too much truth to swallow

Does this thing still work?

2006-10-01T07:31:00.000-05:00

Well I think I will resume blogging again. It's been a good break and it time to smite the leftists with my blog's volcanic power.

BU-WHA-HA-HA-HA-HA!

WTF????

2005-11-07T19:52:00.000-05:00

The American Thinker cites investigative work by Strata-Sphere that might indicate that Joe Wilson might be part of the yellowcake smuggling racket.

Huh?

Yes, I am convinced that Joe Wilson is leftist scum. Yes I am convinced that Joe Wilson lied in his article “What I didn’t find in Africa”. Yes, I’m convinced that Joe Wilson tried to change the outcome of the 2004 Presidential elections. OK, OK, OK all ready.

What I question is, If Joe Wilson was so far gone as to be part of the Yellowcake smuggling racket then why didn’t he just falsify his report to the CIA? I mean, instead of reporting that Iraqis showed interest in “a improved export relationship”—went the only thing that Niger exported that the Iraqis might be interested in was yellowcake—that he report that he learned nothing of the sort?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Who'd thunk it? Elizabeth Edwards hangs at DU.

2005-08-16T19:21:00.000-05:00

Well now the cat's out of the bag Elizabeth Edwards hangs at Democratic Underground, at the Daily "Screw'em" Kos, and listens to Err American and Talk Left radio. Yup, that shows that the best the Dems had to offer was a flaky as a box of Rice Crispies.

Yes, I know, in theory it doesn't matter it what the VP's wife thinks but I still feel that this indicates we dodged a bullet last November.

hat tip PoliPundit and Powerline News.

2005-08-07T20:12:00.000-05:00

Cat Peeking

Olie's advice for Bolton

2005-08-05T08:04:00.000-05:00

Oliver North made a stellar suggestion regarding John Bolton's first official act as UN ambassador:

Before your first meeting in the Security Council, go over and say hello to the French ambassador and, just before he sits down, slip a whoopee cushion on his chair.

I LIKE IT!

Brian Williams: George Washington == Terrorist

2005-07-30T01:37:00.000-05:00

Brian Williams:

It is a story that will be at or near the top of our broadcast and certainly made for a robust debate in our afternoon editorial meeting, when several of us raised the point (I'll leave it to others to decide germaneness) that several U.S. presidents were at minimum revolutionaries, and probably were considered terrorists of their time by the Crown in England.

Leaving aside the obvious point that various U.S. presidents were revolutionaries (e.g., Washington, Jackson, et al) there is no reason to believe that they were consider terrorists.

Also note that while Williams is vague on exactly which presidents he might be referring to it really makes no difference because none of them committed acts that characterize terrorism: attacking civilians. George Washington waged war against England’s soldiers, not England’s civilians.

Now I suppose that some troll will combine my last statement with the fact that the al Qaeda death-squads in Iraq are attacking American soldiers and then claim—by my own logic—that the death squad members cannot be terrorists either. My answer is “Oh yes they are!”

The al Qaeda death-squads in Iraq are terrorists because they target Iraqi civilians and government officials. This makes them terrorists. True, they also use guerrilla tactics against U.S. Soldiers but this just makes them terrorists who also use guerrilla tactics.

Anyway, back to the main point. Tthis statement, of course, exploded in Brian Williams’ hands like a nuclear hand grenade. The right lobe of the blogosphere’s brain had a field day. My favorite is IMAO. Jeff Goldstein’s "9 OTHER analogies NBC'S Brian Williams would like us to consider in the name of showy, PC intellectualism" is also a must read.

Anyway, eventually Williams felt the need of a a little damage control.

While I insist that a re-reading of my question will prove that in no way was I calling the framers "terrorists" (for starters, the word did not exist 229 years ago), I regret that anyone thought that after a life spent reading and loving American history, I had suddenly changed my mind about the founders of our nation.

Here Williams makes a hypertechnical point that he himself never explicitly said the framers were terrorists. After all, in his original statement, he attribute the “point” that certain unnamed U.S. presidents were “considered terrorists of their time by the Crown in England” to certain unnamed colleagues who attended an “afternoon editorial meeting”.

I have two reactions:

First of all, “That’s nice”: a certain percentage of the elites in the MSM have the idea that George Washington was considered a terrorist in his time. While I dispute that he was, Brian Williams just proved that George Washington is considered a terrorist in our time. By the MSM, that is. Thanks for revealing this, Brian!

Secondly: Assuming that Williams totally rejected this premise then why did he write this crap in your blog in the first place? It must not have seemed so beyond the pale at the time. Maybe he just forgot that his moral equivalency, which holds that al Qaeda death squads equal American revolutionaries, isn’t shared by the non-multiculturalists. (Oops!)

Furthermore, now Brian Williams points out it is actually impossible for, say George Washington, to be consider a terrorist because the word terrorism didn’t exist 229 years ago (i.e., 1776). Ok, true enough; the word terrorism was coined in 1795 during the bloody French Revolution, so it couldn’t be used at the time of our revolution. This just makes it even more of a mystery why Williams was so uninhibited about equating George Washington with a terrorist.

Terror attack in London

2005-07-07T07:44:00.000-05:00

Al Qaeda executed a terror attack in London this morning.

America extends her heartfelt sympathy and compassion to our gallant friend and ally, the British people.

The Americans and the British know that they can count on each other when the chips are down. Most recently the British stood by us after 9/11 and we will stand with them to avenge this atrocity.

And as for al Qaeda, we will continue strangling you to death. Savor the anticipation.

What good comes from denying gays the right to marry?

2005-06-29T05:38:00.000-05:00

I've had a running debate with some friends regarding a number of issues. Recently Tom asked a simple question:

Tom asked:

Just curious. Please tell me what good comes from denying gays the right to
marry.

Johnh replied:

Hmmm… I could answer your question with another question: "Please tell me what good comes from pretending to discover non-existent "rights" in the Constitution?" Or more specifically, "Please tell me what good comes from pretending to discover the "right" to same-sex marriage in the Constitution?"

I suppose that such a response would be suitable for a Crossfire-style sound bite but it is actuality rather inadequate because this issue creates problems at several levels.

Judicial Activism. There has been a slow-motion takeover of the political branch of our government by the judicial branch that has been underway for the last 50 years. The essence of judicial activism is judges using their power to usurp elected official's roles—creating law—instead of passively interpreting law. The Massachusetts Supreme Courts decision—which discovered a constitutional right to same-sex marriage that had been undetected for over 200 years—is exhibit A as an example of judicial activism.
I would have no qualms regarding judicial activism if those who favor same-sex marriage were able to persuade the legislatures to pass laws that establishing same-sex marriage. (I would have other qualms, however.) This route would require these advocates to attract political support, build political consensus and perhaps accept compromises just like any other political faction. But, apparently, the political route is too inconvenient for them.
Instead—and as usual with leftists—those seeking to establish same-sex marriage are trying to obtain their desired policy desires through litigation and decisions of judges rather than through the elected representatives of the citizens.
The ideological civil war within the West. In this view, same-sex marriage is just another aspect of the multicultural assault on Western Civilization. (Update: I should have said Classical Liberalism not Western Civilization. My bad) I quoted extensive material describing aspects of multiculturalism earlier in this thread. One of the major aspects of the multicultural assault is " The values of all dominant institutions to be changed to reflect the perspectives of the victim groups. " In this case the tactic is to redefine the word marriage to mean something fundamentally different to what it has meant for the last 5,000+ years.
Inverting the values and norms of the traditions that sustain our society is just another aspect of the left's multicultural assault. The struggle between the left and the conservatives over who controls the definitions of the words and concepts used by our culture occurs as the left seeks to inverted our values and norms
Acceptance of same-sex marriage defines deviancy down. Homosexuality is Both a fact of nature and an abnormality. Statistics show that somewhere between 2% and 5% of the population is gay in any given society, regardless of how tolerant the given society is of homosexual behavior. A reasonable conclusion is that homosexuality is normal in the sense that it is rooted in nature, but that sociality it is abnormal in that the vast majority of people are not and never will be homosexuality inclined. Consequently, homosexuality is a birth defect that should be tolerated but not accepted as a norm.

The last comment, of course, begs the question: So what's wrong with deviancy? Traditionally, social stigmas create a psychological wall or distance between members of a population who rebel against norms and engage in destructive behaviors. In evolutionary terms, this is the same as the herd culling unfit members from itself.

NB: This is a case where mentally or psychologically deficient individuals become less likely to reproduce because they are shunned as opposed to physically deficient individuals who become less likely to reproduce because of physical deficiencies. The ability to recognize and conform to norms is a survival trait for individuals.

With this last thought in mind, consider my statements—made in an earlier part of this thread, describing the utility of morals as survival skills. A culture's survival skills are encoded in its norms and traditions. A culture with dysfunctional norms will is ill adapted for success.
The anthropologist Margaret Mead discovered many small tribes with strange and bizarre cultures during her research. While the existence of these cultures shows how extreme cultures can get I believe that this also shows that the very oddness of these cultures is at least one of the factors that constrained these cultures' success and growth.

Continuing in this vein, defining deviancy down weakens a society by removing the ability to recognize and isolate self-destructive behavior. Defining deviancy down is the cause of the phenomena described by Theodore Dalrymple, whose description I quoted earlier in this thread.

Best regards,
johnh

From al CNN to al Jazeera

2005-06-15T21:18:00.000-05:00

This is one of those "sheed-I-knew-it-all-along" stories. Riz Khan, who currently hosts Q&A with Riz Khan on al CNN, is making a jump to--where else--Al Jazeera.

What is taking the CNN staff so long to make the jump to the only network that is more blatantly anti-American than the BBC?

Hi five to LGF

And activist Judges are the tumors in a Metastasizing Constitution

2005-05-20T06:40:00.000-05:00

Edward Whelan makes the point that the so called "living" constitution is actually the Metastasizing Constitution.

In contrast, Scalia says he likes his Constitution "dead."

Kos-alanche!

2005-03-04T12:45:00.000-05:00

I see that I'm receiving a flurry of visitors from DailyKos ever since he linked to my old Pajamahadeen post.

Welcome to my humble blog, Kossaks. And thanks for the mention, DailyKos!

Clinton aide: There's always hope that [Bush's foreign policy] might not work

2005-03-03T05:53:00.000-05:00

James Taranto analyzes a transcript of Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central's “The Daily Show”, interviewing former Clinton aid Nancy Soderberg, who was flogging her new book: The Superpower Myth: The Use and Misuse of American Might. Amazon.com readers who have rated this book, at least at the time of this posting, have assigned it a perfectly mediocre “two stars” (out of a possible five stars). Maybe her time might have been better spent writing a better book instead of promoting dodgy goods.

As an aside, beware of Clintonistas who write books that suggest that Clinton’s refusal to employ American power in response to, say, I don’t know—maybe to al Qaeda’s 1993 attempted destruction of the World Trade Center bombing, was wiser that Bush's use of it in response to al Qaeda’s 2001 successful destruction of the World Trade Center.

OK, Back on topic.

Nancy Soderberg had the bad fortune to write this book back when the conventional wisdom—at least as announced by the MSM—was that everything was going poorly in Iraq and the prognosis, in general, was bad.

Consequently, Soderberg is having to boost a book,

that is pessimistic about, say, the outcome of Bush’s efforts in Iraq,

which was released to the bookstores on January 28^th

and which said release of said pessimistic book is confronted with the successful Iraqi elections of January 30^th

BU-WHA-HAHAHAHAHAHA!

And now this clueless Clintonista is gamely hitting the talk shows—amid MSM reports about successful Iraqi elections, Iraqis protesting al Qaeda death squad attacks in Iraq, Lebanese citizens protesting the presence of Syrian troops and security forces in Lebanon, and Palestinians protesting and homicide bombing in Tel Aviv—discussing how her book explains why Bush should have had more humility and not attempt the impossible and why the sky wouldn’t be falling if Bush had just tried to be as ineffectual as Clinton and saying all of these things when Bush foreign policy garden is coming up with nothing but roses. And the best part is she is (probably) contractually required to make a fool out of herself this way on national TV and elsewhere. Of course I haven’t seen the contract between her and her publisher (Wiley) but I’m confident that it obligates her—in exchange for that advance that Wiley has to be regretting right now—to hit the talk shows and the book signing and pump her book; hence her interview on “The Daily Show”.

OK, all of the above is delicious enough already but wait, there’s more! Jon Stewart managed to get her to admit that the Democrats are hoping for a Bush failure in the Middle East:

Stewart: Do you think they're the guys to--do they understand what they've unleashed? Because at a certain point, I almost feel like, if they had just come out at the very beginning and said, "Here's my plan: I'm going to invade Iraq. We'll get rid of a bad guy because that will drain the swamp"--if they hadn't done the whole "nuclear cloud," you know, if they hadn't scared the pants off of everybody, and just said straight up, honestly, what was going on, I think I'd almost--I'd have no cognitive dissonance, no mixed feelings.

Soderberg: The truth always helps in these things, I have to say. But I think that there is also going on in the Middle East peace process--they may well have a chance to do a historic deal with the Palestinians and the Israelis. These guys could really pull off a whole—

Stewart: This could be unbelievable!

Soderberg: ---series of Nobel Peace Prizes here, which--it may well work. I think that, um, it's—

Stewart: [buries head in hands] Oh my God! [audience laughter] He's got, you know, here's—

Soderberg: It's scary for Democrats, I have to say.

Stewart: He's gonna be a great--pretty soon, Republicans are gonna be like, "Reagan was nothing compared to this guy." Like, my kid's gonna go to a high school named after him, I just know it.

Soderberg: Well, there's still Iran and North Korea, don't forget. There's hope for the rest of us. [emphasis mine--johnh

Did you catch that? Soderberg is practically admitting that the Democrats are about to hang themselves over Bush’s imminent success! She basically said that the Democrats only hope is that Bush’s successes in both Afghanistan and Iraq are canceled out by some sort of debacle in either North Korea or Iran—perhaps one similar to the Bay of Pigs debacle caused by Ted Kennedy’s brother.

Also recall Jon Stewart’s prediction that his kid would go to a high school named after Bush. Jon Stewart voiced one of my expectations: that Bush is going to be remembered to be at least as consequential as Reagan.

I have to quote James Taranto’s sensible commentary on this interview:

We've long been skeptical of Jon Stewart, but color us impressed. He managed to ambush this poor woman brutally, in a friendly interview. She was supposed to be promoting her book, and instead he got her to spend the entire interview debunking it (at least if we understood the book's thesis correctly from the very brief discussion of it up top).

She also admitted repeatedly that Democrats are hoping for American failure in the Middle East. To be sure, this is not true of all Democrats, Soderberg speaks only for herself, and she says she is ambivalent ("But as an American . . ."). But we do not question her expertise in assessing the prevailing mentality of her own party. No wonder Dems get so defensive about their patriotism.

Interesting too is Stewart's acknowledgment of his own "cognitive dissonance" and "mixed feelings" over the Iraq liberation. It's a version of an argument we've been hearing a lot lately: As our Brendan Miniter puts it, "The president's critics never seem to tire of claiming that the war in Iraq began over weapons of mass destruction and only later morphed into a war of liberation."

Miniter correctly notes that "this criticism isn't entirely right," but for the sake of argument let's assume it is. What does it mean? President Bush has altered his arguments to conform to reality, while his critics remain fixated on obsolete disputes. This would seem utterly to refute the liberal media stereotype. Bush, it turns out, is a supple-minded empiricist, while his opponents are rigid ideologues.

I have to say, Jon Stewart is a pretty switched on guy for a fellow who makes his living entertaining stoned slackers.

Update:

Mike's America has the background on Nancy Soderberg:

Yes, Democrats are left hoping that either Iran or North Korea will start some trouble or worse... Isn't that pathetically sad? And while we are on the subject of North Korea... wasn't it the Clinton Adminstration that went over there in the 90's and promised them anything if they would just behave??? And it was this same Soderberg woman who was #3 in the Clinton National Security Council and worked at the heart of that Adminstration during it's malfeasance in the conduct of foreign policy.

And of course you know that if Kerry were elected... she'd be right back in there making as big a mess of things now as she, Clinton and Albright did then.

Good background investigation Mike! I have to point out that the Clinton-Soderberg dynamic duo wasn't alone on North Korea; Jimmy Carter worked out the deal on their behalf.

Thank you, nick, for the blogrolling

2005-03-02T17:45:00.000-05:00

Nick of Just Opinions was nice enough to blog roll 2muchtruth.

Many Thanks!

New Report on Saudi Government Publications in U.S.

2005-03-02T12:22:00.000-05:00

The Center for Religious Freedom has released a new study titled Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques. The study’s foreword was written by James Woolsey (CIA director from 1993-1195) is worth reading for its own sake. (James Woolsey, by the way, was the CIA director that Bill Clinton avoided meeting for no apparent reason. )

The study reviews the history of the Wahhabi Islamic sect that dominates Saudi Arabia and how it changed from being a fringe element to essentially becoming Saudi Arabia’s “official version” of Islam after 1979. The study examines the how the Saudi ruling family has funded the Wahhabi clerics and their international efforts to create mosques and Islamic schools that only teach the Wahhabi version of Islam. The study also examines the hostile language—hostile to Western culture, that is—of Wahhabi ideology and literature.

Here is a short explanation of the study’s intention:

Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom decided to undertake this project after a number of Muslims and other experts publicly raised concerns about Saudi state influence on American religious life.1 This report complements a May 2003 recommendation of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent government agency, that the U.S. government conduct a study on Saudi involvement in propagating internationally a “religious ideology that explicitly promotes hate, intolerance, and other human rights violations, and in some cases violence, toward members of other religious groups, both Muslims and non-Muslims.” 2 In releasing this report, the Center is also mindful of one of the key findings of the 9/11 Commission Report: “Education that teaches tolerance, the dignity and value of each individual, and respect for different beliefs is a key element in any global strategy to eliminate Islamist terrorism.”

The phenomenon of Saudi hate ideology is worldwide, but its occurrence in the United States has received scant attention. This report begins to probe in detail the content of the Wahhabi ideology that the Saudi government has worked to propagate through books and other publications within our borders. …

As I read the study I was struck by the explicit directives on how to shun infidels and when to kill:

Here is Wahhabi position on saying “Hi!” to an infidel:

On the matter of whether or not to commence greetings with Christians and Jews, the Saudi publication imposes a strict prohibition. Replying to a salutation by an unbeliever, on the other hand, should consist of no more than a terse “and upon you” …. This directive is also contained in the tract published by the Saudi Embassy’s Cultural Department in Washington and collected from the Islamic Center in Washington.

“It is forbidden for a Muslim to be first in greeting an unbeliever, even if he has a prestigious position.”

Here’s the instruction on how to hate your Christian neighbor:

According to the Wahhabi view, it is a Muslim’s religious duty to cultivate enmity between oneself and unbelievers. Hatred of unbelievers is the proof that the believer has completely dissociated from them. A work entitled Loyalty and Dissociation in Islam, compiled by the Ibn Taymiya Library in Riyadh and distributed by the King Fahd-supported Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., states emphatically:

“To be dissociated from the infidels is to hate them for their religion, to leave them, never to rely on them for support, not to admire them, to be on one’s guard against them, never to imitate them, and to always oppose them in every way according to Islamic law.”

Here is Wahhabi intolerance for tolerance:

Western churches have increasingly called for greater unity among world religions and interfaith dialogue, but the Saudi Arabian authoritative religious office is adamant. The government’s Permanent Committee finds no common ground. Islam is the final and most perfect religion and by its coming all previous religions, including Judaism and Christianity, have been nullified. The Saudi text asserts that the Koran has rendered both the Torah and the Gospels obsolete because they were tampered with and altered by wicked or wayward men. The call to greater unity among religions is therefore sinful since it erases the radical differences between Islam and systems of unbelief. The Saudi text, distributed in the San Diego mosque declares,

“It is basic to the belief of Islam that everyone who does not embrace Islam is an unbeliever and must be called an unbeliever and that they are enemies to Allah, his Prophet and the believers….That is why the one who does not call the Jews and the Christian unbelievers is himself an unbeliever….”

Worst of all is for a Muslim to call for such unity and promote this sinful idea at meetings or conferences with unbelievers. Thus, participating in the building of interdenominational places of worship where religious rites other than those of Islam are practiced is a serious instance of misguided behavior meriting severe reprimand

The Saudi government text makes clear the reason interfaith harmony is to be feared is that it will lead to the end of jihad.

“The effect of this sinful call is that it erases the differences between Islam and disbelief, between truth and falsehood, good and bad, and it breaks the wall of resentment between the Muslims and the unbelievers, so that there is no loyalty and enmity, no more jihad and fighting to raise Allah’s word on earth….”

Here is Wahhabi religious instruction on how to be a total overbearing prick toward your domestic help:

The Saudi publications also instruct Muslims that it is preferable not to hire non-
Muslims, especially within the Arabian Peninsula, but, if they do, they have to hate them. In fatwas on the “Treatment of Servants,” published [Document No. 36] by the Saudi Embassy to Washington and collected from the Islamic Center in East Orange, N.J., the late Saudi Grand Mufti Bin Baz states the following about how to handle an infidel domestic worker:

“The women in your household do not have to stay away from her, but they should not treat her as they would treat a Muslim woman. They have to hate her for Allah’s sake….” [Document No. 36]

The study covers an number of everyday topic, for example, how to tell when it becomes necessary to kill another Muslim, demonizing the Jews, how to hate Muslims how are something other than Wahhabis, anti-Americanism, and so on.

Feeling more enlightened yet?

Mexican government hires lawyers to study legal challenges to Minutemen

2005-03-01T06:50:00.000-05:00

A group known as the Minuteman Project is organizing volunteers to conduct surveillance along a twenty-mile stretch of U.S.-Mexican border. The The Minuteman Project's website states:

Our policy of passive activity will be to OBSERVE with the aid of binoculars - telescopes - night vision scopes, and inform the U.S. Border Patrol of the location of illegal activity so that border patrol agents can investigate.

We will not be confrontational with anyone. The tentative area of observation will be a 20-mile stretch of lowlands across the San Pedro Valley in southeast Arizona.

The Mexico edition of the Herald reports that, according to the Mexican Foreign Minister, the Mexican Government intends to use the U.S. court system to oppose volunteer border surveillance groups:

The government of Mexico will use all legal channels to fight the formation of vigilante patrol groups along the U.S-Mexico border, Foreign Minister Luis Derbez said on Monday.

Notice that the author of this article, one Natalia Gómez, chose to spin passive observation of illegal infiltration of our country by her countrymen as vigilantism. Is this word, vigilantism, a good fit? From Wikipedia:

In modern terms, vigilantes are militias or police which attempt law enforcement, in the usual phrase, "by taking the law into their own hands". Vigilantes often operate in secret.

The members of the Minuteman Project fail both parts of this description. They are neither operating in secret nor are they attempting to “take the law into their own hands”. They only intend to alert Homeland Security to any observed infiltration across our southern border. Yes, the Minuteman Project is a type of militia but a militia must also “take the law into their own hands” before they can be considered vigilantes.

The Herald article continues:

In addition, Derbez said that the issue would be broached with U.S. Secretary of State Condolezza Rice during her March 10 official visit to Mexico.

Derbez was speaking specifically to the formation of the Minuteman Project: a 500 strong volunteer group that plans to patrol a 40-mile stretch of the Arizona border throughout April.

Officials on both sides of the border fear the Minuteman patrols could cause more trouble than they prevent.

Trouble? What sort of trouble might that be? Inconveniencing illegal immigrants, drug smugglers, and the occasional al Qaeda death squad by ratting them out to Homeland Security? Creating news that embarrasses Homeland Security officials? I can deal with that sort of trouble.

Note well that Gómez is citing anonymous sources when she quotes unnamed “Officials on both sides of the border”. Is there any sensible reason why such an official would need the protection of anonymity to express such as “discordant” opinion? Or was Gómez just interviewing voices inside her head?

At least some of the volunteers plan to arm themselves during the 24-hour desert patrols.

Evidently Gómez thinks Americans exercising their Second Amendment rights as a contingency against criminal assault by illegal immigrants or drug smugglers is troubling or something. Memo to Gómez: stuff it. If I were participating in the Minuteman Project I would be armed. Why? I’m so glad you asked! Because the illegal infiltrators at the U.S.-Mexican border have earned a reputation for violence, that’s why.

Many are untrained and have little or no experience in confronting illegal border crossings.

This is just more of Gómez’s vigilante spin. The Minuteman Project has already explicitly stated that they intended to avoid any confrontation.

The Mexican government has already hired a Los Angeles based legal firm to prepare a report on possible legal actions to challenge such vigilante groups, Derbez said Monday.

What is this? The Mexican government is hiring U.S. lawyers to facilitate illegal infiltration into the U.S. from Mexico? [Boom! My head explodes as the absurdity reaches critical mass.] This is not logic but a cry of desperation.

Also, I would just love to see the “report” those LA attorneys come up with. What can they say? That Americans plan to lurk on American soil observing any interesting activities that might or might not occur on the American side of the Mexican border? Please.

And what will be the Mexican government’s official complaint about the Minuteman Project? My guess is that it is going to sound like the backseat of a family car around hour nine of driving toward a vacation spot: “Mommy! Johnny’s looking at me again!”

BU WHA HAHAHAHAHA!

Postscript:
all emphasis, except in the quote from Wikipedia, is mine.

Update:

Welcome visitors from Modern Tribalist! Look around and enjoy your visit!

Mark Steyn:The Arabs' Berlin Wall has crumbled

2005-02-28T21:45:00.000-05:00

Mark Steyn has release another article, The Arabs' Berlin Wall has crumbled, that deserves reading. Steyn's basic premise always is that Middle East stability is a Very Bad Thing not a Very Good Thing because it creates a hothouse for human monsters (e.g., Saddam, the Taliban, the Iranians, et al). Even if Bush's actions create a bigger mess it cannot be worse than that "stability" that brewed 9/11.

Here's Steyn:

Three years ago, those of us in favour of destabilising the Middle East didn't have to be far-sighted geniuses: it was a win/win proposition. As Sam Goldwyn said, I'm sick of the old clichés, bring me some new clichés. The old clichés - Pan-Arabism, Baathism, Islamism, Arafatism - brought us the sewer that led to September 11. The new clichés could hardly be worse. Even if the old thug-for-life had merely been replaced by a new thug-for-life, the latter would come to power in the wake of the cautionary tale of the former.

Steyn then gives a list of local improvments in the Middle East since the Iraqi Jan 30^th elections when he poinst out something that suprised me:

And, for perhaps the most remarkable development, consider this report from Mohammed Ballas of Associated Press: "Palestinians expressed anger on Saturday at an overnight suicide bombing in Tel Aviv that killed four Israelis and threatened a fragile truce, a departure from former times when they welcomed attacks on their Israeli foes.

Wow! That is a "Cats and Dogs living together" story if I ever heard one. Of course I don't know how widespread this phenomena was. There was a inability to find any pictures of the ritual post terror-attack Palestinian celebrations; so there seems to be movement in the right direction.

I also wonder about those Palestinians who “expressed anger” at the terrorists who were threatening “their” peace. Were they here all along? Were they just keeping quite before because Nobel Peace Prize winner Arafat would have them killed if he were still alive?

Just asking.

via Lucianne.

White House St. Patrick's Day minus Sinn Fein

2005-02-28T21:36:00.000-05:00

I love the Bush Whitehouse. Now Bush is snubbing Irish terrorists. What next? Maybe he'll begin snubbing supports of Hamas, like Chariac.

According to Swissinfo, The White House is likely to celebrate St. Patrick's Day this yearwithout inviting members of Sinn Fein or any other political parties from Northern Ireland.

Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Long overdue. Now maybe Blair will grow a pair of balls and demand that that the Irish elect leaders who are compromised by terrorism.

Dublin and London blame the Irish Republican Army for a $50 million (26 million pound) bank robbery in Belfast in December and accuse leaders of Sinn Fein, the IRA's political ally, of sanctioning the raid. Sinn Fein and the IRA deny involvement in the robbery.

The White House was expected to make a final decision this week, but it was likely to decide against inviting leaders of Northern Ireland's political parties, including Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein, for the traditional St. Patrick's Day reception.

Syria's Dead End

2005-02-28T21:12:00.000-05:00

I've just encountered a new—at least new for me—blog named Syria Comment. In a post entitled Syria's Dead End, Joshua Landis stated:

The Hariri assassination has placed the Europeans in a very awkward position. If they don't agree to economic sanctions, the US will accuse them of sanctioning murder. Bashar's blunders have cut the legs from underneath Europe. A few days ago, when the Canadian PM claimed that the Lebanese situation was a delicate one and that Syrian troops played an important role in maintaining security, he set off an uproar. Opposition members and supporters alike forced him to retract his statement. When Solana &mdash the EU foreign minister — initially said that Europe's relationship with Syria would not change until the author of Hariri's murder had been found, his words were drowned out by Tsunami of American and French accusations. Europe will have to give way to America on the Syria-Lebanon question. Chirac has stated that Lebanon is France's Iraq. All Europe will soon be confusing Beirut with Baghdad.

HAHAHAHA! Chirac thinks that Lebanon is France's Iraq? HAHAHAHAHAHA! Chirac is having delusions of adaquacy again.

All of that aside, Joshua Landis wrote a very interesting "inside baseball" post regarding the situation in Lebanon and Syria. Consider it required reading.

hat tip to Lucianne.

Postscrpt:
All added emphasis is mine.

Beloved Leader has found a practical use for France

2005-02-28T08:41:00.000-05:00

Beloved Leader (no, not Bush, Kim Jung Il, silly) has some advice for Bush:

He could buy Malta and use it as an unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Med. And use France as a bombing range.

As Glen Reynolds would say: Heh.

The Making Of A 9/11 Republican

2005-02-28T06:36:00.000-05:00

Wow! What an article!

Left coast conservative columnist (I felt weird typing that phrase) Cinnamon Stillwell explains her “road to Damascus” switch from a standard California leftist to being a conservative in her article, The Making Of A 9/11 Republican.

As one of a handful of Bay Area conservative columnists, I'm no stranger to pushing buttons. Indeed, I welcome feedback from readers, whether positive or negative. I find the interplay stimulating, but I am often bemused by the stereotypical assumptions made by my critics on the left. It's not enough to simply disagree with my views; I have to be twisted into a conservative caricature that apparently makes opponents feel superior. They seem not to have considered that it's possible to put forward different approaches to various societal problems and not be the devil incarnate.

But in some ways I understand where this perspective comes from, because I once shared it. I was raised in liberal Marin County, and my first name (Cinnamon) is a direct product of the hippie generation. Growing up, I bought into the prevailing liberal wisdom of my surroundings because I didn't know anything else. I wrote off all Republicans as ignorant, intolerant yahoos. It didn't matter that I knew none personally; it was simply de rigueur to look down on such people. The fact that I was being a bigot never occurred to me, because I was certain that I inhabited the moral high ground.

The leftists’ most annoying characteristic is their relentless assumption of moral superiority.

Having been indoctrinated in the postcolonialist, self-loathing school of multiculturalism, I thought America was the root of all evil in the world. … I put aside the nagging question of why so many people all over the world risk their lives to come to the United States. …

So, what happened to change all that? In a nutshell, 9/11. The terrorist attacks on this country were not only an act of war but also a crime against humanity. It seemed glaringly obvious to me at the time, and it still does today. But the reaction of my former comrades on the left bespoke a different perspective. The day after the attacks, I dragged myself into work, still in a state of shock, and the first thing I heard was one of my co-workers bellowing triumphantly, "Bush got his war!" There was little sympathy for the victims of this horrific attack, only an irrational hatred for their own country.

Notice her leftist colleagues had absolutely no sense of shared fate with their fellow countrymen. Their indifference is the sort that would be slightly more appropriate if they were citizens of another country, not this country. In a way, this is logical. Most leftists have a transnationalist outlook and consequently don’t have an emotional attachment to our country; they can’t hide it.

The other noteworthy point is the total lack of compassion shown for their country and for the 9/11 victims. This indifference is shows her leftist colleagues are complete moral midgets.

Of course the same group of said moral midgets can be guaranteed to assert that they have the most refined sense of moral ethics available. Why during the 80’s, when Africans of European decent denied English common law rights to Africans of African decent in the country of South Africa these same folks—or folks just like her colleagues—were picketing the South African embassy. But let jihadist racial cleansers kill 3,000 Americans on our mainland and “Bush got his war!”

[Adopting a Colombo tone of voice] Just one more question: where did Cinnamon Stillwell work on September 11, 2001? Did she work as a columnist in a newspaper back then? If yes then this means that her co-workers—the same moral midgets who were smugly indifferent to 3,000 American deaths on the mainland—were employed by the mainstream media! Think about the mindset of those who work in the MSM the next time you’re viewing or reading its products.

As I spent months grieving the losses, others around me wrapped themselves in the comfortable shell of cynicism and acted as if nothing had changed. I soon began to recognize in them an inability to view America or its people as victims, born of years of indoctrination in which we were always presented as the bad guys.

Never mind that every country in the world acts in its own self-interest, forms alliances with unsavory countries -- some of which change later -- and are forced to act militarily at times. America was singled out as the sole guilty party on the globe. I, on the other hand, for the first time in my life, had come to truly appreciate my country and all that it encompassed, as well as the bravery and sacrifices of those who fight to protect it.

Thoroughly disgusted by the behavior of those on the left, I began to look elsewhere for support. To my astonishment, I found that the only voices that seemed to me to be intellectually and morally honest were on the right. Suddenly, I was listening to conservative talk-show hosts on the radio and reading conservative columnists, and they were making sense. When I actually met conservatives, I discovered that they did not at all embody the stereotypes with which I'd been inculcated as a liberal.

Although my initial agreement with voices on the right centered on the war on terrorism, I began to find myself in concurrence with other aspects of conservative political philosophy as well. Smaller government, traditional societal structures, respect and reverence for life, the importance of family, personal responsibility, national unity over identity politics and the benefits of living in a meritocracy all became important to me. In truth, it turns out I was already conservative on many of these subjects but had never been willing to admit as much.

In my search for like-minded individuals, I also gravitated toward the religiously observant. This was somewhat revolutionary, considering my former liberal discomfort with religious folk, but I found myself in agreement on a number of issues. When it came to support for Israel, Orthodox Jews and Christian Zionists were natural allies. As the left rained down vicious attacks on Israel, commentators on the right (with the exception of Pat Buchanan and his ilk) became staunch supporters of the nation. The fact that I'm not a particularly religious person myself had little bearing on this political relationship, for it's entirely possible to be secular and not be antireligious. Unlike the secular fundamentalists who make it their mission in life to destroy all vestiges of America's Judeo-Christian heritage, I have come to value this legacy.

So I became what's now commonly known as a "9/11 Republican." Living in a time of war, disenchanted with the left and disappointed with the obstructionism and lack of vision of the Democratic Party, I threw in my hat with the only party that seemed to be offering solutions, rather than simply tearing away at our country. I went from voting for Ralph Nader in 2000 to proudly casting my ballot for George W. Bush in 2004. This doesn't necessarily mean that I agree with Bush on every issue, but there is enough common ground to support his party overall. In the wake of this political transformation, I discovered that I was not alone. It turned out that there are other 9/11 Republicans out there, both in the Bay Area and beyond, and they have been coming out of the woodwork.

Like many a political convert, I took it on myself to openly oppose the politics of those with which I once shared world views. Beyond writing, I put myself on the front lines of this ideological battle by taking part in counterprotests at the antiwar rallies leading up to the war in Iraq. This turned out to be a further wake-up call, because it was there that I encountered more intolerance than ever before in my life. Holding pro-Iraq-liberation signs and American flags, I was spat on, called names, intimidated, threatened, attacked, cursed and, on a good day, simply argued with. It was clear that any deviation from the prevailing leftist groupthink of the Bay Area was considered a threat to be eliminated as quickly as possible.

It was at such protests that I also had my first real brushes with anti-Semitism. The anti-Israel sentiment on the left -- inexorably linked to anti-Americanism -- ran high at these events and boiled over into Jew hatred on more than one occasion. The pro-Palestinian sympathies of the left had led to a bizarre commingling of pacifism, Communism and Arab nationalism. So it was not uncommon to see kaffiyeh-clad college students chanting Hamas slogans, graying hippies wearing "Intifada" T-shirts, Che Guevera backpacks, and signs equating Zionism with Nazism, all against a backdrop of peace, patchouli and tie-dye.

…In the end, the blatant anti-Semitism on the left, even among Jews, only strengthened my political transformation. I was, in effect, radicalized by the radicals.

But more than anything, it was the left's hypocrisy when it came to the war on terrorism that made me turn rightward after 9/11. I remember, back in my liberal days, being fiercely opposed to the Taliban and its brutal treatment of women. Even then, I felt that Afghanistan should immediately be liberated, as Malcolm X once said in another context, by any means necessary. But when it came time, it turned out that the left was mostly opposed to such liberation, whether of the Afghan people or of the Iraqis (especially if America and a Republican president were at the helm).

Indeed, liberals had become strangely conservative in their fierce attachment to the status quo. In contrast, the much-maligned neoconservatives (among whose ranks I count myself) and Bush had become the "radicals," bringing freedom and democracy to the despotic Middle East. Is it any wonder that in such a topsy-turvy world, I found myself in agreement with those I'd formerly denounced?

Cinnamon Stillwell’s complaint regarding “liberals [becoming] strangely conservative” and liberal hypocrisy are breathtakingly bland. I much prefer to apply Christopher Hitching’s observation regarding Noam Chomsky to them: the left’s support of the underdogs has mutated into support for the mad dogs.

My riposte to Hitching’s comment is that this is nothing new; the left has always supported the mad dogs of this world. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro all got a pass at the time from the American left.

All of this means is that there is nothing strange about today’s leftists' behavior; the left’s primary technique has always been framing indictments against the U.S. The left never felt the need to be internally self consistent because the indictments were never sincere in the first place; they were all just another weapon to attack the U.S. with.

The war on terrorism is nothing more than the great struggle of our time, and, like the earlier ones against fascism and totalitarianism, we ignore it at our peril. Whether or not one accepts that we are engaged in a war, our enemies have declared it so. It took the horrors of 9/11 to awaken me to this reality, but for others, such lessons remain unlearned. For me, it was self-evident that in Islamic terrorism, America had found a nihilistic threat that sought to wipe out not only Western civilization but also civilization itself.

The Islamists have been clear all along about their plans to form an Islamic caliphate and inhabit the entire world with burqas, stonings, amputations, honor killings and a lack of religious and political freedom. Whether or not to oppose such a movement should have been a no-brainer, especially for self-proclaimed "progressives." Instead, they have extended their misguided sympathies to tyrants and terrorists.

In the end, history will be the judge, and each of us will have to think about what legacy we wish to leave to future generations. If there's one thing I've learned since 9/11, it's that it's never too late to alter one's place in the great scheme of things.

Why does Cinnamon Stillwell assume that the left’s sympathies are “misguided”? The left supported tyrants such as Stalin when he was starving his farmers to death and they support a tyrant like Castro today. What’s the inconsistency?

Hat tip to KelliPundit.

Postscript:
I added all the emphasis in the quoted article.

Well it looks like somebody in Damascus is hitting the panic button

2005-02-27T19:13:00.001-05:00

The Daily Tory-Graph reports that Syria has cut a secret deal where Iran will hold Iraqi atomic weapons scientists that have become too hot (dare I say radioactive?) for Syria to handle.

Syria's President Bashir al-Asad is in secret negotiations with Iran to secure a safe haven for a group of Iraqi nuclear scientists who were sent to Damascus before last year's war to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Western intelligence officials believe that President Asad is desperate to get the Iraqi scientists out of his country before their presence prompts America to target Syria as part of the war on terrorism.

BU-WHA-HAHAHAHAHA! I love it when these self-esteemed tough-guys begin cracking.

There’s a lot of intestinal infortitude going around recently. Just last year Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi decided to give up his nuclear weapons program after he saw where it got Saddam: in a U.S. cage.

Isn’t it a wonder how these same guys are so much more self-confident when a Democrat is U.S. president? Today Syria's President Asad is assuredly cursing his wretched luck that that Kerry wasn’t elected president in 2004.

This just hasn’t been Asad’s year. First of all, Bush was reelected. This is not good, not if you’re Syrian President Asad. In fact, if you’re President Asad then that has the potential to be fatal. Second, Bush calls him out—in major speeches such at the State of the Union Address—for “creating instability” in the Middle East. Instability is a code word for providing support for the al Qaeda and Baathist death squads operating in Iraq. Then the Syrian instigated assassination of the Lebanese Prime Minister has backfired real badly and created yet another justification for Bush to change the regime in Damascus. And now he’s being busted holding Iraqi nuclear weapon scientists.

Way to go Bashir! If you’re trying to bump yourself to the head of the “regime change” line you’re certainly going about it the right way!

Anyway, the Daily Telegraph article has even more interesting points:

The Iraqis, who brought with them CDs crammed with research data on Saddam's nuclear programme, were given new identities, including Syrian citizenship papers and falsified birth, education and health certificates. Since then they have been hidden away at a secret Syrian military installation where they have been conducting research on behalf of their hosts.

Growing political concern in Washington about Syria's undeclared weapons of mass destruction programmes, however, has prompted President Asad to reconsider harbouring the Iraqis.

American intelligence officials are concerned that Syria is secretly working on a number of WMD programmes.

They have also uncovered evidence that Damascus has acquired a number of gas centrifuges - probably from North Korea - that can be used to enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb.

Yup, Asad is showing himself to be a such a fast learner. NOT! This exactly how Saddam got himself free room, free board and free attorneys to defend him in his upcoming crimes-against-humanity trials.

Sheesh, Muammar Gadhafi is crazier than a tree full of coons and he figured this one out last year. Bush is blessed with unusually stupid enemies—and I’m not just referring to his political opponents.

Under the terms of the deal President Asad offered the Iranians, the Iraqi scientists and their families would be transferred to Teheran together with a small amount of essential materials. The Iraqi team would then assist Iranian scientists to develop a nuclear weapon.

Apart from paying the relocation expenses, President Asad also wants the Iranians to agree to share the results of their atomic weapons research with Damascus.

So he thinks the Iranians will help him develop his bomb after they get theirs working? That’s really stupid. Nobody every wants the nuclear club to get any bigger once they join it and the Iranians are no different.

And just what Asad is going to do about it if the Iranians develop a nuke with the assistance of the Iraqi weapon scientists and Iran reneges on the agreement to reciprocate? Sue them? Invade a nuclear Iran? HA!

The Syrian offer comes at a time when Iran is under close scrutiny from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which is investigating claims that Iran is maintaining a secret nuclear bomb programme.

The Iranians couldn’t care less about the UN. For them it is “go nuclear or bust!”

And now this late-breaking new: The Scotsman reports that Syria handed Saddam’s half-brother over to us as a “good will” gesture. (Too late for you, Asad!) Anyway, here the details on this:

A HALF-BROTHER of Saddam Hussein, who was one of his most reviled enforcers, has been arrested in Syria on suspicion of bankrolling anti-coalition insurgents, Iraqi officials said yesterday.

Sabawi Ibrahim Hasan, a strongman who once served as a head of Saddam’s feared security services, was held after nearly two years on the run. Syrian authorities captured him and handed him over to Iraq in an apparent goodwill gesture.

He was number 36 on the deck of 55 most-wanted Iraqis issued by United States troops after Saddam’s fall in April 2003. He also featured in the US list of the top 30 people sought for supporting the insurgency.

Yeah, right; a “good will” gesture, huh? That was more like a “please don’t change my regime” gesture. That’s so not enough to let Asad off the hook. Saddam’s missing WMDs are believed to have been passed to Syria during the few months before the war and hidden in Lebanon's Bekaa valley and we want them--all of them.

Mark my words; in pursuit of these WMDs Bush will go through Syria and Lebanon like a Tasmanian devil—and he will find them.

Asad is doomed.

Man who aspired to assassinate Bush educated in Saudi funded Islamic high school

2005-02-27T10:51:00.000-05:00

Little Green Footballs reported some details about the guy who intended to assassinate Bush that somehow were hardly reported in the MSM: he was educated in an Islamic high school funded by the Saudis:

Mainstream media identified Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, the US citizen charged with conspiring to assassinate President Bush, as "a former Virginia high school valedictorian." Sounds pretty respectable, eh?

What they didn't tell you: he was valedictorian of the American madrassa known as the Islamic Saudi Academy, and his father worked at the Royal Saudi Arabian Embassy in Washington, DC. Rusty Shackleford has details: Terrorist Son of Saudi Embassy Worker Attended Saudi Run School.

Jawa is all over this one.

Hat tip lgf

Fred Barnes is flogging a Cheney Presidency

2005-02-27T09:09:00.000-05:00

Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard is talking up the idea that Cheney could run for president. Yes, I know Cheney has specifically stated that he wouldn’t consider it. One of the reasons he hasn’t run before is because he couldn’t raise the needed money and one of the reasons for inability to fundraise is that he was too much of an insider and has a—how you say—somewhat colorless personality.

Things are different now. Everybody is now familiar with Cheney and I think that the GOP fund-raising apparatus would line up behind him if he decided to run.

While my intellectual preference for the GOP presidential candidate in 2008 is Cheney my emotional preference is for Condi Rice. Hillary is likely to be the Democratic nominee in 2008 and I would just love to see Condi dismembering Hillary in the debates.

That being said, I think that it may be best for Condi to have four to eight years experience as VP before she advances to president. Of course, there are an untold number of circumstances that may derail her chances of making it to the presidency as of now her odds are as good as anyone’s.

In fact, I think I’d just as happy with either a Cheney- Rice ticket as a Rice-Cheney ticket.

Discover the Network

2005-02-26T11:27:00.000-05:00

David Horowitz has just released a new site named Discover the Network which combines a nifty visual display applet, a search engine and a database populated with over 1,500 leftist organizations, groups, institutions and individuals.

The site is still new and I encountered a few bugs in its search engine operation. The site is still quite usable even in the presence of these bugs and I assume these defects will eventually be corrected. I have high expectations for this site. After playing with it for short while I am now thinking of it as a means for "googling leftists".

Try it! You'll Like It!

Top aide to al-Zarqawi captured

2005-02-26T05:50:00.000-05:00

The Jerusalem Post has an article (AP), that, reports:

Iraqi forces captured a top aide to Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who leads a bloody al-Qaida-linked insurgency believed behind a relentless wave of car bombings, kidnappings, and beheadings across the country, the government said Friday.

We're getting closer and closer to al-Zarqawi; hopefully we're on the verge of bagging that snake.

Dogs and Cats living together: the Spiegel speculates that Bush might be right afer all

2005-02-23T22:52:00.000-05:00

The German periodical, Spiegel, in an ephemeral fit of lucidity, published an article that acknowledges that Bush was right all along and German public—along with Chancellor Schroeder—were wrong. Nobody needs to get their hopes up or anything, this is the same magazine that published this trash about the U.S.; I doubt anything has really changed.

Anyway, for what it is worth, here are a few selected quotes:

Germany loves to criticize US President George W. Bush's Middle East policies -- just like Germany loved to criticize former President Ronald Reagan. But Reagan, when he demanded that Gorbachev remove the Berlin Wall, turned out to be right. Could history repeat itself?

Don’t look now, but it already has in Afghanistan and Iraq. If you don’t wake up fast enough your going to miss Syria, Iran and North Korea. Of course it doesn’t matter if you’re awake or not because you won’t have a damn thing to do with any of it unless you count selling arms to Syria and nuclear reactors to Iraq.

Like Bush's visit, Reagan's trip was likewise accompanied by unprecedented security precautions… the Germany Reagan was traveling in, much like today's Germany, was very skeptical of the American president and his foreign policy. When Reagan stood before the Brandenburg Gate -- and the Berlin Wall -- and demanded that Gorbachev "tear down this Wall," he was lampooned the next day on the editorial pages. He is a dreamer, wrote commentators. Realpolitik looks different.

“Realpolitik looks different”, eh? Well how real is your realpolitik? Right now your realpolitiklooks damn unrealistic. After all, you would have us believe that it was your realpolitik that caused you to take what you assume that Bush’s failures in Afghanistan and Iraq were unavoidable.

But history has shown that it wasn't Reagan who was the dreamer as he voiced his demand. Rather, it was German politicians who were lacking in imagination -- a group who in 1987 couldn't imagine that there might be an alternative to a divided Germany. Those who spoke of reunification were labelled as nationalists and the entire German left was completely uninterested in a unified Germany.

The German left—and all other “lefts”—opposed German unification because it would mean another reduction in the real estate controlled by—and the people enslaved by—communism.

There is more of this drivel in this month’s article ; if you want to read it. I don’t see why you would, next month they’ll be bashing the U.S. again.

Tim Blair: ROVE'S BRILLIANT PLAN

2005-02-23T22:27:00.000-05:00

According to Little Green Footballs, Tim Blair and IowaHawk are in some kind of competition to out-satire Congressman Maurice Hinchey’s monumentally stupid theory that Karl Rove manufactured the Texas Air National Guard memos that Dan Rather got himself fired over.

I’ll recite the background details for those of you who missed the first part of the story line because you were still buying popcorn in the lobby.

Last Sunday, Feb 20^th, 2005, LGF posted an account of an incident where Democratic Congressman Hinchey began expounding, in front of a live audience, about his theory that Karl Rove was behind the fake memos that terminated Dan Ra^ther’s career. It just so happened that a certain member of the audience recorded Hinchey’s impromptu mental alchemy. Anyway, the gist of Hinchey’s brainstorm was that Karl Rove supposedly needed a way to distract attention from Bush’s alleged draft dodging and concocted obviously fake memos that were to be passed to Dan Ra^ther with the intent of creating a distraction from the primary issue: Bush’s draft dodging. Here’s Hinchey:

the most flagrant example of that is the way they set up Dan Rather. Now, I mean, I have my own beliefs about how that happened: it originated with Karl Rove, in my belief, in the White House. They set that up with those false papers. Why did they do it? They knew that Bush was a draft dodger. They knew that he had run away from his responsibilties in the Air National Guard in Texas, gone out of the state intentionally for a long period of time. They knew that he had no defense for that period in his life. And so what they did was, expecting that that was going to come up, they accentuated it: they produced papers that made it look even worse. And they — and they distributed those out to elements of the media. And it was only — what, like was it CBS? Or whatever, whatever which one Rather works for. They — the people there — they finally bought into it, and they, and they aired it. And when they did, they had ’em. They didn’t care who did it! All they had to do is to get some element of the media to advance that issue. Based upon the false papers that they produced.

Now there are a couple of little, minor details that are only blindingly obvious to those who have working minds:

First, if the memos were such obvious fakes then why would anybody expect competent journalist, who are skilled in the art, to fall for them in the first place?

Second, how can Bush dodge a draft that he isn’t eligible for? Put another way, members of the military can’t be drafted for military service because they are already in the military.

These blindly stupid flaws in Hinchey’s theory actual have a function: they mask a number of rather run-of-the-mill stupid flaws in his theory

Now Hinchey has gone on al CNN and tried to rationalize smearing public officials with groundless allegations.

Predictable, the loons at DU (Democratic Underground) are hi-fiving each other over Hinchey demonstrating his willingness to smear public officials with groundless allegations. That’s to be expected.

OK, that just about wraps up the background to Tim Blair’s satire. I expect everybody recognizes players such as Ann Coulter, Gannon, Murdoch, et al. Let’s roll the tape:

Democrat congressman Maurice Hinchey, speaking on CNN, persists with the idea that Karl Rove devised the fake Rathergate memos:
It doesn’t take an awful lot of imagination if you’re thinking about who it is that might have produced these false documents to try to mislead people in this very cynical way. It would take someone very brilliant, very cynical, very Machiavellian, and it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to come up with the name of Karl Rove as a possibility of having done that.

Is Karl Rove truly that brilliant? Using contemporaneous reports and several eye-witness sources, this site is able to reconstruct the events of last August at Evil Rove Headquarters, located many miles beneath the earth’s surface:
(Rove enters the Chamber of Destruction and greets his assembled operatives)
Rove: Gentlemen. Ladies. Mr. Gannon. Mr. Murdoch.
(Various responses: “Hiya!” “Howdy.” “G’day.")
Rove: People, you have done good work. You have tirelessly attempted to undermine John Kerry’s bid for the presidency. And yet the latest polling shows that Kerry may still win.
(Murmured complaints: “Dang!” “This is soooo not happening.” “Can’t compete with a Magic Hat.")
Rove: Silence! I cannot tell you how much this disappoints and angers me.
(An assistant appears at Rove’s side with a baseball bat. He is waved away)
Rove: But now is not the time for fault-finding, or skull-crushing. Now is the time for action. Serious action. In fact, the most serious action it is possible for us to undertake.
Murdoch: You don’t mean ... ?
Rove: Yes. It is time for us to deploy the Doomsday Device.
(Several reel from the table in shock; two are ill)
Rove: Mr. Gannon, please fetch the Device. And put some pants on, for God’s sake.
Gannon: Y-yes sir. Right away, Mr. Karl, sir.
(Gannon exits the room; the anxious conspirators listen as the sound of several vaults being sequentially opened echoes throughout the Chamber. Presently Gannon returns, carrying a briefcase)
Rove: Open it.
(Gannon enters the security code—DAILYKOS—and the briefcase springs ajar. Looking away in fear and torment, he nudges the briefcase towards Rove)
Rove: And now it is time. Time to unveil our most hideous, most perfect plan. (Rove grips the briefcase with both hands) Do you people truly know of the evil that man can attain? Do you know of the Dark Lord’s majesty? Do you know of a terror so sublime that any lesser atrocity—Salem; the Holocaust; our coming assassination and cannibalism of the Pope—will from this point on make you giggle like little girls? Behold!
(Rove removes from the briefcase several sheets of paper. He studies them intently; every eye in the room is trained upon him. Finally, Rove speaks ...)
Rove: This is the frickin’ Doomsday Device? A bunch of bogus National Guard memos? What the hell?
Clarence Thomas: Well, what we thought we’d do, see, was hand these over to the media and ...
Rove: Oh, come on! These are dated 1972 but they’re in Microsoft Word! Hellloooo! You think anybody in their right mind will fall for these? Oh, look here; you haven’t even changed the default settings! Why, I could type these up at home!
Ann Coulter: With respect, sir, the plan was to ...
Rove: Plan? Plan? Listen, legs, this plan wouldn’t fool a Kennedy! Or a crack-addicted homeless person! This so-called plan wouldn’t rate a segment on Air America! This plan I’m looking at wouldn’t be posted at Democratic goddamn Underground! This half-assed, retard plan isn’t worth the ...
Hugh Hewitt: Actually, we were thinking of giving the memos to Dan Rather.
Rove: Proceed.

BU-WHA-HAHAHAHAHAHA!

Where do "Oil for Food" shills go when that caper ends?

2005-02-21T10:14:00.000-05:00

The witty Steve Grahram's recent post,Scott Ritter Turns Tricks for Bloody Dinars, (subtitle: The REAL Whore of Babylon Squeaks Anew) notes that disgraced former chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter has a new gig, which I will let Steve tell you all about.

What was his old gig you ask? I so glad you asked! After he quit inspecting Iraq for weapons he began creating pro-Saddam Cockumentaries! MEMRI reported:

On January 25, 2004, the Iraqi independent daily Al-Mada published a list of approximately 270 individuals and entities who were beneficiaries of Saddam Hussein's oil vouchers. [1] The report evoked reactions from many of those included in the list as well as from the Arab media, among them apologists for Saddam's regime. The fact that so many have opted for silence may give credence to the list's authenticity

[…]

Shaker Al-Khaffaji (7 million barrels) advanced $400,000 to Scott Ritter, former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq. Ritter produced a documentary purporting to tell the true story of the weapons inspections, which in his telling were corrupted by sinister U.S. manipulation.

Ritter's motto: Will shill for Oil.

Anyway, here's Steve Graham:

Scott's new job, which ought to be prison laundry, is writing for AL JAZEERAH! Think about that for a minute. Scott Ritter, the patriotic Marine. Scott Ritter, who loves his country. He's writing for an outfit even more biased than the crew at 60 Minutes. Not just anti-Republican bias. Anti-AMERICAN bias.

Scott, you asshead, why don't you just buy yourself a dishcloth and a rocket launcher and get it over with?

Here's a quote from one of Scotty's fifth columns:

The highly vaunted US military machine, laurelled and praised for its historic march on Baghdad in March and April of 2003, today finds itself a broken force, on the defensive in a land that it may occupy in part, but does not control.

My God, it's Tokyo Rose with a penis.

David Spade for DNC chairman?

2005-02-20T10:16:00.000-05:00

Here's a good article by Gloria Borger, Meet the new party of no, that humorously starts by ripping the Democrats for having an answer for everything: No! I mean, of course, that "No!" is the Democrats' answer for anything proposed by Republicans. Here's a teaser:

As it turns out, Howard Dean is not the best choice to lead the Democratic National Committee. If the party is looking for a new spokesman, there is a better choice--David Spade (with apologies to his Capital One ad):

Social Security reform? No. Clear some judges? No way, Jose. Find some agreement on national security? Nyet.

Democrats fear Social Security reform will work

2005-02-20T10:01:00.000-05:00

The Daily News (Newburyport, Massachusetts) has an article, Democrats fear Social Security reform will work, that basically states what I already think abut the Democrat's actual motives. Here are some teasers:

Reid says Bush's proposal to let younger workers — and only those who want to — divert some of the Social Security taxes they pay into their own private investment accounts would turn that program from a guaranteed retirement safety net into a "guaranteed gamble."

I guess Reid ought to know about gambling, given that he represents Las Vegas ...

and

so far, seems to be the best scare tactic the Dems can muster. Bush wants to allow you to control some of your own money. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

I swear, the Democrats should just switch mascots — replace the donkey with the Cowardly Lion. It's not just that they want to help the helpless. They want to force all of us to think we're helpless

and here's the best quote:

I think the greatest fear Dems have is not that elders will return to poverty, but that more of them actually might be able to lift themselves out of it over their working lifetimes. Democrats need poor people who think only government will save them, and they need them to stay poor.

That is not some right-wing insult. Former Democratic U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey recalls Moynihan telling him that the reason Democrats are so afraid of Social Security reform is because it might make people wealthy, "and they worry that wealth will turn Democrats into Republicans."

That, I suspect, is what scares Harry Reid more than anything.

CIA predicts EU crackup in 15 years

2005-02-20T07:52:00.000-05:00

The Scotsman has an article, CIA gives grim warning on European prospects, regarding a CIA report that forecasts a probable EU breakup by 2020.

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."

Well that seems to be a rather understated. The EU is nothing but a collective of European nations that have agreed to synchronize their welfare state schemes and economic rights policies “upward” so that no nation can escape the EU’s suicide-pact-like consequences.

This synchronization of disastrous policies means that the European nations will—most likely—hold formation right up to the point where they crash into the ground together. My guess is that nobody, except the British, will bale-out soon enough to avoid a common disaster.

Anyway, it seems to me that Europe will become increasing irrelevant as it implodes. To say that such a failure “[undermines] its ambitions to play a heavyweight international role” is strangely coy.

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."

As a result of the increased immigration needed, the report predicts that Europe’s Muslim population is set to increase from around 13% today to between 22% and 37% of the population by 2025, potentially triggering tensions.

"potentially triggering tensions" — Oooo... Ya think?

The report predicts that America’s relationships with Europe will be "dramatically altered" over the next 15 years, in a move away from post-Second World War institutions. Nato could disappear and be replaced by increased EU action.

"The EU, rather than Nato, will increasingly become the primary institution for Europe, and the role Europeans shape for themselves on the world stage is most likely to be projected through it," the report adds. "Whether the EU will develop an army is an open question."

Defence spending by individual European countries, including the UK, France, and Germany, is likely to fall further behind China and other countries over the next 15 years. Collectively these countries will outspend all others except the US and possibly China.

This also means that the EU nations will become even more of a basket case before they go into the final stages of failure. Expect even less military spending. I would say that we should expect even less relevance from the EU nations but I cannot see how they can have any less relevance than they have now.

Put another way, watch for the EU to transmogrify into a Canadian-league geopolitical powerhouse: an ignored, invisible, impotent, effete, effeminate and mincing international metrosexual that is literally good for nothing. This stage is located between now and the eventual collapse.

The problem then becomes, I suppose, is that, yet again, the U.S. will find that it is in her self-interest to rescue Europe from yet another self inflicted disaster.

Why would it be in our national self-interest to help them? To prevent them from being converted into an Islamofascist satellite. The negative birthrates of the old European stock coupled with the positive birthrates of their Moslem emigrants means that Europe is already well underway to being an Islamic outpost.

A new European governmental structure of some kind will emerge following a major collapse. The question becomes “who’s influence will dominate shaping Europe’s post-collapse government, the U.S. or the mullahs?”

Of course, if Islamofascism isn’t defeated by 2020 then one of factors contributing it survival is European interference with our War on Terrorists. Put another way, their deliberate interference with our war on terrorists will also mean that we will be forced to rescue them from their self-inflicted collapse.

(sigh)

I guess irony is that the U.S. will end up having to rescue the EU countries—a mob of vain and dangerously wooly-headed and retarded countries, whose first and most basic impulse regarding all the world's ills is to find the American responsible for them—from a crises that they will be solely responsible for.

The expected next technological revolution will involve the convergence of nano, bio, information and materials technology and will further bolster China and India’s prospects, the study predicts. Both countries are investing in basic research in these fields and are well placed to be leaders. But whereas the US will retain its overall lead, the report warns "Europe risks slipping behind Asia in some of these technologies".

For Europe, an increasing preference for natural gas may reinforce regional relationships, such as those with Russia or North Africa, given the inter-dependence of pipeline delivery, the report argues. But this means the EU will have to deal with Russia, which the report also warns "faces a severe demographic crisis resulting from low birth rates, poor medical care and a potentially explosive Aids situation".

Russia also borders an "unstable region" in the Caucasus and Central Asia, "the effects of which - Muslim extremism, terrorism and endemic conflict - are likely to continue spilling over into Russia".

The report also largely en dorses forecasts that by 2020 China’s gross domestic product will exceed that of individual western economic powers except for the US. India’s GDP will have overtaken or be overtaking European economies.

Because of the sheer size of China’s and India’s populations their standard of living need not approach European and western levels to become important economic powers.

The economies of other developing countries, such as Brazil, could surpass all but the largest European countries by 2020.

Iiieeeee... my eyes!!!

2005-02-16T17:27:00.000-05:00

Must..find..antidote..for..turning..into..stone

Hunting Killer Rabbits in a pond near you SOON!

2005-02-16T12:18:00.000-05:00

Bob White emailed this bit of irony Navy to Commission Attack Submarine Jimmy Carter.

Naming a war machine "Jimmy Carter" can only be accomplished via willful indifference to both logic and evidence. It simultaneously makes a U.S. Naval war ship seem only threatening to us and proves that someone, somewhere, has a really, really sick sense of humor.

I must hurt the miscreant very badly.

Welcome to the Healthcare System of the Future!

2005-02-16T11:39:00.000-05:00

The future that the Clintons aspired to, anyway. I think I speak for most Americans when I say that I would rather have my leg taken off than have a Canadian style health care system and this article, Die in Britain, survive in the US, in the British politcal Journal, The Spectator, explains why.

Here's a teaser:

Suppose you come down with one of the big killer illnesses like cancer. Where do you want to be — London or New York? In Lincoln, Nebraska or Lincoln, Lincolnshire? Forget the money — we will come back to that — where do you have the best chance of staying alive?

The answer is clear. If you are a woman with breast cancer in Britain, you have (or at least a few years ago you had, since all medical statistics are a few years old) a 46 per cent chance of dying from it. In America, your chances of dying are far lower — only 25 per cent. Britain has one of the worst survival rates in the advanced world and America has the best.

If you are a man and you are diagnosed as having cancer of the prostate in Britain, you are more likely to die of it than not. You have a 57 per cent chance of departing this life. But in America you are likely to live. Your chances of dying from the disease are only 19 per cent. Once again, Britain is at the bottom of the class and America at the top.

Read the article. Savor your good fortune that you were born here.

This article describes the consequences of the system the Clintons were purposing to inflict on you and your family. Don’t’ worry for the Clintons, however, I know that they would had already designed some escape-hatch beforehand—they always do.

Like the ghost of Christmas future, this article is a forewarning of the consequences of wrong choices.

Hat tip to New Sisyphus.

Scott Ott: Eason Jordan Quits, Bloggers Mull Next Target

2005-02-14T16:16:00.000-05:00

Proprietor of the Scrappleface satire site, Scott Ott, has just posted this fake news item.

New Sisyphus to MSM, re: Easongate: deal with it

2005-02-14T08:43:00.000-05:00

New Sisphus observed the resignation of Eason Jordan by saying to the MSM:

Deal with it.

A good way to start may be by hiring a replacement for Eason who doesn't think that U.S. troops operate death squads targeting journalists or who doesn't think it's a good idea to gain cheap popularity with European elites by irresponsibly dragging our country's honor through the mud.

Hmmm.... New Sisphus pointed out something that I hadn't picked up on: Eason Jordan converted U.S. soldiers into death squads members.

That leads to my observation that what we're seeing is the typical leftist inversion: In my world U.S. soldiers are fighting al Qaeda death squads. In Eason Jordan's world U.S. soldiers are the death squads.

Seeing the Elephant

2005-02-14T08:26:00.000-05:00

Joe Galloway has an article that I’m basically reciting. He published an email written by a soldier in Iraq.

The email itself is an example of superb writing. Any commentary I might add would just sully the effect, so I’ll just save it for another post.

WASHINGTON - The Internet, which fills our inboxes with spam and scams every day and keeps our delete keys shiny, occasionally delivers a real keeper, such as the words below, which were written by a graduate of West Point, Class of 2003, who's now at war in Iraq.

We tracked down the author, who gave us permission to quote from his letter so long as we didn't reveal his name.

Old soldiers in the Civil War coined a phrase for green troops who survived their first taste of battle: "He has seen the elephant." This Army lieutenant sums up the combat experience better than many a grizzled veteran:

"Well, I'm here in Iraq, and I've seen it, and done it. I've seen everything you've ever seen in a war movie. I've seen cowardice; I've seen heroism; I've seen fear; and I've seen relief. I've seen blood and brains all over the back of a vehicle, and I've seen men bleed to death surrounded by their comrades. I've seen people throw up when it's all over, and I've seen the same shell-shocked look in 35-year-old experienced sergeants as in 19-year-old privates.

"I've heard the screams - 'Medic! Medic!' I've hauled dead civilians out of cars, and I've looked down at my hands and seen them covered in blood after putting some poor Iraqi civilian in the wrong place at the wrong time into a helicopter. I've seen kids with gunshot wounds, and I've seen kids who've tried to kill me.

"I've seen men tell lies to save lives: 'What happened to Sergeant A.?' The reply: 'C'mon man, he's all right - he's wondering if you'll be OK - he said y'all will have a beer together when you get to Germany.' SFC A. was lying 15 feet away on the other side of the bunker with two medics over him desperately trying to get either a pulse or a breath. The man who asked after SFC A. was himself bleeding from two gut wounds and rasping as he tried to talk with a collapsed lung. One of them made it; one did not.

"I've run for cover as fast as I've ever run - I'll hear the bass percussion thump of mortar rounds and rockets exploding as long as I live. I've heard the shrapnel as it shredded through the trailers my men live in and over my head. I've stood, gasping for breath, as I helped drag into a bunker a man so pale and badly bloodied I didn't even recognize him as a soldier I've known for months. I've run across open ground to find my soldiers and make sure I had everyone.

"I've raided houses, and shot off locks, and broken in windows. I've grabbed prisoners, and guarded them. I've looked into the faces of men who would have killed me if I'd driven past their IED (improvised explosive device) an hour later. I've looked at men who've killed two people I knew, and saw fear.

"I've seen that, sadly, that men who try to kill other men aren't monsters, and most of them aren't even brave - they aren't defiant to the last - they're ordinary people. Men are men, and that's it. I've prayed for a man to make a move toward the wire, so I could flip my weapon off safe and put two rounds in his chest - if I could beat my platoon sergeant's shotgun to the punch. I've been wanted dead, and I've wanted to kill.

"I've sworn at the radio when I heard one of my classmate's platoon sergeants call over the radio: 'Contact! Contact! IED, small arms, mortars! One KIA, three WIA!' Then a burst of staccato gunfire and a frantic cry: 'Red 1, where are you? Where are you?' as we raced to the scene...knowing full well we were too late for at least one of our comrades.

"I've seen a man without the back of his head and still done what I've been trained to do - 'medic!' I've cleaned up blood and brains so my soldiers wouldn't see it - taken pictures to document the scene, like I'm in some sort of bizarre cop show on TV.

"I've heard gunfire and hit the ground, heard it and closed my Humvee door, and heard it and just looked and figured it was too far off to worry about. I've seen men stacked up outside a house, ready to enter - some as scared as they could be, and some as calm as if they were picking up lunch from McDonald's. I've laughed at dead men, and watched a sergeant on the ground, laughing so hard he was crying, because my boots were stuck in a muddy field, all the while an Iraqi corpse was not five feet from him.

"I've heard men worry about civilians, and I've heard men shrug and sum up their viewpoint in two words - 'F--- 'em.' I've seen people shoot when they shouldn't have, and I've seen my soldiers take an extra second or two, think about it, and spare somebody's life.

"I've bought drinks from Iraqis while new units watched in wonder from their trucks, pointing weapons in every direction, including the Iraqis my men were buying a Pepsi from. I've patrolled roads for eight hours at a time that combat support units spend days preparing to travel 10 miles on. I've laughed as other units sit terrified in traffic, fingers nervously on triggers, while my soldiers and I deftly whip around, drive on the wrong side of the road, and wave to Iraqis as we pass. I can recognize a Sadiqqi (Arabic for friend) from a Haji (Arabic word for someone who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca, but our word for a bad guy); I know who to point my weapons at, and who to let pass.

"I've come in from my third 18-hour patrol in as many days with a full beard and stared at a major in a pressed uniform who hasn't left the wire since we've been here, daring him to tell me to shave. He looked at me, looked at the dust and sweat and dirt on my uniform, and went back to typing at his computer.

"I've stood with my men in the mess hall, surrounded by people whose idea of a bad day in Iraq is a six-hour shift manning a radio, and watched them give us a wide berth as we swagger in, dirty, smelly, tired, but sure in our knowledge that we pull the triggers, and we do what the Army does, and they, with their clean uniforms and weapons that have never fired, support us.

"I've given a kid water and Gatorade and made a friend for life. I've let them look through my sunglasses - no one wears them in this country but us - and watched them pretend to be an American soldier - a swaggering invincible machine, secure behind his sunglasses, only because the Iraqis can't see the fear in his eyes.

"I've said it a thousand times - 'God, I hate this country.' I've heard it a million times more - 'This place sucks.' In quieter moments, I've heard more profound things: 'Sir, this is a thousand times worse than I ever thought it would be.' Or, 'My wife and Sgt. B's wife were good friends - I hope she's taking it well.'

"They say they're scared, and say they won't do this or that, but when it comes time to do it they can't let their buddies down, can't let their friends go outside the wire without them, because they know it isn't right for the team to go into the ballgame at any less than 100 percent.

"That's combat, I guess, and there's no way you can be ready for it. It just is what it is, and everybody's experience is different. Just thought you might want to know what it's really like."

I got my ears boxed by INDC

2005-02-14T05:53:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I received a short note from, Bill, the proprietor of INDC Journal, informing me of a breach of blogger trackback etiquette.

My transgression was to register a trackback with one of his posts where my trackedbacked (is that a word?) post had neither a link nor any reference to his post.

Bill pointed out that this was considered a “frowned on” breach of etiquette.

OK, I didn’t know that said link was a requirement, but I do now. I had thought trackbacks were permissible if the trackedback post was germane and on topic.

My apologies to Bill and—since he isn’t the only one I’ve done this to—everyone else I’ve annoyed. I won’t do it again.

Eason Jordan knew MSM's culture would protect him

2005-02-13T07:43:00.000-05:00

Yesterday Eason Jordan, a news executive at CNN, decided to resign due to the firestorm of criticism that CNN was drawing over his accusations that U.S. troops tortured and targeted journalists. In an Washington Post article recapping the account of this incident was this tidbit:

Steve Lovelady of Columbia Journalism Review e-mailed his verdict to New York University professor and blogger Jay Rosen: 'The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail.'

Abovitz, the Davos participant whose blog (is there anyone left in America who doesn't have one?) is called Fix the World, says in an interview that Jordan meant what he said about soldiers targeting journalists and that his later backpedaling was 'running, hiding and evading.'

'He was going on a rant and he thought he was among friends,' Abovitz says. [emphasis mine—johnh] 'I thought, if this is true this is the most horrible thing I've heard about the United States military in a long time.'

Abovitz says he had 'no idea' his post would cost 'a big news guy' like Jordan his job. 'What I do regret is that the level of accountability should not just be on one person. Is he the only one who's made a mistake and should be held accountable? Is it just the right wing going after Eason Jordan? It quickly became an agenda, right versus left.'

Note Abovitz's perception of why Eason Jordan permitted himself to speak freely: he thought he was among friends. Meaning that Eason Jordan believed that those present would protect him with their silence. This begs the question: who did Eason Jordan automatically assume would protect him? Well, for starters, he assumed that nobody in the audience—which was largely comprised of journalists—would alert the world of his slander against the U.S. military. He also believed—evidently correctly—that David Gergen wouldn’t voluntarily out him.

Obviously he didn’t count on the possibility of a blogger in the audience, however, but this is beside the point I’m trying to make. My point is that Eason Jordan knew that he could safely smear the U.S. military as he pleased because he was among MSM journalists. Put another way, Eason Jordan knew that a room full of journalists was an excellent risk if he felt like publicly smearing the U.S. military because they wouldn’t out him and not single journalist there disappointed him.

Think about this incident the next time you wonder about where most journalists stand on the U.S. military. This episode reveals the leftist reality distortion field that is such a part of the mainstream media’s culture.

True, David Gergen did confirm Eason Jordan’s statements when Michelle Malkin contacted him but I doubt that David Gergen would have raised the subject first. Let me be explicit, David Gergen—who I believe is particularly reluctant to lie—refused to cover for Eason Jordan when he directly asked about the specific allegations. What am I’m saying, however, is that I feel sure that David Gergen, if given the option, would have kept this story to himself.

Other tipbits about the blogosphere:

Michelle Malkin:

How brave of him to hand in his resignation on Friday night

The Anchoress has some completely scathing comments regarding an Eason Jordan apologist who said that Jordan was “tire-necklaced.”

Welcome PoliPundit readers!

2005-02-12T18:58:00.000-05:00

I'm getting a slight Poli-lanche ever since KeliPundit commented on—and linked to—my post that refuted so much of FactCheck.org's hatchet-job on Bush's SS reform.

Welcome to my humble blog, Poli-Pundit folks! I hope you enjoy your visit.

And thank you, KeliPundit, for your kind words about that post.

Pajamahadeen nail another scalp to the wall

2005-02-12T17:51:00.000-05:00

ABC News: CNN News Executive Eason Jordan Quits: "

CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan quit Friday amid a furor over remarks he made in Switzerland last month about journalists killed by the U.S. military in Iraq. Jordan said he was quitting to avoid CNN being 'unfairly tarnished' by the controversy.
During a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum last month, Jordan said he believed that several journalists who were killed by coalition forces in Iraq had been targeted. "

Well done, Pajamahadeen! Our blogzkrieg has taken down another one.

First Rather and now Eason Jordan. Two down and a few hundred to go.

Of course Jordan had to spin it as 'he was quitting to avoid CNN being "unfairly tarnished" by the controversy.'

Controversy? What controversy? Was there ever a controversy that that CNN is run and staffed by anti-American leftists?

Hat tip to PoliPundit

CNN chief news executive, Eason Jordan, accuses U.S. Troops of torturing Journalists

2005-02-10T17:20:00.000-05:00

Recently CNN chief news executive, Eason Jordan, created a firestorm with remarks he made in at the World Economic Forum at Davos Switzerland. At a session—ironically titled “Will Democracy Survive the Media?”—Eason Jordan “asserted that he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by US troops in Iraq, but they had in fact been targeted”. Eason Jordan subsequently tried to backpedal after he was challenged by U.S. Congressman Barney Frank (D).

Now it develops that the same guy who accused U.S. troops of targeting jounalists in Iraq was also accusing U.S. Troops of torturing Journalists in November:

'Actions speak louder than words. The reality is that at least 10 journalists have been killed by the US military, and according to reports I believe to be true journalists have been arrested and tortured by US forces,' Mr Jordan told an audience of news executives at the News Xchange conference in Portugal.

Fact-checking FactCheck.org’s comments on Bush’s proposed Social Security reforms

2005-02-10T13:10:00.000-05:00

After observing FactCheck.org's work during the last election I had come to regard the group as reasonably “fair and balanced”. Meaning, I’ve come to expect any differences between their conclusions and my opinion as an outcome caused by different reasoning—not malice. Not that saying I’ve I liked or agreed with everything they said but I but I didn’t see them as particularly partisan.

Unfortunately, FactCheck.org’s recent analysis of Bush’s proposed Social Security reforms, and whether Bush’s comments regarding SS reform in his State of the Union Address were accurate or fair, is flawed. Their analysis has a few false statements. A few times it unconvincing insinuates that Bush is withholding essential information about the consequences of his reforms when—in my view, anyway—this “withheld” information seemed perfectly obvious to me.

In FactCheck.org’s defense, their analysis doesn’t assign motives, evil or otherwise, to Bush or his statements. That’s good, objectivity means not pretending to have the ability to mind read. That being said, I discern that the person or persons who conducted this analysis are biased against Bush’s Social Security reform and this bias warped their analysis.

I will show that what FactCheck.org has produced is a political attack that is cross-dressed as a “neutral” analysis.

OK, let’s get started. Here is FactCheck.org on Social Security reform:

Summary
In his State of the Union Address, President Bush said again that the Social Security system is headed for "bankruptcy," a term that could give the wrong idea. Actually, even if it goes "bankrupt" a few decades from now, the system would still be able to pay about three-quarters of the benefits now promised.

Bush also made his proposed private Social Security accounts sound like a sure thing, which they are not. He said they "will" grow fast enough to provide a better return than the present system. History suggests that will be so, but nobody can predict what stock and bond markets will do in the future.

Bush left out any mention of what workers would have to give up to get those private accounts -- a proportional reduction or offset in guaranteed Social Security retirement benefits.[emphasis mine—johnh] He also glossed over the fact that money in private accounts would be "owned" by workers only in a very limited sense -- under strict conditions which the President referred to as "guidelines." Many retirees, and possibly the vast majority, wouldn't be able to touch their Social Security nest egg directly, even after retirement, because the government would take some or all of it back and convert it to a stream of payments guaranteed for life.

FactCheck.org’s point, that Bush didn’t specify “what workers would have to give up to get those private accounts” and that the worker would have to give up a “proportional reduction or offset in guaranteed Social Security retirement benefits” is a little disingenuous. I’ll play my response straight anyway.

First of all, and I don’t think I’m the only one, I thought it was obvious that personal accounts were a partial exchange for some—but not all—Social Security benefits. Put another way, it is very commonplace to give up one thing in order to get another and it seemed obvious to me that this was another one of those cases.

Also, it is difficult to me to understand how anybody could logically conclude that this plan could ever be expected to:

Divert FICA withholding tax from Social Security, and

gradually correct Social Security’s fiscal imbalance

unless the reforms also reduced everybody’s load on the system. To be pedantic, reducing the load on Social Security can only mean that everyone draws less money from it.

That’s why personal accounts were selected as a way out of this mess in the first place: they reduce the Social Security system’s load.

Bruce Bartlett writes more lucidly on this subject than I do. Here is some of his commentary:

I have heard more than a few people discuss Social Security reform as if the private accounts will magically fix Social Security without any necessity of reducing benefits. Indeed, they are adamant that there not be any cut in benefits whatsoever, now or any time in the future.

Obviously, such a position is ludicrous. The whole point of creating private accounts has always been as part of a trade-off. Workers would lose future Social Security benefits, which is what stabilizes the system's finances, and the income earned on the accounts will compensate them for this loss.

In order to induce people to make this trade-off, Bush strongly emphasizes that the status quo is unsustainable in the long run. He points often to the fact that the Social Security trust fund will be exhausted in the year 2042. At that point, current projected revenues from the payroll tax will only cover about 75 percent of promised benefits. The implication is that benefits will either have to be cut across the board by 25 percent or the payroll tax rate will have to rise by about 4 percentage points.

I’m going to address FactCheck.org’s second point, the one about “many retirees … wouldn’t be able to touch their nest egg directly” and so on, later in this post.

Now we’ll pick up in the analysis where we left off.

analysis

Bush made Social Security the centerpiece of his Feb. 3 State of the Union address. He gave more details of how he proposes to change the system -- but left out facts that don't help his case.
Social Security "Headed Toward Bankruptcy?"
The President painted a dire picture of Social Security's finances:

Bush: The system, however, on its current path, is headed toward bankruptcy . And so we must join together to strengthen and save Social Security.

"Bankruptcy" is a scary term that Democrats have used too, when it suited them, but it could easily give the wrong idea. Nobody is predicting that Social Security will go out of business the way a bankrupt business does. It would continue to pay benefits -- just not as many.

The President was a little more specific about that later in his address, while repeating the word "bankrupt":

Bush: By the year 2042, the entire system would be exhausted and bankrupt . If steps are not taken to avert that outcome, the only solutions would be dramatically higher taxes, massive new borrowing, or sudden and severe cuts in Social Security benefits or other government programs.

But how severe would those benefit cuts be? In fact there are two official projections -- one by the Social Security Administration (SSA) and a somewhat less pessimistic projection by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The President referred to the SSA projection, which calculates that the system's trust fund will be depleted in 2042. After that, the system would have legal authority to pay only 73 percent of currently promised benefits -- and that figure would decline each year after, reaching 68 percent in the year 2075.

The CBO doesn't project trust-fund depletion until a decade later, in 2052, and figures that the benefits cuts wouldn't be so severe, a reduction to 78% of promised benefits. But either way, even a "bankrupt" system would continue to provide most of what's promised currently.

OK, lets stop the tape here. FactCheck.org shopped around and found an organization, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), that has arrived at a slightly different conclusion: ten whole years. This means that the CBO basically agrees with the Bush administration in general but has a minor disagreement about the time line.

By the way, arriving at different conclusions is easy if you just plug in slightly different assumptions into your models. In these sorts of political fights both the “hawks” (i.e., the pro-SS reform folks) and “doves” (i.e., the anti-SS reform folks) will plug in defensible assumptions that are selected because they yield the results that favor their arguments. The truth is probably between the extremes and I suspect that it is much closer to Bush’s position. Of course this is just my opinion since I don’t have the talent to do my own calculations.

Now regarding the CBO’s assertion that a 78% reduction of promised benefits would be needed as opposed to the administration’s 73% guess: this dispute is over only a 5% difference between the President and his critics. In my view, either reduction is a whole lot worse than Bush’s plan, which calls for a 0% reduction.

Furthermore, the President did not specify what he would do to fix the problem. He again urged creation of private Social Security accounts. But those would be of no help whatsoever in shoring up the system's finances, as acknowledged earlier in the day by a senior Bush administration official who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity:

"Senior Administration Official:" So in a long-term sense, the personal accounts would have a net neutral effect on the fiscal situation of the Social Security and on the federal government.

Well, I have to say that I’m astounded that FactCheck.org understood that the “Senior Administration Official’s” statement, “the personal accounts would have a net neutral effect on the fiscal situation of the Social Security”, to mean that personal accounts “would be of no help whatsoever in shoring up the [Social Security] system's finances”!

Think about this for a minute: FactCheck.org would have us believe that the Bush administration is conceding, up front, that Social Security reform can be expected to temporarily incur a huge deficit, expose investors to some slight risk that they will experience some loss and, at the end of the day, the Social Security system will be fiscally no better off than it is now. Put another way, FactCheck.org is saying that Bush intends on spending enormous political capital and cause the nation to take on a huge temporary deficit so as to accomplish nothing!

Simply put, the implications of their statement are unbelievable.

The following is a quote from a transcript of the "Background Press Briefing on Social Security," [pdf] which occurred on 2 Feb 2005. This is the same transcript that FactCheck.org has taken their quotes from. I’ve shown the sentence fragment quoted by FactCheck.org within the context of the two paragraphs where it was located. These paragraphs clearly shows that whatever “net neutral effect on [Social Security’s] fiscal situation” might mean, it cannot mean that Social Security’s fiscal dilemma is unimproved.

With respect to the fiscal effects of the personal accounts, in a long-term sense -- and I know those of you who have talked to me have heard me say this before -- but in the long-term sense, obviously, the personal accounts, as we would structure them, would not create a net new cost for the system. To the extent that people put money in these accounts and invest in these accounts, there would be a corresponding reduction in the government's liabilities from the Social Security system that is equal in present value to the money placed in the personal accounts up front. So in a long-term sense, the personal accounts would have a net neutral effect on the fiscal situation of the Social Security and on the federal government.

I would hasten to point out that this is distinct from something like an add-on account, where under an add-on account you actually would have a net new cost because you would have -- you would require resources up front to fund the accounts, but the accounts, themselves, would be creating additional -- or would be a part of an additional program or additional obligations on top of the current Social Security system, rather than addressing existing obligations. So an add-on account would add to the net cost of the system, but the accounts as we are envisioning them would actually be no net cost for the system over time.

My reading of these paragraphs leads me to conclude that the “Senior Administration Official” was trying to say that introducing personal accounts would have a “net neutral effect” with respect to costs to the existing system. Personal accounts would have a “net neutral effect” with respect to costs to the existing system because the liabilities of personal accounts are borne by the private sector.

That being said, the language used in these two paragraphs is not as clear as it could be. This is probably because it is a transcript of a person speaking rather than a written text. When people write they have a chance to review their language and edit or otherwise polish their prose; transcripts are unpolishable.

The “Senior Administration Official” added some confusion when he said, in the same paragraph, “To the extent that people put money in these accounts and invest in these accounts, there would be a corresponding reduction in the government's liabilities” and “personal accounts would have a net neutral effect on the fiscal situation of the Social Security and on the federal government.” To my way of thinking, when the “Senior Administration Official” asserted that personal accounts would both cause a “reduction in the government's liabilities” and have a “a net neutral effect on the fiscal situation of the Social Security, it made the first paragraph to seem incoherent. I say “incoherent” because I understand “net neutral effect” to mean “no change in the long run”.

It is the second of the two quoted paragraphs that shows that the “Senior Administration Official” (Bush?) was probably alluding to the fact that personal accounts would add “no net cost [to] the system over time.”

In light of these two paragraphs, I find it difficult to understand how FactCheck.org could justify their assertion that a senior Bush administration official “acknowledged” that personal accounts wouldn’t “shore up” the Social Security system’s finances. I conclude that FactCheck.org is being either deliberately deceptive or is way too slapdash to be in the fact-checking business.

OK, now back to FactCheck.org’s analysis.

And that "net neutral effect" is just over the long term, 75 years or more. In the shorter term, creation of private accounts would require heavy federal borrowing to finance the payment of benefits to current retirees while some portion of payroll taxes is being diverted to workers' private accounts. The administration projects it will borrow $754 billion (including interest) through 2015 to finance the initial phase-in of the accounts, and much more thereafter. The liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities -- which opposes Bush's proposal -- projected that $4.5 trillion (with a "t") would be required to finance the first 20 years of the accounts after they start to be phased-in in 2009.

OK, FactCheck.org is noting that the “hawks” and “doves” are forecasting very different peak debts to be incurred by Bush’s proposals. It is prudent to guess that reality is somewhere between these two extremes. To their credit, FactCheck.org did point out that the high estimate was manufactured by Bush’s leftist opposition.

The problem with the deficit spending is that too much of it will threaten the Dollar’s standing as the world’s currency by making the Dollar weaker. Also it means that the U.S. must pay a higher interest on bonds and so on. This worries me.

A friend of mine, Tom G, pointed out that the Treasury would receive a windfall of revenues when the baby-boomers begin to retire and cash in their 401K’s and other tax-deferred investment schemes. He said that the current rules for estimating future deficits are not allowed to factor in such considerations. If true then this means that these deficit projections are inflated to some degree—who knows how much—for procedural reasons.

My thinking is that we should consider increasing tax rates to mitigate the coming deficits. I also reason that since private accounts will increase the annual GNP by a percent or so then the treasury should be receiving additional tax revenues anyway. In effect, the personal accounts will contribute to paying for their transition costs.

Yes, I know, the existing Social Security system could be saved if we are willing to pay additional taxes, so the question becomes "why not just do it that way?" My answer is that I don’t think the existing Social Security system is worth paying higher taxes for and the personal accounts are. Put another way, I think personal accounts are worth the trouble and cost to transition to them.

Private Accounts: A Sure Thing?
The President made those private accounts -- which he now prefers to call "personal" accounts -- sound like a sure bet:

Bush: Here's why the personal accounts are a better deal. Your money will grow, over time, at a greater rate than anything the current system can deliver -- and your account will provide money for retirement over and above the check you will receive from Social Security.

History suggests that the President is correct -- the stock market has averaged a 6.8 percent "real" rate of return (adjusted for inflation) over the past two centuries, according to Jeremy Siegel, professor of finance at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. The administration says a conservative mix of stocks, corporate bonds and government bonds would return 4.6 percent, even after inflation and administrative costs. And the administration also figures that private accounts would need to generate only a 3 percent rate of return to beat what Social Security provides.

But there's no guarantee that history will repeat itself. Markets are inherently unpredictable and volatile. At present, for example, all major stock-market indexes are still well below where they were five years ago.

In this quote, FactCheck.org uses data provided by Wharton finance professor Jeremy Siegel. Here FactCheck.org points out that Jeremy Siegel has calculated that the U.S. stock market has averaged a 6.8 percent “real” (i.e., adjusted for inflation) rate of return over the last two centuries.

Here is Jeremy Siegel

…stocks are the most profitable long-term investment – providing a premium that offsets stocks’ greater short-term risks relative to bonds and cash. From 1802 through 2003, the broad stock market provided “real” returns – adjusted for inflation – averaging 6.8 percent a year. “On average, you have doubled your purchasing power every decade in the stock market,” he said during his talk, adding that while stocks have failed to meet that average over a few long periods, performance has been remarkably consistent.

The downturn that began when the tech-stock bubble burst in 2000 merely returned the market to normal patterns following a period, from 1981 through 1999, of outsized returns – 13.6 percent a year. “We are right on the trend line,” he said.

Siegel has long argued that stocks should form the core of most small investors’ retirement portfolios….

I’ve discussed Jeremy Siegel and his calculations regarding stock market returns at length elsewhere. Jeremy Siegel has produced several stock market return calculations and I believe they are all correct. I noticed, however, that FactCheck.org selected the calculation that shows the lowest percentage return to quote. Selecting the lowest number is useful as a political weapon because it makes personal accounts seem less attractive. Not there is anything wrong with quoting a low-ball figure, per se, but FactCheck.org should have mitigated the unfairly negative impression it created with other data available from the same authority that FactCheck.org cited.

Finally, regarding FactCheck.org comment:

But there's no guarantee that history will repeat itself. Markets are inherently unpredictable and volatile. At present, for example, all major stock-market indexes are still well below where they were five years ago.

This statement has one true and one false statement. First, FactCheck.org let us know that markets fluctuate; true. Second, it is simply not true that “all major stock-market indexes are still well below where they were five years ago”.

I’ll address FactCheck.org’s false “fact” first. The Dow Jones industrial index is unarguably a “major stock market index”. Figure 1 is a chart showing the most recent five years of the Dow Jones industrial index, from February 2000 to February 2005. The Dow Jones Industrial Index, after five years—which includes the burst of the dot com bubble and the outbreak war on September 11^th—is down only a few percentage points. The same chart makes it obvious that this index was positive as recent as summer of 2001 with respect to February 2000.

Figure 1. Chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Index for the last five years

I find it inexplicable how FactCheck.org could make such a gross error on such an easily verified fact.

OK, now to the “fact” that FactCheck.org got right: that markets will fluctuate. There are two points that need to be made regarding market fluctuations. First, nobody denies that markets fluctuate. For the purposes of personal accounts, investing in the stock market only makes sense in the long run and five years is way too short-run to make any sense. Second, this phenomenon is why folks 55 and older will not be allowed to have personal accounts when the SS reforms are launched. Private accounts need time to recover from stock market reverses and folks who are 55 and older cannot count on having enough time for their personal accounts to recover before they retire.

I would have thought the folks at FactCheck.org should have understood this.

OK, I guess I beat those two paragraphs into the ground. On to the next one.

Benefit Offsets
The President made no mention of one crucial aspect of the proposed accounts -- anyone choosing one would also have to give up an offsetting portion of their future guaranteed retirement benefits. If their investments in private accounts returned more than 3 percent annually over the years, they would end up better off than under the current formula. But if those investments did worse, they wouldn't make up for the portion of benefits that were given up, and the owner of an account would end up worse off. The President didn't explain that trade-off.

Well I don’t think I’m the only one, but I thought that this was an obvious tradeoff. Does anyone actually need to have that explained to them?

The other point is that is worth reciting is that personal accounts’ risks are so low—and returns so high—that they make SS look like a poor investment.

"The Money is Yours?"
The President also glossed over some severely restrictive aspects of the accounts he is proposing, saying flatly "the money is yours."

Bush: In addition, you'll be able to pass along the money that accumulates in your personal account, if you wish, to your children and -- or grandchildren. And best of all, the money in the account is yours, and the government can never take it away .

That's not exactly true.

As described by the "senior administration official," the owners of personal accounts wouldn't be able to touch the money while they are working, not even to borrow. The money would remain in the hands of the federal government, which would administer the personal accounts for a fee which the official said would be about 30 cents per year for every $100 invested.

And even at retirement, the government would control what becomes of the money. First, the government would automatically take back a portion of the money at retirement and convert it to a guaranteed stream of payments for life -- an annuity. The amount taken back -- called the "clawback," descriptively enough -- would depend on the amount of money the retiree requires to remain above the official poverty guideline. That's currently $12,490 for a couple or $9,310 for a single person. Only after the combination of traditional Social Security benefits and the mandatory annuity payments from the private account equal the poverty level would any remaining portion in the account be "yours."

OK, FactCheck.org finally gave me some information that I didn’t know. I didn’t know what would happen to the personal account’s money at retirement.

FactCheck.org is saying several things:

1. You cannot access your personal account for any reason until you retire. Not even for medical emergencies.

2. The goverment will charge you a 0.3% annual fee to manage your personal account

3. At the time of your retirement, the goverment will use part of your personal account to purchase an annuity for you. The income from the annuity, together with your Social Security payout, will guarantee that in the worst case your income will remain above the poverty line. There is a slight risk that the personal account will not have enough money to completely pay for the annuity.

4. Any residual personal account money leftover after the purchase of the annuity is turned over to the owner of the personal account.

Regarding issue 1: you cannot access your personal account for any reason until you retire.

This is reasonable. You cannot access your Social Security account until you retire either, so you’re no worse off in that regard.

Preventing citizens from frittering their nest egg away guarantees that the government’s will always be able to keep its promise that the retirement scheme will be able to perform when citizens retire.

Regarding issue 2: the government will charge a 0.3% annual fee for managing your personal account. This is similar to the management fees for an index fund. For example the Vanguard 500, a S&P 500 index fund, has annual costs of roughly 0.18% while Morgan Stanley’s S&P 500 index fund has annual costs of about 1.5%. (In my view, 1.5% is steep by index fund standards.) Mutual funds charge much more. In summary, a 0.3% administration fee is quite an attractive deal and is comparable to the low cost management fees charged by index funds.

Regarding issue 3: The government will take back a part of your personal account when you retire.

The hostile tone in the phrases “take back” or clawback is misleading. The money “taken back” will immediately be used to purchase an annuity for you. This annuity is your property because you paid for it. The annuity, when combined with your Social Security, guarantees that our retiree’s incomes will be above the poverty line. In theory this means no more poor elderly.

Regarding issue 4: The money remaining in the personal account after the purchase of the annuity is turned over to the account owner. (Party!)

Put another way, at retirement the account owner receives the portion of the personal account remaining after the purchase of the annuity.

At one level, FactCheck.org seems to be insinuating that the money in the personal account is something less than the property of the account’s owner. The subtitle for this section, “The Money is Yours?”, sounds like the it was designed to undermine the reader’s confidence that they would “own” the money.

FactCheck.org also resorted to scare quotes. Scare quotes are a literary device used by writers to distance themselves from the scare-quoted text because they believe the text is inappropriate for some reason. Consider, for example, of how FactCheck.org employed scare quotes in the following sentence: ‘Only after the combination of traditional Social Security benefits and the mandatory annuity payments from the private account equal the poverty level would any remaining portion in the account be "yours."’ In this case FactCheck.org was sending a message suggesting that whatever the money in the personal account might be, they didn’t think you should considered it “yours”.

Now there is no evidence that either FactCheck.org or myself can use to justify the idea that a personal account's money doesn’t belong to the account’s owner, but that didn’t inhibit FactCheck.org from signaling that it might not.

OK, there’s only a small bit of FactCheck.org’s analysis remaining and it mostly recites material from that press briefing without saying anything interesting. I’m skipping over the rest of their analysis.

Summary:
The plan proposed by Bush provides an income sufficient to keep retirees above the poverty line. Retirees receive 100% of their personal account at the time of retirement, either as an annuity or as cash.

Before I go on I want to point out a general principle: Social Security is not intended to provide a comfortable retirement. Put another way, Social Security is not enough to “live” on but too much to starve.

Everybody should understand this up front. Everybody should make provisions for their retirement. It is their responsibility to do this and nobody else.

Social Security is a safety net that prevents the old from starving if something goes terribly wrong in their lives, are unable to work the normal 40 years so as to save for their retirement or—perhaps—are just too irresponsible to save for their retirement

The SS reforms only affects people 55 or younger so most people have plenty of time to figure out a retirement plan before the first people retire under this plan.

Nobody can make me feel guilty because it only guarantees a just-above poverty level income.

OK, that should be sufficient troll repellent. Not that I have any of them or anything.

Conceivable problems.

There is a risk that inflation will diminish the annuities purchasing power. There are two types of annuities: fixed and inflation adjusted. I would think that the annuity would be the inflation adjusted variety. I haven't heard which type it will be, however.

In effect, the private accounts are paid for by the deficit we will incur as we transition to private accounts. Fundementally, borrowing is usually a dumb way to get investment money. I’m troubled by it. On the other hand, the alternatives are worse.

The current average monthly benefit for Social Security retirees is $955 a month, only $200 above the $755 needed for a poverty-line income. This is according to an article on MSBC, “Dissecting the president's Social Security plan”. The President's plan is clearly, on the average, a reduction, from the current SS payout. I say again, anyone with a working brain will have implemented their own retirement plan to supplement the goverment's retirment plan.

FactCheck.org’s scorecard:

They made disingenuous arguments that insinuated Bush was being deceptive about Social Security reform. This was a dishonest technique.

They insinuated that the money in personal account will somehow not fully be “yours”. More dishonesty.

They seemed to make much out of a 5% difference between Bush’s estimate for how much SS benefits would have to be cut, if nothing else was done, and the CBO’s estimate I guess they were trying to manufacture a talking point.

They Dowdified an administration official such that he seem to be saying that SS reform will not cure Social Security’s fiscal problems. Now this is contemptible misconduct. I don’t like liars and FactCheck.org has damaged its reputation for veracity.

They made a blatantly false statement when they stated that all major stock marketed indexes are still well below where they were a year ago. This also builds FactCheck.org’s reputation for lying.

They pointed out that the Bush Administration and the “doves” have very different estimates of the peak deficit caused by SS reform. This is OK. This sort of data should be on the table.

All in all, I have to say I was disgusted with FactCheck.org’s conduct. They have shown themselves to not be a neutral fact checking organization; at least as far as Social Security reform is concerned.

shopping around for the data that fits

2005-02-09T14:36:00.000-05:00

The debate over Social Security reform is going to be an unusually technical one by current standards. I guess I’m about to make it even more so. My bad.

In these sorts of political fights both the “hawks” (i.e., the pro-SS reform folks) and “doves” (i.e., the anti-SS reform folks) will seek out data and opinions that favor their argument.

One time-honored tactic is to select the data that makes your argument look the best. I will be using FactCheck.org’s analysis of Bush’s as a concrete example of shopping around for data fits your spin.

First a little about FactCheck.org. They claim to be:

…a nonpartisan, nonprofit, "consumer advocate" for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.

For my part, I’ve generally considered them to be reasonably fair during the 2004 elections. I have a rather different view of their neutrality regarding Social Security reform, however. I’ve discerned that FactCheck.org—or at least some of the folks who work their—are apparently are opponents of Bush’s Social Security reform.

I have a number of other issues with their analysis of Bush’s proposals but I intend to deconstruct these in a future post.

Social Security “doves” oppose personal accounts. Attacking personal account requires the doves to find data that makes personal accounts appear as unprofitable as possible. Since personal accounts will be at least partially based on stock market returns the doves need defendable data showing the historical stock market returns from the worst available viewpoint. FactCheck.org did this in two ways:

they presented the average stock market returns from 1802 through 1991, and

these stock market returns were corrected for inflation

I’ll deal with my second point first. Presenting the stock market returns as corrected for inflation is OK since increases due to inflation are illusionary. Correcting for inflation is presents the investor’s true gains.

It also yields the lowest possible stock market return numbers; which is why I suspect how FactCheck.org selected them.

I normally wouldn’t have thought using inflation corrected stock market returns would have been noteworthy if the rest of FactCheck.org’s analysis was balanced.

OK, now I want to discuss my first point: FactCheck.org presented average stock market returns from 1802 through 1991. On the face of it, it seems prudent to use all of the historical data available, after all, the more data the better right? Well, it isn’t better if you leave out pertinent data.

FactCheck.org used stock market return data provided by Wharton finance professor Jeremy Siegel. Jeremy Siegel determined that average, real (i.e., inflation and depression corrected) stock market returns from 1802 through 1991 was 6.8 percent a year.

So? What’s my problem with this? My issue is that there have been structural changes to our economic system that occurred in 1935 when Federal Reserve act restored to the Federal Reserve all of the powers necessary to make it a fully functional central bank. Furthermore, data provided by FactCheck.org’s own authority on stock market returns, Jeremy Siegel, proves my point.

Jeremy Siegel made the following statement regarding long term prospects for returns on stocks:

The average compound rate of return on stocks from 1802 through 1991 was 7.7 percent per year: 5.8 percent from 1802 to 1870, 7.2 percent from 1871 to 1925, and 10.0 percent from 1926 to 1991.

First, note well that this data is not corrected for inflation. That means, for example, that the returns from 1802 through 1991 is 7.7 percent instead of 6.8 percent.

OK, back to the argument.

Notice that FactCheck.org’s authority on stock market returns, Jeremy Siegel, specifically noted that the average compound rate of return on stocks stock since 1926 was 10 percent and in contrast the rates for 1802 to 1870 and 1871 to 1925 were 5.8 percent and 7.2 percent respectively.

The chart in Figure 1 shows Jeremy Siegel’s data annotated with a timeline regarding a major structural flaw in the U.S.’ financial system that existed from 1811 through 1935: no central bank. The Jeffersonians of 1811 refused to renew America central bank’s charter when it expired in 1811.

This removed the government’s only effective tool for regulating the money supply, its means for enforcing bank discipline, its means for borrowing money, and its means for preventing major financial institutions from failing in the event of panics. The Jeffersonians, having destroyed the financial regulatory system created by Hamilton, proceeded to replace it with nothing.

Figure 1. A chart of Jeremy Siegel’s data annotated with markers showing the dissolution and reconstitution of the U.S. central bank. The chart shows that the absence of a central back is associated with markedly lower stock market returns.

Thereafter, for the next 124 years, American monetary authorities would simply be unable to intervene decisively so as to abort a market panic before it spiraled out of control. Consequently, as a direct result of Thomas Jefferson’s irrational hatred of banks—which was adopted as his followers as an ideology—economic disaster struck the U.S. roughly every twenty years until our central bank was fully reestablished.

So what difference can a central bank make? Consider the first panic that occurred since 1929: the October 1987 stock market meltdown. This was the worst market crash since 1929. The market had its worse one-day decline—22.8 percent—in history and many thought that that it signaled the start of a new Great Depression.

This time America’s reconstituted central bank, the Federal Reserve, intervened immediately and decisively to stem the panic and to protect the economic institutions from harm. This was first panic since the Federal Reserve was properly reconstituted in 1935 and it averted a financial disaster exactly as Alexander Hamilton intended—for the first time since the market panic of 1792.

The market quickly recovered and fifteen months later it broke new records.

Had there been no central bank to prevent a market panic from causing a catastrophic market crash and the economy required, say, 10 some years to recover, as did following the 1929 crash, then Jeremy Siegel’s data would have shown the post 1925 rate of return as being much less than 10 percent.

Why am I discussing this economic history? Because FactCheck.org used Jeremy Siegel’s average, inflation adjusted stock market returns for the years 1802 through 1991, 6.8 percent, as a baseline market return. This average would be much closer to 10 percent—and probably higher—if we had a central bank between 1811 through 1935.

I say “probably higher” than 10 percent because the Great Depression would have probably been adverted if we had a competent central bank during those years. Preventing the Great Depression would have boosted the 1926-1991 returns above 10 percent.

The chart also shows that the U.S. had reconstituted a rudimentary central bank— the Federal Reserve—in 1913. This is true, but, because of the same psychosis that led us to dispose of our central bank in 1811, our central bank was reborn without the essential powers necessary to be fully functional. The Federal Reserve act finally corrected these deficiencies in 1935, after the Great Depression nearly destroyed our banking system.

Another contributing factor as to why the Federal Reserve failed to avert the crash of 1929: we were still rebuilding our expertise at running central banks. It’s one thing to pass a law establishing a central bank and it is another to build the expertise necessary to run one when a panic hits the fan.

One more point: Jeremy Siegel’s data ends just before 1990’s bull market. This would have boosted the post-1925 returns slightly if they were included.

Conclusion

The changes in the U.S.’ economic structure caused by losing and regaining our central bank is not widely appreciated and I cannot fault the folks at FactCheck.org if they simply didn’t know about these considerations.

That being said, FactCheck.org use of the 1802 –1991 inflation adjusted average causes their analysis to arrive at a low looking, “dovish argument friendly” yields.

I believe that it is reasonable to consider Jeremy Siegel's 10 percent stock market returns for the post 1926 period as a reasonable baseline for forecasting future stock market returns.

Scott Ott: Pentagon Sets Rules of Engagement for Journalists

2005-02-08T16:10:00.000-05:00

The explosion over Eason Jordan slander inspired another Scott Ott Satire, Pentagon Sets Rules of Engagement for Journalists:

Spurred by CNN executive Eason Jordan's accusations that U.S. troops have
targetted Journalists in Iraq, the Pentagon today issued revised rules of engagement for encounters between U.S. forces and the members of the news media.
Under the new guidelines, U.S. troops will first offer journalists an opportunity to throw down their cameras and notebooks and approach with hands raised.

'We're there to kill terrorists, not journalists,' said an unnamed Pentagon official. 'The new rules are designed to make it easier for our personnel to distinguish between the two, since they're often found together and have similar objectives.' [emphasis mine—johnh]

Once in captivity, the so-called Prisoners Of Undetermined Loyalty
Embedded with Terrorists (POULET), will be treated according to the Geneva
Conventions, although the Justice Department has yet to rule on their official
status."

I don't know which lines I love more, the phrase "Prisoners Of Undetermined Loyalty Embedded with Terrorists" or the snipe about journalists and terrorists "often being found together" and having "similar objectives".

Technically poulet is the "the flesh of a chicken used for food" but this time I suspect the emphasis is on the chicken.

There is nothing wrong with your computer!

2005-02-05T15:43:00.000-05:00

I'm currently tinkering with my template and style sheets. I'm trying to adjust some details that have been irking me and whatever you're seeing right now— particularly if it is ugly— is just me making the mess worse before I make it better.

Remember:

I control the vertical....
I control the horizontal....

Update:

OK, I'm at a stopping place now. I aim to have a tasteful site, but my aim has been known to be poor.

Please register any comments, criticism, brickbats, violent reactions and whatnot via email or in the comment section.

Chief News Executive of CNN accuses US troops of targeting journalists!

2005-02-04T11:29:00.000-05:00

I am totally outraged by this out and out lie!

This is from a post, “Do US Troops Target Journalists in Iraq?” at World Economic Forum blog. This post was describing the proceedings at a discussion that was oh-so-aptly-titled “Will Democracy Survive the Media?”

Right now, I’m so enraged that words are failing me. And it is probably a good thing that they are. Anyway, here’s the money quote:

This fiery topic became a real nightmare today for the Chief News Executive of CNN at what was an initially very mild discussion at the World Economic Forum titled "Will Democracy Survive the Media?".

At a discussion moderated by David R. Gergen, the Director for Public Leadership, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, the concept of truth, fairness, and balance in the news was weighed against corporate profit interest, the need for ratings, and how the media can affect democracy. The panel included Richard Sambrook, the worldwide director of BBC radio, U.S. Congressman Barney Frank, Abdullah Abdullah, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Afghanistan, and Eason Jordan, Chief News Executive of CNN. The audience was a mix of journalists, WEF attendees (many from Arab countries), and a US Senator from Connecticut, Chris Dodd.

During one of the discussions about the number of journalists killed in the Iraq War, Eason Jordan asserted that he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by US troops in Iraq, but they had in fact been targeted. He repeated the assertion a few times, which seemed to win favor in parts of the audience (the anti-US crowd) and cause great strain on others.

Due to the nature of the forum, I was able to directly challenge Eason, asking if he had any objective and clear evidence to backup these claims, because if what he said was true, it would make Abu Ghraib look like a walk in the park. [no kidding--johnh] David Gergen was also clearly disturbed and shocked by the allegation that the U.S. would target journalists, foreign or U.S. He had always seen the U.S. military as the providers of safety and rescue for all reporters.

Eason seemed to backpedal quickly, but his initial statements were backed by other members of the audience (one in particular who represented a worldwide journalist group). The ensuing debate was (for lack of better words) a real "sh--storm". What intensified the problem was the fact that the session was a public forum being taped on camera, in front of an international crowd. The other looming shadow on what was going on was the presence of a U.S. Congressman and a U.S. Senator in the middle of some very serious accusations about the U.S. military.

To be fair (and balanced), Eason did backpedal and make a number of statements claiming that he really did not know if what he said was true, and that he did not himself believe it.[whatahelluvajournalist!--johnh] But when pressed by others, he seemed to waver back and forth between what might have been his beliefs and the realization that he had created a kind of public mess. His statements, his reaction, and the reaction of all in attendance left me perplexed and confused. Many in the crowd, especially those from Arab nations, applauded what he said and called him a "very brave man" for speaking up against the U.S. in a public way amongst a crowd ready to hear anti-US sentiments. I am quite sure that somewhere in the Middle East, right now, his remarks are being printed up in Arab language newspapers as proof that the U.S. is an evil and corrupt nation. That is a real nightmare, because the Arab world is taking something said by a credible leader of the media (CNN!) as the gospel, or koranic truth. What is worse is that I am not really sure what Eason really meant to communicate to us, but I do know that he was quite passionate about it. Members of the audience took away what they wanted to hear, and now they will use it in every vile and twisted way imaginable.

To me, what was said can not be put back into the genie's bottle.

This is an outrageous lie. Eason would have us believe that all of the leftwing, military-hating, quagmire-calling, anti-American journalists in Iraq and elsewhere would deliberately maintain radio-silence if they believed that American troops were deliberately targeting their fellow journalists. Hell No they wouldn’t! These useless leftists have so little to talk about that they’ve already beaten the Abu Ghraib so far into the ground that it is below sea level and they are still beating.

Does Eason expect us to believe that all these same leftists hacks—every one of them—would voluntarily not scream bloody murder if they thought U.S. troop were targeting anyone them? Give me a frigging break!

This is more odious that the Ra^therBougusGate scandal. At least Ra^ther only accused Bush of disobeying orders—not murdering journalists.

I challenge Eason Jordan to prove his statements to be true

If he cannot then I challenge CNN’s management to fire Easton Jordan for his deliberate odious lies about American soldiers.

If CNN’s management refuses to fire Easton Jordan then I challenge CNN’s owners to purge Easton Jordan and all CNN management complicit with not ejecting a notorious public liar from an international news organization.

OK, Pajamahadeen, we've beaten back Dan Ra^ther's attack on Bush's reelection. Now CNN Chief News Executive is attacking the reputation of our warriors. It's time to put our pj's back on, our work continues.

Here is this story in various other places around the blogosphere:

Kerry Spot

Little Green Footballs observes:

Apart from the Washington Times, mainstream media has brought down the Cone of Silence on this story. You’ll find not one word about it at the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, or any other major paper.

Hugh Hewitt

Thus far no major media outlet has demanded an accounting of Jordan, but the idea that a major figure from American media traffics in such outlandish and outrageous slanders on the American military deserves attention and criticism, not indifference.

Hat tip to New Sisyphus

Postscript:

The bold emphasis in the quotes from the World Economic Forum blog is mine.

New Sisyphus: On Bush's state of the Union address

2005-02-04T10:13:00.000-05:00

New Sisyphus, member of the U.S. State Department's Republican underground, has some excellent commentary about George W Bush's State of the Union address. My favorite part was where he commented on the remarks Bush directed toward Iran:

By far and away the most heartening part of the speech. Once again, the President demonstrated that he understands the threat the terrorist regime of Iran presents and, once again, he has proved himself up to the task of facing it down. The President spoke simple, plain words, and the simple plain truth when he said:

Today, Iran remains the world's primary state sponsor of terror — pursuing nuclear weapons while depriving its people of the freedom they seek and deserve. We are working with European allies to make clear to the Iranian regime that it must give up its uranium enrichment program and any plutonium re-processing, and end its support for terror. And to the Iranian people, I say tonight: As you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you.

Let us translate this for you: Iran is a terrorist state that denies basic liberty to its people. We're willing to give the EU a shot at solving this problem since there is a high likelihood of an internal revolution solving our problem for us, but, bottom line is that if Iran keeps on the course it's now on, we'll take care of the problem ourselves, in time-honored American style (if you're uncertain what that is, find an elderly German or Japanese man to explain it to you[emphasis mine—johnh]). And, by the way, that internal revolution we are hoping for? Well, we're for it, we support it, and when you make your move we'll be there to help.

Heh, heh, Heh, Heh, Heh. " find an elderly German or Japanese man to explain it to you". I liked that touch!

How can the MSM be blindsided by the same Iraqis they’ve been preoccupied with for two years?

2005-02-04T07:41:00.000-05:00

Charles Krauthammer begins his piece by quoting the New York Times:

"At polling centers hit by explosions, survivors refused to go home, steadfastly waiting to cast their votes as policemen swept away bits of flesh.''
-- New York Times, Feb. 2, on the Iraqi election.

He then quotes an associate who observed:

The media have not been as surprised, noted a friend of mine, since the Nicaraguans turned out in their 1990 election to kick out the Sandinistas.

BU-WHA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!

Gee, he's right! The same MSM that had focused like a laser-beam on these same Iraqis for the last two years were totally blindsided by the object of their preoccupation. Just like they were in Nicaragua. How do you suppose they managed to do that? How could such a thing be possible?

When anyone receives—or barely avoids—being injured by another they need to assess whether the incident was the result of an accident or an attack. Put another way, they have to ask themselves the question: “Am I the victim of malice or stupidity?”

If the incident was unintentional then other party will claim is “it was an accident.” Of course all attackers attempt to avoid retribution by also pleading “it was an accident”.

A wise victim knows that they probably will not be able to workout actual intent by simply listening to the other party because they will lie if they are guilty of malice.

So what to do? A better means for ascertaining the other party’s intentions is to know something about their history: Does their behavior reoccur too often to be accepted as “just an accident”?

Krauthammer pointed out that the MSM’s history included being “surprised” by the outcome of the Nicaraguan. I would like to point out that the same media was chanting quagmire before the war in Afghanistan—which lasted a whole three weeks—had even started.

A casual observer would note that the MSM’s history shows chronically negative—and chronically inaccurate—reporting of one particular subject: U.S. efforts to oppose tyranny. In every case this reporting would lead the MSM’s audience to conclude that the U.S.’ efforts were doomed.

This sort of “reporting”, coincidently, would have the effect of undermining political support for such efforts. In almost every case—Vietnam being a notable exception—the MSM was not only wrong but was spectacularly repudiated by the very people who they ware falsifying news reports about.

Ya know, it just makes you wonder, might they have been just as wrong about South Vietnam? Just asking. And if so, that is, if their negative reporting in Vietnam was just as defective as their reporting in Nicaragua and Iraq then does that mean that they contributed to the Stalinist enslavement of the entire country of South Vietnam? Just asking. And if so, does this mean that the MSM was a pro-al Qaeda death squad, pro-Islamofascist, pro-Baathist force in today’s Iraq—just like they were a pro-Stalinist force during Vietnam War?

What would the world’s anti-Democratic, anti-American brigands do without the MSM? I guess they would have to invent it. I mean it wouldn’t be a fair fight unless these thugs could be protected and supported by their natural ally, MSM.

And what should the Iraqi people conclude regarding the MSM’s consistently incorrect reports that they were unready to vote and that the al Qaeda death squad’s efforts should be rewarded by postponing the election? Why they should conclude that they were the victims of malice, not stupidity, of course.

German unemployment the highest since World War II

2005-02-02T18:13:00.000-05:00

According to Bloomberg :

German unemployment jumped to the highest since World War II as new rules added welfare recipients to the jobless register, clouding the outlook for Chancellor
Gerhard Schroeder in elections this month.

I've already blogged about Europe's impending economic decline here. Nice to see the Germans performing on demand.

Hat tip to Drudge

Liberal group's ad falsely claims Bush plan would cut benefits 46 percent

2005-02-02T04:51:00.000-05:00

MoveOn.org, proprietor of the Democratic Party, has launched a deceptive anti Social Security reform ad that has been analyzed by FactCheck.org:

Summary

MoveOn.org launched a false TV ad in the districts of several House members, claiming through images and words that President Bush plans to cut Social Security benefits nearly in half. Showing white-haired workers lifting boxes, mopping floors, shoveling and laundering, the ad says "it won't be long before America introduces the working retirement."

Actually, Bush has said repeatedly he won't propose any cuts for those already retired, or near retirement. What MoveOn.org calls "Bush's planned Social Security benefit cuts" is actually a plan that would hold starting Social Security benefits steady in purchasing power, rather than allowing them to nearly double over the next 75 years as they are projected to do under the current benefit formula. The White House has discussed such a proposal, and may or may not adopt it when the President puts forth a detailed plan expected in late February.

Democracy is a weed

2005-02-01T20:54:00.000-05:00

By this I mean that democracy is not some sort of hothouse flower that can only survive in an unnaturally unthreatening environment. If that were true there would be no democracies in existence today.

Democracy has flourished in all countries with an Anglo-Saxon culture: the UK, Canada, the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand. It has been more or less transplanted—like a liver transplant that barely avoided rejection—into France, Germany and other continental countries. Japan and—after some adjustment—South Korea have deep-rooted democratic traditions. The Philippines—where I worked for over five years—has a genuine democracy.

And democracy would have survived in South Vietnam, if democracy’s natural enemy—the Democratic Party—hadn’t forced the U.S. to withhold our promised support after we withdrew in 1973.

El Salvador conducted elections with a three-way civil war underway. Nicaragua eventually obtained a chance to vote the Sandinistas out of government; that is, after Reagan finally got around the obstacles thrown up by democracy’s natural enemy—the Democratic Party.

The U.S. has conducted its elections during wartime—even during our Civil War—without fail. And nobody has ever challenged the legitimacy of the 1864 election the way certain pundits predicted the Iraqi election would be challenged.

Democracy is weed that cannot be stamped out whenever the citizens refuse to let it be stamped out. That the Iraqis voted and gave legitimacy—gave consent—to their governors so they can be governed is just another election in a long line of troubled elections.

It is totally within its nature for democracy’s natural enemy—the Democratic Party—to try and forsake the Iraqis when they needed help the most. That is because the Democratic Party has as much to do with democracy as all of those Stalinists countries whose names that begin “The People’s Democratic Republic of [whatever]”.

Both the Democratic Party and those Stalinist countries hijack the word “Democratic” in service of an assault on democracy. Both the Democratic Party and those Stalinist countries serve statist ideologies. Both the Democratic Party and those Stalinist countries driven by leftist, transnationalist ideologies that have histories of attacking undeveloped Democracies in places like South Vietnam, El Salvador, and Iraq.

Fortunately for Classical Liberals, democracy—being a weed—is too robust to usually succumb to attacks from the Democratic Party.

Scott Ott: Iraqi Voting Disrupts News Reports of Bombings

2005-02-01T13:44:00.000-05:00

This one shows Scott Ott's scorn for the MSM's attempt to keep peddling their quagmire spin:

News reports of terrorist bombings in Iraq were marred Sunday by shocking graphic images of Iraqi 'insurgents' voting by the millions in their first free democratic election.

Despite reporters' hopes that a well-orchestrated barrage of mortar attacks and suicide bombings would put down the so-called 'freedom insurgency', hastily-formed battalions of rebels swarmed polling places to cast their ballots -- shattering the status quo and striking fear into the hearts of the leaders of the existing terror regime.

Hopes for a return to the stability of tyranny waned as rank upon rank of Iraqi men and women filed out of precinct stations, each armed with the distinctive mark of the new freedom guerrillas -- an ink-stained index finger, which one former Ba'athist called 'the evidence of their betrayal of 50 years of Iraqi tradition.'

Journalists struggled to put a positive spin on the day's events, but the video images of tyranny's traitors choosing a future of freedom overwhelmed the official story of bloodshed and mayhem.

The Democrats' 'Uncivil War' on the Iraqi elections

2005-02-01T11:44:00.000-05:00

Mark Steyn slaps John Kerry and the Democrats around in his great article entitled The 'civil war' that wasn't:

AND so the 'looming Iraqi election fiasco' joins 'the brutal Afghan winter' and 'the brutal Iraqi summer' and 'the seething Arab street' and all the other junk in the overflowing trash can of post-9/11 Western media fictions. The sight of millions of brave voters emerging from polling stations holding high their purple dye-stained fingers was so inspiring that, from America's Democratic Party to European protest rallies, opponents of the war waited, oh, all of three minutes before flipping the Iraqis their own fingers, undyed.

'No one in the United States should try to over-hype this election,' warned John Kerry yesterday before embarking on the world champion limbo dance of Iraqi election under-hyping.

He has a point. One vote does not a functioning democracy make. To be a truly advanced, sophisticated democracy you need an opposition party that knows how to react to good news by sounding whiny and grudging and moving the goalposts. [emphasis mine—johnh] 'The real test is not the election,' he declared, airily swatting aside 8 million voters. 'The real test is...'

I dozed off at that point, so I'm unable to tell you what moved goalposts the senator inserted. But no doubt they involved, as they always do, the Bush administration needing to 'reach out' more effectively to involve the 'international community'.
'International community', by the way, doesn't mean Tony Blair, John Howard, the Poles, Japan, India, Fiji, et al but Jacques Chirac and Kofi Annan, a pantomime horse in which both men are playing the rear end. But, in an advanced, sophisticated democracy, that's how we define the 'international community': no matter how many foreigners are in your coalition, it's unilateral unless Jacques is on board.

Yup, Steyn has it right.

Bill Moyers' Delusion Is No Longer Marginal

2005-02-01T11:09:00.000-05:00

If you swallow a cockroach as soon as you wake-up in the morning then nothing more distastful can happen to you all day. Unless you read one of Bill Moyers' posts, that is.

Bill Moyers just did a post that, even considering the source, shocks me with its crudeness. The premise of his post, The Delusional Is No Longer Marginal, is that America is run by religious fundmentalists who don't care about global warming, world peace, the Middle East and so on because we're on the verge of the rapture and because the Bible prophecies predicted this was going to happen it's all God's will anyway and the long term doesn't matter because Jesus is comming soon anyway. Here's a taste of the hair-ball Moyers coughed up:

And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 Time-CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations, or in the motel turn on some of the 250 Christian TV stations, and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, 'to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth, when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?'

OK, Bill, let's work with your premise that George W Bush is a religious fundamentalist who doesn't give a damn about global warming because the apocalypse is upon us. In that case, why would Bush waste his time reforming Social Security since, according to the faith that you claim makes every decision for him, SS won't go broke soon enough to matter?

Or perhaps your premise is false because this article’s sole intention was just to assassinate George W Bush's character?

Update:

I just recalled that Charles Krauthammer has already commented on Moyers' wackiness back in December of 2003 in his article Bush Derangement Syndrome:

It has been 25 years since I discovered a psychiatric syndrome (for the record: ``Secondary Mania,'' Archives of General Psychiatry, November 1978), and in the interim I haven't been looking for new ones. But it's time to don the white coat again. A plague is abroad in the land.

Bush Derangement Syndrome: the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency -- nay -- the very existence of George W. Bush.

Now what prompted Krauthammer's article was some total unhinged things said by Howard Dean. (I had a different diagnosis: I figured Dean mouth was just being controlled through a microchip the DU implanted in his brain.)

Anyway, Krauthammer went on to say this about Bill Moyers:

It is true that BDS has struck some pretty smart guys -- Bill Moyers ranting about a ``right-wing wrecking crew'' engaged in ``a deliberate, intentional destruction of the United States way of governing'' and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, whose recent book attacks the president so virulently that Krugman's British publisher saw fit to adorn the cover with images of Dick Cheney in a Hitler-like mustache and Bush stitched-up like Frankenstein. Nonetheless, some observers took that to be satire; others wrote off Moyers and Krugman as simple aberrations, the victims of too many years of neurologically hazardous punditry.

Hey, Teddy Kennedy!

2005-01-31T20:53:00.000-05:00

OK, I didn't think of this, but I sure wish I did.

The Barcepundit wondered how TV pictures would look if a different finger was dipped into the ink. Here is Iraq's current president, al-Yawar, giving his due regards:

Hey, Ted Kennedy!

This picture just cries out for a caption. Possible captions include insults directed toward Euro-weasels and so on. My best suggestion that Ted Kennedy is the most deserving for his insane pre-election speech demanding that we do a Vietnam style bug-out.

Postscript:

The image was taken from Barcepundit. The image, of course, was photoshopped.

Is this an insane man or does he just play one on TV? “

2005-01-31T20:37:00.000-05:00

I'm tempted to give up. I just cannot write as well as the Diplomad.

Here is the Diplomad snickering at John Kerry's attempt to not say something nice about an accomplishment—the election in Iraq— by a man who would make a better president than John Kerry; even if he was in a coma: Dubya.

[here is] your friend John “Christmas in Cambodia” Kerry! Listen to the leader speak:

I think it's gone as expected. <…> it is significant that there is a vote in Iraq. But no one in the United States or in the world-- and I'm confident of what the world response will be. No one in the United States should try to overhype this election. This election is a sort of demarcation point, and what really counts now is the effort to have a legitimate political reconciliation, and it's going to take a massive diplomatic effort and a much more significant outreach to the international community than this administration has been willing to engage in. Absent that, we will not be successful in Iraq.
And a few days prior to this prouncement he had announced,

Throughout Europe, as I met with European leaders, it's clear that they're prepared to do more, but the [Bush] administration has not put the structure together for people to be able to do it," he said.
Is this an insane man or does he just play one on TV? “Gone as expected?” “Overhype?” Uh, you mean like, uh, you did with your war record, Senator? “A massive diplomatic effort and a much more significant outreach to the international community than this administration has been willing to engage in?” What is he talking about? What does that mean? Negotiate with Al Zarqawi? Who are the mysterious European leaders he met who want to do more but are prevented from doing it by Bush? They must not belong to the EU which is now busy falling all over itself to kiss Bush’s behind and dump money on Iraq. Or Kofi? Is he afraid of Bush or what?

The French Combat Knife

2005-01-30T19:51:00.000-05:00

For a limited time only, get the KY-86 Combat Sheath

This high speed survival weapon comes with a yellow "PEACE" sheath, which can be broken down into two (2) tactical panty shields. These French military-issue quilted menstrual pads are velcroed together to form the sheath. They each feature a special contour shape, to ease in road march rash, and come in a delicate 'Desert Flower' scent.

Manufactured in Dien Bin Phu, Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the "Old Yeller" KU-86 French Army Knife is now available in limited numbers to the public. This state-of-the-art survival knife is the exact model currently issued to the elite Frence soldiers. This knife has a look all its own and contains all the special tools every French infratryman requires to for survival on the modern field of battle.

The knife handle consists of indestructable OD green Kraton handles, bisected by a bold yellow stipe and capped with stainless steel end pieces. The French Flag is proudly depicted on one side.

Packed inside this French powerhouse are a lanyard loop; a 'stars and stripes' pacifier, for practicing sucking on America's tit; a back azimuth compass, to aid in hasty retreats; a 3 1/4" 420HC stainless steel butterknife blade; a pop-up white flag, for emergency unconditional surrenders; a hair comb. for keeping vogue combat hairstyles in place; and of course, a whine corkscrew.

hat tip Geeks With Guns

UPDATE:

Welcome to visitors from KNIFE SURVIVAL TECHNIQUES and TRAINING KNIFE!

Look around and enjoy your stay!

France repeats call for foreign troop pullout from Iraq

2005-01-30T19:11:00.000-05:00

France repeats call for foreign troop pullout from Iraq:

French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin has reiterated France's support for Iraqis to re-establish full independence with the pullout of foreign troops from the country, a Tunisian newspaper reported.

Before I continue with the requisite frog bashing, I would like to point out that France's forces are currently infesting the Ivory Coast. Perhaps the French should discontinue staining Africa with their presence before expressing any option regarding their better's conduct.

Now back to the case at hand:

First of all, I smugly note the irony that it is French, of all people, who are saying that the Americans are arrogant! This irony is enough to make my head spin.

Second, exactly who in the world asked (or cares) what the French opinion about whether "foreign" forces (i.e., non-French) forces remain in Iraq might be?

Let me answer that last one. For the record, Amercia is somewhere between completely and totally uninterested in what France's opinion might be. On any topic. If the U.S. ever wants to know what French opinion might be then we will beat it out of them.

George Will on "Statecraft as Soulcraft"

2005-01-30T11:47:00.000-05:00

I've admired George Will's work for a long time. Today's article by George Will, The great frontier, refers to one of his books that I had the pleasure of reading back in the 80’s:

Twenty-two years ago there was a book, written by this columnist and read by dozens, titled ``Statecraft as Soulcraft: What Government Does.'' It was a manifesto, of sorts, for ``big government conservatism.'' It argued that modern government, with its myriad prescriptions, proscriptions and incentives, cannot help but endorse and, to some extent, enforce certain values. So it should be thoughtful and articulate about it.
It cannot be said of Bush, as was famously said of Martin Van Buren, that he rows toward his goal ``with muffled oars.'' Bush has said ``I don't do nuance,'' and his ``ownership society'' agenda -- from Social Security personal accounts to health savings accounts to tax cuts -- is explicitly explained as soulcraft. Its purpose is to combat the learned incompetence of persons who become comfortable with excessive dependence on and supervision by government. His agenda's aim is to continue, in the language of his inaugural address, ``preparing our people for the challenges of life in a free society.''

That is the crux of modern conservatism -- government taking strong measures to foster in the citizenry the attitudes and aptitudes necessary for increased individual independence. That is what the Homestead Act did, out in what no longer is the Great American Desert. "

As usual, George’s article is suffused with intelligent observations. Recommended reading.

Social Security calculator

2005-01-30T11:28:00.000-05:00

Bob White discovered that the Heritage Foundation has put together an Social Security calculator. This calculator shows how much more you as a worker can get if your FICA taxes were invested in a Personal Retirement Account rather than Social Security.

Thanks Bob!

72% turnout in Iraq's election

2005-01-30T08:35:00.000-05:00

With about two hours to go before the polls close in Iraq, FoxNews is reporting that there has been a 72% turnout. My Political Science professor once made a statement to our class: "The ballot box is just a substitute for blood in the street." Via today's vote, the Iraqis have registered that they are not acquiescing to being ruled by “blood in the street”; and they’re defying the al Qaeda death squads to do so.

The winners, in general, include the Iraqis and America. The Iraqis, of course, won because they are refusing to be ruled by tyrants. For America this election is another successful step in our project to tame the parts of the middle east that are infested with criminal regimes.

America military forces deserve special mention: over 1,100 American warriors have died advancing America’s interests. Criminal regimes spanned an uninterrupted area from Syria to Pakistan when Bush took office in 2001. One of the regimes, Afghanistan’s Taliban, protected bin Laden, provided a sanctuary for al Qaeda and enabled al Qaeda’s September 11^th terror attack on the U.S.

Today elected governments and not criminal regimes run Iraq and Afghanistan because our warriors removed the despots and created the stability needed to organize civil governments.

And we got a freebie: our exhibition of military force flipped Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi without firing a shot—or even our showing any interest in servicing him in the near future. Muammar Gaddafi ditched his WMD program for one reason and one reason alone: he saw what our military did to Saddam and Gaddafi was frantic to avoid Saddam’s fate. No prison cells for Gaddafi!

President Bush also deserves special mention. The successful outcome for this election is yet another in a series of victories for George W Bush. This victory also means a defeat for Bush’s opponents. A partial list of these losers includes:

bin Laden: he anointed Zarqawi to be prince “the prince of al Qaeda in Iraq”, Iraq presumabily being a district in the Caliphate bin Laden aspires to.

Zarqawi and his al Qaeda death squads: Zarqawi’s wave of homicide bombings, explicit death threats and terrorism was just one big wet firecracker.

The Baathist death squads: Baathists who were trying to reestablish an Sunni-based tyranny received a setback.

Syria and Iran: they provided support and money for the death squads that were trying to stop the election. Oh, and you’re next! Start sweating it.

The Weasels : France, Germany and France’s toy poodle, Belgium, did everything in their (non-existent) power to stop the U.S.

The UN : The UN Oil for Security Council Vetoes Scandal descredited the UN.

Saddam: Saddam bet the farm that French UNSC vetoes would save him from one division of U.S. Marines.

The Main Stream Media: The MSM was pulling for U.S. defeat.

The Democrats: The Democratic Party’s elites were pulling for U.S. defeat.

Ted Kennedy.: Treasonous drunkard, Ted Kennedy, has been trying to cause the U.S. to loss in Iraq in the same way he caused us to lose in Vietnam: by making us abandon the battlefield and leave our enemies in control of it.

Yup, Bush overcame some major opposition.

Oh, and an order for Treasonous Drunkard Ted Kennedy: Drink up.

The Diplomad upsets the ignorant left!

2005-01-29T18:26:00.000-05:00

The Diplomad has a trumphant post where he notes that certain leftist blogs are having a collective hissy-fit because he was less than adoring of the UN. Actually the Diplomad is very contemptious of the UN, having wasted too much of his adult life watching that odious transnational organization in action.

Anyway, the Diplomad writes much funnier than I can. Here's a teaser:

Ah, The Diplomad has upset the ignorant left! That makes us happy. We are very happy; we dance the Diplomadic dance of joy -- a dance seen only twice before, to wit, on the occasions of the dates of the HowardianBushite election wins.

It seems that the leftoblogs (you can find them in our comments section, our trackbacks, or at www.technorati.com) are in a hissy-fit because our little non-profit blog has dared to poke fun at their sacred for-profit UN and their untouchable for-mucho-profit Global Warming Franchise. It seems the UN hasn't shared its Oil-for-Food gains with its supporters as yet, so they have been unable to go out and buy a working brain with the optional sense-of-humor chip installed.

The Diplomad should be required reading.

Like Saddam, Social Security is a crisis until Bush tries to fix it

2005-01-29T17:50:00.000-05:00

The Questions And Observations blog, QandO, has an excellent post, Oh, that Social Security Crisis, which analyzes why the why the Democrats have suddenly changed their mind about whether Social Security is at risk.

QandO uses a couple of article by BSD afflicted Krugman that simply claims that Bush invented the Social Security crisis yesterday. QandO notes a number of speeches by Clinton, and others, during the 1990's that specifically mention the Social Security crisis. They also note that the Social Security Administration was saying 1998, "It is important to address the financing of both the OASI and DI programs soon..."

Regarding why the Dems are exhibiting such antics now, QandO quotes Tom Maguire's reasoning:..

if I were a proper Dem, I would insist that there was no current Social Security problem, and await the day when a Dem president and Congress could implement a more progressive solution.

Yup, I agree.

Ted Kennedy tries to rerun tet 68

2005-01-28T20:17:00.000-05:00

Rush Limbaugh examined Ted Kennedy's recent comments at the National Press Club:

SENATOR KENNEDY: We have reached the point that a prolonged American military presence in Iraq is no longer productive for either Iraq or the United States. The US military presence has become part of the problem, not part of the solution. No matter how many times the administration denies it, there is no question they misled the nation and led us into a quagmire in Iraq. Despite the clear lesson of history, the president stubbornly clings to the false hope that the turning point is just around the corner.

RUSH: You remember, ladies and gentlemen, shortly -- by the way, you know where this term "quagmire" started? It's Walter Cronkite's word for Vietnam, and it is that expression of Cronkite's which is seen in the mainstream media to have turned the public opinion against the war. Thus, the use of "quagmire" as a word to describe Iraq by Senator Kennedy is no accident. Now, you'll recall that shortly before our election in November, Osama bin Laden tried to influence our election with a statement aired on Al-Jazeera. Yesterday, three days before the crucial election in Iraq, Senator Kennedy tried to influence the Iraq election and the demoralization of US troops and the undermining of US policy with a statement that he hopes will influence the election in Iraq. ...

Yup, I've already blogged about how Teddy led the Senate to welch on our aggrements to support South Vietnam, which led to South Vietnam losing to North Vietnam. That fat obnoxious drunkard is trying to make the U.S. lose again.

Keep trying, Teddy, bin Laden is counting on you coming through. After all, just like the North Vietnamese, bin Laden can't beat us on the battlefield—he can only win through turncoats like you.

Iraq the vote

2005-01-28T19:27:00.000-05:00

National Lampoon comes through again. Also "Iraq the vote" is a great play on MTV's "mock the vote" slogan.

Hat tip to Shane for emailing this link.

The Tyrant-friendly EU

2005-01-28T15:31:00.000-05:00

Václav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic, observes that sanctimonious lip-servicer of human-rights, the EU, is practicing appeasement:

I vividly remember the slightly ludicrous, slightly risqué and somewhat distressing predicament in which Western diplomats in Prague found themselves during the Cold War. They regularly needed to resolve the delicate issue of whether to invite to their embassy celebrations various Charter 77 signatories, human-rights activists, critics of the communist regime, displaced politicians, or even banned writers, scholars and journalists -- people with whom the diplomats were generally friends.

Sometimes we dissidents were not invited, but received an apology, and sometimes we were invited, but did not accept the invitation so as not to complicate the lives of our courageous diplomat friends. …

`Dissidents or trade'

This all happened when the Iron Curtain divided Europe -- and the world -- into opposing camps. Western diplomats had their countries' economic interests to consider, but, unlike the Soviet side, they took seriously the idea of ''dissidents or trade.'' I cannot recall any occasion at that time when the West or any of its organizations (NATO, the European Community, etc.) issued some public appeal, recommendation or edict stating that some specific group of independently minded people -- however defined -- were not to be invited to diplomatic parties, celebrations or receptions.

But today this is happening. One of the strongest and most powerful democratic institutions in the world -- the European Union -- has no qualms in making a public promise to the Cuban dictatorship that it will re-institute diplomatic Apartheid. The EU's embassies in Havana will now craft their guest lists in accordance with the Cuban government's wishes. The shortsightedness of socialist Prime Minister José Zapatero of Spain has prevailed.

José Zapatero, you may recall, is the Spain’s socialist Neville Chamberlain who ran on a platform of bugging out in Iraq. He was opposed by, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, who was a steadfast ally of the U.S.

Al Qaeda pulled their man, José Zapatero, to victory by bombing a Spanish commuter train a few days before the March 2004 election. Zapatero won and to Spain’s everlasting shame, capitulated in the war with al Qaeda by removing Spain’s soldiers from Iraq.

I can hardly think of a better way for the EU to dishonor the noble ideals of freedom, equality and human rights that the Union espouses -- indeed, principles that it reiterates in its constitutional agreement. To protect European corporations' profits from their Havana hotels, the Union will cease inviting open-minded people to EU embassies, and we will deduce who they are from the expression on the face of the dictator and his associates. It is hard to imagine a more shameful deal.

In my view, old Europe has already stained her honor. The EU’s actions are not a matter of supine acquiescence but instead are their technique. The EU countries are violating any actual principles since they never gave a damn about such things anyway.

During the 1990’s they couldn’t be bothered to halt an ongoing genocide occurring within Europe. Just think about this outrage: the Europeans were so unconcerned with the genocide conducted by Milosevic against fellow modern-day Europeans—in Europe, at that—that none of them could bother themselves to stop him.

Now mind you, the Europeans aren’t helpless; many European countries are members of NATO, have militaries with sufficient troops and equipment to service Milosevic.

Now why would anyone expect this bunch selfish moral midgets—who were willing to sit while Milosevic exterminated their fellow Europeans—to be willing to inconvenience themselves over Castro—who is just running measly tyranny over a few million Cubans of European decent? I don’t. In fact, I’d be surprised if they’d miss this opportunity.

[…].

Today, the EU is dancing to Fidel Castro's tune. … tomorrow it could bid for contracts to build missile bases on the coast of the People's Republic of China. The following day it could allow its decisions on Chechnya to be dictated by Russian President Vladimir Putin's advisors. Then, for some unknown reason, it could make its assistance to Africa conditional on fraternal ties with the worst African dictators.

Where will it end? The release of Milosevic? Denying a visa to Russian human-rights activist Sergey Kovalyov? An apology to Saddam Hussein? The opening of peace talks with al Qaeda?[emphasis mine—johnh]

For that matter, I’m expecting France to propose exchanging ambassadors with al Qaeda any day now.

It is suicidal for the EU to draw on Europe's worst political traditions, the common denominator of which is the idea that evil must be appeased and that the best way to achieve peace is through indifference to the freedom of others.[emphasis mine—johnh]

If that behavior suicidal then they have been committing suicide for years now.

Remember this, gentle readers, the next time you hear some sanctimonious Euro-weenie complain about the U.S. not meeting their lofty human-rights standards. Their human-rights rhetoric is only for show. It is attire for preening about on the world stage, not for governing their conduct.

War Stories from Fallujah

2005-01-27T05:15:00.000-05:00

Did you ever want to read a well-written, first person account of combat in Fallujah? Well first lieutenant Neil Prakash, is both an excellent writer and an superb story-teller. He is also a tank platoon leader in Avenger Company, which is organized as Team Avenger for Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF).

The full breakdown of 1LT Prakash’s place in the scheme of things is: 1LT Prakash, Avenger Co, 2nd Battalion — 63rd Armor Regiment “Lions” (2-63AR), Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF 2), Forward Operations Base (FOB) WARHORSE

His blog, Armor Geddon, looks to be a cross between a journal and collection of short stories about his adventures when the U.S. took down Fallujah. I highly recommend going back to his first posts and then reading forward so as to read his tale in chronological order.

Here’s a teaser regarding some of the exercises that occurred just before we went into Fallujah:

SGT P told me all about the rehearsal yesterday that took the task force up to the attack position. They had reconned the site where they would stage for the attack and where we would breech into the city. "Oh my lord, Sir. You should have seen it. There were more vehicles than I have ever seen in my life. There were tanks, bradleys, humvees and PCs as far as you could see, stretched out across the desert. It was sick."

"Yeah well, I heard that yesterday was a reduced force rehearsal. Only the key leaders were out there with you. That was only 25% of the division task force for the assault."

“Sweet Jesus. This city has no idea what's about to hit it."

You're next!

2005-01-26T15:11:00.000-05:00

Make sure you put some english on it when you swat them with that wrench!

Hat tip to Neo Warmonger

Thomas L Friedman: "Boy is my butt sore"

2005-01-26T13:34:00.000-05:00

New blogger on the blog and member of the State Department's Republican underground, "New Sisyphus", just fisked the same Friedman column that I worked over a few days ago. Friedman, who writes a column for the New York Times (motto: All the news that fits their spin) did a column that New Sisyphus couldn't resider either: News Flash: NY Times, Columnist Dislike President Bush, Despair For Future of U.S.-E.U. Relations. Here's a taste:

As a liberal bellwether, Friedman represents the ultimate in conventional wisdom (the good ol' CW). The CW is hopelessly naive about Palestinian intentions; Friedman is hopelessly naive about Palestinian intentions. The CW is that any foreign policy challenge or setback is due to some American failure; Friedman is pretty sure that any foreign policy challenge or setback is obviously due to some American failure. The CW is that Democratic policy provisions are always altruistically motivated and self-evidently good; Friedman thinks that.....well, you get the idea.

Yesterday's Friedman column, "An American in Paris," is an exemplar of the genre. Chock full of cliches, lame metaphors and tired thinking--the kind one would expect from a political science professor at Evergreen State College--it was just crying our for a Fisking.

So, without further ado, please follow us to Friedmanland, were everything is always America's fault, Saudi princes have bona fide peace plans and if only Likud would retire from politics the Middle East would be an oasis of peace, science and industry!

[...]

In Friedmanland, France is Europe and Europe is France (plus perhaps Germany, but only if the Christian Democrats/CSU aren't in power). Never mind that the President enjoys solid support in Iraq from half of Europe in the form of actual boots on the ground (United Kingdom, Italy, Portugal, Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Ukraine, Moldova, Norway, Bulgaria, Albania, Slovakia, Macedonia, and until terrorism-stained elections the better half of Spain). Nope, so long as enlightened opinion in the Quai D'Orsay says non, then Europe is against us! Certainly no one Tommy talks to is pro-Bush. I mean, he is a journalist after all.

Now go read his entire post, he had me cracking up.

EU to implode under burden of red tape

2005-01-26T13:00:00.000-05:00

The EU Referendum blog has a post titled Cut red tape or suffer decline.

The whole post is worth reading but my reason for commenting on it is because it reenforces a point that I've been harping on for a while: the Europeans are drowning in their statist waste products.

Here's Richard of EU Referendum:

Latest of the long line of critics, the government's own 'red-tape czar' is calling on the EU to improve its business regulation or face long-term economic decline, according to The Times today.

Of course the Europeans are already in decline. Then the 'red-tape' czar, in a Herculean feat of mental alchemy, then

... called for an independent organisation to monitor and audit red tape and said: 'There need to be sufficient commission civil servants (sic) to carry out these functions and to progress the simplification agenda.'

Did ya catch that? The clueless Euro-weenie is proposing to add another set of bureaucrats who's purpose is to lift the dead hand of bureaucracy from Europe's vestigial economies. That like sending Custer more indians.

Asked what would happen if red tape continued to grow, Mr Arculus said: 'I think the consequences for Europe are extremely serious.' Europe's economy could decline to half the size of the US over the next 20 years if the tide of regulation was not stemmed, he said. [emphasis mine—johnh]

Yup, that's why the only thing that Europe is going to do is shrink in our rear-view mirror as we leave them behind.

Hat tip to The Diplomad

The Social Security tar pit

2005-01-26T10:38:00.000-05:00

My friend, Tom G, is organizing a Townhall meeting on Social Security reform. He sent an email query to his associates eliciting feedback regarding Social Security concerns.

Here is a list of my reasons for believing we have to do something about reforming Social Security.

The Social Security (SS) system senselessly insists on conducting itself in a losing manner. You could design an investment program that would be even less profitable than SS, but that would take time. Our laws then coercively force citizens to invest in this poorly performing investment.

In summary, our SS system forces citizens to involuntarily invest a portion of their retirement savings into the least attractive retirement plan available.

The only defense I can think of for the SS system is that it is guaranteed to avoid loses at the price of only producing small gains. This defense is gravely weakened because the “safety” it provides is purchased at such a prohibitive price in lost opportunity that only the most clueless citizens would select it over the private accounts. (Of course I’m only referring to citizens who are approaching retirement. These folks do not have enough time to benefit from private accounts.)

The SS system enervates our economic growth. SS taxes are invested in government bonds. Like flies trapped in government securities amber, the trillions of dollars in the SS funds languishes in stasis until the citizens retire and it is doled out in monthly checks.

The money “invested” in SS is lost to the economy for the forty years or so between a citizen’s first paycheck and when he gets it back as a SS check. In contrast, retirement savings invested in private accounts—which presumably would be invested in index funds and so on—would have increased annual GNP growth by a few percent each year. This increase in the GNP’s rate of increase, of course, would compound annually.

We would all be much better off today if private account had been around for the last forty years.

Without either a material reduction in benefits or a material reform (e.g., private accounts), the existing SS system will become a threat to our economy. This is because the ratio of workers to retirees will become so low that SS taxes will have to be greatly increased. This debilitating tax increase will become a progressively larger drag on our economy.

Similar to the Ghost of Christmas Future, the Europeans’ much larger welfare state infrastructure warns us as to our fate should we fail to reform SS. The Europe’s welfare states are in trouble for the same reason that our SS system is destined to be in trouble: aging populations resulting in growing number of recipients and dwindling numbers of taxpayers to fund entitlements. Europe crisis has arrived decades before ours because (1) their population is aging quicker than ours, and (2) the stresses on their economies—already stagnated by their cradle-to-grave welfare systems—are approaching the danger zone.

Like so many clueless dinosaurs futilely struggling to escape a tar pit, the European countries are struggling to escape their self-constructed fiscal trap. This slow-motion spectacle of the European economies being consumed by their welfare states is a morbid example of what awaits us should we fail to act.

The sooner we reform SS the less painful it will be. It needs to be done, we need to get it over with.

Why is Dean running?

2005-01-25T17:30:00.000-05:00

So Howard Dean is looking destined to become the DNC chairman.

And Hillary—as expected—is speechifying like she will be running in 2008.

And waaaay back in winter of 2003/2004—back when it looked like Dean was going to run the table and be the Democratic nominee in 2004—I read Dick Morris’ prediction that if Dean did win the Democratic nomination then

Dean, upon copping the prize, is likely to fire Terry McAuliffe and take control of the Democratic National Committee. No longer will its coffers be available to the Clintons to use as their private fund, channeling donations to candidates and causes they favor or that favor them.

Hmmm…. Clinton—Bill, that is—handpicked McAuliffe because he knew that McAuliffe would be a reliable marionette; dispensing DNC cash as Bill instructed him to. McAuliffe would have come in handy during Hillary’s 2008 election campaign.

And I guess the reason why Dean would have immediately fired McAuliffe is because McAuliffe—being Clinton’s creature—was covertly working against Dean during his campaign.

Now this is getting interesting. Dean is working hard to replace McAuliffe as the DNC chairman. If Dean is successful—and it increasingly looks that he will be successful—then Dean will be in a position to return the favor during Hillary’s 2008 campaign.

Yeah, I know, this thread of circumstances is flaky enough to get me nominated for the “Oliver Stone ‘Manchurian Canard’” award. And I’m thinking I deserve it this time.

Is Dean vindictive enough to go all of this hassle just to get some payback at the Clinton’s expense? I wouldn’t have thought so.

Perhaps Dean genuinely thinks that his leadership is exactly what the Democratic Party needs. (I’m sure the left-lobe of the blogosphere’s brain would agree with that assessment.)

Well, I don’t know the answers, I’m just asking.

In any case, my judgment is that it doesn’t matter that much who gets elected to the DNC chair; nobody can get elected unless they are accepted by the Michael-Moore-deranged Democratic Party elites. That should make it easier to beat’em again next time.

Turner Compares Fox's Popularity to Hitler

2005-01-25T15:35:00.000-05:00

Ted Turner called Fox a propaganda tool of the Bush administration and indirectly compared Fox News Channel's popularity to Adolph Hitler's popular election to run Germany before World War II.

I think Mr. Jane Fonda is just mad because FoxNEWS has kicked CNN's butt in the ratings.

Turner made those fiery comments in his first address at the National Association for Television Programming Executives' conference since he was ousted from Time Warner Inc. five years ago. Other comments include:

On Fox News: While Fox may be the largest news network [and has overtaken Turner's CNN], it's not the best, Turner said. He followed up by pointing out that Adolph Hitler got the most votes when he was elected to run Germany prior to WWII. He said the network is the propaganda tool for the Bush Administration. "There's nothing wrong with that. It's certainly legal. But it does pose problems for our democracy. Particularly when the news is dumbed down," leaving voters without critical information on politics and world events and overloaded with fluff," he said.

Yeah, I just hate it when a major news network withholds "critical information on politics and world events" from us voters. Why I recall a "a chief news executive", named Eason Jordan, did an opinion piece in the New York Time where he admitted his network:

...has systematically covered up stories of Iraqi atrocities. Reports of murder, torture, and planned assassinations were suppressed in order to maintain [his network's] Baghdad bureau.

Now maybe it's just me, but I would say that this withheld information was pretty important, critical even. So who was his employer? What news network would deliberately withhold such information?

I'm SOOOO glad you asked! It was Ted's network: "al CNN"!

Hey Ted! Thanks for that heads up on FoxNEWS! Get back with us if Fox ever descends below the standards of CNN (i.e., below sea level.)

Thanks big guy!

Hat tip to Drudge

update:

I should have expected this, but since I never do I was caught off-guard when, of course, Ted Turner's dumb comments—comparing FoxNEWS to Hitler and so on—was a topic on Brit Hume's segment on this evening's news.

After Brit quoted the effects of second hand marijuana on Ted Turner he then quoted a riposte from "a Fox News Spokesman”:

'Ted Turner is understandably bitter having lost his ratings, his network and now his mind. We wish him well."

My initial post lasted about 2 hours before Fox topped it. Oh well.

Postscript: the quote from the FoxNEWS spokesman is from my memory. I know that quote is fundamentally correct but might slightly vary from what was actually said.

Update2:

The quote of the FoxNEWS spokesmane has been corrected. Now have a link to the the quote.

It's like watching a hamster blow up in a microwave, only this time you’re gleeful!

2005-01-24T17:50:00.000-05:00

This hilarious gem (quicktime) is so good that the blogosphere’s PC-weenies are blowing a gasket. (note: you will have to click "View the VW ad" after arriving a the hyperlink.)

The miscreants include:

KelliPundit: “it is one of the most tasteless pieces of film, no doubt.”

Jewlicious: “Most tasteless ad ever?”

Jeremy Tai Abbert: “That tastless viral ad for the Volkswagen Polo…”

They hated it. Good! This shows who is supporting the mad dogs over the underdogs around here.

On the other hand mrbrown gets my price for brilliant tongue-in-cheek commentary:

And if you've watched it, you might want to know that RoSPA (The Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents) is angry at this commercial. They noticed that the VW driver doesn't appear to be wearing a seat belt or any other form of safety harness, thus making him a unsuitable role model for impressionable British youth.

and we can’t tolerate “unsuitable role models” now, can we?

Note: you can install the plug-in necessary to view a Quicktime movie here.

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin

Postscript:

The title of the post was inspired by a title on the Industrial Waste blog. My bad.

Update:

KelliPundit responds with this comment:

John,
Just discovered that you have judged my entire distaste for terrorists because I did not exactly enjoy the VW Bomber commercial.

I will not defend my stance on terrorists since it is painfully obvious that you did not take any time at my site to find out what side I fight for. I guess it is just too easy to take my dislike for the commercial and judge everything about me. Could it be laziness?

Now to the commercial: Since you obviously valued my opinion...What bothered me about the commercial was seeing the mother holding the baby outside the cafe. As a mother of young boys, my stomach instantly churned at this site. Call it reflexive or whatever. But it was my gut feeling at the time I saw the video. I've also visited the Jewish websites that lists the victims of suicide bombers and have read the individual stories. It struck a raw nerve in me that did not make me laugh.

Having said that, I am open minded enough to see how many people see this commercial as funny. I don't ridicule those people or call them names. They are entitled to their gut feeling as well.

After finding your post I nearly just blew it off and did not respond, but I felt compelled to do so. Compare our side bar of links and they are not much different. Dude, we're on the same team. Let the other side chew on each other. I believe we are all entitled to our own gut reactions to different situations...Geez...I don't believe I pleaded for the feelings of terrorists anywhere.
My first thought was how hurtful this commercial would be to anyone who had lost a loved one or had survived such a horrific event. Ridicule me on those grounds
if you must.
KelliPundit

Hmmm... After looking at your site It is apparent that I was wrong and you are right. I was too careless to bother looking at your site and just jumped to the conclusion that your objection was motivated by misplaced sympathy—not revulsion at the material itself.

You deserve, and I giving you, a public apology.

That I'm in this position is all my fault. I would be here I had exercised due diligence.

Again, my humble apologies.

johnh

Another masterpiece by Victor Davis Hanson

2005-01-23T18:55:00.000-05:00

Victor Davis Hanson has produced another masterfully written article Postmodern War, which was published in the excellent City Journal:

It is still suicidal to meet the United States in a conventional war—at least for any enemy that has not fully adopted Western arms, discipline, logistics, and military organization. The recent abrupt collapse of both the Taliban and Saddam Hussein’s regime amply proves the folly of fighting America in direct conflicts. The military dynamism that enables the United States to intervene militarily in the Middle East—in a manner in which even the richest Middle Eastern countries could not intervene in North America—is not an accident of geography or a reflection of genes, but a result of culture. Our classical Western approaches to politics, religion, and economics—including consensual government, free markets, secularism, a strong middle class, and individual freedom—eventually translate on the battlefield into better-equipped, motivated, disciplined, and supported soldiers.

To an American television audience, al-Qaida videos of pajama-clad killers in ski masks beheading captives look scary, of course. But a platoon of Rangers would slaughter hundreds of them in seconds if they ever approached Americans openly on the field of conventional battle or even for brief moments of clear firing. In Mogadishu, Somalia, everything boded ill for a few trapped Americans—outnumbered, far from home, facing local hostility in urban warfare—and yet the real lesson was not that a few Americans were tragically killed, but that the modern successors to Xenophon’s Ten Thousand or the Redcoats at Rorke’s Drift managed to shoot their way out and kill over 1,000 in the process.

This is one of those articles that is so good that I just have nothing to add. Now go read it!

Iran, the ultimate "red state."

2005-01-21T11:12:00.000-05:00

Thomas Friedman analyzes the world's biggest "blue state" (Europe), Americans who's outlook is no longer American but European (the Democrats) and the dawning realization in Europe that their anti-Bush sentiments are actually anti-American sentiments.

Why are Europeans so blue over George Bush's re-election? Because Europe is the world's biggest "blue state." This whole region is a rhapsody in blue. These days, even the small group of anti-anti-Americans in the European Union is uncomfortable being associated with Mr. Bush. There are Euro-conservatives, but, aside from, maybe, the ruling party in Italy, there is nothing here that quite corresponds to the anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-tax, anti-national-health-care, anti-Kyoto, openly religious, pro-Iraq-war Bush Republican Party.

If you took all three major parties in Britain - Labor, Liberals and Conservatives - "their views on God, guns, gays, the death penalty, national health care and the environment would all fit somewhere inside the Democratic Party," said James Rubin, the Clinton State Department spokesman, who works in London. "That's why I get along with all three parties here. They're all Democrats!"

[...]

...the prevailing mood on the continent (if I may engage in a ridiculously sweeping generalization!) still seems to be one of shock and awe that Americans actually re-elected this man.

Before Mr. Bush's re-election, the prevailing attitude in Europe was definitely: "We're not anti-American. We're anti-Bush." But now that the American people have voted to re-elect Mr. Bush, Europe has a problem maintaining this distinction. The logic of the Europeans' position is that they should now be anti-American, not just anti-Bush, but most Europeans don't seem to want to go there. ...

Why not? The they will just be joining the French.

Europeans were convinced that Kerry had won on election night and were telling themselves that they knew all along that Americans were not all that bad - and then suddenly, as the truth emerged, there was a feeling of slow resignation: 'Oh well, we've been dreaming,' " said Dominique Moisi, one of France's top foreign policy analysts. "In fact, real America is moving away from us. We don't share the same values. ... In France it was a very emotional issue. It was as if Americans were voting for the president of France as much as for president of the United States."
[...]
The one concrete result of the U.S. election will probably be to reinforce Europe's focus on its own efforts to build a United States of Europe, and to further play down the trans-Atlantic alliance. "When it comes to emotions, the re-election of Bush has reinforced the feeling of alienation between Europe and the U.S.," Mr. Moisi said. "It is not that we are so much against America, it is that we cannot understand the evolution of that country. ... This election has weakened the concept of 'the West.' "[Emphasis mine—johnh]

HA! "Weakened the concept of 'the West'", Huh? And exactly who's "concept of 'the West' might have been weakened? Europe created Communism (Karl Marx was a German), Fascism, Nazism, Socialism and UN worship and yet according to top frog foreign policy analyst, Moisi, it’s all America’s fault that “the concept of ‘the West’” has been weakened.”

Hey Moisi, since when has the “the concept of ‘the West’” included incorporating losing national strategies such a heavy trade protectionism, economy crushing welfare systems, high unemployment, transnational progressivism, effete-ism, unilateral disarmament, the inability to defend national interests, the refusal to acknowledge that the West is under islamofascist attack? Not doing these things doesn’t weaken the concept of ‘the West’, it just make the U.S. a better, stronger place than Europe.

Let me offer you my concept of ‘the West’: the Europeans can fund economy-crushing welfare states by unilaterally disarming. Europeans have the freedom to be this irresponsible because they know that the U.S. is defending Europe.

The Europeans can indulge in moral preening on the world stage because they are relieved of the manly tasks of defending themselves. Europe’s detachment from having to conduct her own defense make it so much easier for her to shriek effeminate objections to the methods the U.S. uses when defending Europe.

And my final part of my concept of ‘the West’ is that Europe will have a fruitless hissy fit after she realizes how America has already dismissed Europe as simply irrelevant. America need not take any notice; nobody here (other than Democrats) gives a damn.

Funnily enough, the one country on this side of the ocean that would have elected Mr. Bush is not in Europe, but the Middle East: it's Iran, where many young people apparently hunger for Mr. Bush to remove their despotic leaders, the way he did in Iraq.

An Oxford student who had just returned from research in Iran told me that young Iranians were "loving anything their government hates," such as Mr. Bush, "and hating anything their government loves." Tehran is festooned in "Down With America" graffiti, the student said, but when he tried to take pictures of it, the Iranian students he was with urged him not to. They said it was just put there by their government and was not how most Iranians felt.

Iran, he said, is the ultimate "red state." Go figure.

Go figure what? What is there to work-out about the obvious? Of course the Iranian people would love for us to remove their criminal regime and toss them the keys. Watching the impending elections in Iraq has to be killing them with envy.

If the media coverage was war, the good guys would be getting slaughtered

2005-01-21T08:39:00.000-05:00

Chrenkoff examines the firehose of negative news on Iraq.

... it's one thing to have a gut feeling about media negativity and another to know exactly how negative the coverage is. So today I decided to do a little tally.

Chrenkoff's numbers are staggering.

Hat tip to powerline

At any cost, don't let'em off the plantation!

2005-01-21T05:50:00.000-05:00

David Limbaugh makes a polemic point:

"Two major changes have occurred since those long-forgotten days when Democrats were identifying Social Security as a crisis that had to be fixed immediately: The problem has gotten worse, and Democrats have proven they weren't sincere in the first place."

Well, as polemics this might work but what if you are trying to make a serious point?

Everybody acknowledged the last time we patched up Social Security that the changes weren’t a permanent solution; it was only intended to keep Social Security creaking along for another few decades. The repairs were considered successful because they kicked the problem somewhere into the next century.

The Social Security fund’s balance improved after the last fix, for a while, just as we always expected it to. And now it is on the decline again, again completely anticipated.

So the first part of David Limbaugh’s assertion, that “the problem has gotten worse” is true to the extent that the fund’s balance has been declining since its apogee a few years ago.

Now on to Limbaugh’s second point. He asserts that the Democrats have bad motives: “Democrats have proven they weren't sincere in the first place [about fixing Social Security].” Is this fair?

Well I guess it depends on what you define as an acceptable Social Security fix. The Democrats oppose any fix—regardless of its efficacy—if it reduces the citizen’s reliance on government run (read Democrat run) programs.

President Bush’s proposed fix will phase account holders from a government-run wealth transfer program into private investment accounts. It will also, eventually, render Social Security irrelevant. Nobody in their right mind would chose the underperforming Social Security accounts once everybody gets used to the idea of private accounts. Especially after they get used to the idea of private accounts being a good—and much more profitable—risk over the long run.

In fact private accounts will become the new “third rail” of politics. Voters will eject any politician that talks-up doing away with the private accounts. Social Security will, in contrast, will be come quite huggable.

The Democrat’s idea of a fix is to layer yet another temporary patch and kick the problem into the future another few years. One might sense that this is less of an “idea” than a habit—unless you also understand that the Democrats need Social Security for its own sake.

Put another way, the Democrats are the ones who need Social Security—not the country. The country needs some structured system coerces its citizens into prudently saving for their retirement. The Democrats need a government-run (read Democrat run) program that detaches citizens from our economy and—the Democrats hope—retards any inclination toward self-reliance. The ideal outcome, for the Democrats, would be an enervated citizenry with a herd-like fear of leaving the Democratic plantation.

Private account will complete the transformation of America into an ownership society. An ownership society will make it impossibly awkward for Democrats to demagogue Wall Street when all of the voters have a stake in Wall Street’s success. An ownership society will also be a society where the average person is much wealthier and the government—except for having to establish an involuntary investment structure—will have little to do with it.

Put another way, it is the Democrats who will die if George Bush grasps the “third rail” of politics.

So was David Limbaugh’s second assertion unfair? Not if “fixing Social Security” means fixing our national retirement system. Yes if “fixing Social Security” means retaining our existing system at any cost.

postscript:

As I type these words I realized that I might be wrong: having a stake in America’s victory over Islamofascists never stopped the Democrats from demagoguing Iraq. Oh well, let them continue demagoguing Wall Street too; they will just be driving yet another wedge between themselves and Americans.

Iran Will Defend Against U.S. Attack

2005-01-20T17:38:00.000-05:00

Iranian President Mohammad Khatami warned the U.S. "Iran has plans to defend itself should the United States make any aggressive moves". He added 'The possibility of a U.S. attack against Iran is very low. We think America is not in a position to take a lunatic action of attacking Iran,' Khatami said. 'The U.S. is deeply engaged in Iraq.'"

HAHAHAHAHAHA!

That was the best laugh since John Kerry challenged the SwiftVets to "Bring it on" and then, maybe 24 hours later, began begging Bush to call them off before they hurt him too badly.

OK, let's get back to the warning growled by Iran's Mad-Dog-in-Chief. After a cursory examination of about, oh, 32 milliseconds, I determined that this threat was so loopy that only Barbra Boxer wouldn't giggle.

I mean, really, the President of a country that LOST a war with IRAQ—a country we dispatched in three weeks—is warning us that we better not mess with Iran if we don't want to get hurt.

Yeah, right.

He just wants to keep us from removing his criminal regime until he gets his nukes debugged. Then he wouldn't need to bluff.

French tsunami relief effort croaks

2005-01-20T10:37:00.000-05:00

The "Last of the Famous International Playboys" blog has a post that has to seen to be believed:France 2 Humiliates French Government. The blogger Douglas posted:

The expeditious and professional deployment of US troops on humanitarian assistance missions to areas devastated by the Boxing Day Tsunami has quite publicly embarrassed the French government— on live television, no less. Yet another reason to thank the US Armed Forces.

For days now, the US military has been getting favorable coverage on the French nightly news due to its response to the Indian Ocean Tsunami. But tonight's broadcast was simply astounding. At 8 minutes into the broadcast, anchor David Pujadas begins a discussion of the disaster response and introduced a report on the American deployment:

First off, here is the powerful American machinery in action. For 24
hours now, there has been a landing ["débarquement"] taking place — there is no other word — while helicopters continue the distribution [of humanitarian
aid].
The report begins with an improvised helipad and then shows US airmen distributing "survival packages" of food, clothes and demountable shelters. In addition to showing those in need that they have not been forgotten, these supplies will allow their recipients to live for another day, says the narrator. Cut to shot of a Sri Lankan beach where amphibious vehicles are disembarking from landing craft — umistakably reminiscent of the D-Day landings. Note that above Pujadas used the word "débarquement" ("there is no other word"), which is the word most often used to refer to the D-Day landings. Footage of thousands of US marines offloading equipment. None of them are armed, points out the narrator, as this is a reconstruction mission. An interview with Juan Quijada, a US marine whose rank is not given. "Just here to help them as best I can," he says. 13,000 soldiers, we're told, and so far 200 metric tons of supplies
At nine minutes and 30 seconds into the broadcast, Pujadas says that "the scale of need must not hide the failure to provide it." He introduces the next report: "... the failure of a French civilian rescue mission in one of the most heavily affected areas."

We learn that 100 French firefighters as well as rescue and response workers have been sent to Meulaboh to establish a field hospital but that 8 days after their deployment and 15 days after the disaster, only 25% of their supplies have been delivered "because France has no helicopters [to deliver them]." (NB: during the Afghanistan war, France had to rent ALL of its helicopters from the Russian army.)
"The good will of the rescuers is not in question," says Pujadas. "This is well and truly a foul up."

[...]
The report tells us that France has only 1 helicopter on the scene, a Dauphin. However this one is on loan from the manufacturer, Aérospatiale, and is normally used to shuttle around executives, not to move large amounts of cargo.
Sporting a sour smile, a French soldier is interviewed:
For the moment, we don't have the infrastructure in place, if you will, for logistics. The tents, the shelters, the hospital grounds. We can't begin to
treat people under these circumstances.
When the news team arrived, the day's mission was no more than the installation of a latrine. The narrator says:
Privately, the doctors admit that the first emergency phase has passed and that the French have missed it.
On screen, we then see a French doctor say... "As soon as our supplies gets here. No problem." Then we are treated to the image of the French begging for assistance from an Indonesian colonel! "We're expecting helicopters tomorrow," he says, asking for two trucks so they can move supplies. The colonel laughs and claps him on the shoulder. Then the French meet with some Americans. "It's been tough for us," says a French firefighter. "The Americans prove goodnatured toward the 'Frenchies,'" says the narrator. "But not much else." Then a big, impressive American Chinook helicopter arrives, empty, to pick up American journalists. French men looking dejected.
The report ends with the following summation:
... that the French army should even now be unable to provide them with a few helicopters 15 days after the fact is surprising, especially given the public outcry that the tsunami provoked. It is as though France no longer has the means even to express its emotions.

Wow. I never expected to good coverage from the French. I also never expected to hear a such scathing self-criticism out from the French either.

How to Interrogate Terrorists

2005-01-17T13:46:00.000-05:00

Heather Mac Donald has an excellent and long article How to Interrogate Terrorists. This article is so long and makes so many worthy points that I won't bother to do any commentary. At least not now.

Now go read it!

Shane has reservations about Sauther motives

2005-01-17T13:34:00.000-05:00

I recently blogged about an article by, Van Gordon Sauther, an ex-president of CBS’s news division, where Sauther stated that CBS’ news had become so liberal that he stopped watching it.

Shane emailed and said:

Well I have never known too many ex-employees to give their former employer a good review. :)

Well that may be true, particularly with laid-off employees. This is a good reason to interpret ex-employees’ scorn with due skepticism. But in this case you don’t have to take Sauther’s word for it; you can check most of his assertions yourself.

Sauther said: CBS news has “it has no credibility”. I could defend that assertion.

Sauther said: CBS news has “no audience”. Well, that’s not strictly true but I think everybody understood him to mean that CBS news has a tiny audience and I believe most observers would more or less agree with that assessment. I sure do.

Sauther said: CBS news has “no morale”. Well I’m not in a position to know anything firsthand but I accept this assertion as true. I reason that being employed by an industry laughingstock would sure reduce my self-regard. CBS’ worker bees should be glum, if only because they’re probably looking at another round of layoffs.

Sauther said: CBS news has “no long-term emblematic anchorperson”. Another true assertion, at least for now.

Now most of these assertions are either obviously true or at least seem very plausible to me. The most interesting assertions Sauther made was:

A large swath of the society doesn't trust the news media. And for many, it's even stronger than that: They abhor the media and perceive it as an escalating threat to the society.

Now that statement might be debatable to certain people but not to me. Why? Because I agree that broadcast news is an escalating threat to America. Most news broadcasters, FoxNEWS aside, have actively endeavored to undermine the political support for our war in Iraq. CBS news attempted to change the outcome of the 2004 election by attacking the Bush campaign by running a false story late enough during in the campaign that so as to make it unanswerable. (I could go on but it is unnecessary and I might run out of electronic ink. )

Anyway, Sauther’s statement was my primary reason for blogging about his article in the first place.

Getting back to Shane's email, I still haven’t fully answered his point that Sauther might be just disgruntled. OK, fair enough. There are a number of factors that lead me to think that his article isn’t about settling a score over being fired twenty some years ago.

First of all, the jobs of all corporate officers in broadcast news divisions are always on thin ice anyway. Sauther himself said that he lost his job due to a management shake-up. As the president of CBS’ news division I expect that Sauther did his fair share of hiring and firing. Maybe he even presided over a layoff, who knows?

I think that the perspective gained from being a high level officer would tend to moderate any sense that his firing was unfairness or whatnot. Anyway, Sauther lost his job something like twenty years ago and I guess I accept his statement that he “great affection for CBS News” at face value, although I could be wrong for doing that.

This all makes me recall something I read years ago. In one part of her funny book, And So It Goes, which describes her adventures in broadcasting, journalist Linda Ellerbee examines both the scorn network management has for their typical viewer and management level job insecurity:

… one of the central precepts of television news. We who work in television believe we are smarter that the people who watch television. Television news producers often turn down certain stories because, they say, the stories are too complicated or too dull to mean anything to the plumber in Albuquerque.

[…]

Imagine, if you will, the arrogance of some producer who is too scared to ride the subway after dark, too lazy to start a fire in his fireplace without a fake self-starting log, too ignorant to change a tire and too confused to do his own tax return making fun of the plumber in Albuquerque just because he's a plumber in Albuquerque and he watches the television news. How can they ignore the fact that the plumber in Albuquerque, unlike most television news producers, at least has steady work?[emphasis mine—johnh]

Here Ellerbee strengthens my point that Sauther knew--or at least should have known that he could abruptly lose his job and for little reason.

Update:

Shane quickly sets me straight with this email:

I never said I DISAGREED with them though! ;-)

OK, so noted. I enjoyed writing my post all the same.

Hugh Downs denies press coverage is liberal and instead proves that journalists are arrogant elitists

2005-01-16T07:04:00.000-05:00

One of the biggest old ladies on broadcast news, Hugh Downs, is hereby nominated for the "Pigs are unaware they're laying in their own waste-products" award for the following self-serving statement he made on Scarborough Country:

SCARBOROUGH: Conservatives have forever accused the media of being liberal. We have a poll that the Pew Research Center put out. Seven percent journalists out of 500 local and national reporters questioned called themselves conservative; 34 percent say they are liberal; 54 percent say they‘re moderate.

Is there a liberal bias in the media or is the bias towards getting the story first and getting the highest ratings, therefore, making the most money?

DOWNS: Well, I think the latter, by far. And, of course, when the word liberal came to be a pejorative word, you began to wonder, you have to say that the press doesn‘t want to be thought of as merely liberal.

But people tend to be more liberated in their thought when they are closer to events and know a little more about what the background of what‘s happening. So, I suppose, in that respect, there is a liberal, if you want to call it a bias. The press is a little more in touch with what‘s happening. [emphasis mine—johnh]

Let’s stop right here and examine the part of Hugh Downs’ statement that I’ve highlighted. Marvel at its fundamental idiocy. If stupidity had mass then that statement would have imploded into a black hole and sucked Hugh Downs right into it.

Hugh Downs’s premise is that journalists are liberal because “they’re in-touch with what’s happening”. I object to his premise on two grounds: (1) it is an insult and (2) its falsity is blindingly obvious.

First, regarding the insult, if Downs’s premise is true then people who are not liberal “are less liberated in their thought" because “they are further from events” and “know a little less about the background of what’s happening” than their liberal counterparts. And, for good measure, people who are not liberal are “a little less in touch with what’s happening”.

Well bless the non-journalists’ simple little minds! Downs’ must find it inexplicable that we’ve managed to produce ingrates who oppose receiving liberal coaching—cleverly disguised as news (similar to hiding a child’s crushed aspirin in their applesauce)—from such cultured and worldly beings.

OK, I can’t go on like this.

Downs’ smug rationalization is Exhibit A if you ever want to make the case that the media is arrogant, haughty, condescending, self-aggrandizing, snooty and conceited. Downs is saying, in short, people who aren’t liberal are just too ignorant to be otherwise.

That attitude just makes me want to give Downs a hearty boot to his crotch.

Now let’s consider Downs’ transparently idiotic assertion that the experience from “being closer to events” and “knowing a little more about the background of what‘s happening” makes journalists liberal. Please.

Let’s give Downs’ insult to everyone’s intelligence the dignity of a test. Let’s pick a profession that it not known for being more liberal than the general population. Oh, I don’t know, let’s pick policemen.

Policemen, as a group, are, if anything, right of center. Now let’s apply the factors that Downs identified that mold journalists from average citizens into leftists ideologues impersonating journalists.

…people tend to be more liberated in their thought when they are closer to events… Well I can’t think of anyone who is “closer to events” than policemen. Sometimes policemen get so close to the events that it gets them killed. I know this because journalists—who keep themselves at a safer distance than cops—report on cop killings.

…people tend to be more liberated in their thought when they… know a little more about what the background of what‘s happening. Again, it is a cop’s job to document evidence, take written statements, be streetwise, exercise judgment regarding the characters he’s dealing with and more. Furthermore, unlike journalists, defense attorneys will attack a cop’s work in a courtroom setting. The only thing that journalists have to endure is being fact-checked by hundreds of bloggers.

A reasonable person, applying Hugh Downs’ theory—which rationalizes why most journalists are liberals—to cops, would conclude that all cops should be even bigger leftwing nutbars than the typical journalist. Commonly known facts implodes Hugh Downs’ theory even faster than Dan Ra^ther’s memo story.

Regarding the insult implicit in Downs' comment: you are implicitly insulting the listener’s intelligence if you expect the listener to accept a deliberately stupid statement you’ve made as true. Evidently Downs confidence in the audience’s stupidity was such that he uninhibitedly offered an patently silly excuse—and one that only required about 32 milliseconds of thought to refute—and expecting a credulous audience to swallow it without gagging.

I’m sure he would have fabricated a less blatant deception if he thought his audience was any smarter.
So why are leftists attracted to the media? For the same reason they’re attracted to academia: it gives them a means to shape our culture by controlling how information is presented.

Even ex-CBS'ers hate CBS' news

2005-01-16T06:15:00.000-05:00

This is just too good. Van Gordon Sauter, ex-president of CBS’s news division—from the 1980’s to be sure—just had a scathing article published in the LA Times: What's Ailing CBS News? Let's Make a Not-So-Little List:

"What's the big problem at CBS News? Well, for one thing, it has no credibility. [emphasis mine—johnh] And no audience, no morale, no long-term emblematic anchorperson and no cohesive management structure. Outside of those annoyances, it shouldn't be that hard to fix. Personally, I have a great affection for CBS News, even though I was unceremoniously shown to the door there nearly 20 years ago in a tumultuous change of corporate management. But I stopped watching it some time ago. The unremitting liberal orientation finally became too much for me. [emphasis mine—johnh] I still check in, but less and less frequently. I increasingly drift to NBC News and Fox and MSNBC. "

And then Sauther goes on to say:

This week, when CBS News announced that four employees would lose their jobs in connection with the George Bush National Guard story, I was struck by how the network had become representative of a far larger, far more troubling problem: A large swath of the society doesn't trust the news media. And for many, it's even stronger than that: They abhor the media and perceive it as an escalating threat to the society. [emphasis mine—johnh]

MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Take THAT!

An “escalating threat to the society”, huh? Yup, I’d say this boy’s on the ball.

Hat tip to Murrell for emailing me a heads-up on this one.

Triangulating the War

2005-01-14T14:34:00.000-05:00

Victor Davis Hanson has yet another astute post on NRO: Triangulating the War.

Hanson describes the grim resolve the U.S. showed during WW II in the face of repeated disasters we encountered all the way to our eventual victory.

Focusing like a laser beam on the small problems we’re encountering—and showing not a trace of embarrassment that their much direr predictions fell flat—the political complainers refuse to acknowledge our resounding successes. Hanson marvels at the effeminate whimpering emanating from both our media and certain political leaders at any and all difficulties, not matter how trifling.

He points out that we’ve recently enjoyed victories that nobody thought were plausible before we achieved them. His examples include a three week war that dispatched the same Taliban that defeated the Russians in ten year war. He points out that we have recently achieved the election of a pro-American, Afghan president via free democratic elections; and both events would have been unbelievable beforehand.

Just read the whole thing.

Andy Rooney regrets that the big ones always get away

2005-01-14T06:57:00.000-05:00

Murrell emailed me about story, CBS firings should go higher up, he found that quoted Andy Rooney, a 60 Minutes commentator and notorious curmudgeon, where Andy sourly complained:

"The people on the front lines got fired while the people most instrumental in getting the broadcast on escaped,' Rooney said He was referring to the firing of producer Mary Mapes and the requested resignations of a senior vice president and two 60 Minutes producers while anchor Dan Rather and CBS News chief Andrew Heyward kept their jobs."

The reason why Ra^ther and Heyward dodged the bullet is because the Thornburgh report—an investigation of Ra^therBogusGate that was ordered by CBS’ owners—held both Dan Ra^ther and Andrew Heyward blameless on the grounds that Ra^ther was just an innocent newsreader and because Heyward issued a directive—after the program was aired—ordering “a careful re-examination of the September 8 Segment to make certain that the 60 Minutes Wednesday reporting was sound in all respects.”

Rooney thinks the house cleaning is incomplete.

I guess Rooney is annoyed because the Thornburgh report gave sufficient political cover to justify inaction on Rather and Heyward. In my view, I’m most annoyed because this report concluded a lack of political bias at CBS. Kevin Craver, of Ra^thergate, speaks for me when he blogged:

The right lobe of the blogosphere today is picking apart the e-mail correspondence between former CBS Producer Mary Mapes and freelance journalist Michael Smith. I believe, like many, that the e-mails are a prima facie case of political bias that Dick Thornburgh and Lou Boccardi overlooked.
But one e-mail in particular, which has been quoted extensively in the blogosphere, stands out in my eyes, but not for the reasons cited on other blogs.
I am talking about this Aug. 31 e-mail from Smith to Mapes (page 62 of the report). I bold-face two passages for emphasis:
Today I am going to send the following hypothetical scenario to a reliable,trustable editor friend of mine . . .
What if there was a person who might have some information that couldpossibly change the momentum of an election but we needed to get anASAP book deal to help get us the information? What kinds of turnaroundpayment schedules are possible, keeping in mind the book probably couldnot make it out until after the election . . . . What I am asking is in this bestcase hypothetical scenario, can we get a decent sized advance payment,and get it turned around quickly.

The fact that Smith desires to “change the momentum of an election” is telling in and of itself. But what is more telling to me – what hints that the crew was desperate for a hit, any hit to the incumbent president – is the dull blade of the weapon CBS was trying to fashion.
Previous presidential embarassments that changed politics – Watergate, Teapot Dome, etc. – did so because the sitting president was connected to criminal activity. I am not defending anyone who willingly shirks military duty, but in this case, CBS hoped to prove President Bush did something that many sons of privilege from all political stripes (including the last commander in chief, if my memory serves me correctly) attempted during the Vietnam War.

I agree. The real outrage was CBS’ attempted intervention in the election’s outcome. This memo makes it evident that the players at CBS were committing politics and not journalism. Any investigator who was given this email, read it, and concluded that CBS was bias-free anyway is too naïve to conduct an investigation.

Ann Coulter, snickering at the one of the report’s authors, said:

Proving once again how useless "moderate Republicans" are, The CBS Report -- co-authored by moderate Republican Dick Thornburgh -- found no evidence of political bias at CBS.

Well, of course CBS would only accept Republicans who didn’t have a pair; that how Thornburgh got the job.

On top of everything else, Little Green Footballs noted that CBS had altered some of the Thornburgh report’s document attributes. CBS had originally posted the the Thornburgh report’s such that viewers could copy and past text. Subsequently, CBS had altered the document’s pdf attributes to prevent bloggers from using copy and paste when composing postings on this report.

Here is a link to a version of the the Thornburgh report’s with the copy and paste attribute enabled. Hat tip to LGF.

I will give Scott Ott, the satirist, the last, scathing, word:

CBS News Switches to Reality Gameshow Format
(2005-01-11) -- When life hands you a lemon, the old saying goes, make lemonade. CBS News President Andrew Heyward is doing just that, announcing today that the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather will be re-launched on March 10 as Myopic Zeal: The CBS Evening News Gameshow.
"It's edgy, it's hip and it capitalizes on our key asset -- intermittent credibility," said Mr. Heyward, who survived a recent epidemic of myopic zeal which proved terminal for four of his staff. "Since the internal investigation report, viewers have wondered if we could ever be trusted again. Instead of trying to rebuild that shattered credibility, which would take years and millions of dollars, we're going to roll with the punches."
The new show will feature the same set, the same reporters and the same style as Evening News Classic, but during each segment viewers can go to a website and vote on which elements of each story may be false, or at least lacking adequate authentication. Prizes will include cash and a chance to become a 'Myopic Zeal' correspondent for a day, which includes the full training course in ethics which 'big-time journalists' now receive.
"It gets the viewers involved in the story in a way that was possible before only on a blog," said Mr. Heyward. "We've taken a hard look at the blogosphere and decided, if you can't beat them, join them. We'll even let the viewers vote on why the errors were made, whether by myopic zeal, political subterfuge or gross incompetence."
The embattled news czar said production costs for the new show would be the same as the old, "since the reporters and producers won't have to do anything differently."
The network has begun talks with Mr. Rather's talent agent in hopes of pulling him out of semi-retirement to sign him as 'anchor' for the new show.
"For decades, Dan Rather has been our face and voice of intermittent credibility and myopic zeal," said Mr. Heyward. "Sure, there are others in this industry who are as zealous and as credible but he's the Tiffany anchor, having done for this network what anchors do best."

I'm awed at the way Scott Ott can cranks out such brilliance every day.

The War on the War on Terrorism

2005-01-13T13:58:00.000-05:00

In September of last year Norman Podhoretz wrote the masterful essay World War IV: How It Started, What It Means, and Why We Have to Win [pdf]. In this essay Podhoretz reasons exactly they way I do: he counts the Cold War as World War III and he considers America’s current war on Islamofanatics, jihadists and Islamic sectarian cleansers as a fourth World War.

Now Podhoretz has released yet another essay—this time examining the establishment’s struggle against Bush pursuit of wining WW IV—entitled The War Against World War IV [pdf] (html version). Podhoretz begins this essay—after a couple dozen paragraphs of rhetorical throat clearing—by concluding that Bush is unlikely to bend to the New York Times and continue fighting WW IV with his full energy. (Gee, I could have told you that.)

Podhoretz proceeds to analyze a number of players in the “War Against WW IV”. All of it is good and he zings some of my favorite subjects. I’ll quote some of his best:

America’s opponents that we’re fighting in Iraq:

In Iraq, the insurgents—a coalition of diehard Saddamists, domestic Islamofascists, and foreign jihadists—have a simple objective. They are trying to drive us out before the seeds of democratization that we are helping to sow have taken firm root and begun to flower. Only thus can the native insurgents hope to recapture the power they lost when we toppled Saddam; and only thus can the Iranians, the Syrians, and the Saudis, who have been dispatching and/or financing the foreign jihadists, escape becoming the next regimes to go the way of Saddam’s under the logic of the Bush Doctrine.

The despots tyrannizing these countries all know perfectly well that an American failure in Iraq would rule out the use of military force against them. They know that it would rob other, non-military measures of any real effectiveness. [emphasis mine—johnh] And they know that it would put a halt to the wave of reformist talk that has been sweeping through the region since the promulgation of the Bush Doctrine and that poses an unprecedented threat to their own hold on political power, just as it does to the religious and cultural power of the radical Islamists.

But the most important thing the insurgents and their backers in the neighboring despotisms know is that the battle for Iraq will not be won or lost in Iraq; it will be won or lost in the United States of America. [emphasis mine—johnh] On this they agree entirely with General John Abizaid, the commander of the U.S. Central Command, who recently told reporters touring Iraq: "It is all about staying the course. No military effort that anyone can make against us is going to be able to throw us out of this region." Is it any wonder, then, that the insurgents were praying for the victory of John F. Kerry—which they all assumed would mean an American withdrawal—or that the reelection of Bush—which they were not fooled by any exit polls into interpreting as anything other than a ratification of the Bush Doctrine—came as such a great blow to them? [emphasis mine—johnh] But too much is at stake in Iraq for them to give up now, especially as they are confident that they still have an excellent shot at getting the American public to conclude that the game is not worth the candle. General Abizaid again: "We have nothing to fear from this enemy except its ability to create panic . . . and gain a media victory." To achieve this species of victory—and perhaps inspired by the strategy that worked so well for the North Vietnamese— they are counting on the forces opposing the Bush Doctrine at home. These forces comprise just as motley a coalition as the one fighting in Iraq, and they are, after their own fashion, just as desperate.

For they too understand how much they for their own part stand to lose if the Bush Doctrine is ever generally judged to have passed the great test to which it has been put in Iraq. [emphasis mine—johnh]

I felt the resonance of alike-thinking minds as I read this passage.

Norman Podhoretz then examines America’s domestic transnationalist opponents:

...the liberal internationalists, with their virtually religious commitment to negotiations as the best, or indeed the only, way to resolve conflicts; their relentless faith in the UN (which they stubbornly persist in seeing as the great instrument of collective security even though its record is marked by "an unwillingness to get serious about preventing deadly violence"); and their corresponding squeamishness about military force. ….

Under Jimmy Carter (whose Secretary of State, Cyrus R. Vance, was a devout member of this school) and to a lesser extent under Bill Clinton, the liberal internationalists were at the very heart of American foreign policy. But while George W. Bush has thrown a rhetorical bone or two in their direction, and has even done them the kindness of making a few ceremonial bows to the UN, he has for all practical purposes written off the liberal-internationalist school. Nor has he been coy about this. As he declared in a speech at West Point on June 1, 2002:

We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants, who solemnly sign nonproliferation treaties, and then systematically break them.

The liberal internationalists were not slow to pick up on what statements like this held in store for them. While Kupchan [(an American transnationalist)] said f latly, "the election of George W. Bush [that] sounded the death-knell for liberal internationalism" (defined by him as "a moderate, centrist internationalism that manages the international system through compromise, consensus, and international institutions"). [Other American transnationalists], on the other hand, blamed Bush alone:

[A] set of hard-line, fundamentalist ideas have taken Washington by storm and provided the intellectual rationale for a radical post-11 September reorientation of American foreign policy. ... [This] is not leadership but a geostrategic wrecking ball that will destroy America’s own half-century-old international architecture.

…, thanks to the workings of this "wrecking ball," the liberal internationalists have been reduced to a domestic echo chamber for the French and the Germans. All they seem able to do is count the ways in which the "unilateral" invasion of Iraq has done "damage to the country’s international position" its prestige, credibility, security partnerships, and the goodwill of other countries" [emphasis mine—johnh] Since they refuse even to consider whether 9/11 demanded a "reorientation"—whether, that is, it demonstrated that "the tools and doctrines of the [old] system had outlived their utility" and had to be replaced with a "new set of rules for managing the emerging threats to international security"—they can hope for nothing better than a reversion to the status quo ante.

This observation reinforces my contention that transnationalists are patriots of “transnational organizations” (e.g., the UN) and diplomatic structures and “international goodwill” and anything else other than the U.S. and her national interests. In their worldview the U.S. interests are made to be sacrificed to what they evidently hold to be the “higher good”.

This dream, [the transnationalists think], could yet be realized by a scuttling of the Bush Doctrine through a withdrawal from Iraq that

would bring about a reconciliation with friends and allies shocked by Washington’s recent unilateralism and repudiation of international obligations, and thus do much to restore . . . American credibility and "soft power" in the world.

As against Hoffmann, neither Ikenberry nor Kupchan envisages so rosy a future for their common creed, even in the exceedingly unlikely event that the Bush Doctrine is abandoned. If, however, the doctrine should be vindicated by Iraq, they all fear—and rightly so—that it will be almost impossible, in Kupchan’s words, to “bring the U.S. back to a liberal brand of internationalism.” Or, I would add, to bring its exponents back to the center of the foreign-policy establishment.

Other players that Podhoretz covers includes “the Realists” ( i.e., Brent Scowcroft, et al), the subset of “Realists” and the entirety of the liberal internationalists who are rooting for our defeat, our media—this section is titled “All the news that fits their spin”—who are also attempting to engineer our defeat.

Podhoretz also revisits Tet, a concrete example of America being defeated by our media.

These outtakes were just the best parts of a great essay. Just read it all.

Ben Stein's defense of virtue

2005-01-06T14:38:00.000-05:00

Pam H just emailed me Ben Stein’s last column, which he wrote in December of 2003. His column is so moving I will post it in this space:

How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World?

As I begin to write this, I "slug" it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is "eonlineFINAL," and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started.

Lew Harris, who founded this great site, asked me to do it maybe seven or eight years ago, and I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end.

But again, all things must pass, and my column for E! Online must pass. In a way, it is actually the perfect time for it to pass. Lew, whom I have known forever, was impressed that I knew so many stars at Morton's on Monday nights.

He could not get over it, in fact. So, he said I should write a column about the stars I saw at Morton's and what they had to say.

It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world's change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars.
I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie.

But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.
Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.

How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a "star" we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model?

Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails. They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer.

A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.

A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him.

A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.

The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.

We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.

I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton's is a big subject.
There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament. The policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive. The orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery. The teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children. The kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.

Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse.

Now you have my idea of a real hero.

Last column, I told you a few of the rules I had learned to keep my sanity. Well, here is a final one to help you keep your sanity and keep you in the running for stardom: We are puny, insignificant creatures.

We are not responsible for the operation of the universe, and what happens to us is not terribly important. God is real, not a fiction, and when we turn over our lives to Him, he takes far better care of us than we could ever do for ourselves.

In a word, we make ourselves sane when we fire ourselves as the directors of the movie of our lives and turn the power over to Him.

I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin--or Martin Mull or Fred Willard--or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them.

But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life.

I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister's help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.

This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.

As so many of you know, I am an avid Bush fan and a Republican. But I think the best guidance I ever got was from the inauguration speech of Democrat John F. Kennedy in January of 1961.

On a very cold and bright day in D.C., he said, "With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth...asking His blessing and His help but knowing that here on Earth, God's work must surely be our own."

And then to paraphrase my favorite president, my boss and friend Richard Nixon, when he left the White House in August 1974, with me standing a few feet away, "This is not goodbye. The French have a word for it--au revoir. We'll see you again."

Au revoir, and thank you for reading me for so long. God bless every one of you. We'll see you again.

I completely agree with Ben Stein, movie “stars” are the most successful (and, consequently, the best paid) of our entertainers. Movie stars are entitled to due respect for their talents as entertainers but no more respect than that.

I also have no quarrel with whatever salary they can command; they produce huge profits for their employers. I also have no problem with certain actresses being manicured while being limo’ed somewhere. They’ve earned their money and they can spend it as they please.

That being said, earning huge bucks and using it for the purposes of living as high as possible, supporting huge consumption and being serviced by the hired help reveals self-indulgence, not virtue.

Virtue is a “values” word. You cannot discriminate between virtuous behavior and typical movie stars’ behavior unless you have the values necessary to recognize virtue—or the lack of it.

Today the word “virtue” has connotations of quaintness. This is largely the fault of our entertainment industry. Ironically, it is an industry that wouldn’t exist without virtuous Americans because America herself wouldn’t exist without virtuous Americans; virtuous America makes self-indulgent America possible.

Being a warrior is one of the least self-indulgent things a man can do. A military—ideally—is a socialist meritocracy. It is socialist because, in the military, ideally, the group is more important than the individual. It is a meritocracy because, ideally, a soldier’s standing is determined by his competence.

The military’s uncompromising devotion to competence and high performance is rooted in the harsh consequences of incompetence and inadequate performance: death and mutilation on the battlefield. Consequently military training is rigorous and sometimes harsh.

Combat is often conducted in harsh conditions. The summertime temperatures in Iraq exceed 120° F, Tora Bora (al Qaeda’s Afghan mountain sanctuaries) are some of the world’s most forbidding mountains with elevations to 10,000 feet and are snow-capped year-round.

The contrast cannot be made more stark. A man enlisting for military duty is voluntarily surrendering some of his civil rights so that he may endure the regimentation of the military's socialist culture, hardship, harsh conditions, hard training, the risk of death and mutilation and low pay all for the purpose of preserving a society of individuals, some of which are as undeserving of their blood as the entertainers Ben Stein wrote about.

Ben Stein’s essay celebrates the virtue of our most virtuous—our warriors—while being troubled that our culture assigns outlandishly high prestige to the most self-indulgent and unworthy among us: our entertainers. He is also sufficiently self-aware to realize that his writings about which stars he saw eating at Morton’s sent messages that contributed to the inflated prestige our culture assigns to our entertainers. Ben Stein discontinued writing his column when he realized that this misplaced prestige also contributes to our culture’s disdain for our virtuous defenders.

Put another way, he saw his writing was contributing its small part to corroding the values that our virtue depends on and he knew he had to stop writing it. I suppose that he would demure and characterize quitting writing his column about movie stars he saw dining at Morton’s was a small thing but I know that his self-respect demanded it. After all, the advantage of virtue is self-respect.

It’s Time to De-Fund the UN

2005-01-05T07:02:00.000-05:00

Melanie Morgan has an essay arguing that the U.S. should defund the UN and kick its headquarters out of the U.S. You can find out more about Melanie and the organization she belongs to at http://www.moveamericaforward.org/.

I agree with Melanie but I object that her objectives are dinky; she really should be working to extricate the U.S. from the UN as well as the worthy goal of evicting the UN’s headquarters.

Like Frankenstein’s monster, the UN should be regarded as a well-intended experiment that failed. Dr Frankenstein didn’t have the guts to destroy his terrible mistake and paid the price; we should learn from his example.

The UN can’t even be defended on the grounds that it doesn’t create more problems than it solves; it doesn’t. The UN coddles bloody tyrants, psychopaths and criminal regimes (e.g., Arafat, Saddam, Slobodan Milosevic, Iran Syria, North Korea) and cannot even agree to a definition of the word terrorism because too many of its members use terrorism.

Similar to a banker brazenly frequenting opium dens or a sheriff being greeted with hugs and kisses by Mafiosi, the U.S. stains her good reputation by deigning to descend into the UN.

We gotta stop swimming in this cesspool.

Melanie’s objectives are an OK first step but we have to leave the UN and take its decent members with us when we go. Unfortunately—as tempting as the idea seems—it is impractical to leave the UN without creating a replacement first.

In my view, the U.S. doesn’t need the UN: we can readily create ad hoc organizations and otherwise do whatever we deem necessary without the UN’s interference. On the other hand, if the leftist press is to be believed, all of the other countries think they cannot act without some transnational organization to give them “legitimacy”. I’ll restrain myself from ranting about the UN’s “legitimacy” since I have larger fish to fry. (I can imagine your joy.)

In my view, the solution is for the U.S. to create another transnational organization that is designed to assist the U.S. in solving problems (e.g., terrorism, criminal regimes and so on). One of the primary world problems that such a transnational organization would solve is the UN; it would solve the “UN problem” by making it irrelevant. Once decent countries begin cooperating under the sponsorship of this new transnational organization then the UN can be left to wither away. This is easily done: the U.S. continues to “participate” in the UN but only for the purposes of vetoing malignant UNSC resolutions. We just discontinue trying to work through the UN.

After international consensus acknowledges that the new transnational organization has proven itself to be beneficial then the U.S. can safely rid herself of the UN.

Good bye, good luck, good riddance.

What should this new transnational organization be like? Well, I don’t want to see anything that aspires to world government. Personally, I think the right model is a group of vigilantes, and I think the world’s Anglo-Saxon nations are just the right countries for the job.

Others have a rather different view. Ivo H. Daalder and James M. Lindsay of the The Brookings Institution propose, in their essay An Alliance of Democracies: Our Way or the Highway, that the U.S. should form a new alliance limited to countries where democracy is so rooted that reversion to autocratic rule is unthinkable. They noted:

Using criteria and rankings compiled by the widely respected Freedom House and the Polity IV Project at the University of Maryland, nearly five dozen countries meet this membership threshold. These include not just the obvious candidates, such as the OECD countries, but also Botswana, Brazil, Costa Rica, India, Israel, Mauritius, Peru, the Philippines and South Africa. The diverse mix of regions, cultures and traditions represented makes for the basis of a truly global institution. More countries could join as they demonstrated a deeply rooted commitment to democratic governance.

Further, they state:

The second key to making such an alliance work is to give it a broad mandate with real responsibilities. The Community of Democracies seeks to promote democratisation worldwide. The purpose of an Alliance of Democracies would by necessity be far more ambitious: it would unite democracies to confront their common security challenges. Alliance members would work jointly to strengthen international co-operation to combat international terrorism, halt weapons proliferation, stop the spread of infectious diseases and slow down global warming. And it would work vigorously to advance the values that its members see as fundamental to their security and well-being—democratic government, respect for human rights and market-based economies. It would accomplish these objectives in part by working through existing international institutions—it would become a powerful caucus at the UN and its affiliated agencies, enabling its members to pool their votes and exercise diplomatic clout in a co-ordinated fashion.

But to achieve its full potential the alliance would also have to develop its own capabilities. On the military front, that means emulating Nato. The alliance would develop doctrine, promote joint training and planning and enhance inter-operability among its member militaries. These efforts could cover high-intensity warfare and peacekeeping operations.

Now I’m somewhat skeptical that a group that is so diverse can accomplish the mission sketched by Daalder and Lindsay but I’m sure that they will be more effective than the UN. I suppose, in theory, they could manage to be even less effective than the UN, but this underachievement will take a lot of time and talent.

In any case, I strongly doubt that the Alliance of Democracies proposed by Daalder and Lindsay can possible be as hostile to the U.S. (as the UN is) or would protect tyrants (as the UN does). Put another way, it would be what the UN was originally intended to be.

Still, most of the potential members cited by Daalder and Lindsay are just to weak and poor to provide much more than moral support and some troops. I’m sure the heavy lifting will continue be done by the usual Anglo-Saxon nations. That would be, of course, the U.S., the UK and Australia. The exceptions, I’m afraid, would be Canada and New Zealand. Canada is too European to do men’s work and New Zealand is too much of a deadbeat to help. On the other hand, I think that we can expect some material help from Israel and—I think—India. I believe that certain other European countries (e.g., Poland) will exert themselves while they can but will eventually be suppressed by France after the EU assumes responsibility for its member’s foreign polices.

This also means that the U.S. will be freed from wasting her energy trying to make the UN work. The miscreants that remain in the UN will thereafter be saddled with whatever heavy lifting the UN does; which I suspect will be none at all.

it's Norway or the doorway.

2005-01-04T07:28:00.000-05:00

If I wasn't the one who wrote this post and was merely informed that its title “ it’s Norway or the Doorway” pertained to Jan Egeland —the UN eurodip who groused about the “stinginess” of advanced nations (read the U.S.)—I would have automatically assumed the title was inspired by the Jan Egeland's doorknob-like intelligence. No, it is just Mark Steyn’s take on Egeland’s actual agenda :

What Jan Egeland means when he talks of "stinginess" is you're not ponying up enough taxpayer bucks to his departmental budget. That's the only measure of global compassion that matters, and he doesn't want to have his time wasted with a lot of chit-chat about any of this other stuff: It's my way or the highway, he says — if, indeed, such a thing is said in Norwegian. Anyway, it's Norway or the doorway. As it happens, the United States pays 40 percent of Mr. Egeland's budget. But, even if the budget was tripled and the U.S. paid 70 percent of it, that wouldn't be enough.

[…]

Yet, even though Mr. Egeland's office has a permanent bureaucracy dedicated solely to humanitarian relief work, a week after the disaster it didn't seem to have actually done anything other than fly in some experts to assess the situation. Reporters on the ground have noted the lack of activity in Colombo and Sumatra. But the U.S. government already had ships and troops and water and medicine on the way.

It was already clear enough that the transnationalists think that the only proper role for nation-states is to fund the UN and then step aside while the UN handles everything. If case it wasn’t then Clare Short—the eurotwit who quit British Prime Minister Blair’s cabinet in a huff over the Iraq war—has made it explicit. She stated:

...the effect of the parallel coalition would be to undermine the UN. ... only the UN had the "moral authority" to lead the relief work.

The UN has Moral Authority? Please. The UN spared no effort to prolong the Iraqi people’s suffering by protecting Saddam and his tyranny. Instead of the UN it was the U.S. that saved the Iraqi people by removing Saddam. I’d like to see Short try to lecture the Iraqis about the UN’s “Moral Authority”.

"I think this initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to co-ordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN when it is the best system we have got …"Only really the UN can do that job,"

Got that? Jan Egeland’s “stinginess” comment wasn’t about 120,000 tsunamis victims, it’s all about the transnationalists trying to rescue the UN.

update:

Great minds think alike. Jonah Goldberg characterizes the UN as odious:

If the issue is helping suffering people, why did the United Nations crowd - led by Clare Short, the former head of U.N. international development - scream bloody murder when it was announced that India, Japan, Australia and the United States would coordinate aid efforts? Short declared that any efforts to help the suffering tsunami victims outside U.N. authority would "undermine" the world body.

So much for pragmatism. Who cares who helps the needy, and under what flag, as long as it gets done?

As it happens, the United Nations' most ardent supporters are anything but pragmatists. They hope passionately that the organization might become what Tennyson called the "Parliament of Man, the Federation of the world." Or they hope with equal fervor that it may serve as an idealistic alternative to American hegemony. Or they wish for both. And that's where I start having problems.

Hmmp. Odious, huh? The Cambridge dictionary defines odious as:

extremely unpleasant; causing and deserving hate

Yup, Jonah couldn't have put it more succinctly.

Jonah made another observation:

The United Nations really is an amazing cultural fault line. On one side are
those who believe that it is the last, best hope for mankind. On the other are
those who think that title still belongs to America.

Yup. My only problem with his characterization is that I'm convinced that the UN has shown itself to be the last hope of bloody tyrants (e.g., Saddam, Slobodan Milosevic.) It amazes me that anyone would misplace the UN into a list of possible "hopes for mankind".

Tony Blankley also speaks for me when he predicts that, after the dust has settled, that nobody will say "thank you":

The president should [stop pandering]. Money will not buy him -- or us -- love. He and America should give according to the voice of our conscience -- not in order to try to win a compassion competition.

It was inevitable that we would do all in our power to save lives, bring in emergency food, water, medicine and shelter. No other country is able to do it, and few other countries would be motivated to do so. But virtue is its own reward. Those around the world (and here at home) who hate, fear or envy the United States will never love us for our good deeds. So be it. [Emphasis mine—johnh]

But after we have taken care of the emergency (which we will do, pretty much singlehanded -- I don't think we are waiting for a French or German aircraft carrier full of helicopters and medicine), let us not get carried away with generosity for rebuilding lands that have been mismanaged since the beginning of time.

He right, you know. The U.S.’ interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Somalia primarily benefited Muslims. The U.S. cannot be accused of self-interest because we had no interests at stake in any of these cases. Did the Great Satan earn any good will in the Muslim world? HA! As Tony Blankley says, "Virtue is its own reward".

Which is a good thing because in each case nobody ever said "thank you" afterwards.

Secret Meeting to 'Rescue' U.N.

2005-01-03T16:30:00.000-05:00

They’re on a mission to save the UN

Just as the UN was circling the drain so nicely this gang of earnest dolts are throwing it a lifeline.

Groan. Some organizations are too stupid to live. Others are so malignant that they must be destroyed. The UN manages to be both. The UN is Bermuda Triangle of a Malignant Stupidity™ so incalculable that it would drown in its own waste products were it not for Neville Chamberlains like Richard C. Holbrooke.

The backlash to the UN’s oil for UNSC vetoes scandal was building and if we were lucky the UN would disappear down the same abyss where Jimmy Carter and Mondale were last seen.

And now Holbrooke happened. Cluelessly and guilelessly—like so many Pinkies’ causing Brain’s latest scheme to misfire or a gang of Gilligans screwing up the skipper’s latest hare-brained scheme to escape the island—he and his fellow fools are trying to rescue our nemesis.

(Thanks a lot, pal. Remind me to get even with you for that injury. In fact, why wait?)

Anyway, the New York Times did this breathless “You Go Girl” account of Holbrooke’s pro-UN activism:

"The meeting of veteran foreign policy experts in a Manhattan apartment one recent Sunday was held in strict secrecy. …

The mission, in the words of one participant, was clear: 'to save Kofi and rescue the U.N.'
At the gathering, Secretary General Kofi Annan listened quietly to three and a half hours of bluntly worded counsel from a group united in its personal regard for him and support for the United Nations.

This group is “united in its personal regard” Kofi? For what reason? Was is for Kofi’s attempt to delegitimize the U.S. war that removed Saddam by calling it an illegal war? For providing a venue for France, China and Russia to protect Saddam from the U.S.? For Rwanda’s genocide? For being complicit with networks use of the false “stolen explosives” story, broken on the eve of the election?

The group's concern was that lapses in his leadership during the past two years had eclipsed the accomplishments of his first four-year term in office and were threatening to undermine the two years remaining in his final term.

Yup just think how much more damage French can do if Kofi and the UN are still in business.

…Their larger argument, according to participants, addressed two broad needs. First, they said, Mr. Annan had to repair relations with Washington, where the Bush administration and many in Congress thought he and the United Nations had worked against President Bush's re-election.

Oooo… I get it. It was all a huge misunderstanding. It just looked like Kofi was trying to tank Bush' reelection so as to get a president elected who would be much more to his liking.

Now who were these Neville Chamberlains that are trying to save the UN? Clintonistas and UN apparatchiks and transnationalist rift raff, that’s who.

Richard C. Holbrooke, a United States ambassador to the United Nations under President Clinton

John G. Ruggie, assistant secretary general for strategic planning from 1997 to 2001

Leslie H. Gelb, a professor of international relations at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard

Timothy E. Wirth, a former president of the Council on Foreign Relations

Kathy Bushkin, the president of the United Nations Foundation

Nader Mousavizadeh, executive vice president of the United Nations Foundation and a former special assistant to Mr. Annan

Robert C. Orr, the assistant secretary general for strategic planning

We gotta keep these dolts under surveillance.

Lugar Condemns Plan To Jail Detainees for Life

2005-01-03T06:12:00.000-05:00

First of all, I want to state up front that I've always had a lot of regard for Senator Lugar. I consider him one of the "grownups" in the Senate.

That being said, I have a real problem with his objection to jailing al Qaeda fighters, al Qaeda death squad members and terrorists for life.

According to Reuters:

A leading Republican senator yesterday condemned as 'a bad idea' a reported U.S. plan to keep some suspected terrorists imprisoned for a lifetime even if the government lacks evidence to charge them.

Sen. Richard G. Lugar called indefinite holding of terror suspects 'a bad idea.'

Sorry, Senator Lugar, this is a war, not a crime scene. Wars are conducted on battlefields not in court rooms. Further, terrorists, by definition, are these illegal combatants (i.e., war criminals.)

They have to be war criminals because every terrorist tactic I can think of is illegal under international law. War criminals become war criminals by violating the laws of war.

I have written a lengthy analysis elsewhere proving that the war criminals forfeit whatever rights they might enjoy once they become prisoners. I will now quote the U.S. Navy regarding whether the laws of war protects war criminals:

Combatants who are also civilians must inevitably tread so close to the line separating deception from treachery that the law can offer them scant protection. It is, furthermore, difficult to imagine any legal regime under which this would not be true, for the simple reason that, in defining that line, law is the central issue.

[..]

A terrorist or other "illegal combatant" who trades upon his adversary's respect for the law is, in effect, using the law as a weapon. He cannot simultaneously use it as a shield, and he may well deprive those around him of its aegis as well

It seem perfectly clear to me. Captured terrorists are SOL.

Anyway, I totally agree Lugar’s position that the U.S. government must abide by her constitution and so on but I look askance at Lugar’s invocation of dubious constitutionality as a basis of criticizing this proposal:

…we ought to have a very careful, constitutional look at this.

Well I encourage Senator Lugar to “look very carefully” at the constitution for guidance in this matter, but this search shouldn’t take too long. Our constitution only consumes four sheets of parchment and, as far as I can see, is simply silent about the “rights” of non-Americans, animals, vegetables, minerals and foreign terrorists.

Put another way, Lugar doesn’t have a leg to stand on if wants to justify his opposition to this proposal in terms of our constitution.

Changing the subject slightly, I feel like dinging Reuters for invoking the authority of certain anonymous “influential senators” for the purposes of insinuating that the whole idea is unconstitutional. First of all, Reuters has an anti-American bias in general and is biased against our war with Islamic fanatics in particular. Second, invoking the alleged words of some anonymous dissident is an ancient technique for reporters and editors to inject their personal viewpoint into “news”.

This second, technique is a favorite of The New York Times editorial board. In February of 2003, when the U.S. was on the verge of the invasion to remove Saddam, Ann Coulter snickered:

For one year, I don't believe the Times has managed to interview a single person who supports war with Iraq in a nation ablaze with war fever .

A man from Mars—astounded at the NY Times inability to encounter at least one person from America’s majority—might recommend a surefire technique for finding someone who’s opinion differs with the NY Times’ editorial board (i.e., leaving the building.) The rest of us know perfectly well that the NY Times is committing politics and not journalism.

Similarly to the NY Times, Reuters wants to insinuate that incarcerate terrorists is somehow unsporting by quoting “influential senators” to be “[denouncing] the idea as probably unconstitutional.” Hmmm… So certain anonymous “influential senators” believe that jailing terrorists indefinitely is “probably unconstitutional”, huh? Well I believe this is “probably” just their opinion. Personally I rely on the Supreme Court for rulings on points of constitutionality and “influential Senators”.

See ya at the Supreme Court, you “influential Senators”.

As an aside, I wonder which political party the defenders of terrorists belong to? It makes me recall that during the 1988 Presidential debates that Michael Dukakis’ response when asked by CNN's Benard Shaw if he would begin to see the merits of the death penalty should his wife be raped and murdered. Mike Dukakis, who in Shaw’s scenario was presumably still standing over his raped and murdered wife, began asserting “his opposition to the death penalty” and before an astounded nation he—in effect—transformed himself into the defense attorney for his wife’s rapist and murderer on national TV. I could almost see him absently wiping his wife’s blood from his shoes.

Getting back to Reuters’ certain anonymous “influential senators”: could these defenders of anybody but Americans and America be from Dukakis’ party? Who knows? It’s unfortunate that Reuters “forgot” to name names.

Israeli aid not kosher

2004-12-31T06:13:00.000-05:00

Sri Lanka rejected Israeli army's offer to help with the tsunami disaster.

"a government offer to send a team of doctors for an Israeli field hospital was declined by Sri Lankan authorities.

A 150-member Israeli military delegation had been just hours from taking off in an air force plane when the mission was scrapped unexpectedly. Israel ultimately sent a plane with 80 tons of medical supplies, food and emergency equipment to the disaster-stricken country. "

Astounding.

The tsunami killed seventy seven thousand people in Sri Lankan. I have no idea how many people are at risk of dieing from injuries or illness but obviously that Sri Lankan leaders regard it essential that they remain untreated rather than expose them to medical treatment from an Israeli hand.

Put another way, the Sri Lankan leaders are saying that they'd have that a certain number of their citizens die rather than allow their lives to be saved by an Israeli.

Giant squid 'taking over world'

2004-12-29T20:59:00.000-05:00

Cue the soundtrack for a really cheesy black and white sci fi/horror flick. Giant squid 'taking over world' :

GIANT squid are taking over the world, well at least the oceans, and they are getting bigger.

According to scientists, squid have overtaken humans in terms of total bio-mass.
That means they take up more space on the planet than us. "

Gee, they say this like it is a bad thing.

postscript:

I'm really giving away my age when I feel I must specify "Black and White" to correctly set the atmosphere.

hee hee, Nick Coleman just walked into a buzzsaw!

2004-12-29T15:21:00.000-05:00

This isn't going to be pretty. Thomas Lifson of The American Thinker is gazing with morbid fascination at Nick Coleman, who fated himself to be pulled into the blogosphere’s gearbox.

"Oh Boy! Just when you thought the legacy media might have wised-up in the wake Dan Rather's career crash, along comes Nick Coleman, the worst columnist at the Worst Major Daily Newspaper in America. [This would be the Minneapolis St Paul [Red] Star Tribune--johnh ] The old adage is that when you find yourself in a hole, you should stop digging. Instead, Nick has rented a metaphorical backhoe. Coleman is about to gain fame well beyond his home market, and I don't think he is going to enjoy the experience.

Evidently, Nick has been wounded deeply by the ridicule he has endured at the hands of fellow Minnesotans John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson, who comprise two of the three principals of Powerline, just named the first-ever 'Blog of the Year' by Time Magazine. As result, he attempts to hit back with inuendo about the size of the sexual organs of his antagonists.

Gee, does that ever win an argument? Guys with delicate egos shouldn’t go there.

Today’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune publishes a column by Coleman that is so scurrilous in its innuendo, so devoid of fact and logic, and so downright stupid that it took my breath away. How on earth does material of this quality get by an editor? Are they all on vacation? "

In the previous couple of centuries, a wise adage told the powerful to “never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.” Those who purchased such quantities of ink became accustomed to unchallengeable status. But, as Hugh
Hewitt and others have been pointing out, we live in new times. Bloggers buy pixels by the googleplex, and they don't have to wait 24 hours before firing the next round.

Lifson winds up his post with this gem:

Others have speculated that Nick Coleman is "insane" or is having a "meltdown." I have no clinical insight to offer, but I do see an analogy to a well-known practice of some of those bent on extinguishing their own lives. Certain people with access to a gun lack the guts to pull the trigger and blow their own brains out. So instead, they pull their gun on a police officer and threaten to kill him. The practice is known as "suicide by cop." I think Coleman has invented "career suicide by blogger."

This.ought.to.be.good

Stingy Americans

2004-12-29T08:15:00.000-05:00

Demure Thoughts busted that jackass who called the U.S. stingy. I wish I had thought to say this:

"Swedish shithead Jan something or another was whining this morning about wealthy nations like the USA not doing their part. I find it amusing we are the stingy ones yet the UN has no problem allowing all that Oil for Food Money to not pay for FOOD! We are so stingy in fact I think we should just kick the UN out of NY and sell the property to Donald Trump. Call in all those municipal parking tickets and other crap those diplomats manage to screw the American tax payers out of and give THAT money to disaster relief.

I think I have found my winner for the 2004 Cocksucker of the Year Award, The United Nations."

Gee, she right! It was those deliberately useless ~~cocksuckers~~ criminals at the UN who embezzled Iraqi children’s food-money! Where was this sanctimonious eurodip then? Stuffing his pockets?

update:

Bruce Bartlett added:

The claim of stinginess, however, comes from a different calculation—foreign aid as a share of national income. In 2003, U.S. foreign aid came to just 0.34 percent, well below the world leading Dutch at 2.44 percent. Other big contributors are Ireland (1.83 percent), Norway (1.49 percent), and Switzerland (1.09 percent). The U.S. would have to triple foreign aid just to reach the lowest of these contributors.
The first thing one notices when looking at the big foreign aid contributors is that they all spend very little on national defense. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in 2002, The Netherlands spent just 1.6 percent of its gross domestic product on defense. Norway spent 2.1 percent, Switzerland spent 1.1 percent, and Ireland spent a piddling 0.7 percent. By contrast, the U.S. spent 3.4 percent—and this was before the Iraq war. It’s easy to be generous with foreign aid when another country is essentially providing your defense for free.
Another thing one notices is that the foreign aid data are only for “official” (i.e., government) aid. The data are sketchy, but by all accounts Americans are far more generous in terms of charitable contributions than the citizens of any other country. A 1991 study found the United Kingdom to have the second largest percentage of private charitable giving. But in 2003, charitable giving amounted to 8.6 billion pounds or 0.8 percent of GDP in the U.K., according to the Charities Aid Foundation, compared to $241 billion or 2.2 percent of GDP in the U.S., according to the American Association of Fundraising Counsel.

Excellent points, Bruce.

Rumsfeld: 'You Go to War with the Senate You Have'

2004-12-28T21:57:00.000-05:00

Scott Ott strikes again with his post'You Go to War with the Senate You Have'. Here he is manufacturing a fake quote from Rumsfeld:

"You go to war with the Senate you have. It's not the Senate you might want or wish to have at a later time."

Meanwhile, President George Bush said he will not request additional funding in order to "up armor" Mr. Rumsfeld.

"I give Secretary Rumsfeld what he requests," said Mr. Bush. "He has expressed no fear of the insurgents in the Senate. It looks like he has all the steel he needs."

Bush Nominates Limbaugh, Coulter as Judges

2004-12-28T21:42:00.000-05:00

Scott Ott reported:

In an effort to reach out to Democrats and heal partisan wounds, President George Bush today announced he would nominate radio host Rush Limbaugh and author Ann Coulter as judges on the federal circuit courts of appeal.

"I'm pleased to nominate Mr. Limbaugh, a disabled American, and Miss Coulter, a woman American, to the federal bench," said Mr. Bush. "I expect bipartisan support in the Senate for these nominees since we all share a commitment to diversity on the courts."

Sen. Arlen Specter, who will chair the Senate judiciary committee, said, "I'm impressed with the president's magnanimous gesture of reconciliation with our friends on the other side of the aisle. As judiciary chairman, I will personally guarantee that these nominees will move on a fast-track."

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, said he had not heard of Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter before, "but I understand that they're celebrities," he said, "and we Democrats have always had a warm relationship with the entertainment industry."

Ahhh..., let the healing begin!

Scott Ott is, of course, the proprietor of the parody site, Scrappleface. The confirmation hearings would have made greate TV, however.

underlying causes of the European left's anti-American bias

2004-12-28T21:24:00.000-05:00

Davids Medienkritik blog had a post examining the reflexive German anti-Americanism:

"Unfortunately, the vast majority of the European left is reluctant to question the UN's many flaws and failings. This is particularly true in the German media. The ongoing bribery scandal surrounding the UN's oil-for-food program has received very sparse coverage. This stands in stark contrast to coverage of American efforts in Iraq, where every American misstep, both real and perceived, is reported in great detail. Any form of progress in Iraq, such as the opening of schools and hospitals, has been almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media.

But what are the underlying causes of this widespread bias? It is important to understand that the European left has always feared American power and sought to contain and control it. The United Nations is one of the few bodies with which Europeans can hope to influence and restrain the United States. This also explains why the Angry Left is so angry about the US not joining Kyoto and the ICC. By rejecting these agreements, the US has denied Europe two further means of checking American power and economic growth."

John Kerry, presumably, would have made nice by joining the ICC. Kerry voted against the Kyoto treaty so I cannot snipe at him about this.