Highway 99
Thursday, April 29, 2004
It appears that San Francisco Republican Jason Erickson has stopped blogging; his last post is dated March 12, just after the Madrid train bombings. I hope he hasn't gone on the wagon permanently; it's good to hear now and then from a conservative living in what's arguably the most liberal area of the United States.
While Jason's on what I hope is a temporary hiatus, we can check in on someone who describes himself as "an Orange County native trapped in the SF Bay Area."
This sounds promising. In fact, I've already blogrolled it. After all, how can you not like a guy who calls himself the Oriental Redneck?
I began watching Fox News on a regular basis only last year, as the preparations for war began heating up. So I might well have missed the story of Shepard Smith's arrest, even if it made headlines in November of 2000.
I like Shepard Smith, but I have to admit I get a kick out of his police mug shot. Actually, as arrest photos go, it ain't half bad. It's better than a lot of people's driver's license pictures. In case you haven't seen it, you can find it here.
Tuesday, April 27, 2004
I've been thinking some more about my last post, and about the notion that "ABC has actually been putting journalism over partisanship for the better part of a week." I wonder if that's really true. It occurred to me that the media might actually be in the first stages of doing to John Kerry what they did a few months ago to Howard Dean.
It's possible that the people who work in the establishment media have been coming to the conclusion over the past couple of weeks that Kerry is not so electable after all. Since for most of them it's paramount to get the Democrats into office -- which Democrats get into office is of secondary consideration -- journalists may be thinking that Kerry has to be jettisoned for the good of the party, and they're willing to do their bit. It's like amputating a gangrenous limb in order to save the life of the patient.
If so, it's not surprising that reporters could begin to turn on Kerry.
I would be encouraged that so many people seem to be thinking that Kerry can't beat Bush, if not for one thing: I keep remembering the way Kerry came roaring back from the dead on January 19, 2004, after virtually everybody had written him off. (The only person I can remember who correctly predicted Kerry's victory -- besides Kerry himself -- is Congressman Mark Foley, who confidently gave his prediction during an interview on Fox News the morning of the Iowa caucuses. As far as I know, no one else even came close.)
Here's hoping lightning won't strike twice.
Monday, April 26, 2004
I hate to have to say this, but ABC News deserves (gag, choke) congratulations for the job it's been doing the past couple of days (cough, retch). Between the explosive memo implicating U.N. aristocrats in the UNSCAM Oil-for-Food scandal that the ABC evening news publicized a couple of days ago and this morning's grilling of John Kerry concerning his throwing his medals/ribbons away at a Vietnam War protest, ABC has actually been putting journalism over partisanship for the better part of a week. I'm surprised no ABC reporters have had to be hospitalized -- I would have thought this sort of thing would kill them. I hope they keep up the good work, but I can't say I'm optimistic. (Sputter, gasp, gag.)
Some time back I mentioned that the French unemployment rate had recently been hovering around 9.5%. Well, that wasn't quite accurate, and I feel the need to add a correction:
There, that's better. If I left an inaccurate unemployment figure on record, the French might think I was trying to insult them.French unemployment figures have been revised upwards and now officially stand at 9.8% or 2.68 million people, a full percentage point above the eurozone level. In 2003, there were 67,000 fewer employed than in 2002, due in large measure to government cutbacks intended to help stave off a looming crisis in public finances. (The government employs one of every five French workers, meaning that one three [sic] French citizens is either employed by the government or dependent on someone who is.)
The Foreign Office Alumni/Lawrence of Arabia Memorial Society: or, I Never Saw an Arab Arse I Didn't Want to Lick.
Do you suppose it will ever dawn on these morons that if you've been trying to restore peace in an area for four decades and are farther away from peace than ever, a new approach might be a good idea? And these are the shitheads who call Bush stupid and stubborn. I never could stand diplomats. Smarmy, double-talking, tyrant-appeasing little asswipes."Our dismay at this backward step is heightened by the fact that you yourself seem to have endorsed it, abandoning the principles which for nearly four decades have guided international efforts to restore peace in the Holy Land."
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
Some people are already expressing doubts about whether anyone at the United Nations will pay a price for their corruption in the Oil-for-Food scandal.
If accountability does not eventually come through official channels, we should, at the very least, withhold an amount from America's U.N. dues equal to the amount the U.N. stole from the American taxpayers and fenced to Saddam.
A nice additional touch would be if we withheld still more in the years to come, until we had enough to pay the Iraqi people back the amount the U.N. cheated them out of during the sanctions period.
It might be a long time before the U.N. had any more greenbacks to subsidize their mischief-making.
If we can't actually stop their nasty little shenanigans in the immediate future, we can at least cut back on this sucker's game we've been playing. Maybe at one time some Americans thought of the United Nations as a good place to let our enemies harmlessly blow off steam, railing against us with no real consequence. Those days are gone. The place is downright dangerous. It needs to be grounded like the spoiled brat that it is. The best way to do that is to cut off its allowance.
I was watching the start of Paul Wolfowitz's testimony before Congress yesterday morning when I noticed that sitting near Wolfowitz and the other witnesses was an easel with a Kinko's bag propped up against it.
To the extent I'd ever thought about where government officials get their charts and graphs and other visual aids, I had just assumed they had it all done in-house; it never occurred to me that congressional aides would go running down the street to Kinko's to have printing or copying done for use in important presentations. But that clearly discernible Kinko's bag seemed to argue otherwise.
That got me thinking about what a potentially rich source of information the folks at Kinko's might be. If I were a D.C. reporter, I think I might start cultivating sources at Kinko's the same way a Hollywood gossip columnist might cultivate the orderlies at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica. People making minimum wage who are ahead of the media curve in possessing information on the rich and famous are in a remarkably strong bargaining position. Assuming I were willing to pay for tips, I could leverage a small amount of money into a large amount of data and probably more than a few exclusives.
Let's hope that officials at least stick to more confidential printing and copying methods when it comes to classified data.
What Iraq really does need: its own version of C-SPAN.
A second thought on my previous post: Is the word "Ekhbaria" related to "Akbar," as in "Allah Akbar" (or is it sometimes spelled "Allihu Akbar")?
Yeesh. Just what the world needs. Another Arab TV network.
Fox News was showing footage from the aftermath of today's bombing in Riyadh, and the footage was credited to something called Al-Ekhbaria. Now, I've certainly heard of al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya -- but Al-Ekhbaria? That was a new one on me.
I googled it, and got a few hits. There were several that appeared to be satellite-company sites listing various TV networks and their frequencies; these were followed by six -- www.al-ekhbaria.net/, www.al-ekhbaria.org/, and www.al-ekhbaria.com/, plus the same names but without the hyphens -- resulting in a few "site not found" and a few "site under construction" messages.
One of the satellite sites lists Al-Ekhbaria right between al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya; another one indicates that Al-Ekhbaria is out of Saudi Arabia. All the satellite sites say Al-Ekhbaria is, along with Jazeera and Arabiya, on Arabsat, which I assume is an Arab-owned satellite.
The six hits listing the network name with the three different suffixes, with and without hyphens, yielding the "not found" and "under construction" messages make it appear that this is a new network that has just reserved all the likely English-language variations on its name while it is in the process of actually getting a website up and running.
If this network is anything like the media in other parts of the Arab world, and more specifically if it's anything like other Saudi Arabian media, Al-Ekhbaria is going to be just one more channel of sewage.
Check out this nifty new feature at Chicago Boyz. I've been interested for some time in the notion of using market activity to predict political events, or at least to gauge the public mood in a way the media might miss. Well, Jonathan Gewirtz isn't just examining the idea, he's doing something about it, installing a quote board on the Chicago Boyz' site and inviting Boyz readers to trade on the board.
I have no idea whether this will work or not, but it should be interesting to watch it play out.
BTW, the above link will take you to the individual post having to do with the trading board -- but to see the board itself, you'll have to go to the Boyz' main page.
Remember those stories of British and German troops coming out of their World War I trenches to play some soccer games at Christmastime?
Here's an update on that theme -- warmer in some respects, colder in others:
Two nuclear submarines, one British and one American, surfaced near the North Pole on Monday for an impromptu game of soccer, Britain's Royal Navy said.
The two vessels surfaced through two naturally occurring gaps in the ice about half a mile from each other after completing a joint underwater exercise.
"The crews of HMS Tireless and USS Hampton are gearing up for a game of football," Commander John Parris said.
"It will probably be English football (soccer) since I doubt our lot know much about playing American football," Parris told Reuters from Portsmouth in southern England. "I expect there will also be the mother of all snowball fights."
Why on earth is this not getting more attention? Because it would illustrate the kind of enemy we're dealing with and why we have to fight hard to defeat him? Because it is a perfect example of the wages of appeasement, and the appeasement-minded media are not enthusiastic about publicizing it?
ENDLESS HATRED
As Spain pulls its troops out of Iraq, the body of a Spanish policeman killed when Islamic terrorists blew themselves up has been pulled from its grave and set on fire:The coffin and body of special agent Francisco Javier Torronteras were pulled from the tomb in Madrid Sur cemetery in Carabanchel and pushed 1,000 yards in a wheelbarrow before being doused with petrol and set alight.
The body was found with a pick driven into its head and a spade dug into its chest.
The interior ministry said the act of desecration could have been part of "an Islamic rite of revenge".
Monday, April 19, 2004
The fighting now taking place in Fallujah and Najaf is the battle we've been avoiding for twenty-five years. This is the idea I wish Bush would stress over and over to the American people, until we get the security situation nailed down.
If you see Islamofascism as a great wave that transcends national boundaries and that has been gathering force for decades, then it makes the most sense to see the combat that broke surface a couple of weeks ago as actually having begun decades ago -- perhaps as far back as the Suez crisis, certainly as far back as the taking of the American hostages by the government of Iran in 1979.
When the Americans refused to back up the British (okay, and the French) in their effort to keep the canal, they gave the first faint encouragement to what would become virulent Arab nationalism. That early impulse might have died out, however, or at least been transmuted into a less harmful form, if not for the massive empowerment it received in 1979 by the actions -- or rather the inaction -- of Jimmy Carter.
When Carter allowed our hostages to be kept at the will of the Iranians without striking back in any meaningful way (I can't count that pathetic choppers-crashing-in-the-desert scene), it was the next after Suez in the long line of abandonments of the field of battle that brought us to where we are now.
Next up was Reagan, avoiding combat after the Marine barracks was bombed. Then it was Bush Sr., caring too damn much about the stinking, corrupt, America-hating United Nations, and wanting to avoid too many American casualties, stopping before the job was done in the first Gulf War. Next came Clinton, and the first World Trade Center bombing, the destruction of the African embassies, the bombing of the USS Cole. And still we did nothing.
Finally, under Bush Jr., after the unprecedented disaster of 9/11, a first blow was struck when we overturned the Taliban in Afghanistan.
But then, at the beginning of the Iraq invasion, there was a plot twist. As the Coalition soliders raced toward Baghdad, it was the Arab soldiers who took up the avoidance tactic, as the Iraqi Army melted away into the civilian population. There was method to their madness, of course -- it was suspected at the time, and it has been confirmed in the past few weeks, that they intended to live to fight another day -- but the fact remained that, once again, the main battle had been postponed.
Now the battle has been joined.
I wish Bush was putting it this way, so that people who think the recent fighting is a sign of failure will understand: This is the battle that we had to fight, that we've been avoiding for decades but can avoid no longer, and that would be waiting for us to fight another day even if we did manage to avoid it again now. The casualties we are taking now, we would only have to take another day. It's time to stop running, finally, and turn around and fight, and begin at last the process of truly defeating our deadly enemy.
I am surprised but very pleased to see these new poll results, in which Bush has widened his newly-regained lead over Kerry. I would have thought that the fighting in the Sunni Triangle would have hit Bush hard.
I know there are American troops stationed in Spain, though I'm not sure how many. With Spain jerking its troops out of Iraq faster than you can say "appeasement," the thought occurs to me: Why not immediately pull an equal number of American troops out of Spain, and send them to Iraq? You could also pull some out to compensate for the loss of Honduran troops, and send those Americans to Iraq as well.
And while we're at it, why not let Zap know now that we'll be pulling the rest of our soldiers out of Spain by the end of this calendar year? After all, we're already planning to reduce our forces in Germany and South Korea; why should Spain be exempt? They're big kids now, and can defend themselves. (Or can they? Well, with the Americans gone, I guess we'd have an opportunity in the years to come to find out.)
John of Iberian Notes is on a roll.
Read the whole thing. It's long, but every paragraph is loaded with clear thinking, and a variety of topics get hit. Every sentence is worth reading.Mr. Castells, let me make something clear. Again, it's going to sound arrogant, and it probably is. Spain lives under the Anglo-American protective umbrella, and it's ridiculous to deny it. Spain would probably not be able to hold Ceuta and Melilla if not for American and NATO protection. To maintain its domestic independence within its claimed borders, which include those two Spanish cities on the African coast, Spain is dependent upon Great Britain and the United States, the enforcement arm of NATO, since Spain spends less money on defense than any other Western European country. Spain is effectively a US-UK protectorate, as it was during the Cold War. For reasons of national pride, Spain is often loath to admit this.
. . . Mr. Blair has demonstrated an unfailing ability to waffle and wobble and get himself into minor Mandelsonesque scrapes and try to please everybody on the small stuff, just like Bill Clinton. Unlike Mr. Clinton, Mr. Blair has always been dead straight right on the big stuff when it counted, as in Northern Ireland--it's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than it was--, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, the War on Terrorism, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Tony Blair may be the most courageous politician alive. I agree with him so strongly on international issues that I forgive him all his other weaknesses and I trust his instincts, both political and ethical.
. . . "Preventive action" goes way back in history. It's nothing new. When we blockaded Cuba back in '62 that was preventive. We prevented the Russians from setting up intermediate-range missiles with which they could actually blow us up (now we know that Kennedy knew the Russians knew their other delivery mechanisms weren't worth a damn). The point of the Vietnam War was to prevent the Communists from taking over Indochina. The Israeli attack in the Six-Day War in 1967 was a preventive strike, as was the Israeli destruction of Iraq's French nuclear plant.
Tom Devine of the Bluebook Authority has lunch with his anti-Semitic, conspiracy-minded friend. Tom finds him amusing. I find him chilling. There was a time when I could have written guys like this off, but no more.
Want to read a transcript of John Kerry's 1971 testimony before a Sentate investigating committee? You can find it here. The usual caveat applies, that documents don't necessarily stick around C-SPAN's website forever.
Via Tim Blair:
I would love to have seen this, if in fact it happened. My distrust of the L.A. Times is such that I wouldn't put it past Brownstein to plant a story, with the connivance of the Donks, to lull the Bushies into a false sense of security. But assuming the hubbub took place as described, I would give a lot to see the video. Bet it's hilarious.When two reporters ask the president three times if he feels responsible for 9/11, do they realize they are enraging people from coast to coast? Ron Brownstein reports in the Los Angeles Times that an unnamed Democratic lobby gathered a focus group and showed them a campaign ad accusing Bush of negligence for failing to stop the 9/11 attacks. Brownstein wrote that the focus group exploded with "volcanic" rage against the ad. He quoted a Democratic operative as saying, "They were so angry I thought they were going to turn the tables over." Why do you think a notion that enrages normal Americans is considered worthy of throwing in the president's face at a press conference? At least the reporters didn't ask him if he and Osama hatched the 9/11 attack together. Wouldn't you say they could be a bit out of touch?
If you have not been able to find a copy of the August 2001 PDB on-line and you'd like to have a look at it yourself, you can find it here. Word of warning, though: I'm not sure how long reference documents like this stay on C-SPAN's website.
Bush's people, including Bush himself, have begun a campaign to reauthorize the parts of the Patriot Act that are due to expire next year. In case you'd like to read the text of the Patriot Act itself, you can find it here.
I've been hearing on the news today that a ceasefire is being offered to the residents of Fallujah in exchange for the residents handing in their weapons. There was a vague mention of the animals who murdered the four contractors and mutilated their bodies, but it seems not to be a central part of the ceasefire deal. If those shits are allowed to remain free, it will be a disgrace -- and in the eyes of the Iraqis, we will have lost face to a horrible degree. And I think we're all starting to understand what the long-term consequences of that usually are.
Officer Stephan Gray, Merced Police Department, murder victim. God, I hope this is not a harbinger of things to come:
A friend of a co-worker of mine had to move residences temporarily, it was so hard to sleep because of the search helicopters.A Merced policeman was killed Thursday evening, marking the first time an officer was killed in the line of duty since the Merced Police Department was founded in 1889.
. . . Officer Stephan Gray was shot after pulling over a vehicle in his unmarked patrol car in the 1900 block of Glen Avenue in central Merced at 7:23 p.m.
The suspect was "a known gang member" and apparent drug dealer.Gray, born in Tulare, came to Merced from Fresno when he got married.
"He thought it would be safer here," Tony Gray lamented, "because it was smaller."
Of course, most police probably wouldn't approve of the method I'd use to try to tame people like Tahua "Tao" Cuitlahuac Rivera: legalize drugs. I still think it's the only long-term solution, though.
The search has since died down somewhat; the thinking is that Rivera has fled to Mexico.The California Highway Patrol and the Merced County Sheriff's Department circled the skies above, and the California Department of Justice sent a high-flying surveillance plane to survey the perimeter of the area.
Not surprisingly, the suspect comes from a lovely local family.Residents here mourned the loss of the city's first police officer killed in the line of duty, with many remembering Officer Stephan Gray's devotion to his job and commitment to helping troubled youth.
Hmmm. Nancy must have ESP. She hasn't seen her brother, yet she knows he didn't do anything wrong. It's neat when family members are so spiritually connected they can read each other's minds at great distances.Rivera's sister, Nancy, repeatedly interrupted Andrade's brief statement to the press Sunday and said her brother didn't kill the officer.
"They have my mom for no reason; they are going to kill him. Everybody's all against us," Nancy Rivera said. She said she has no idea where her brother might be hiding.
Thursday, April 15, 2004
Fabian libertarianism. It would be like Fabian socialism in reverse. That's what we need to be working on. Not policies of libertarianism so pure that they'll never pass as legislation. We need to work at gradual changes.
Remember the analogy of the frog being boiled alive. Throw the frog into boiling water, he'll leap out immediately. Put the frog into lukewarm water and start heating it slowly, and the frog might get cooked before he realizes what's happening. That's how much of the regulation of the last century has crept up on us.
The collectivists came to realize that they were frightening people with their talk of revolution in the early twentieth century. So they changed tactics, and spent most of their time (New Deal and Great Society eras excepted) producing incremental changes, small "improvements" that didn't produce a backlash.
Now most people are so used to a big-government welfare state that it's the thought of small government that frightens them. Remember the reaction to the government shutdown when Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton clashed over the budget. We need to produce small changes that add up to a lot over time. Voters will be reassured if we don't shove them out of their comfort zone, but rather shift their comfort zone slowly over the course of years. As their comfort zone moves, they'll move with it -- in the direction we want them to go, if we do this correctly.
It took the collectivists about a century to produce the full-fledged welfare state. It'll take us a long time to roll it back, but it can be done if we take the long view.
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
Two points I wish had been made during last night's press conference (although I don't think it would be Bush's style to make them):
(1) It looks to me like the vast majority of troops engaged in the current intensified combat are Marines, rather than the mixture of Army soldiers and Marines that charged across the desert toward Baghdad in the opening phase of the war. This distinction is significant because one often-heard objection to the war is that poor and desperate people sign up for the military in order to get money, a college education, and/or job skills otherwise denied them, making the military a cruel exploiter of the poor. This claim is made often -- remember Charlie Rangel wanting to bring back the draft? -- but I remember it in particular in connection with the Jessica Lynch capture and rescue. There is certainly some truth in the claim as regards people who sign up for the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the National Guard, or the Coast Guard; people sometimes do sign up as a way of escaping poverty or lack of skills. I'm not buying it, however, where the Marine Corps is concerned. You do not join the Marines because you can't find a job elsewhere, or to acquire civilian job skills. Unlike other branches of the service, the Marines don't even have their own supporting professionals such as doctors or lawyers -- they use the Navy's. No, if you join the Marines, you are literally looking for a fight. Combat is what Marines do. What's going on in Iraq now is the Marines' reason for being. Let them do what they volunteered to do.
(2) It's been over two-and-a-half years since September 11, 2001. I believe that most tours of duty in the military last for two, three, or four years. I think it's safe to assume, therefore, that the majority of the U.S. personnel now in Iraq either enlisted or re-enlisted since 9/11 -- in other words, they were fully aware that they were volunteering for a wartime military, after their country had already been viciously attacked. The first wave of troops to go to Afghanistan may have been caught psychologically unprepared, having signed on when war seemed unthinkable. But that state of affairs is less true with each month that passes.
Oh, THAT liberal media! Get a load of this online chat in which Washington Post reporter Dana Priest answers questions from readers. Priest fairly bristles with hostility toward the Bush Administration and it comes through in virtually every answer she gives. (And in virtually every question posed by the readers -- easy telling what kind of readership the Post gets.)
In an early answer, Priest says, "The number one conclusion from these hearings is that there was not sufficient intelligence sharing." A few questions later, though, Priest takes a remarkably laid-back attitude toward a certain party who might be implicated in this major failure of intelligence sharing:
Sure, that makes sense. After all, having worked in the same office with another participant is the exact equivalent of HAVING WRITTEN THE POLICY THAT REINFORCED THE INFORMATION WALL BETWEEN THE CIA AND THE FBI.Alexandria, Va.: The one issue all the members of the commission seem to agree on is the failure of the CIA and FBI to share information with each other. Since Ms. Gorelick played a major role in assuring such a failure would occur, shouldn't she be removed from the commission and be forced to testify herself?
Dana Priest: Well, they knew her role would be an issue so she's recused herself from asking certain questions. Commission exec. Zelikow, too, has a conflict since he worked with Rice.
At another point, a questioner wraps up an inquiry with a slam at Wolfowitz, which Priest doesn't exactly object to:
Yeah, I'll bet she's heard plenty of Wolfowitz jokes in the Washington Post newsroom. God, I shudder to think what the world would look like if these idiots ran it -- which is obviously what they believe they ought to be doing.Charlotte, N.C.: . . . I would feel better about the situation if Cheney announced that he had to retire for "medical reasons" and Wolfowitz and the other administration neo-cons who have been giving the president such bad advice leave office to seek greater opportunity or are assigned to important posts such as the ambassador to Lichtenstein.
Dana Priest: I'll just pass on your mini-editorial -- and add that I've heard many people joke that Wolfowitz deserves to be the ambassador to Iraq.
Actually, I think Wolfowitz deserves to be the ambassador to Iraq, too -- but I don't mean it as an insult or a joke. I think that, given the way Wolfowitz was warning of the danger of Iraq and wanting to introduce reforms there way back in the 70s, he might be the perfect guy to watch over the new democracy and help it get up and running. Unfortunately, his Jewishness might prove a crippling handicap in such a setting. It's a damn shame, really.
At no point does Priest ever correct questioners when they make outlandish claims about the administration. ("Mr. Bush, Ms. Rice & other members of the Bush cabinet snubbed Secretary State Powell's advice to seek UN Approval. Now our troops are left (ALONE) to defend themselves . . ." or "What about the Republican finger pointing. Why does the media never complain about this but constantly accuses Democrats of doing it?") I think it's reasonable to conclude that Priest agrees with every one of them.
And then there's this:
Did Tenet actually say this? I haven't heard all his testimony, so I can't make a conclusive judgment, but off-hand this strikes me as self-contradictory crap. After Bush makes several requests for information on Bin Laden's plans and intentions to strike the U.S. -- after he is clearly "actually proactive about this" -- then the briefer self-initiates a PDB on that very subject? What's wrong with this picture, boys and girls? It's as if Priest thinks she would suffer some kind of fatal seizure if she gave Bush credit for anything, no matter how obviously he deserves it.The PDB: Bush claimed last night that he asked for the Aug. 6 PDB. What's the story there? Was he actually proactive about this, or was he just relenting to prolonged insistence by security officials?
Dana Priest: Tenet says the PDB was self-initiated by the briefer after Bush had asked several times about Bin Laden's intentions/plans to strike the US. So it was a little bit of both.
Well, you get the idea. The entire chat session is like that. Read the whole thing, unless you'd find it too depressing. And then show it to a friend of yours who won't believe that the Washington Post is biased as hell.
Note: This transcript is behind WashingtonPost.com's slightly intrusive registration wall. If you don't want to go through the wall, you can go to Google's news page and do a search on one of the phrases excerpted above. That should bring it to you, sans wall. That's how I got in. Be aware, however, that articles seem to stick around Google's news-search cache for only about a month.
Our other first-rate Anglosphere ally (besides the guy who's so obvious he need not be named) is John Howard of Australia. I've mentioned before how hard it is to come by information on Howard; it's ridiculous how little news of Australia gets into the media here.
Well, I'm happy to report that JoHo is going to be a guest tomorrow on Neil Cavuto's show on Fox News. Cavuto's on at 1 p.m. California time, with a repeat broadcast at 10 p.m. (that's 4 p.m. and 1 a.m. Eastern time, or 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. Greenwich/Zulu, for you zone-challenged folks).
I think this will be the first time I'll have seen Howard in a setting where he's speaking to an American audience, and I am looking forward to it. Let's hope it garners Howard more of the attention and appreciation he deserves.
Monday, April 12, 2004
If you're interested in reading Condoleezza Rice's statement to the 9/11 commission, you can find it here.
If you want to read her entire testimony, including commission members' questions and Rice's answers, you can find that here.
If you'd like to watch streaming video of her appearance, you can find that here, at C-SPAN.
It is not reassuring that the death penalty has been abolished in Iraq. I was startled to come across that fact in this Belmont Club post:
I somehow managed not to hear about the abolition when it happened. I did a little googling and got some information that seemed to indicate the Coalition suspended the death penalty when they took over. I hope the Iraqi government reinstates it when they take power on June 30. Saddam Hussein getting life imprisonment, rather than death? Unthinkable. The shits who killed and burned the American subcontractors and then mangled the bodies, getting only prison time? Can't be. I refuse to believe it.Sadr blinks! He wants to live, probably betting that he will get a prison term (capital punishment is abolished in Iraq) he can emerge from with his reputation enhanced to claim his just reward.
If capital punishment is officially banned, then find some other way to kill these people. I don't give a damn if the U.N. disapproves.
In case you'd like to read Tony Blair's brief essay, published yesterday in The Observer, you can find it here.
And here, you can find more on this:
Hmmm. Lots more going on here than meets the eye. I just wonder what, exactly?After last month's flap about which foreign leaders support him, you'd think John Kerry would jump at the chance to get a few words of support from George W. Bush's closest ally. But when British Prime Minister Tony Blair tried to meet the Democratic presidential candidate this week, Kerry said he was just too busy.
In addition to the obvious differences over the Iraq war, another source of potential strain between Blair and Kerry has to do with protectionism versus free trade:
I think that should actually be Minister Patricia Hewett, not Secretary, but the point is taken. I just wish the Donks would take it.Most recently, Blair has waded into the controversy over outsourcing, rejecting the Democrat protectionist position and confirming his attachment to free trade as the only reliable road to prosperity for all. When asked if he wasn't worried about outsourcing, he stated that of course he regretted any job losses. But in a veiled swipe at Kerry and others he continued that for his part he was "not going to pretend I have the powers to stop it." His Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewett was even more outspoken in her criticism, dismissing calls for measures against outsourcing as "siren voices" and accusing Democrat politicians of "playing politics with people's jobs and prosperity." She warned them that "protectionism is the road to recession."
Question: When's the last time Tony Blair referred to himself as a socialist?
I wonder if Blair, in the privacy of his own mind, still thinks of himself as a socialist, no matter what statements he makes for public consumption. I have my doubts.
I also wonder whether Blair has ever read The Road to Serfdom, a book I discovered when I read George Orwell's review of it. Blair and Orwell are examples of the sort of person F.A. Hayek seemed to have in mind when he wrote The Road to Serfdom, which he dedicated to "the socialists of all parties."
Winds of Change has found some Iraqis who are not only pro-U.S., they're also pretty damn brave:
Bonus pleasant surprise: WoC's source for the story was CNN.Tribal leaders in Kut -- apparently opposed to the violence incited by militant Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr -- fought with his militia and plan to hand the southern Iraqi city over to U.S. forces, a U.S.-led coalition source close to the situation said Friday.
Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words, especially when the picture is a BuzzChart. BuzzCharts is a feature of NRO, and some of the charts they show are startling even to those of us who know full well that the economy has been improving powerfully. One showing the expected fall in the deficit and another showing the recent surge in job growth are candidates for the sort of cheap, data-rich political campaign ads that I was touting in an earlier post.
Apparently the Australians have conservative talk radio.
And from what I've seen of the Australian media, I'd judge JoHo correct. Notice how the author of this passage never considers that Bush and Howard might be successful because they represent ideas that work better than the ideas of all those clever intellectuals. Golly, could this be an example of the leftist slant Howard was describing?Bush and Howard resemble each other in another respect- their shared hatred of clever liberalism. Both are very skilful indeed at reaching out to other people who resent cleverness and learning. Bush, as clever as a fox when it comes to political chicanery, presents himself as an amiable Texan cowpoke. Yet, it is clear that his resentment of East Coast intellectuals is quite genuine. It is why he became a smartarse at Yale in the first place, and why he loathes John Kerry. It is why he does the cowpoke thing so persuasively. Howard's identification with the battlers is just as authentic - it is how he reaches out so successfully to anyone with a sense of grievance or resentment. He has described talkback radio as the iron lung of political opposition - necesary because of the centre-left disposition of other media.
Were you aware that there was a Samoan Nazi Party that tried to get Samoans classified as whites? Well, until I read this, neither was I.
Sound familiar?
Read all about it.Another unmentioned aspect is the sheer adolescent pettiness of the criticism. This can be seen most clearly in international press coverage of the United States, which scarcely ever misses an opportunity to America-bash, even when reporting on areas that are in essence non-political, such as economic statistics and scientific discovery. Revel discusses the typical example of a story in the economics journal La Tribune, which gleefully announced "The End of Full Employment in the USA" when the US unemployment rate climbed to 5.5 percent in early 2001 (at the time, the French government was congratulating itself for reducing French unemployment to only twice this level). More recently, the British Broadcasting Corp gave exhaustive coverage to a technical problem with the US Mars Spirit Rover, but barely mentioned the successful effort to solve the problem. This spiteful editorial decision, and countless others like it, was typical of an organization in which balanced, accurate news coverage has become secondary to the holy task of denouncing Uncle Sam.
This isn't exactly what CNN's been telling us, is it?
You can find the whole thing here.Our progress is amazing. Many people who knew only repression and terror now have hope in their heart and prosperity in their grasp. Every day the Iraqi people stream out into the streets to cheer and wave at us as we drive by. When I'm on a foot patrol, walking among a crowd, countless people thank us -- repeatedly.
I realize the shocking image of a dead soldier or a burning car is more sellable than boring, detailed accounts of our rebuilding efforts. This is why you hear bad news and may be receiving an incorrect picture.
If you've never been exposed to Peter Hitchens, you might be surprised at how different he is in almost every respect from his brother Christopher.
Thursday, April 08, 2004
In a post from Sunday, I wrote about a couple of Ways and Means Committee hearings that I found noticeably nasty, with open partisan warfare going on without let-up. I said I'd keep checking the Ways and Means website to see if the transcripts had been posted yet. As of a few minutes ago, they still hadn't.
Observation: The Senate Foreign Relations Committee website is a heck of a lot easier to use than the House Ways and Means Committee website.
Condi Rice's upcoming testimony seems to have drained away some attention from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's hearings on the U.N. Oil-for-Food program scandal. I watched the Oil-for-Food hearing's opening statements by Richard Lugar, the Republican committee chair, and Joseph Biden, the Democratic ranking minority member. The contrast between the two opening statements was stark, and infuriating.
Lugar's opening statement actually dealt with the issue at hand -- the corruption in the Oil-for-Food program and the lack of accountability on the part of the United Nations.
Biden, on the other hand, ignored the entire issue of the Oil-for-Food program and spent his entire opening statement bitching about the current fighting in Iraq -- there was the inevitable comparison to Vietnam -- and bashing Bush. The Democratic turds cannot criticize their sacred U.N. cow even when that's what the hearing is all about, and they cannot resist bitching about Bush no matter how off-subject their bitching is.
There was a time in my life when I would have felt pretty comfortable if someone had labeled me a liberal. Now the Democrats make me sick.
If you want to read the opening statements yourself, you can download them from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's website, here.
Wednesday, April 07, 2004
Author Stephen Schwartz was a guest tonight on The O'Reilly Factor. He said he was the originator of the term "Islamofascist."
I could have sworn I've heard Christopher Hitchens say that he coined the term "Islamofascist."
Wonder who's right. Of course, it's possible that each one came up with the word separately and at about the same time as the other. The phenomenon of Islamofascism was staring us in the face, and the moment was right for the word to be invented. If neither Hitchens nor Schwartz had come up with it, someone else would have.
I came up with the term "techno-libertarianism" to describe the application of biotech to the human individual under the individual's voluntary control, limited only by the development of technology at a given stage of history. I coined the term because I wanted a word that would cover only the forseeable scientific developments relating to human biotech, as opposed to the metaphysical or supernatural developments that tend to get included under the heading of "transhumanism." Within a few months, I noticed someone else using the word techno-libertarianism. There was no question of plagiarism on either side; it was just an instance of the time being ripe for a word to come into being, of a concept crying out for a label to give it form.
Interesting that the other guest on the O'Reilly segment was Yaron Brook, director of the Ayn Rand Institute, a strongly pro-war libertarian whose views on Iraq and more generally on Islamofascism I find in refreshing contrast to the isolationist, blame-America position of many libertarians and especially of the Libertarian Party.
Victor Davis Hanson directed this passage toward Arab readers. Interesting, though, that you can read the entire passage and change the one word "Islamic" to "European," and the passage still works completely:
Read the whole thing.. . . And so we have long shown patience with those who hate us, and more curiosity than real anger.
But that was then, and this is now. A two-kiloton explosion that incinerated thousands of our citizens--planned by Middle Easterners with the indirect financial support of purportedly allied governments, the applause of millions, and the snickering and smiles of millions more--has had an effect that grows not wanes.
So a neighborly bit of advice for our Islamic friends and their spokesmen abroad: topple your pillars of ignorance and the edifice of your anti-Americanism. Try to seek difficult answers from within to even more difficult questions without. Do not blame others for problems that are largely self-created or seek solutions over here when your answers are mostly at home. Please, think hard about what you are saying and writing about the deaths of thousands of Americans and your relationship with the United States. America has been a friend more often than not to you. But now you are on the verge of turning its people--who create, not follow, government--into an enemy: a very angry and powerful enemy that may be yours for a long, long time to come.
An eye-opening piece by Stephen Pollard on the odious politics of Peter Ustinov. I had no idea of what a totalitarian-worshipping lickspittle this guy was. Wouldn't you know he'd be a spokesperson for a UN agency? Just kind of fits. Sort of a shame though -- I'm not sure I'll be able to sit through another movie scene with him in it.
Sunday, April 04, 2004
Remember when things got so wild last summer that the Capitol Police were called in and a House Ways and Means Committee meeting nearly turned into a full-fledged brawl? The one where Pete Stark called Scott McInnis a wimp and a fruitcake and Chairman Bill Thomas a cocksucker? It was, of course, a notable contribution to the store of colorful invective Pete Stark has supplied over the years.
It was an episode reported almost completely (surprise!) from the Democrats' point of view.
Well, apparently things haven't gotten any better in the intervening months. There were two House Ways and Means Committee hearings last week that were broadcast on C-SPAN, and you should really go check out the streaming video before it disappears from C-SPAN's archive (look under "latest video" -- you'll have to click off the main page to get to video of the hearings). Unfortunately when I looked earlier today, it appeared that someone had put video of the same hearing under the two different links for the two different hearings. But that mistake might get fixed within the next few days.
Both hearings took place last Thursday, April 1. One dealt with the controversy over whether then-head of the Medicare office Thomas Scully deliberately suppressed high estimates of the cost of the new Medicare prescription-drug provision. In this hearing, the main fighting event took place between Republican Committee Chair Bill Thomas and Democrat Charlie Rangel, ably backed up by Baghdad Jim McDermott, who might just be the BBC's favorite congressman.
The other was a Health Subcommittee meeting on the upcoming Medicare discount drug cards. Here most of the arguing was between Republican Chair Nancy Johnson and the ever-bubbly Pete Stark (who, as you know if you clicked on the Fox News link from a few sentences back, once called Nancy Johnson a whore. Funny how the media didn't jump all over that. Can you imagine the reaction if a Republican referred to a Democratic subcommittee chairwoman as a whore? He'd have been forced to resign. But not our boy Pete).
This Health Subcommittee meeting is featured on this page, which indicates that the hearing transcript is not yet available. The bigger hearing, the one chaired by Bill Thomas, is featured here. I'll try to keep an eye on these pages and link to the transcripts when they show up.
The infighting is incredibly bitter in both hearings. I was aware of the explosion from last summer, but I hadn't been paying close attention to Ways and Means, and I was slightly taken aback by the level of tension and mutual contempt between the parties shown in both hearings. The ones I really felt sorry for were the witnesses, who sat there in the rhetorical crossfire going back and forth between the Republicans and the Democrats probably wishing they were just about anywhere else.
I wonder if this excruciating level of tension is a result of the closely divided congress and the Donks still not being accustomed to being in the minority, even after several years. They still seem to feel that majority leadership is their birthright. If they get trounced in November, I wonder, will that make things better or worse? And what on earth would "worse" look like? Physical attacks in the committee rooms?
There was a very strange moment yesterday morning on Fox News's Cashin' In. Ex-New York City Mayor Ed Koch was on, explaining why he intended to vote for George Bush in the upcoming election: all other issues were trumped by the issue of international terrorism, and Democrats just didn't have the stomach to take on the terrorists.
The opposing guest was one I'd seen before on Fox. He was introduced as "Democratic strategist Bob Beckel. He is not supporting Bush . . ." The title on the screen also repeatedly labeled him "Democratic Strategist."
At the first opportunity, Beckel lit into Koch.
No transcript is available yet on the Fox News site; when I checked a few minutes ago, the transcript archive only went up to last Saturday, March 27. I will try to remember to link to the transcript when it becomes available.
In the meantime, since I had a tape in the VCR, I can give you my homemade transcript of the pertinent part of what Beckel said:
I hope my writing conveys the babbling, raving quality of the way Beckel was speaking, but I think you had to see the tape to appreciate how out of control he sounded.Ed Koch -- I remember when Ed stood on Brooklyn Bridge ten years ago or so and said, "How am I doing?" And I said, "Great!" Don't ask the question again today, Ed.
If you're for Bush for the War on Terrorism -- then the first part was right, Afghanistan -- going into Iraq, what it's done is create more terrorists, frankly.
What we ought to do is what Kerry said. We're in there, we've got to stay for awhile. Let's declare victory and get out.
Ed, you know why you want to be in the Middle East? Ask (audio silenced) about this. The neocons and you have wanted a footprint in the Middle East to protect Israel from the very beginning of this thing.
He contradicted himself within the same breath when he said of Iraq, "We've got to stay for awhile. Let's declare victory and get out."
Then, he evidently said the name of a person Fox didn't think should be mentioned in this context, perhaps out of fear of a lawsuit. I've noticed that any time Fox is running a live program, it will put the word "live" in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. This show didn't have the "live" label, so it's safe to assume it was pre-taped. Apparently Fox bleeped the name Beckel mentioned as part of the Great Neocon Conspiracy: "Ask (silence) about this."
Then the clincher: "The neocons and you have wanted a footprint in the Middle East to protect Israel from the very beginning of this thing." Those un-American, unpatriotic Jooooos, dragging America into an unnecessary war on the basis of all those lies cooked up in Texas, just for the benefit of Israel! IT'S ALL THE FUCKING JEWS' FAULT!
This would not be so disturbing if it were coming from some lunatic-fringe, DemocraticUnderground/Indymedia type.
But Bob Beckel is a mainstream Democratic operative. According to his own website, Beckel worked on Robert Kennedy's campaign, served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Carter Administration, and was campaign manager for Walter Mondale.
This is yet more evidence that virtually the entire Democratic Party has moved into the fever swamps of conspiracy theories, including anti-Semitic ones. After the gibberish spouted by Ted Kennedy, Jay Rockefeller, Howard Dean, and John Kerry, you can throw this onto the ever-growing pile of examples. The Democratic Party seems sick unto death.
Thursday, April 01, 2004
I was googling for info on John Malkovich when I came across this post by an apparently strange guy named Richard Oxman, describing the passage last September 17 of H.R. 3077, in which the House of Representatives voted to support the creation of a federal tribunal to investigate and monitor criticism of Israel on college campuses.
Since I have some pretty strong libertarian leanings, it might surprise some people to find out that I think this is a good idea. Most "criticism of Israel" is nothing more than disguised anti-Semitism, and while anyone is free to be an anti-Semite, some of the more extreme manifestations that show up on campuses should not be allowed in institutions that receive federal money. He who pays the piper calls the tune, and if you want Uncle Sam to pony up, you'd better expect some federal oversight. It just damn well goes with the territory.
Besides, it's a question of fairness. Most college campuses are ludicrously sensitive to the possibility of offending any identifiable demographic group, yet some groups are mysteriously exempt from protection by the thought police. America and Israel obviously have targets painted on them, but other countries come under fire to the extent to which they are good allies of America or Israel. If you're going to have anti-discrimination laws at all, you'd better be prepared to apply them evenhandedly.
My opinion of the bill is tentative, however, because I haven't yet had a chance to do any real research on it. All I have to go on is the description I found in this Press Action post, and I'm not sure I want to trust anything I find on this blog.
To explain why I'm leery, let me point out that in the blog's side panel is a poll asking the reader to "Cast Your Ballot for President" -- and the available choices are George Bush, Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, John Kerry, Dennis Kucinich, Cynthia McKinney, Ralph Nader, Nobody, and Other. I clicked on View Results, and when I looked at them -- earlier this afternoon -- Noam Chomsky was way out in front. Enough said.
