator, and he wasn't. Nor was he anything like the Bush-hating, Al Franken liberal he's become on the trail with Kerry. Cleland was one of the Senate's most conservative Democrats. In 2001 he supported the huge Bush tax cut. And although he now fumes that the Iraq war had no rationale other than Halliburton profiteering, he actually supported the Senate's Iraq resolution in October of 2002. Sen. Cleland pretty well embodied the kind of Vichy Democrat Howard Dean raised $50 million attacking.
But at the end of the day, Cleland was still a vote for Tom Daschle to be Senate leader. And so Bush set out to eliminate him. The president visited Georgia six times in support of Cleland's challenger, Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss, turning the election into a referendum on the president's popularity. Most of Chambliss' attacks were based on Cleland's most "liberal" votes on social issues like partial-birth abortion. But in the race's closing weeks, Bush and Chambliss hammered at the fact that Cleland was voting with Senate Democrats against Bush's proposed Homeland Security Department because of its infamous provision limiting union rights. The message was that Cleland was kowtowing to big labor at the cost of protecting America. Most famously, Chambliss ran a vicious ad on Cleland's homeland security votes featuring images of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. In the popular liberal mythology, the ad disgustingly questioned Cleland's patriotism. "To this day I am motivated by—and I will be throughout this campaign—the most craven moment I've ever seen in politics, when the Republican Party challenged this man's patriotism in the last campaign," John Kerry has said.
But that's not what happened. The ad, though sleazy in its use of Osama and Saddam, didn't question Cleland's patriotism. It questioned his political courage and judgment. It focused narrowly on his behavior in office and his actual votes against the Homeland Security Department. With images of Bin Laden and Saddam flashing onscreen, a narrator declared that, "As America faces terrorists and extremist dictators, Max Cleland runs television ads claiming he has the courage to lead." The ad then listed Cleland's votes against the Homeland Security Department and said he was stalling "the president's vital homeland security efforts." It concluded: "Max Cleland says he has the courage to lead, but the record proves Max Cleland is just misleading."
Unfortunately, Cleland did a lousy job of responding to such attacks. As he was pummeled on national security—clearly the issue of the day as war with Iraq neared, Cleland stuck to stale Democratic themes like Social Security. Occasionally, Cleland and his supporters counterattacked, but they were ineffective. They reminded reporters that Chambliss had evaded serving in Vietnam and even tried in vain to drum up last-minute stories about Bush's National Guard service. Cleland also called in former Vietnam veterans to defend him and hit back at Chambliss—including, most prominently, John Kerry.
There's something patronizing about the way Democrats now view Max Cleland—and faux naive about the way they view his defeat. Was Chambliss' ad really that much worse than what happens in any election? Chambliss' criticism was based on Cleland's actual votes. The fact that Cleland volunteered for Vietnam and Chambliss avoided it means something, but it certainly doesn't mean that Cleland should be immune from all attacks on his Senate voting record. Georgians were voting for senator, not platoon leader, after all. And yet Democrats see the attacks on Cleland as categorically worse than any others. It's hard to think that's not partly an emotional reaction to a man confined to a wheelchair. But politics ain't beanbag, as they say. Cleland is hardly the first man ever to be savaged in a political campaign. Michael Dukakis, to name one, had a pretty similar experience: He was brutalized by Republicans who painted him as weak on defense, and he failed to hit back effectively. But you won't see Dukakis warming up crowds for Kerry any time soon.
Who knew? Duke has bought up the rights to everyhting in the public domain.Duke University, of Durham, North Carolina, purchased the entirety of the public domain late last evening for a fee of 2.2 trillion dollars. Sources familiar with the negotiation report that Duke's reclamation of the public domain is unprecedented. As a result of the purchase, Duke University is the sole rights-holder to a huge collection of materials, including the Bible, the works of Shakespeare and Dante, and Francis Scott Key's The Star Spangled Banner.
April Fool's
Now, Bob Shrum is going to have a bigger job in the Kerry ad campaign. Expect more populist messages from the Boston Brahmin.
Apparently, dirty politics has spread to campuses. Occidental College got so upset about the ugliness in their student government elections that they shut down student government for the rest of the year. Personally, I never saw that student governments did anything all that significant except give kids an opportunity to feel important. But, it shouldn't be shut down just because some people were getting nasty.
Shot in the Dark has made the mistake of reading Kos. Liberal blogger Kos is exulting over the deaths in Fallujah.
Hugh Hewitt thinks that Kerry is a fool.Dukakis in the tank had a better grasp of campaigning than Kerry, and Kerry's assertion that Bush Administration actions are responsible for the recruitment of terrorists is the most compelling reason yet offered as to why Kerry is unfit for the presidency. If Bush caused the terrorists, Mr. Kerry, who were those people training in Afghanistan throughout the nineties. Did they anticipate the rise of Bush and get their work-outs in early?How about just a partisan guy with no real core of beliefs and willing to say whatever he thinks will make Bush look bad and Kerry look good.
Now, environmentalists are upset about Palm Sunday.
I am so sick of John McCain.
Rich Lowry looks at the Kerry plan to stop outsourcing.Kerry has now released a plan to deal with the issue of "outsourcing." One would think it would involve jail, or reeducation camps, or at least the mandatory recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance — sans the phrase "under God," of course — by everyone heading an American business. Instead, Kerry is proposing changing the mix of tax incentives for American corporations. On Kerry's own terms, this is absurd — like offering Benedict Arnold increased child tax credits, free dental care and college aid for his five children to try to keep him from betraying his country.
Unless Kerry's "Benedict Arnold CEO" line is a ridiculous, demagogic and unworthy smear of American business. His own tax plan exposes it as exactly that. Kerry wants to repeal a provision that allows companies to defer paying taxes on profits from overseas operations and — in order to keep corporations from getting too hard hit by a more onerous tax burden — also to cut the corporate tax rate. Imagine that — lower taxes for the treasonous! That's even worse than a tax cut for the merely rich. Kerry thus makes a huge intellectual concession: that businesses respond to incentives, that taxes and regulations affect their behavior and that tax-cutting Reaganites have always had a point.
In fact, a reason U.S. corporations do business overseas is that U.S. corporate taxes are so high compared with other countries. They operate overseas for other perfectly benign reasons: to be closer to foreign customers and to achieve efficiencies that make them more productive. Why this is considered a bad thing is not clear — except that it makes for an easy pander to economically illiterate voters. Companies with thriving overseas operations create management jobs back here in the United States, and most economic literature suggests that the phenomenon of "outsourcing" was a key factor in the glorious boom of the 1990s, lowering prices and thus keeping inflation low as economic growth soared.
Is it a good or bad sign that Bush toilet paper is selling more than Kerry toilet paper?
Jim Rutenberg in the New York Times looks at how Hollywood opponents of Bush (that is almost everyone) are slipping anti-Bush plots into their programming.In recent weeks, characters in prime time have progressed beyond the typical Hollywood knocks against Washington politicians to calling out the president directly or questioning his policies, including the decision to go to war in Iraq, the support of the antiterrorism law and the backing of a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.Of course, campaign finance laws don't count these as in-kind contributions to Kerry.
On the NBC show "Whoopi," the hotelier played by Whoopi Goldberg delivered an anti-Bush screed when the president, played by a lookalike, appeared at her establishment to use the facilities. "I can't believe he's in there doing to my bathroom what he's done to the economy!" she said.
One of the wise-cracking detectives on the NBC show "Law & Order," played by Jesse L. Martin, referred to the president as the "dude that lied to us." The character went on to say, "I don't see any weapons of mass destruction, do you?" His cantankerous partner, played by Jerry Orbach, retorted that Saddam Hussein did have such weapons because the president's "daddy" sold them to a certain someone "who used to live in Baghdad."
But the season finale of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" on HBO arguably best conveyed the growing sentiment. On that episode, the main character, played by the comedian Larry David, backed out of a dalliance sanctioned by his wife after noticing that his prospective paramour had lovingly displayed a picture of Mr. Bush on her dresser.
Viking Pundit has coined a new word for Kerryspeak, "Splunge-peranto".?Free but fair? like ?I voted for it before I voted against it? and ?You are not duped when somebody misleads you and in effect lies to you or doesn't tell you the truth? is all part of a new language Kerry is trying to invent called Splunge-peranto. The defining characteristics of Splunge-peranto are statements that are 1.) non-specific, 2.) self-contradictory, or 3.) laden with escape clauses such that the speaker can later claim he meant the exact opposite.
(Side note: what exactly is the definition of being duped? Hmmmm...)
Polipundit points out that, as an April Fool's Joke, the Kerry campaign just released an ad about Bush losing jobs.Let's say you're a Kerry campaign adviser and you want to run a new ad focusing on job losses. Do you:
a) Know that a key employment report is going to be released on April 2; so you should wait until then before airing the ad?
or
b) Release the ad on April 1 so that it can be countered by boffo job creation numbers the very next day?
Someone at the Kerry campaign screwed this up big time.
I wonder how the Kerry people will spin these job growth numbers.
I thought the terrorists weren't going to target Spain anymore.
Is there a movie in Richard Clarke's future? Gag.
Stephen Moore explains that gas prices are not at historic highs if you adjust for inflation. And he explains why prices are high and what should be done to lower them.
Bill Whalen looks at all statistical patterns in presidential elections. Following all these patterns either Kerry or Bush should win this year. Here are some samples.What's in a name? In the 19th Century, gentlemen-candidates who publicly sported a middle name tended not to be two-term presidents: John Quincy Adams, William Henry Harrison, James Knox Polk, James Abram Garfield. It may partially explain why Grover Cleveland dropped his first name, Stephen, from his political persona (that, and his family's habit of addressing each other by their middle names). If the election remains tight after Labor Day, will the New York Times suddenly change its style rule to "George Walker Bush"?
"4" Factor. Since the advent of the two-party system, only once has the party that won in a "0" year election lost it in the subsequent "4" year contest. That was 1884, when one-and-out Republican Chester Alan Arthur (there's that pesky middle name again) chose not to run. Two differences between then and now: Arthur inherited the presidency after Garfield's assassination; and the GOP had controlled the White House for the previous 24 years (whereas the White House changed party hands four times in the 24 years from 1976 to 2000).
Hoop dreams? . . . From 1940 to 1972, the home state of the NCAA men's basketball champ also voted for the winning presidential candidate (the lone exception: 1960, when Ohio State won it all and Nixon didn't). Since 1988, the tournament has alternated from winner to loser, this year being the winning candidate's turn to carry the champ's state. The advantage here: Bush. Three of the teams in next weekend's "Final Four"--Oklahoma State, Georgia Tech and Duke--come from Republican "red" states. If you're a Democrat, the Connecticut Huskies are your team.
American Spectator looks at the war on the Boy Scouts.
Bruce Bartlett attempts to explain why outsourcing is not the disaster that some thinkit is.The most important finding of the Global Insight study is that the cost savings from outsourcing don't just flow into higher corporate profits. They contribute significantly to higher output in the U.S., which leads to job increases elsewhere in the economy. The study estimates that the gross domestic product was $34 billion higher last year because of outsourcing and that this created over 90,000 net new jobs. These figures will continue to rise in future years. By 2008, GDP will be $124 billion higher and the number of new jobs created by outsourcing will rise to 317,000.
Joel Mowbray says that the real division in this election is how the candidates view evil.
It sounds like Bush will get his opportunity for his first veto.
Charles Krauthammer is not impressed by Richard Clarke's apology to the families of 9/11 victims.Indeed, one has to admire it -- the most cynical and brilliantly delivered apology in recent memory: Richard Clarke using the nationally televised Sept. 11 commission hearings to address the families of the victims. "Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you."
Many were moved. I was not. For two reasons. First, the climactic confession "I failed you" -- the one that packed the emotional punch -- was entirely disingenuous. Clarke did the mea culpa and then spent the next 21/2 hours of testimony -- as he did on every talk show known to man and in the 300 pages of his book -- demonstrating how everyone else except him had failed. And they failed because the stubborn, ignorant, ideologically blinkered, poll-driven knaves and fools he had been heroically fighting against within the government would not listen to him.
Message: They failed you.
Second, by blaming the government for the deaths of their loved ones, Clarke deftly endorsed the grotesque moral inversion by which those who died on Sept. 11 are victims of . . . George Bush. This is about as morally obscene as the implication (made by, among others, the irrepressible Howard Dean) that those who died in the Madrid bombings were also victims of George Bush.
This is false. They were all victims of al Qaeda and al Qaeda alone.
Bill Clinton did not apologize for Oklahoma City. Ronald Reagan did not apologize for the Beirut bombing. FDR did not apologize for Pearl Harbor. George W. Bush owes no apology. If an apology is owed, it is owed to the entire country and not just the families, and it is owed by the murderers who planned and carried out Sept. 11.
Mona Charen watched C-Span's replay of the Dick Cavett debate show with John Kerry and John O'Neill about whether or not there were atrocities committed by American troops in Vietnam. Mona Charen was not impressed with Kerry's answers.Cavett attempted to remain neutral, but it was ultimately too much for him. Not only did he agree with Kerry, but O'Neill tried his patience by interrupting repeatedly. With barely concealed sarcasm, Cavett said: "Nobody believes that there will be a blood bath if we withdraw. That was a cliche we used to hear a lot. Neither of you believes that do you?" Kerry's answer was emblematic of the antiwar left. He said he thought it was a "baiting argument" by the pro-war side since "there'd be no interest on the part of the Vietnamese to start massacring people after people (the United States) had pulled out."
Following America's withdrawal and Congress' decision to cut off every penny for Southeast Asia, there was a terrible genocide in Cambodia, so terrible that it overshadows the horror of what befell Vietnam. Roughly 800,000 boat people chose to take their lives in their hands rather than remain in communist Vietnam. Some 65,000 were executed, and this does not include those who slowly starved in concentration camps.
Wonder if the senator would care to revise and extend his remarks?
The White House has released its anti-terror plan that was developed before 9/11. So, what happens to all the allegations that the Bush people didn't pay attention to Al Qaeda before 9/11? Are we seeing more of the President's mousetrap strategy?
Christopher Hitchens lays into those who now think that Iraq was a waste.I debate with the opponents of the Iraq intervention almost every day. I always have the same questions for them, which never seem to get answered. Do you believe that a confrontation with Saddam Hussein's regime was inevitable or not? Do you believe that a confrontation with an Uday/Qusay regime would have been better? Do you know that Saddam's envoys were trying to buy a weapons production line off the shelf from North Korea (vide the Kay report) as late as last March? Why do you think Saddam offered "succor" (Mr. Clarke's word) to the man most wanted in the 1993 bombings in New York? Would you have been in favor of lifting the "no fly zones" over northern and southern Iraq; a 10-year prolongation of the original "Gulf War"? Were you content to have Kurdish and Shiite resistance fighters do all the fighting for us? Do you think that the timing of a confrontation should have been left, as it was in the past, for Baghdad to choose?
I hope I do not misrepresent my opponents, but their general view seems to be that Iraq was an elective target; a country that would not otherwise have been troubling our sleep. This ahistorical opinion makes it appear that Saddam Hussein was a new enemy, somehow chosen by shady elements within the Bush administration, instead of one of the longest-standing foes with which the United States, and indeed the international community, was faced. So, what about the "bad news" from Iraq? There was always going to be bad news from there. Credit belongs to those who accepted--can we really decently say pre-empted?--this long-term responsibility. Fallujah is a reminder, not just of what Saddamism looks like, or of what the future might look like if we fail, but of what the future held before the Coalition took a hand.
Thursday, April 01, 2004
It sounds like Bush has totally won over Morton Kondracke. Remember when Kondracke used to be the resident liberal on the Mclaughlin Group?Clarke and various Democrats, including presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., have accused the White House of engaging in vicious character attacks to discredit Clarke.
But Clarke, after all, has been vicious in attacking Bush. The Bush response has been, in the main, factual.
On CBS' "60 Minutes," Clarke declared, "I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it ... for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know."
Besides making some petty observations that Clarke was trying to sell a book, the White House released — and was entirely within its rights to release — a background briefing that Clarke held with reporters in August 2002 in which he defended White House preparations.
Contrary to a Time magazine assertion that the Bush administration rejected Clinton administration anti-terrorism plans out of "animus," Clarke told the reporters that Bush had kept on Clinton officials — notably, Clarke himself — and that Clinton never had actually developed a full-blown "plan" to fight terror.
Questioned sharply by 9/11 commission members about the contrast between the background transcript and his book, Clarke claimed — in essence — that he'd "spun" reporters at the urging of his White House superiors. The only alternative, he said, would have been to resign. Surely, he could have simply declined.
The most damning single challenge to Clarke's credibility is the fact that he urgently sought to stay on in the Bush administration to be No. 2 man at the Department of Homeland Security.
Friends of Clarke have told me that he was deeply bitter when he was denied the job. Clearly, were he in that post today, his book, "Against All Enemies" (The Free Press, 2004), would never have been written.
Check out James Taranto. He has a great collection of stories with his usual snarky wit.
Ed Driscoll notes the way that ABC News believes that it is proper to show the corpses of the Americans killed in Fallujah because it might make people think twice about going to war, but that they didn't want to show the pictures of people jumping from the World Trade Center. I guess that would have been too distressing and incite people to anger. So, corpses in pursuit of their political agenda are fine.
Lileks does a great job fisking Kerry's inane MTV interview. (Kerry is in italics)I will respect the international community — not that we're tying ourselves to it in a way that doesn't allow us to make decisions and protect our own security. But it's important to try and build real coalitions. It's important to bring people to our side. Even the powerful United States of America needs friends and allies on this planet. And I intend to pursue a foreign policy that faces up to realities.Read the whole thing.
Again: a real coalition means “Germany and France.” Would he consider a coalition that included Germany and France, but did not include England, to be “real”? What’s the magic number of nations? Do we weight the nations for population and the nature of the government? If the UN is on our side, and most of the governments are autocracies, does that lend legitimacy to our efforts? “I intend to pursue a foreign policy that faces up to realities.” These realities apparently do not include the nature of nations, which is to act in their self-interest above all. Unless he thinks all those Syrian vetoes were done out of high-minded principles.
We continue:
For instance, North Korea, George Bush didn't even negotiate, didn't even begin the process for two years. I would never not open the process of real dialogue to see what the possibilities are.
The government of North Korea is made up of liars and thieves who are starving millions of their own people to prop up a crime gang. They rolled us once. There is no profit in “opening up the process of real dialogue to see what the possibilities are” when you know that the process will result in the same old deals: give us oil and food so we can feed our army and keep building nukes while we insist that we’re not. I heard this line back in the 80s, over and over again: it was important to talk to the Soviets, to have lots of summits and sign lots of papers, because at least we’re talking! That’s preferable to fighting, and it has to lead to something good. Okay, well, imagine that Hitler never declared war on the United States, and conquered Europe by 41. Would you prefer that FDR responded by “opening up the process of real dialogue to see what the possibilities are” or sending the smart boys off to a dark room to draw up Overlord?
Warning: when someone says “opening up the process of real dialogue to see what the possibilities are” they have conceded the first round of negotiations, because the other side knows we can be had, and had cheaply. Because we want to deal. Because we want a deal for domestic consumption. Because we want a deal to legitimize the international apparatus of talks, more talks, summits, signings, banquets where the Secretary of State gavottes with the high-haired brute who sits atop his private gulag.