Highway 99
Sunday, February 29, 2004
Another Free State Project update. According to the Free State Project website, which I just looked at, as of tomorrow, March 1 (apparently they're a couple of time zones ahead of me), the project has 5,499 signed-up members. They've had a good weekend. But they need to gather membership more quickly, or they're not going to get 20,000 people signed up before their self-imposed deadline. I'm convinced that these people need publicity, preferably TV exposure, and they'd grow like Topsy. Maybe a note to John Stossel, suggesting the FSP as a story idea, would do the trick.
I'm glad I resisted the temptation to forego 60 Minutes tonight. For some time now I've been getting increasingly disgusted with the left-wing bias of a lot of the segments on 60 Minutes, and in fact I've skipped several installments in recent months. (Andy Rooney and Christiane Amanpour are particular irritants.) But I'm glad I watched tonight because of the first segment, which showed footage shot by a Dutch filmmaking team of North Korean teenagers spouting anti-American rhetoric centered on, of all things, The Diary of Anne Frank. The book is apparently a big part of the nationwide curriculum. The right to use the book was sold to the North Korean government for a pittance by Anne Frank's cousin and sole surviving relative, who appeared on the show and who seemed genuinely distraught at the use to which the book is being put.
Apparently the students read the diary as a prediction of what is soon going to happen to them; Americans are the new Nazis and are planning to invade North Korea shortly, and the students are to prepare themselves for the soon-to-be invasion -- not by hiding in an attic like Anne Frank, though, but rather by taking up arms to slaughter the Nazi Americans. Bush is the new Hitler and it is the (genetic?) nature of Americans to make war and disrupt what would otherwise be a peaceful world.
Coached by their teachers, who were filmed whispering to the students the answers they were expected to give, the kids would recite things along the lines of "We will die defending our country against the imperialist warmongering American aggressors. Bush, the new Hitler, will not succeed in leading his fascist army in conquering the world," or "The only reason there are shortages of food is that the bourgeois exploiters steal and leave the proletariat to starve." That's not word for word, but you get the idea. It's boilerplate totalitarian rhetoric, reminiscent of what people were forced to babble under Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot or Saddam.
But the populations of other totalitarian regimes were not what the kids reminded me of most forcefully as I watched them tonight. No, the people I was reminded of reside a little closer to home.
I kept wondering whether any members of the European or American Left who happened to be watching the show were reminded of themselves as they listened. Did they nod in agreement as the kids gushed their America-is-evil, Bush = Hitler slogans? Or were any of them embarrassed to realize that their own thinking was perfectly aligned with that of a bunch of robotic, brainwashed North Korean teenagers?
Saturday, February 28, 2004
Portrait of a Press Secretary being tortured. Ever think it might be fun to be the President's Press Secretary? Then check out this transcript of Tuesday's White House press conference, in which Scott McClellan endures a grilling by reporters on Bush's support of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning gay marriage. McClellan tries gamely (and futilely) to convince the reporters that Bush did not in fact change his position from a states' rights endorsement during the 2000 campaign to his current pro-Amendment stance. It sounds like McClellan is repeating phrases that he rehearsed just prior to the press conference, probably after they were tried out on a few focus groups. See if you can count how many times he says beliefs and principles, respect and dignity, enduring institution of our civilization, protecting the sanctity of marriage, and sacred institution between a man and a woman. Whatever the White House is paying this guy, he deserves a combat-pay bonus for this press conference.
Free State Project revisited, redux. Okay, this is getting ridiculous. Normally the Free State Project website gets updated only every few weeks. Now it seems it's being updated a few times a day. A little while ago the member count had gone up to 5,491 and now it's up again to 5,492. Well, at least it's going in the right direction after having gone down a bit in the past week or two.
I've often wondered why I've never seen an article on the FSP in either Reason magazine or The Economist -- very different magazines in many ways, but both devoted to a libertarian/classical liberal philosophy, and so seemingly a perfect fit for the subject of the FSP.
Free State Project update revisited. Well, that was fast. I checked the Free State Project website again this morning to see if I could find out why their numbers had dipped slightly (see my previous post) -- and found instead that their home page had been updated since last night, and that now, as of February 28, they're up to 5,488 members. I notice that this weekend the project has a gathering occurring called "Winter Escape to New Hampshire," which might account for the small fluctuations in membership the past few days.
Friday, February 27, 2004
Free State Project update. According to the Free State Project website, as of today, the project -- which is organizing a move of 20,000 libertarian-minded people to New Hampshire within the next five years -- has 5,485 signed-up members. On February 18, I noted that the project had 5,487 members. Membership hasn't exactly surged in the past couple of weeks, has it? When I have more time I'll look at their website more thoroughly and see if they have an explanation.
Courtesy of Glenn Reynolds, here's an article in Commentary magazine titled "The UN and the Jews." Since Glenn linked to it the day before yesterday, I've noticed links to it on one or two other websites; however, no one else seems to be mentioning the strand of the article that jumped out at me.
As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, I try to note items in the media having to do with Ireland -- when the Irish behave well and when they behave badly -- and with the way Ireland is perceived and portrayed in the media. (For my last post on this subject, which in turn links to earlier posts, go here.)It was not an event that any of the big newspapers saw fit to cover, but this past December, a draft United Nations resolution condemning anti-Semitism was quietly withdrawn by Ireland, its sponsor in the General Assembly. In a complicated exchange, Irish Foreign Minister Brian Cowen had promised the measure to his Israeli counterpart Silvan Shalom, but in the end Cowen refused to carry out his side of the bargain, pointing to a lack of consensus on the issue. (Several Arab and Muslim states had objections.) Thus went by the boards what would have been the first-ever General Assembly resolution dealing directly with the problem of anti-Semitism.
The Irish don't play a big role in the Commentary article. But what role they play ain't pretty.
In a similar vein, Collin May at Innocents Abroad talks about another bit of Irish influence on recent international developments:
And as long as I seem to have gotten into a round-up of matters Irish: Back in late December, I noted that there had been no new posts from Bran over at Blog Irish for over a month; the last new post, at that time, was from November 21, 2003. And sure enough, Blog Irish remained silent for over a month more after I made mention of it on Christmas Eve. On January 28, 2004, however, Bran was back -- not surprisingly, it was the publication of the Hutton Inquiry report that got him talking again! -- and he's been blogging up a storm ever since. So if you fell out of the habit of checking out Blog Irish during Bran's sabbatical, be sure to pay him a visit again.Europe is fast becoming obsessed with judicial activism on both a European and international scale. Perhaps the best example of this was the hideously inept tenure of former Irish president, Mary Robinson, at the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights. A former constitutional lawyer, Robinson turned the Commission into a legalistic and activist center to attack what should have been political, not judicial, decisions taken by nations around the world, with Israel being the prime target.
Wednesday, February 25, 2004
Several journalists and bloggers have been commenting on Naomi Wolf's story of Harold Bloom making a pass at her some twenty years ago. In general, the commentators don't seem too impressed.
My own reaction was twofold:
1) Possibly Naomi Wolf, like John Lennon's killer Mark Chapman, was unhealthily obsessed with the character of Holden Caulfield. This could explain how she could go completely bonkers when her teacher put his hand on her leg. It's not like it hasn't happened before, right?
2) Huh? Harold Bloom put his hand on a woman's leg? (Took me a few seconds to realize I was confusing him with Allan Bloom.)
Sunday, February 22, 2004
I've been trying to decipher the various news stories I've seen concerning the serious race riot in Australia last weekend. The Independent has its ususal left-wing take here and here. News.com.au has an update here.
Some of the less politically-correct reality seeps through between the lines of this piece from The Age:
And you really start to get a sense of what's going on from The Australian:Aborigines are not the only ones trying to deal with their anger. Some of the officers in the riot's front line were people who gave their time freely to take young Aborigines on rural camps. Local police have said morale at Redfern station plunged when officers saw on television the faces of young people they had mentored, hurling missiles at police.
The kid died when he fell from his bicycle and was impaled on a fence. The Aborigines in the neighborhood say he was being chased by the police; the police deny this; the neighbors are howling for "justice," comparing the kid to a hero from Aboriginal history, calling him a martyr, comparing their burning neighborhood to Northern Ireland and the Gaza Strip . . . all the usual, routine bullshit that goes on in an incident like this.Two cousins, to whom TJ was very close, were in trouble with the police. The Hickeys had a reputation around town, and Cynthia, one of TJ's three maternal aunts, believes the local police had all the boys in their sights. Her three brothers, William, Thomas and Joseph, were doing time in prison, along with TJ's dad, Ian.
TJ, though, kept himself out of serious trouble until moving to Sydney to join his mother. His six sisters, all younger, remained at school in Walgett, sharing Cynthia's overcrowded three-bedroom house with her seven children and partner, Greg.
Grandfather Thomas says he was aware TJ was getting up to "a bit of mischief" with purse snatching. Cynthia admits he was "no angel", but that was understandable, because kids in Walgett had to grow up tough.
. . . Court records show [TJ] appeared in Bidura Children's Court at Glebe last September 10 to admit to offences of stealing from a person, resisting police and possession of a small quantity of marijuana. . . .
By most reckonings, his criminal history was relatively light, at least by Walgett standards.
In November last year . . . [t]he police were called and this time TJ found himself facing serious criminal charges: assault causing actual bodily harm in regard to the woman, who was left with a 6cm welt on her face, and assault of his cousin. He was convicted in absentia after failing to attend the Children's Court in Walgett on December 11. Magistrate Sue Seagrave issued warrants for his arrest, which were in force at the time of his death last Saturday. He was also made subject to a 12-month apprehended violence order concerning his cousin.
TJ would have been fully aware he was wanted.
My verdict so far: TJ was a budding young thug whose promising career as a destroyer of other people's lives was tragically cut short when he spotted the police in his street and, knowing he was wanted for some assorted felonies, pedalled like hell to get away from them; unfortunately he had bad coordination compared to most other career criminals and somehow managed to impale his own strikingly stupid ass on a fence in one of the more spectacularly bungled getaways of recent weeks. And the rest of that stuff, the hero/martyr/racist-cops-killed-my-baby song-and-dance? Just more Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton bullshit, only this time with an Australian accent.
Oh, and in somewhat related news, apparently some people in New Zealand are starting to object to special privileges for the indigenous Maori, resulting in violence in the lead-up to the next election.
Strange that Tim Blair hasn't been blogging on any of this.
Another interesting article from the February 14th Economist.
There's another paragraph, but the above is the essential stuff. By the way, as I've mentioned before, the reason I don't link to Economist articles is that they're behind a wall that you have to be either an online or print-edition subscriber to get past, and even then, you have to answer an unusual number of unusually nosy questions if you're a print subscriber trying to gain access.Room, board and broadband
Internet access in hotels is fast becoming a standard amenity
Just as they take for granted air-conditioning and cable TV, business travellers increasingly expect to find broadband-internet access in their hotel rooms. Nearly 500,000 hotel rooms around the world will have high-speed internet access by the end of the year, predicts Amy Cravens of In-Stat/MDR, a market-research firm. Despite all the hype surrounding the provision of wireless-internet access in coffee shops and airports using Wi-Fi technology, the number of public Wi-Fi "hotspots" is tiny in comparison: most travellers are far more likely to get online in their hotel rooms. As in-room connectivity becomes more widespread, what was once seen as a distinctive feature to attract discerning customers is increasingly regarded as a necessary service.
In-room service is now shifting from a fee-based model towards becoming an amenity--"from pay-per-view to free shampoo", as Ms Cravens puts it. In America, where the market is most developed, most large hotel chains began wiring up their rooms several years ago. Access charges were typically $10 per day or $3 per hour. But now some hotels give away broadband access. Last year, Marriott announced that it will provide free access in more than 1,200 of its hotels; Fairfield Inn will do so at over 500 hotels by the end of this year. In recent weeks, similar announcements have come from the Holiday Inn, Holiday Express and Best Western chains. Tom Higgins, the boss of Best Western, says free access is becoming the norm because travellers object to paying for what they now regard as an essential service.
All of these hotel chains hope that the provision of free access will boost loyalty and occupancy, by encouraging customers to choose the same hotel or chain again. European hotels, which were noticeably slower on the uptake, are catching up--in many cases using Wi-Fi to provide in-room access without having to lay cables. The situation in Asia is much patchier.
Another update on Ireland. More encouraging news concerning Ireland (for my last Ireland post, go here):
From the February 14th issue of The Economist.Ireland and Britain: Normal relations
Irish views of Britain have changed for the better
"The Irish are a fair people," Dr Johnson once said, "they never speak well of one another." But they now speak well of the British, says a new poll of young Irish professionals, jointly commissioned by the British Council and the British embassy. Three in four of those surveyed, all graduates under 40, have a broadly favourable view of Britain. Even more (81%) say the relationship between the Irish and British governments is good to excellent.
Such a response reflects a transformation in Irish attitudes to Britain over the past 30 years. Relations deteriorated as violence in Northern Ireland escalated, and the impact was felt througout Ireland. In 1972 a mob burned down Britain's embassy in Dublin. In 1976 the IRA assassinated the British ambassador; in 1979 it blew up Lord Mountbatten.
The two countries share an 800-year history of conflict and distrust. But the latest chapter is of partnership more than friction, and also of notably good personal relations between the prime ministers, Ireland's Bertie Ahern and Britain's Tony Blair. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland was a key by-product of that improvement.
Irish unity remains a strong aspiration among those surveyed, but it is no longer pressing. While two-thirds favour it, the timing is less certain: only 36% say it will happen some time, and over a quarter of these think it will take more than 20 years. Indeed, links with Britain, as Ireland's biggest export market, now seem stronger than with Northern Ireland. Only half the respondents had ever visited Northern Ireland, against 84% who had been to London.
Ireland remains one of the best-performing economies in the European Union. Indeed, its feat of catching up and then overtaking Britain in GDP per head may be one reason for the change in Irish attitudes. Yet, in an echo of British views, the Irish public feels itself closer (in economic, social and cultural terms) to Boston (73%) than to Berlin (16%), and to the United States than to Europe.
Two years ago, when Queen Elizabeth's mother died, the Irish flag flew at half-mast over Dublin's post office: a symbolic flag over a building at the heart of the 1916 rebellion. That only one caller complained shows how normal relations now are. All that is left is a state visit by the queen. Even that is planned, though not before Northern Ireland's devolved government is restored.
Friday, February 20, 2004
The Australian intelligence agencies are sticking up for themselves, too:
Read the whole thing.Australia's chief intelligence officer has defied critics of intelligence assessments on Iraq and declared the advice to the Howard Government was "right and reasonable".
Even on the most contentious issue of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, Peter Varghese, the new head of the Office of National Assessments, says the "jury is literally still out" - although he concedes the assessment may ultimately be found to be wrong.
So yesterday the U.N. announced that it agreed with the U.S. concerning the timing of elections in Iraq:
And then today Ayatollah Sistani indicated he'd go along with the deal:The US plan for a June 30 transfer of authority to an Iraqi government received major endorsement after United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan agreed that elections could not be held by then and that the handover date should not be changed.
Was I surprised by either of these developments? Taken aback? Caught off-guard?Iraq's top Shi'ite religious leader hinted in an interview published on Friday that he would allow a delay to elections in line with a U.N. verdict that ruled out polls before the end of U.S.-led occupation in June.
No, I was not.
Why wasn't I?
Because I knew about them in advance, that's why. Because on January 24, Steven Den Beste told me all about it:
I'm sure glad Steven's around to clue me in. My powers of prediction have increased markedly since I started reading him.The Ayatollah Sistani is attempting to position himself as a major player in determining Iraq's political future, as de-facto representing the Shiite majority. His recent demands for elections, and the demonstrations held to support him, were attempts to show that he has real power to disrupt any plan which doesn't satisfy him. Elections as such weren't really the issue; the point was to prove that he cannot be ignored. . . .
And now he's made his point. But everyone needs a face-saving way of backing away from the immediate crisis, and getting the UN involved was a good way to do that.
What's going to happen is that the UN team will agree with Bremer that elections aren't possible. Sistani could not give away that point directly to Bremer because it would make him look weak, but he can accept it from the UN, and will.
And the UN won't blow its lines, because if it crosses us up on this, then it is history. That's why it caved in last summer, and that's why it isn't going to "go French" now.
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Free State Project update. According to the latest posting on their website, the number of signed-up members now stands at 5,487.
There's been a spate of stories lately concerning Sir David King, science advisor to Tony Blair's government, urging the American government to sign up to the Kyoto treaty. A few of the articles give the Bush administration's view that technological progress, rather than tighter regulation, is the answer to environmental problems. And if you'd like to read an examination of the King controversy from an unabashedly pro-technology, pro-capitalist point of view, you can't beat Tech Central Station.
Saturday, February 14, 2004
Better late than never. Though it damn well took him long enough. Paragraph from the February 9 National Review (page 10 of the dead-tree edition, in the section "The Week . . ."; can't find it in the online edition):
Indeed. Since one factor in my turning hard against the IRA years ago was my admiration for and gratitude to Margaret Thatcher, I've been wondering whether Blair's extraordinary performance as our ally would have an effect on any residual sympathy among Irish-Americans for the IRA. (If you would like to read previous posts I've done on Ireland, Irish-Americans, and the IRA, go here.)Longtime readers of NR will remember that Rep. Peter King, Republican from New York, used to appear regularly in our pages--especially our letters pages, where he would joust with us over Northern Ireland. He would vigorously defend IRA leader Gerry Adams, for example, as a misunderstood patriot rather than the terrorist we believed him to be. The congressman tells us that he is set to release a new novel, Vale of Tears, and that it depicts Tony Blair as a good guy and the IRA as a gang of thugs in league with al-Qaeda. A small victory in the war on terrorism.
Since opinion polling in America is often done on the basis of race but almost never on the basis of ethnicity (organizing replies according to whether the respondent was Irish- or Korean- or Cuban-American, as opposed to whether he/she was white or Asian-, or Hispanic-American), and since I can't remember seeing data on American attitudes toward the IRA (though I'm sure such data must exist somewhere, even if it's really old data), I have no basis on which to make a judgment. My impression is that there's very little sympathy left for the IRA here, and that this change was occurring even prior to 9/11; however, it's possible that I'm projecting my own feelings onto a blank canvas, or letting wishful thinking influence my perception. There is a small amount of anecdotal evidence that indicates things are moving in the right direction, and I've been blogging on this topic whenever I find good signs and omens.
Or whenever I find bad signs and omens.
Let's hope this news item from AtlanticBlog represents just a statistical fluke -- the percentage change involved is pretty small.It is early in the morning, I have yet to encounter, or even read about an academic, and yet I am in a foul, foul mood about Ireland. Where to begin? The latest MRBI (basically, the big Irishing [sic] polling company) poll came out, showing a small gain for Sinn Fein in Ireland, up from a consistent 9% to 10%. 10% for the killers of Sinn Fein. What is wrong with people? The Labour Party, Ireland's longstanding left-wing party, stands at only 19%. Apparently their tiresome habit of not winning support by killing people or even using bats on them has made them just too dull for the lunatics.
By the way, if you'd like to read the Amazon description of Peter King's book, here it is.
Another day, another misleading headline. This one's from yesterday's USA Today: "Arms hunt in doubt in '02: Prewar study predicted search could be fruitless."
Sounds like the prewar study indicated that there was a good chance there were no weapons to find, doesn't it?
And that impression is reinforced by the story's first paragraph:
Man! That lying, misleading, neocon-besotted Texas bastard! He led us straight into war after having been informed by his own people that the Iraqis didn't have WMD! Maybe it really was all about the oil!A classified U.S. intelligence study done three months before the war in Iraq predicted a problem now confronting the Bush administration: the possibility that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction might never be found.
Except that, er, well, that isn't what the report actually says at all:
In other words, the 2002 study didn't indicate whatsoever that there were no WMD, only that the chaos of battle and its immediate aftermath would make those weapons damned hard to find.The study by a team of U.S. intelligence analysts, military officers and civilian Pentagon officials warned that U.S. military tactics, guerrilla warfare, looting and lying by Iraqi officials would undermine the search for banned Iraqi weapons. . . .
"Locating a program that . . . has been driven by denial and deception imperatives is no small task," the December 2002 report said. "Prolonged insecurity with factional violence and guerrilla forces still at large would be the worst outcome for finding Saddam's WMD arsenal."
The report went to the National Security Council but was not specifically shown to President Bush, the officials said.
The study findings clash with statements by U.S. officials that caches of banned weapons would be found.
Not quite what the headline, subheadline, and first paragraph imply, is it? In fact, you might even say that the headline, subheadline, and first paragraph try mightily to give you the impression that Bush either lied about Iraqi WMD or didn't know what the hell he was doing . . . whereas the lower paragraphs of the article reveal that the 2002 study kind of like, you know, backs up everything the Bush administration has been saying.
But of course, walking past countless newspaper vending machines blaring the USA Today headline, as I've been doing, you wouldn't be able to realize all that, would you? Nah, you'd just think that our glorious free press, that bastion of truth, justice, and the American way, was holding that nasty liar Bush's feet to the fire.
But I'm sure this whole headline thing is a mere coincidence.
Update: I took the above info from the dead-tree edition, which came out on Friday, February 13. The online story that the link takes you to currently has the word "Iraq" inserted at the beginning of the headline and it drops the subheadline. I haven't had a chance to read the entire online story, but the first few paragraphs, which I examine in the post, appear to be the same in both versions.
Another update. Because yesterday's paper was actually the issue covering Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, it sat in the curbside newspaper dispensers displaying its infuriatingly dishonest headline above the fold for three full days, giving God knows how many people the (deliberately, I believe) wrong impression that BUSH LIED! BUSH LIED! BUSH LIED! Was this bit of timing intentional, I wonder?
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
Good Aussie news. The proposed U.S.-Australia free trade agreement looks like it's a go, in spite of the controversy.
Just came across an article that may be of some interest even though it's old -- looks like it might have been written before the tech bubble burst. It's by R.U. Sirius and deals with the evolution of the 1990s magazine Mondo 2000, of which I have many fond memories and several old copies. Another article that is uncredited but appears to have been written by R.U. Sirius can be found here. And if you're interested in a history of Mondo from the perspective of a friendly outsider, you can find that here.
Free State Project update. According to the latest posting on the Free State Project website, "5,441 members as of February 9, 2004."
Now this is interesting. I received a solicitation from the Bush-Cheney '04 organization. On the back of the form you're supposed to return with your donation is the following declaration:
Actually, I think that part about minors being prohibited from contributing is a little out-of-date; I believe some court ruled that it violated the First Amendment rights of minors, and so they are again able to contribute.The maximum an individual may contribute to the campaign is $2,000 ($4,000 per couple) per election. Corporations, foreign nationals without "green cards" and minors (under 18 years of age) are prohibited from contributing. Contributions from federal government contractors are prohibited.
But that's not the part I'm really interested in. What caught my eye was the bit about foreign nationals without green cards not being allowed to contribute. And the reason it caught my eye was that just yesterday I was reading this post from W. at Merde in France:
He links to a French-language site I can't read but which apparently describes the contributions in question; he also links to newspaper and blog stories about the large fees Joe Trippi earned from his work on the Dean campaign.Kinda trippy
A fool and his money are soon parted. According to reports on 'Le Vrai Journal', idiotic French are sending their money (the French don't really earn money, they get welfare and medical benefits) to groups like MoveOn.Org and the Howard Dean campaign. Suckers.
So, my question: Did the Dean campaign accept illegal contributions from non-U.S. citizens? Not that I really mind at this point. Since it's clear that the Dean campaign is probably going nowhere, all the French contributors did was throw their money away. (Whether contributions from non-U.S. citizens to an organization like MoveOn are illegal, I don't know.) But it would be interesting to find out whether Dean or any other Democratic contenders have knowingly accepted illegal contributions from Bush-hating Old Europe.
Monday, February 09, 2004
How can you not love an excerpt that begins like this?
It's from an article titled "Faith, Shame, and Insurgency: Life in occupied Iraq," by Steven Vincent, in the March 2004 issue of Reason magazine. I looked for it on the Reason.com website, but couldn't find it; it appears that stories from the March issue aren't up on the site yet. I will keep an eye out for it and link to it if and when it becomes available. Reason has been strongly anti-Iraq war, from the libertarian rather than the left-wing perspective, but Steven Vincent is coming at events from a different direction:"A lot of French journalists are shit," Wady, the sculptor, observed one afternoon as we shared a narghile filled with apple-flavored tobacco. "They come here and talk against the U.S. in a stupid way. They don't care about the crimes of Saddam Hussein." And it's not only the French, noted Esam Pasha, a painter and translator for the U.S. military: "European and Arab journalists talk to us, but they don't care about our happiness in being liberated. They only want us to make anti-American comments." Even a cabbie who took me to the Shabander one afternoon weighed in. "Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabia TV, no good," he said. "They only show pictures of bombings and killings of Americans--always how things are bad in Iraq, never how they are getting better."
Worse, I heard many stories at the Shabander about foreign correspondents staging news events to discredit the U.S. One young man introduced me to a Spanish photographer who, he later reported, had just finished posing an Iraqi woman in a nearby pile of rubble looking plaintively toward heaven, as if seeking deliverance from U.S. bombs. Rasim, the painter, claimed he witnessed Arab TV journalists pay idle Iraqis to light a car on fire and throw rocks to create an "anti-American" demonstration. "These journalists come here with their minds already made up," he groused. "They're not interested in anything that contradicts their anti-American viewpoint."
A pro-war reporter working for an anti-war magazine, who comes back from his fact-finding mission less optimistic yet even more intensely pro-war: Now there's a point of view you don't come across in the media every day. Read the whole thing now if you've got access to the dead tree edition, later if necessary.I'd come to Iraq to test my beliefs. Back in New York, I'd been a firm and vocal backer of the war, though not necessarily of the Bush administration. After witnessing firsthand the horrific events of 9/11, I felt the civilized nations of the world had to take on terrorism at its roots--roots that included the Middle East's legacy of poverty, hopelessness, and despotism, epitomized by, among other tyrants, Saddam Hussein. . . .
But a question had always nagged me: How could I truly endorse the war unless I actually went to Iraq? How did I know my assumptions were correct? And so last fall I traveled to the cradle of uncivilization . . . What I saw and heard surprised, delighted, and horrified me in ways I could never have predicted. I still support the war--even more so, in fact. But I'm less optimistic than I was on April 9, 2003, the day the statue of Saddam fell in downtown Baghdad, when, through my tears, I believed the good guys had won.
Friday, February 06, 2004
Does Florida have a "three strikes, you're out" law?
I ask because, in all the coverage I have seen today on the finding of the body of Carlie Brucia and the long criminal background of Joseph P. Smith, who was caught on videotape kidnaping the child, I have not heard or read a single reference to whether a three-strikes law would have kept Smith off the streets and Carlie Brucia alive. In fact, I have not heard or read one single mention of three-strikes laws, period. As far as the media coverage goes, such laws might as well not even exist.
I suspect that Florida does not have the law. I think that, if it did, Smith would have been locked up for life some time ago.
And I suspect the reason we have not heard anything about three-strikes in connection with this story is political. Most media people are liberals. Most liberals seem to be uneasy with or downright hostile to the three-strikes laws that exist in other states.
I think the media are deliberately avoiding bringing up the subject because this whole story would be powerful evidence in favor of a type of law that media people disapprove of.
There is some indication that Smith flashed a weapon of some type at Carlie to get her to come along with him when he kidnaped her. If it turns out that he had a gun, expect that the media will treat this fact in a way diametrically opposed to the way they've handled (or ignored) the three-strikes law issue. We will probably hear a lot about gun control laws and whether more of them might have prevented this crime.
What liberal media?
Thursday, February 05, 2004
Another of Steven Den Beste's analyses of current international politics -- this one on possible profound benefits of the Israeli wall/fence/barrier.
From Reuters:
Robert McNamara winning friends and influencing people in Berkeley by knocking the United States.McNamara seemed to please many in the crowd with criticism of U.S. nuclear policy and the U.S. health care system, often reeling off facts and figures with vigor and self confidence as though he still served in government.
Repellent news item of the day:
You can tell which one they think is more important.MPs urge sanctions against Israel
A committee of MPs is urging the government and European Union to impose economic sanctions against Israel.
. . . Committee chairman and Conservative MP Tony Baldry said Israeli policy was causing despair among Palestinians, and spawning conditions in which suicide bombers "can easily be recruited".
The MPs said the international community should not shy away from using sanctions to gain "political leverage" over Israeli policies. . . .
Despite the criticism, the MPs stressed they were sympathetic towards Israeli safety concerns and said that suicide bombing "as well as being morally abhorrent, has been a catastrophic tactic that has done great harm to the Palestinian cause".
Bastards.
Last night on CNBC's Dennis Miller Show, guest panelist Dennis Prager made an excellent suggestion: Make the U.N. relocate to an Arab country. That way, U.N. personnel would be forced to acknowledge the reality of the civilization that is intent on destroying Western civilization.
Superb idea. Wish I'd thought of it myself.
Monday, February 02, 2004
Speaking of Newsweek's Evan Thomas -- the cover of this week's Newsweek is disgustingly misleading. There is a quote from David Kay in large white capital letters on a black background: "WE WERE ALL WRONG." On one side of the quote is a photo of Saddam Hussein. On the other side are photos of Kay, Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Rice, and Blair. The clear implication is that Kay was referring only to himself, the Bush administration, and Blair as having been "all wrong."
That's not what Kay meant.
Here is the quote in context, from CNN's transcript of the Senate hearing at which Kay testified on January 28:
Kay was alluding to the fact that last spring everyone thought Saddam had stockpiles of WMD -- the Americans, the British, the Australians, the French, the Germans, the Russians, the U.N. -- and the only overt disagreement was on how to tackle the situation. (Indeed, I'm still not convinced he didn't have them -- I still find it highly plausible that they were moved, or destroyed at the last minute with small quanitities saved to begin again when the heat was off.)But I also believe that it is time to begin the fundamental analysis of how we got here, what led us here and what we need to do in order to insure that we are equipped with the best possible intelligence as we face these issues in the future.
Let me begin by saying, we were almost all wrong, and I certainly include myself here.
Sen. [Edward] Kennedy knows very directly. Senator Kennedy and I talked on several occasions prior to the war that my view was that the best evidence that I had seen was that Iraq indeed had weapons of mass destruction.
I would also point out that many governments that chose not to support this war -- certainly, the French president, [Jacques] Chirac, as I recall in April of last year, referred to Iraq's possession of WMD.
The Germans certainly -- the intelligence service believed that there were WMD.
It turns out that we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that it is most disturbing. [Emphasis added.]
I just wonder which motive was the stronger on Newsweek's part: sensationalism for profit, or political sympathies.
And they say Bush misled us.
Crap like this is why fewer and fewer people trust the mainstream media with each passing year.
I've recently realized whom the neo-cons remind me of.
When Evan Thomas talked about his book The Very Best Men -- Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA in this interview on Booknotes on December 17, 1995, it would have been easy for most people to believe that vigorously pro-Western, pro-American liberal interventionists didn't really exist anymore. And it would have been true, if you had only been looking at Democrats. (Lieberman possibly excepted.)THOMAS: Well, it's different. For a long time it was where the sort of attractive Democratic preppies hung out. It's a little bit a contradiction in terms. In Washington the sort of cool crowd in the 1950s were liberal Democrats, Stevensonian Democrats. They didn't like Eisenhower. They sort of put down Eiswenhower as being dull, Midwestern, wore bad suits, didn't know the right wines. And the people who were sort of sharper and cooler tended to be liberal, but they were liberal interventionists. It was the kind of liberalism that doesn't really exist anymore. They wanted to save the world by conquering the world. They wanted a very active CIA and a very active State Department. They wanted America to be a great power, to take its rightful role running the world. And these people were, by and large, headquartered in Georgetown.
The catch was, such people did still exist, but they had migrated to the outskirts of the Republican Party (even though some of them retained their registration as Democrats) and had started attracting the label of neoconservatives.
The best-known neo-cons are, as conspiracy-minded anti-Semites the world over never tire of pointing out, disproportionately Jewish; the OSS and early CIA personnel were disproportionately WASP and Irish. But though blood may be thicker than water, culture is thicker than blood, and culturally, today's neoconservatives are the grandchildren of those liberal Democratic interventionists of the late 1940s and 1950s, who knew that America was the greatest country on earth and that it deserved to be defended against its enemies with every weapon available and who were not afraid to try to spread democracy by force or persuasion if the alternative was to let totalitarianism fester and spread.
Why aren't the Republicans using John F. Kennedy to shut up Democratic criticism of various aspects of the War on Terror? (1) Kennedy invaded a sovereign nation when he sent Cuban exiles to the Bay of Pigs to try to effect regime change. (2) When Castro and Khrushchev reacted to the attempted invasion by putting missiles in Cuba that could be used to attack America, Kennedy blockaded Cuba -- an act of war -- in a preemptive strike to rid Cuba of its weapons of mass destruction even though Cuba under Castro had not attacked the U.S. or any other country. (3) Kennedy sought to impose democracy on Communist Cuba. (4) Kennedy got elected in part by claiming that there was a missile gap between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. that later turned out not to exist, and from what I understand about this issue, Kennedy knew it didn't exist.
Any or all of this information could neutralize a lot of the carping now coming from Democrats. I hope it will get used after the primaries are over and the real campaign gets underway, particularly if John Kerry does end up the winner, since he has said that John Kennedy was his political hero. This stuff is just too good to pass up.
