With the election upon us, I thought it would behoove me to provide a handy translation guide for people who don't understand how a one-time democrat could bring herself to vote for George Bush:
You say: "We need to understand why we are hated. The key to living in peace is to not have enemies."
What I hear: "If people like me have our way, in 15 years you will have to wear a black sack over your head and sit in separate sections at restaurants."
You say: "But it's all about oil!"
What I hear: "If people like me have our way, in 15 years you will have to wear a black sack over your head and sit in separate sections at restaurants."
You say: Kerry is smarter and more nuanced than cowboy Bush."
What I hear: "If people like me have our way, in 15 years you will have to wear a black sack over your head and sit in separate sections at restaurants."
You say: "Bush lied! People died!"
What I hear: "If people like me have our way, in 15 years you will have to wear a black sack over your head and sit in separate sections at restaurants."
I hope this clears things up.
China has inked a $70 billion oil and natural gas deal with Iran. Gee, do you think that maybe, just maybe, this is tied to a promise of intervention if the U.S. tries to bring Iran's IAEA violations before the UN Security Council? Nah. Countries like China and France and Russia never do anything like that.
One of the things that worries me about the prospect of a Kerry presidency is the hidden cost of having to outbid the other Security Council members in these situations, which -- let's face it -- is the only way Kerry is going to avoid that cowboy-ish use of force that he so disdains.
The Kuwaiti newspaper Al Rai Al Aam is reporting that Osama bin Laden is living in an area north of Kabul. Of course, it makes no sense that his supporters would come out and say this if it were true. Perhaps the Al Rai Al Aam newspaper is the Kuwaiti version of CBS...
LGF has pointed out that MSNBC has altered the transcript of Tom Brokaw's October 28th interview with John Kerry. Among the changes, MSNBC has removed Kerry's statement that "my record is not public," which refered to parts of his military record including his IQ scores.
The original LGF post links to the original page for the interview along with the newly revised page. However, the current versions of BOTH of these pages omit Kerry's statement that his record is not public.
At the time of this writing, however, it is possible to pull up the original version of the original page by using Google's caching feature.
As indicated by LGF and others, the original does have the Kerry "not public" statement.
This, my fellow Americans, is double-plus ungood.
Many bloggers (including the Volokh Conspiracy) have noted a NYPost report about the missing 12 minutes of the Bin Laden video. It turns out that Al Jazeera edited out a bunch of material in which UBL admits that Al Qaeda has suffered serious setbacks, and in which he complains of how the Afghan election was successfully completed and not thwarted by Taliban violence.
Naturally, the rest of the U.S. and world media don't want you to know this any more than Al Jazeera does, so thus far it has not been picked up by other news outlets. I will be surprised if any major television network or national paper (other than the Wash Times, FoxNews, or WSJ) picks up the story.
Post here if you find I'm wrong.
One thing most Americans seem to agree on is that UBL's latest video helps President Bush's re-election prospects.
What the left and right disagree about is whether UBL actually understood that when he decided to offer his 2 Riyals worth on the election.
I have seen several Democrats argue that if UBL is as smart as he allegedly is, then he must have realized he was helping Bush.
Just as many Democrats have confused intelligence with eloquence in the past (in their dismissal of George Bush), so they are now confusing intelligence with knowledge.
The fact that Osama seems to have a brain does not immediately imply, for instance, that he knows how to speak English. More importantly, it does not imply that he knows how to speak American.
The man has spent his entire life in the Greater Middle East and Africa, studying Wahhabist Islam and terrorist tactics. His stated goal, when speaking to his followers, has been to reintroduce an Islamist Caliphate and expel all infidels from lands that have historically been ruled by Arabs and/or Muslims.
Those are the things about which we can assume he is knowledgeable.
A life lived among Islamists in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Sudan is not, however, the best preparation for getting inside the American mind.
What Osama knows -- what everyone but John Kerry and his most devoted followers knows -- is that a stable democratic nation in the heart of the Middle East is incompatible with the reintroduction of the Caliphate. In fact, it is the single thing most likely to prevent the return of an Islamist Caliphate.
He therefore wants to prevent the rise of a free Iraq.
Now ask yourself, which of the two candidates has been less supportive of the war in Iraq? Which one has called it the "wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time"? Which one must Osama believe would pull U.S. troops out of Iraq the soonest?
That, ladies and gentlemen, is who Uncle Sama would like you to vote for.
UPDATE:
Betsy's page has a link to a good piece on Senator Kerry's reaction to the UBL tape.
Just minutes ago, John Kerry made a statement about the new bin Laden tape:
I will stop at absolutely nothing to hunt down, capture, or kill the terrorists wherever they are, whatever it takes, period.
Hmm. Back in the early 70's, when being antiwar was seen as a political meal-ticket, Kerry spoke to a group of students at the University of Northern Iowa, and one student's summary of the speech included the following:
John Kerry said that the reason he is speaking out against the war is because the whole thing is so absurd. He as a person had nothing against the people of Vietnam and could in no way feel right about killing someone he didn't even know. He said that the government has made a mistake, that it should admit to the mistake, and then pull out of Vietnam. He feels that the present policy of "winding down the war" is false. You're either at war or you're not.
Well, now. The natural question here is, do we believe the Kerry of 1972 or the Kerry of 2004? Because, if the old Kerry is the real Kerry, unless bin Laden is one of those mysterious "foreign leaders" with whom he has met, Kerry isn't going to be able to "hunt down, capture or kill" anybody.
If immitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Democratic pundits must really be blushing after after having some of their favorite sound bites lifted by Osama Bin Laden in his latest video.
Now which box am I supposed to check again, Mr. Bin Laden?
...
EAT ME.
A British medical journal, The Lancet, has just "fast-tracked" to publication an article estimating that the Iraq war and its aftermath have seen about an additional 98,000 deaths in the past 18 months over what would have been expected based on official pre-War Iraqi statistics.
Uh, exqueaze me? Official Saddam Hussein Reign of Terror Totalitarian Dictatorship statistics were the mortality benchmark? Now, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I don't recall ANY of that madman's mass graves having little body-count booklets buried in them next to the 6-year-old girls with their heads shot off--still clutching their mothers' hands.
The authors' estimation procedure also leaves a lot to be desired. Remember, their number is an estimate, not an actual count. As Tim Worstall has pointed out at Tech Central Station, the authors guess that somewhere between 8,000 more people and 194,000 more people may have died because of the war. So they've really narrowed it down there.
Not only did this dubious bit of fuzzy math get published, The Lancet pumped it through the peer-review process in six or seven weeks. That happens to be about five or six times faster than a normal academic journal cycle. Why would they do that on the eve of the U.S. presidential election, you ask? No, you probably aren't asking that. You don't need to ask.
UPDATE (10:42am PT): Lancet Methodology Ludicrous
Here is how the "researchers" arrived at their estimated death tolls: they asked locals. That's it. No proof whatsoever. They did not even ask to see death certificates (except in a small fraction of cases): "The research team decided that asking for death certificates in each case, during the interviews, might cause hostility and could put the research team in danger."
If the "researchers" were not suffused with bias they would have immediately seen the inanity of this methodology: opponents of the war and the democratization of Iraq had an incentive to grossly inflate mortality counts, whereas the truly bereaved would not deny their losses.
I used to sit on the peer-review board of an academic journal, and I quit over just such a biased methodology, when a paper was published against my recommendation. The paper relied on student test scores in which the tests had been administered by the students' own family members!!! They had an incentive to inflate those scores, an incentive that would be obvious to any unbiased party. When the journal published it anyway, I walked.
It's sad -- but not surprising -- to see that the Lancet is no better than the rag I walked away from.
American artists and intellectuals, writes Victor Davis Hanson, are vexed. They cannot fathom why so many of their fellow citizens continue support George W. Bush despite their most artful and nuanced protestations.
Rather than sit idly by while the heads of our chattering classes begin to explode in frustration, I would like to offer an explanation of the phenomenon they find so puzzling.
Successful artists and intellectuals are, by definition, talented communicators. A poet or a pundit who regularly struggles for words is, by definition, incompetent. If most of the people you spend time with are also in the business of communicating, you come to equate eloquence with intelligence, ability, and reason.
That equation is mistaken.
In a previous life I was a computer software engineer with a company you may have heard of. Everyone I worked with was at a minimum an able coder, but there were a few whose brilliance never ceased to impress me. One of the most brilliant, I'll call him Fred, was also one of the least eloquent. He regularly mangled the English language in ways that made me cringe. His C++ code, by contrast, was like a fugue by Bach, and his ability to debug other people's code made Sherlock Holmes look like Mr. Magoo.
Americans who work outside of academia and the arts generally know similar people whose intelligence is not reflected in their vocabulary or felicity of expression. As a result, they do not assume, as many on the left have assumed, that George Bush is a mental lightweight simply because of his tortured grammar.
As it turns out, middle America is right. A recent (and lengthy) analysis of military intelligence test scores reveals that, if anything, George Walker Bush is smarter than John Forbes Kerry.
Middle America cares more about substance than style. It cares more about veracity than verbosity. It cares more about guts than it does about hair.
That is why we will be voting for George Bush.
Thomas Lipscomb's article in the New York Sun on Tuesday covered the recent discovery of Kerry-related materials at the Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University at Lubbock. The items consist of captured Viet Cong documents that show that the North Vietnamese "monitored closely and looked favorably upon the activities of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War during the period Senator Kerry served most actively as the group's spokesman and a member of its executive committee."
I think Kerry's promoting of the Viet Cong position regarding American POW's is very clear in this article from July 23, 1971:
Angry wives of American prisoners of war lashed out Thursday at peace advocate John Kerry, accusing him of using the POW issue as a springboard to political office.
When Kerry, a spokesman for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, attempted to introduce relatives of POWs at a news conference four women in the back of the room shouted, "That's a lie!" and "What office are you going to run for next?"
...
At the opening of the news conference, Kerry called on Nixon to publicly set a release date for withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam so that POWs could come home.
He said Nixon earlier refused to set a withdrawal date because of North Vietnam's refusal to guarantee the return of American POWs.
But the latest Viet Cong peace offer which guarantees the release of POWs as American troops are withdrawn is being ignored by Nixon, Kerry charged.
The question is, though, was Kerry parroting the Viet Cong position in response to directions from Hanoi, or is that what he would have been doing anway as one of history's quintessential "useful fools?" The Jawa Report addresses that possibility much better than I ever could:
Let me start off by saying the documents appear real to me. But having said that, do we really learn anything new? I'm just not so sure this is the smoking gun that it is alleged to be. In 1995 I attended a May Day rally in Moscow's Red Square. At that rally I heard the head of the Communist Party USA as he denounced Yankee Imperialism, mourned over the loss of the Soviet Union, and lied about how Soviets once had a greater standard of living than Americans. Did the CPUSA have direct links to the Soviet Union? Of course. Did this guy actually believe the vile garbage spewing from his mouth? As far as I could tell, yes.
The phrase Stalin used for people like this was 'useful idiots'. These were people who thought they were doing what was in the best interests of their own country by betraying that country. It always fascinates me when I hear or read what traitors write. Very rarely does a traitor think of what he is doing as treason. Rather, the common thread among traitors is that they believe that they are smarter than officials in government. They believe that their acts of betrayal are in fact acts of patriotism. So when traitors gave away nuclear secrets to the Soviets at the start of the Cold War, they rationalized it as a higher form of patriotism. If the people in the State Department were only as smart as me they would realize that the only way to guarantee our nation's safety is if the Soviets also have a bomb.
Does this sound familiar?
During one of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War protests in April of 1971, member Phil Lavoie said, "I love this country, man. Like wow, it’s really beautiful. But we’re not fighting for democracy over there. We’re fighting so some people in this country can have more money."
(Elyria Chronicle-Telegram 4/23/71 p4)
Fight the power, brother.
You owe it to yourself to watch this video juxstaposing a younger George Bush being told to fix his hair for the cameras, and a more recent Senator Edwards re-enacting a scene from the movie "Shampoo."
Having seen both uncut video files that were used to make this composite, I can tell you that Bush touched his hair exactly once, and that Edwards, well, he was still primpin' away after about 10 minutes, and the cats were getting frightened by my laughter, so I had to stop watching it.
BeldarBlog has an excellent post comparing John Kerry and Neville Chamberlain:
When Neville Chamberlain returned from the Munich Conference on September 30, 1938, proclaiming that his agreement with Hitler had secured "an honourable peace" and "peace for our time," his personal history up to that point — as compared to John Kerry's now — gave comparatively little proof that he was a fool and a dupe of the enemies of civilization. If John Kerry is elected, however, and turns out to be the Neville Chamberlain of the 21st Century — if his presidency is consistent with his actual record, rather than his current rhetoric — then given what the American public already knew of his personal history as of November 2004, there will be one clear word with which history will describe both him and ourselves
Suckers.
Read the whole thing.
Am I the only one who is totally nonplussed by the recurrent shot of an IAEA "seal" that is running on the cable news networks during NYTrogate coverage?
From the look of it, it's just a conventional brass lock, a wire, and a little crimped metal tag (presumably stamped with an IAEA number).
Now maybe there's something to these tags that makes them difficult to forge, but if so it sure doesn't leap out at the casual observer. It seems as though Microsoft has better anti-piracy protections on ever box of its software than the International Atomic Engergy Agency puts on WMD facilities.
UPDATE:
Well, it turns out that this observation is moot. According to a post at Wizbang, the al Qaqaa bunkers:
were only partially sealed. The front door was tagged but there were ventilations shafts on the SIDE of the buildings that could not be sealed. Quoting from the report: "The shafts were not sealed and could provide removal routes for the HMX and RDX while leaving the front door locked."
My partner in crime, Deus Ex Macrame, also tells me that she saw a report that Saddam was forging IAEA seals! If she digs up a link, we'll post it here.
If John Kerry is elected and, somewhere down the road, he finds himself having to deal with leaks by disgruntled administration and ex-administration officials, lets be sure to remind him that he thinks leaking government documents is a good thing. This is from a July 7, 1971 profile of Kerry of the Walla Walla Union Bulletin:
He says he deplores a lack of statesmanship in this country but is cheered by Daniel Ellsberg’s action in bringing the Pentagon papers before the public.
“It shows that it’s still amazing what one honest person can do,” he said.
For those who, like me, are too young to remember the Nixon era, Daniel Ellsberg was a former normal person who gradually turned moonbat, climaxing with his leaking of confidential documents about the Vietnam War (the Pentagon Papers). Mr. Ellsberg attended some of the same anti-war rallies as Kerry back in the 70’s:
Awe-struck and admiring, [reporter J. Anthony] Lucas followed Ellsberg on his round of activities. First he receives an award from the Federal Employees for Peace, and we hear him dropping into the vintage idiom of radical chic: "Brothers and sisters, I am really high on you…" Then he is on one 747 jet after another, to L.A., to Chicago, everywhere.”
At the Orchestra Hall in Chicago there is a giant Peace Awards event. Searchlights probe the night sky. Ramsey Clark is master of ceremonies. Joan Baez is there, and George Wald, and Pete McCloskey and John Kerry and Wayne Morse. Ellsberg goes over big. (Coshocton Tribune 2/1/72)
Oh, and the brave Mr. Ellsberg was recently making headlines by encouraging Bush administration officials to follow in his footsteps and leak documents about Operation Enduring Freedom.
I’m sure Mr. Kerry will feel the same way about people like Daniel Ellsberg when it’s his administration being kneecapped.
So I’m scanning some microfilm from 1946, and I spy an article titled "State Guard Called As Pitched Battle Rages Over Voting: Armed Siege at County Seat." It really has to be read in its entirety to be appreciated, but this should give a hint:
ATHENS, Tenn., Aug. 2 – (AP) – Two men were reported killed and at least 22 wounded here tonight as a bitter local political campaign flared into an open election day battle around the barricaded McMinn County jail.
From within the jail, surrounded by a crowd estimated at 500 persons, a man who identified himself as Justice of the Peace Herman F. Moses told newsmen via telephone that "we might have eight wounded and two dead here."
Besieged Deputies Trade Shots With Mob
He did not name the victims and there was no way to check his report as members of the crowd swapped gunfire with the deputized officers within the jail.
A few moments earlier, Moses had answered a telephone call from Chattanooga.
After, volley after volley had been fired by the combatants using pistols and light rifles, the barricaded officers sent out an appeal by telephone – "We need help."
Meanwhile at Nashville, the state capitol, Adj. Gen. Hilton Butler announced that the 6th Regiment of the state guard was being mobilized at Maryville, Tenn. They would be ready to move into Athens at daybreak.
Elements of the Middle Tennessee Brigade have also been mobilized and will move into Athens from the west at the same time, Butler said.
The local hospital said 14 persons, five of them considered in a serious condition, had received treatment for gunshot wounds. In addition, ambulance drivers said they had been unable to reach three other persons lying within the range of fire and the extent of their injuries was not known.
So…in about a week, when we are collectively rolling our eyes at the plague-like collection of attorneys that have descended upon various swing states, and bemoaning the incidents of voter fraud and other shenanigans, we should take the time to kick-back, take a deep breath, and thank our lucky stars that this election has not involved the use of the following sentence:
A double line of men with drawn guns was formed and the ballot box was carried out to the sedan.
Fingers crossed.
On Monday, Senator Kerry ran with a New York Times' story about 380 tons of high explosives missing from the al Qaqaa facility outside of Baghdad. Kerry, Edwards, and assorted Democratic party operatives have blamed president Bush for failing to guard the site and prevent the looting.
The trouble (for the Times and the Kerry campaign) is that the stuff was apparently already gone when U.S. troops arrived on the scene the day after the fall of Baghdad back in April of 2003. NBC reporter Jim Miklaszewski observes that:
April 10, 2003, only three weeks into the war, NBC News was embedded with troops from the Army's 101st Airborne as they temporarily take over the Al Qakaa weapons installation south of Baghdad. But these troops never found the nearly 380 tons of some of the most powerful conventional explosives, called HMX and RDX, which is now missing.
Why didn't the NYTimes or the IAEA who fed them the story bother to mention this? One official Miklaszewski spoke with has an idea:
Recent disagreements between the administration and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency makes this announcement appear highly political.
Looks like Kerry's gonna have to wipe that Qaqaa-looting grin off his face.
UPDATE (Oct 26, 04: 8:00am PT):
CNN has picked up and headlined the NBC report, but, true to form, the NYTimes has only buried an oblique reference to it deep in its follow-up story. I used to subscribe to the print edition of the Times.... I still can't get my hands completely clean.
UPDATE (Oct 26, 04: 5:30pm PT):
Betsy over at the BetsysPage blog points out another testimonial to the absence of high explosives at al-Qaqaa when U.S. troops arrived on the scene in April of 2003. Thanks Betsy.
According to this EurasiaNet article, members of the Taliban are accepting that the recent elections in Afghanistan were a success:
Mulla Abdul Salam ("Raketti") describes himself as a former Taliban military commander in Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar Province. Before that, he was a mujahedin fighter against Soviet occupation forces.
He earned the nickname "Raketti" on the battlefield, because of his proficiency with shoulder-fired rockets.
Now based in the southeastern province of Zabul, Mullah Raketti was interviewed by RFE/RL’s Afghan service in the southern city of Kandahar recently. He discussed his view of the country’s future following the presidential election.
Mulla Raketti said he was willing to accept any national government picked by the voters and he believes many of his former Taliban colleagues feel similarly. He said the successful conduct of the presidential election in early October provides an opportunity for Afghan Transitional Administration Chairman Karzai, if he is confirmed as the new leader, to win the support of many Taliban members.
Mulla Raketti told RFE/RL that the election -- which passed relatively peacefully despite Taliban threats to disrupt the poll -- represented what he called a blow for the militia.
"In my opinion, ’yes, [it was a blow].’ The Taliban had said they would destroy the election process and that they would not allow the elections to be held. They failed in what they said," Mulla Raketti said.
If even the mujahedin are reluctantly coming to terms with the fact that the Afghan elections were a success, can the mainstream media be far behind?
Via NRO's The Corner is this wonderful article in Slate by Richard Rushfield. He had the great idea of wearing pro-Kerry paraphernalia into a heavily pro-Bush part of town, and vice-versa. It goes a long way towards explaining why so many liberals think that they "don't know anyone who voted for Bush."
In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, author Douglas Adams imagined a little creature called the "Babel fish." When placed in a person's ear, the Babel fish would automatically translate any form of communication in any language into something the person could understand. The Babel fish, Adams wrote, "was responsible for more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of the Universe."
In the hope that Adams is wrong about the merits of understanding foreigners, TheGantelope has translated a recent think-piece by German historian Michael Sturmer. The newspaper Le Monde thought so highly of this piece that it translated it into French. That's good, 'cause we've got French in our bag of tricks, but German is mostly Greek to us.
If you'd like a window into what European intellectuals and media elites are thinking about the U.S., read on… [ our comments are interleaved between sections of the Sturmer editorial, which is block-quoted ]
The United States, Europe's Necessary Partner
by Michael Sturmer
LE MONDE | Oct 19, 2004
Europeans in general, and the French and Germans in particular, should be careful what they wish for, because their prayers may well be heard in Washington: after the Vietnam syndrome, America could develop an Iraq syndrome, telling others to go to hell and, protected behind her oceans, remaining the most secure nation in an insecure world.
"Protected behind her oceans"? From terrorists? Like we were protected on and before 9/11? The fact that even a highly educated European history professor could be so uninformed as to think that that's possible explains a lot about Europe's inability to understand U.S. foreign policy. Most Americans realize that the seas no longer confer safety, and so support a more aggressive, outward-looking defense policy than they did in earlier times. Europeans have still failed to grasp that simple fact, and so search for (and in fact manufacture) other reasons.
What's especially stunning about Sturmer's ignorance on this point is that he didn't need to figure it out for himself. President Bush has repeatedly made this point in a number of speeches dating back at least to 2003.
Perhaps if Europeans spent more time listening to what American leaders actually say, instead of mocking their diction, making nuanced jokes about their mannerisms, or denigrating them as "cowboys," they would begin to get a clue.
Bush the father will no doubt long remain the last American president to have offered to a European nation – West Germany, in 1989 – a "partnership in leadership." Even Tony Blair, abandoned by his European comrades, has not managed to obtain it. The Iraq crisis confirms what General de Gaulle summed up in saying that war sometimes reveals things that otherwise would have remained hidden. This conflict has become an hour of truth for the Atlantic alliance at a time when Eastern Europeans are putting all their hopes into the possibility of being, for the first time in history, on the side of the stronger power. The first lesson is that the Americans, regardless of who occupies the White House, proceed on every vital question from the principle: "Together when possible, alone when necessary."
Sturmer is right that America will not stand for a U.S. president who cedes our nation's autonomy to another power – particularly at this point in our history. He's wrong in thinking that Bush has not made important concessions for Blair (e.g., the second trip to the U.N.?), something that Bush would do for very few other foreign leaders.
While Sturmer's last sentence is undoubtedly true for most Americans, we doubt that it is true for most Kerry supporters. For them, just as for Kerry, we suspect that the real test for military action is: "Proceed together, if enemy tanks are rolling down main street, but otherwise do not proceed at all." Remember, Kerry opposed freeing Kuwait from Saddam's clutches in Gulf War I, even with a coalition blessed by the participation of France.
In establishing the parameters of diplomacy during the first three months of his administration, George W. Bush fell neatly into that tradition, apart from the criticisms of his predecessors and the rants [we have no idea what Sturmer's getting at here, ed.]. Positions that seemed to be in opposition to one another in the heat of the electoral campaign were revealed to be, on the larger scale of the life of a nation, simple variations on a common theme. Harold MacMillan was once asked what drove politics: "Events, my dear sir, events."
Second lesson: the effort to circumscribe America's worldwide power via the U.N. and to reduce it to more European dimensions is doomed to failure, even with the help of an axis that stretched all the way to Moscow, to borrow the phrase – as fatal as it was unconscionable – that had currency at one point in Berlin. Gulliver will not allow himself to be bound by the Lilliputians, and both France and Germany have already shown that they heed the U.N. only when it suits them.
Well, it's nice to see a European intellectual admit that countering U.S. power via the U.N. is one of the driving forces in European foreign policy. And, batting 1000, Sturmer is also right to point out French and German hypocrisy on the necessity of U.N. approval.
Third lesson, hardly more novel than the first: Europe cannot unite itself against the United States, but only within the context of a larger pax Americana. Europe is weaker when Germany and France pull in one direction while Great Britain, Poland, Italy, and the Netherlands pull in another. It is not by [anti-American] electioneering in Berlin or paleo-Gallic posturing in Paris that we will enhance Europe's capacities for action. These only serve to undermine and demean the capacities we have.
Duh!
Europe has gained nothing from the Iraq crisis, except perhaps the painful recognition of its own powerlessness. It has, on the other hand, lost much, particularly its self-confidence and the certainty of being able to count on itself and, as needed, on the United States in times of crisis. He who believes Europe can be united without or against the U.S. has against him all the lessons of history, from the Marshall plan to the creation of NATO.
Maybe so, Dr. Sturmer, but at this point most Americans would not be overly inclined to offer Europe any new "plans," except perhaps the "Teresa Heinz Plan" (i.e., "Shove it"), or the "Dick Cheney Plan" (you can guess that one, I think).
If sanity is slowly returning to French and German intellectuals, it is doing so far too late. We doubt that most Americans now favor a united Europe if it is united under a French or German banner. We will always stand by those European countries that have stood by us, what happens to the rest is of less interest.
Worse yet, efforts to do so – to once again cite de Gaulle – go against "the force of things." It will not fracture Europe, but it will reduce her to little more than a free-trade zone. Old national egos will once again break the surface and will debate subsidies and postal systems, larger nations will look out for themselves while smaller ones will cautiously seek out protectors, and there will be little left of Europe's capacity for action.
Uh, Michael? That's pretty much what y'all have got right now.
For the United States, as for other nations, charity properly begins at home. A stable, U.S.-aligned Europe has always been in America's interest. During the Cold War, NATO was the mechanism for achieving that aim. Today Washington is using it as a toolbox, while Europeans fancy it an engine of miracles that produces security out the bottom without much being fed into it at the top. The Istanbul summit changed nothing: NATO is broader yet more hobbled than ever. This alliance, whose members can no longer rely on one another, has all but had it.
Sturmer's comment on a U.S.-aligned Europe strikes us as naïve. France in particular has never been "aligned" with any nation, and certainly not with the United States. No American politician since the Revolutionary War has imagined otherwise. Since France ceased to be a world power itself, it has sought to undermine the actual world powers by playing them against each other. It did this by withdrawing from Nato in 1966, during the height of the Cold War, and it is doing so today by cozying up to the dictators in Beijing (e.g., search this site for the words France and China).
Given that reality, no well-informed American harbors any illusion that a united Europe will be U.S.-aligned if France plays any role in it. Germany, too, seems to have little inclination to align itself with the U.S. That's their decision. We're not weeping over it. We're moving on.
In time of need, will America come to Europe's rescue, despite the behavior of the Europeans? [To the rescue of the Brits, Italians, Poles, etc.? Yes, but it will be because of their actions, not despite them. To the rescue of the French, the Belgians, or the Germans? Not unless there is some critical U.S. interest at stake. ed.] Recall that, until the 10th of September 2001, the Bush administration was in the process of reducing its overseas commitments and that it is still doing so today, that the Iraq war is not ripe for a sequel, and that an Iraq syndrome similar to the Vietnam syndrome is beginning to develop. In an effort to surf on the wave of public opinion, John Kerry has promised to allow himself only to be dragged into vital wars, something that will not make the management of future crises any easier.
This "Iraq syndrome" idea is another of the major mistakes still being made by European elites. While Senator Kerry's most ardent supporters (including the mainstream media) never tire of comparing Iraq to Vietnam, far more Americans liken the current conflict to World War II. Where an earlier generation was forced to fight a global battle against Axis fascism, we must fight a global war against Islamo-fascism. We see helping the Iraqis to establish a toe-hold for democracy in the Middle-East as a crucial battle in the war against fanatical Islamist terrorism. A battle that we must win.
Whoever occupies the White House in future will be pulled by the opposing forces of isolationism and global mission, with the outcome uncertain. Mr. Bush has well discovered the appeal of allies and even – after a few remedial lessons from Baghdad – the usefulness of the U.N.'s blessings, but, when in doubt, unilateralism will triumph. George Bush is more American than John Kerry, but the latter is not quite as European as Europeans would like to believe. A Kerry victory would not erase trans-Atlantic friction overnight. On the contrary, that which was refused to Mr. Bush – a NATO role in post-conflict Iraq – would have to be accorded to Mr. Kerry. Otherwise, NATO might as well lower her flag forever.
We agree that George Bush is more American than John Kerry. That is why Kerry supporters include those on the left who never tire of criticizing our nation and its policies, whatever those policies happen to be. He is more palatable to them than a more American president.
Bush always knew the benefit of allies. What he and many other Americans have learned is that France and Germany are not our allies. Germany is perhaps best described as a strategic partner whose antipathy towards America is a nuisance that must be tolerated. France is a strategic opponent, by its own choosing. While it is necessary to work with France in some ways, such as inter-agency communication within the law-enforcement community, it is more clear than ever that France's main foreign policy goal is to constrain America's freedom of action by any means necessary, including by building up the military power of the Chinese dictatorship (In addition to holding joint military exercises with the Chinese, France is lobbying to have Europe drop bans on military exports to China—and not just for economic reasons).
As for the U.N., the only thing that has changed is that our doubts about its moral bankruptcy have been wiped away. No one who has followed the trail of the Oil for Fraud program has missed the fact that security council votes were bought. No one has missed the fact that dictators have chaired U.N. human rights committees. The extent to which the U.N. is now appropriately reviled in much of America has still not percolated into the European mindset. The sooner it does, the better.
That's why European nations should take their own security more seriously, and build a level of military readiness at least comparable to that of France or the United Kingdom. But most of them, Germany in particular, are far from that goal. Even Balkan peace-keeping operations, celebrated as an example of European prowess, could quickly collapse if the U.S. were not there to provide guarantees in case of escalation.
And, thanks to French and German obstructionism and antipathy, such guarantees will be far less forthcoming in future.
[…]
From its first act to its last, which of course has yet to be written, the Iraq war has left a sour lingering taste in Washington, even if neo-conservatives have relearned to appreciate allies and the legitimacy they bring. The crisis of confidence feeds on the fluctuations in foreign policy and U.S. security that Raymond Aron has described as oscillating "between crusading spirit and isolationism from a corrupt world that refuses America's message."
Again, the value of true allies was never in doubt. The fact that Germany and France are not U.S. allies might have been in doubt before Iraq. It no longer is. And to whose crisis of confidence is Sturmer referring?
Whoever wins this election, the fundamental tendencies of U.S. foreign policy will persist, with their contradictions, as they have for two-hundred years. The most important and most difficult is the option developed by Wilson in 1918, directed against Lenin and Wilhelm II, which consisted of "making the world safe for democracy." The Hamiltonians ... see the world as a market they wish the U.S. to dominate. Jeffersonians learned from the French Revolution to avoid "entangling alliances" and therefore seek security principally at home. Finally, for Jacksonians, everything boils down to U.S. security and prosperity, the rest of the world be damned!
Rooted in various traditions and interests, these forces are still at work and we cannot know which will prevail. In earlier times, the USSR imposed an American presence on Europe. Oil leads it to remain in the Middle-East and China draws it to the far-East. It no longer counts on Europe. Can Europe count on America?
Many foreigners and most of the American left have fallen into the trap of believing their own propaganda. Before 9/11, as in the decision to liberate Kuwait from Saddam in Gulf War I, oil no doubt played a major role. After 9/11, its relative importance has diminished and the importance of combating Islamo-facism through a Wilsonian democracy project has grown. America could have secured all the cheap Iraqi oil it wanted from Saddam if, like France, it had been willing to abandon sanctions. Why it is so hard for European intellectuals and the American left to grasp that point is unclear.
In this context, Europeans should not content themselves to wait for Washington to come around to Churchill's view that "the only thing worse than having allies is not having them." They would do better to draw some inescapable conclusions: That Europe needs America more than America needs Europe. That Europe cannot act on the world stage except in concert with the United States. That the purpose of the UN is not to turn European nations against one another or against the United States. Finally, that, from London to Warsaw, we seek the ultimate assurance of security from an alignment with America, not from France or – absurdly, given its economic weakness and lack of nerve – from Germany. And that, in a crisis, neither France nor Germany could avoid making a pilgrimage to Washington.
And who now believes that Americans would be willing to fight and die for France or Germany?
--Andrew Coulson with Deus Ex Macrame
If you wonder why it is that John Kerry has voted against so many weapons systems during his time in the Senate, this snippet from a summary of a speech that Kerry gave at the University of Northern Iowa back in 1972 might clear things up:
One afternoon forty high school students took an education field trip to UNI. The purpose of the event was to hear the views of John Kerry on the Vietnam War and what he has been doing...After his speech there was a question and answer period. When he was asked his opinion of a professional army he said it was unwise. His reasons for this viewpoint proved very enlightening and thought provoking.
I'll say.
UPDATE (by Andrew):
Given the current post over at Powerline, it seems that Democratic strategy is not to eliminate our standing army, as Kerry wanted to do in the '70s, but just to disenfranchise it a little.
During the run-up to the recent war in Iraq, while the protestors and pundits were repeating the mantra “No War for Oil,” I was scanning microfilm of newspapers from the early 1950’s. One article I found, which I regrettably did not print-out, reported that the Soviets were set to launch a new propaganda campaign, the centerpiece of which was going to be the assertion that General MacArthur and President Truman were waging the war in Korea in order to enrich themselves on Wall Street. It was just a single, small article, reporting a fact. There were not, as far as I could ascertain, any follow-ups. No lengthy Sunday Magazine exposes on MacArthur’s ties to investment banking firms, or Truman’s shadowy ties to big business. No opinion columns railing against the capturing of the White House by cigar-chomping capitalists. The media of that era considered the source and took the propaganda for what it was. And that was the end of it.
Which brings me to this Isntapundit post that I came across via Andrea Harris. It’s one of the best posts I’ve read in months, and it addresses the phenomenon illustrated above: that a lot of what passes for mainstream reporting and political discourse today is almost indistinguishable from the anti-American, pro-communist propaganda put out by the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War:
Cronkite's broadcast marks an historical turning point in American history. It demonstrated the tremendous power of a journalistic establishment consolidated into a few national television networks and publications. For decades thereafter, the major media would mold popular opinion on the national scale, assigning ideas to the mainstream or the margin as they deemed fit. Indeed, the trade of journalism now consciously regards the shaping of opinion as its rightful purpose, and has abandoned the quaint notion of merely informing opinion. Journalists, consciously or otherwise, omit or distort any information that doesn't accord with their view of the world. Worst of all, to this day, the conventional wisdom of journalists shows the influence of Communist propaganda.
Consider the following passage from David Dellinger's foreword to Vietnam Will Win!
Having seen the faces of napalmed and tortured Vietnamese, having experienced the insistence of the military-industrial complex on continuing an unjustifiable and losing war which has already killed off more than 30,000 Americans, we have taken a fresh look at the liberal corporate economy at home. We are reexamining the system of "representative democracy" which assures the privileges and preserves the power of the power elite. We are questioning the relevance of an antiwar movement which has not faced up to the causes of war and has been insensitive to the daily institutionalized violence of America's property relationships.
Obviously, Dellinger's agenda was quite radical. The result of this "reexamination" was supposed to be a Communist revolution in the United States. That didn't exactly happen.
But you could dust off that passage and publish it in Time magazine today, along these lines:
Having seen the images from Abu Ghraib, having found no WMD to justify this losing war which has already killed more than 1,000 Americans, it is time to take a fresh look at the powerful corporate interests (including such beneficiaries of the Iraq adventure as Halliburton) which wield so much clout in this Administration.
...
George Bush is too busy cutting taxes for the rich, to stop and wonder why so many foreigners hate America, and why we have lost the respect of our natural allies. The violence and inequity of America's relationship with so much of the world is mirrored in the widening gap between rich and poor.
The only part of Dellinger's passage that doesn't come along nicely is the slam at the "antiwar movement". It's not clear what he meant. But the bit about "facing up to the causes of war" translates perfectly to the familiar plaintive question: why do they hate us? Dellinger's answer to the question would pass editorial muster at Time, so long as it was phrased in the latest fashion rather than that clunky Communist jargon.
It amazes me that people who fancy themselves world-wise, who pride themselves on not falling for “the government line” and who congratulate themselves for being nobody’s fool, then turn around and repeat, with no apparent sense of irony, all of the vicious, trumped-up propaganda that has been put out there by anti-administration and anti-American sources (New York Times, I’m looking at you). They are far too savvy and hip to believe that there are “evildoers” who want to “take away our freedoms,” yet they parrot charges that the President of the United States lied about weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for invading Iraq so that the corporation for whom his friend used to work could make money (never explaining why the evil masterminds then failed to plant some of these WMD’s in Iraq to bolster their story). They remind me of goth kids who fancy themselves rebels and mavericks, trumpeting their refusal to conform to society…as they huddle together in their identical outfits of head-to-toe black.
Look, it is right and proper to view your government with a healthy dose of skepticism. Any administration is going to try to put the best spin on its actions, we all know that, and you have to take its pronouncements with a grain of salt. But rejecting outright the version of events as told by the White House, while swallowing whole the obvious propaganda coming from its enemies and detractors, is not an indication of wisdom. It’s moonbattery. And just because you have enough sense not to take candy from strangers doesn’t mean you aren’t still an idiot for falling for a Nigerian scam e-mail.
Given his success in hanging on to power for thirty odd years, it is puzzling how Saddam could have wasted so much of his oil-for-fraud money.
The three biggest recipients of his kickback largess were Russia, France, and China. But France and China could have been relied upon to oppose U.S. intervention in Iraq--and U.S. foreign policy generally--wether or not Saddam paid them off. As we've noted here on numerous occassions, The French have not only been hostile to the U.S. since the 1950s, they were hostile in the immediate aftermath of WWII and even, to some extent, during the war.
China also has a vested interest in the containment of U.S. power.
Only Russia really needed to be bought, since Putin has occasionally been favorable to U.S. foreign policy and friendly toward the Bush administration.
That means Saddam wasted two thirds of the money that he raked off UNScam.
His inefficiency is helpful, though, in that it has revealed France's duplicity to a wider audience that would have been aware of it otherwise.
Bureaucrats in Wisconsin are trying to figure out which Milwaukee students to deny a future. Milwaukee has a school voucher program that allows low-income parents to choose any school for their children, public or private, and then receive public funding to cover the tuition.
But many state legislators, mostly Democrats backed by the teachers unions, have opposed this program, and forced a cap on the number of students allowed to participate. That cap now stands at 15,000 kids.
This year about 14,800 kids are participating, and the number is expected to surpass the cap next year. So, because of the self-interested teachers' unions and their political pawns, Wisconsin is going to be in the business of locking the public school-house door next year, only this time their locking the kids IN.
The program is a real boon to its participants. Participating students have higher graduation rates, families are far happier with their chosen private schools than with their former public schools, and academic achievement is up according to well-designed studies.
But the unions want to keep their monopoly on the education labor force, and Machiavellian politicians want to hang on to union support (and hence to their jobs), so they're not only doing everything they can to keep the cap in place, they're trying to kill the whole program.
How do they sleep at night? How do they look their own children in the eyes and not think of the thousands of children whose futures they are stealing for their own gain?
How can we let them get away with this?
Get informed about market education reforms.
Do what you can to get them passed in your state.
I must confess to being among those who do not understand John Kerry’s obsession with obtaining French approval and cooperation in Iraq. At this late stage, what would be the point? The only benefit I can see would be to Kerry himself (should he be elected), but at what cost? How much American taxpayer money would he have to shovel into French coffers for the pleasure of being able to say to his doubters, “I told you so?”
No. Far better that the French help us in Iraq in the only way they’d be willing to (barring copious remuneration): by being our nagging, toothache-like reminder that American foreign policy should never be based on expectations of genuine appreciation or gratitude.
It has been a source of amusement and, at times, despair to see the hand-wringing of the misguided souls who labor under the illusion that French recalcitrance and ingratitude (what comedian Eddie Izzard fondly terms “spikiness”) began the day that George Bush decided to invade Iraq, and can be erased with sufficient acts of humility and obeisance. Clearly, these people do not know that, while the Battle of the Bulge was still raging and American soldiers were freezing and dying to prevent the Germans from pushing back into France, the French Resistance paper Combat was publishing bitter attacks on American policy towards the liberated countries. Or that, while men like Band of Brothers’ Bill Guarnere were losing life and limb for them, the French were already turning on their American benefactors “because they do not distribute so many cigarettes and chocolate” and because “American uniforms clothe businessmen out for commercial conquests.” (Los Angeles Times 12/29/44)
Yes, there will always be a small number of French who do understand and appreciate the things that America has done for them and for the world, but if the above examples do not illustrate the folly of hoping that we can somehow count on the goodwill of the majority of the French people if we just expend enough time, money and effort to obtain it, consider this excerpt from an editorial in the August 26, 1954 edition of the Los Angeles Times:
It is easy to say – and maybe it ought to be said – that the theory that friends and allies can be won through lavish gifts has been exploded in the French case. The French have flouted their savior, their benefactor and the pillar of their support. Consider the record of the last 10 years :
First, Americans liberated France after her abject defeat. Then the United States fought and overcame Soviet opposition to rating France as a major postwar power, and established her as one of the five permanent (vetoing) members of the United Nations Security Council.
When the great giveaway began with the Marshall Plan, France got more than any other nation, and likewise, when later giveaway programs, military and economic, were invented, France headed the list of beneficiaries. In all France has had $12,000,000,000 from us with no enforceable obligation upon her.
Then we went along with French colonial policy in Indo-China and North Africa, although that policy was vain and expensive. The Indo-China war alone cost us $3,000,000,000.
And what have we received in return? The accusation that we are conspiring to set Western Europe against Russia and foment war. And the advice that Americans go home.
If you want more evidence, just have a look at John Miller and Mark Molesky's book: Our Oldest Enemy (whose identity, by this point, you can guess).
The fact that John Kerry is still seeking the approval of these people is one of the many reasons why I will not be voting for him in November. President Bush, wisely, has moved on.
I'm a pretty irreverent guy. But HOLY COW is this an outrageous movie!!! And lemme tell ya, if MLW Kay and I were cringing or wincing now and then during the flick, there are almost certainly folks who are spontaneously combusting in their seats.
That said, even when we were cringing or wincing, we were laughing our butts off. Hilarious no-holds-barred political satire, great direction, clever dialogue, and some catchy (and creatively profane) songs. Good stuff that's worth the price of admission if you aren't afflicted by political correctness and you're able to laugh at your political predilections and world events.
But wear your asbestos undies just in case.
The NYT reports today that the U.S. reluctantly "aquiesced" to a request by European powers that they make yet another generous nuke appeasement offer to Iran, to get it to stop enriching uranium.
Within hours of the NYT piece going to press, Iran has already told Europe (and hence John Kerry, who supports the European line) to go take a hike.
Iran refuses to stop uranium enrichment
TEHRAN, Oct. 16 (Xinhuanet) -- Iran on Saturday said it would reject any European proposal to drop its uranium enrichment, the state television reported.
"Any proposal which deprives Iran of its legitimate right to a fuel cycle is not acceptable," Hossein Mousavian, head of foreign policy of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, was quoted as saying.
As widely predicted, Afghanistan's transitional leader, Hamid Karzai, is enjoying a major lead over all his rivals in the Afghan election, as early vote totals are tabulated.
The number of votes counted thus far is tiny, however, so things could still change. If they don't, Karzai's current 59% of ballots counted would mean he won't even need to face a run-off election.
One of the topics receiving a lot of attention today is Thomas Lipscomb's article in The New York Sun, which delves into some of the questions surrounding John Kerry's discharge from the Navy. The issues are fairly complicated so I won't cover them here, but a thorough read-through of the relevent points can be had at Captain's Quarters, Beldarblog, and INDC Journal (and note that many commenters on those sites have pointed out some solid reasons why this may all be much hue and cry about nothing). I can, however, add something that may be related, and that is this: Kerry's anti-war activities began earlier than is generally acknowledged, while he was still on active-duty as an admiral's aide in the Navy.
The standard John Kerry bio has him beginning his career as an anti-war protester at the Moratorium event in October of 1969. Kerry himself, however, put his first act of protest much earlier, just two weeks after his return from Vietnam, when he gave a speech before the Groton Rotary Club:
His third purple heart qualified Kerry to come home, although he was offered a job as an admiral’s aide to stay. "I decided," he says, "to return and tell the people the real story. My sister Peggy was very much involved in the antiwar movement then. Two weeks after I was back, I made a speech before the Rotary Club in Groton, Massachusetts, where my father lived, and I really let them have it. But I was fighting pressure. I knew there’d be ostracism and censorship. I was still in the Navy as an admiral’s aide in New York. What really triggered me was that a friend of mine was killed in Vietnam. Naval Lt. Don Droz was blown up. He was an Annapolis grad and left a family."
"So I got involved in Moratorium. I have a private pilot’s license and flew one of the speakers around the New York area. Next day I drafted a letter to the admiral requesting to resign and run for Congress."
Kerry is maddeningly vague here as to whom he is referring when he says he was facing "ostracism and censorship" but, given the context, he may be referring to his superiors in the military. If so, then perhaps some of this conflict is reflected in his file. This could be quickly and easily cleared up if Kerry would just sign form 180, allowing for the full release of all of his military records.
In response to an American/British initiative to combine the military and reconstruction forces in Afghanistan under one Nato command, France and Germany vociferously dissented, today.
"There is a clear 'no' of the German government for a merging of the mandates," said German Defense Minister Peter Struck. He continued: "We'll continue focusing on reconstruction while other nations are engaged in the fight against international terrorism."
To my ears, it sounds like Germany is trying to minimize the risk of being targeted by terrorists by letting other nations handle the actual combat. Interestingly, Associated Press reporter Robert Burns also seems to have a problem with what Struck said. So much so that Burns added the words "in Afghanistan" in parentheses at the end of Struck's sentence. Struck didn't say those words in that sentence, Burns tacked them on himself.
There is no obvious justification for Burns' editorial revision. Are German combat troops on the hunt for Islamist terrorists elsewhere in the world? Not that I know of. Germany seems to want other folks doing the fighting everywhere, not just in Afghanistan.
The title of this article, which appeared in the Seattle Post Intelligencer, is "US allies don't want NATO in Afghanistan." The two countries that the title refers to are France and Germany. At what point do we stop calling these nations allies? Sure, we engage in trade with them, and we periodically cooperate with them on military and aid projects, but couldn't the same be said of the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War?
Did we call the Soviet Union an ally in the 1960s?
"The Manchurian Candidate" was a crude little piece of political axe-grinding by its director--and he admitted as much himself.
What made it such a joke was that, in its effort to convince viewers of the evils of corporations and the profit motive, it had to rely on make-belief nonsense about a corporation abducting and brainwashing U.S. soldiers in an effort to seize the U.S. presidency. Riiiiiiiiight.
Well imagine my delight this evening while I watched the recent DVD release of "Bon Voyage," a French film set during June 1940 as the Germans are about to take Paris. No, I wasn't delighted about the Third Reich's conquest of France, but rather at how the movie delivers a powerful political message simply by relating the events of that early summer more than half-a-century ago.
It isn't an overtly political movie. It's a character driven farce, and a funny one at that. But the significance of the events are there nonetheless, for viewers to take in with their own ears and eyes. In its rush to minimize unpleasentness, the government of France decides to cave in to the advancing German forces over the period of a few weeks. The only flourish added by the director (Jean Paul Rappeneau) is that the government also decides to use some WMD ingredients in French possession as a bargaining chip with Hitler, rather than ensuring that they are spirited out of the country to prevent them from falling into Nazi hands.
On the whole, the facts speak for themselves. The French had been so desperate to avoid war that they first convinced themselves it would never come, then tried to spare themselves by appeasing Hitler, and finally caved in to his advancing army in a matter of weeks. The unsatisfactory results of these decisions are now a part of history.... A part of history that too many people on both sides of the Atlantic appear to have forgotten.
Rappeneau, the director, has almost certainly not forgotten them. He was born in 1932.
How will today's young children remember our actions 60 years from now?
John Edwards was in Michigan talking about outsourcing recently, and telling voters how he believes closing a few tax breaks would stop it. Sorry, John, ain't gonna happen.
Labor costs are so much lower in nations like India that the presence or absence of tax loopholes pales into insignificance. The U.S. is not alone in facing this reality. As newratings.com reports, "Royal & Sun Alliance, a leading UK-based property and casualty insurance company, said today that its planned [1,100] job transfers [to India] would lead to annual cost savings of more than £10 million."
The only things that will seriously mitigate the net effect of outsourcing are much higher productivity in the US and the increased availability of higher value-added skill sets. Both could be achieved through an education system transformed along free market lines, with financial assistance being available to ensure that all families could participate in the education marketplace.
This has to be done at the state level if we care even remotely about the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution, so neither federal political ticket can make this happen. Kerry/Edwards could certainly make it more difficult, however, given their complete opposition to market-insipired education reform. At least Bush/Cheney understand the merits of market education, and wouldn't put as many roadblocks in the way of states that have the initiative to go for it.
During the height of RatherGate, I remarked on how Rather, his producers, and their management maximized the equation CBS = (ignorant + biased).
In an effort to wrest the mantle of partisan buffoonery away from CBS, ABC News political director Mark Halperin sent out a clumsily-worded memo to his staff exhorting them not to hold Bush and Kerry "equally accountable."
My personal favorite among the memo's mangled "sentences": "But as one of the few news organizations with the skill and strength to help voters evaluate what the candidates are saying to serve the public interest."
As you'll note, that monstrosity's got a capital letter at its head and a period at its tail, but it ain't no sentence. Where do the major media find these people?
Senator Kerry's central claim is that he will be able to win over the support of France, Germany, and Russia. He seldom lists the names of these nations, but these are quite clearly the ones he's referring to.
Before the Duelfer report, it was possible to believe that Kerry was simply naive--that he just didn't know the extent to which France and Russia were duplicitous under-the-table allies of Saddam Hussein. Now that he's been quoting the Duelfer report for a few days, we can assume that he has been briefed on its most important points.
If, after Duelfer, Kerry persists in saying that his diplomatic nuance will allow him to win over France and Russia, he is, to be blunt, a fool or a liar.
To give you some idea of the case against France and Russia, here are a few passages from the Duelfer report:
Iraq encouraged competition between
France and Russia to do more to support Baghdad.
[In 1998] Baghdad was largely successful in drawing the Secretary General into
the controversy and causing France and Russia to take firmer positions on its behalf.
The sanctions debate in the Security Council in June 2001 was indicative with the Russians demanding further relaxation.... [Iraqi] Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and the new Foreign Minister, Naji Sabri, were making progress internationally. France, Russia, and Syria (then a member of the Security Council) were all quite vocally supporting Iraq in sanctions debates in the Security Council.
In 1988, Iraq paid 1 million dollars to the French Socialist Party, according to a captured IIS report dated 9 September 1992. ‘Abd-al-Razzaq Al Hashimi, former Iraqi ambassador to France, handed the money to French Defense Minister Pierre Joxe, according the report. The IIS instructed Hashimi to “utilize it to remind French Defense Minister, Pierre Joxe, indirectly about Iraq’s previous positions toward France, in general, and the French Socialist party, in particular”.
‘Aziz says he personally awarded several French individuals substantial oil allotments. According to ‘Aziz, both parties understood that resale of the oil was to be reciprocated through efforts to lift UN sanctions, or through opposition to American initiatives within the Security Council.
The IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] flagged two groups of people to influence French policy in the UNSC: French Governmental officials and influential French citizens. IIS documents recovered by ISG identify those persons of interest, to include ministers and politicians, journalists, and business people.
The top three countries with companies or entities receiving [secret and illicit] vouchers were Russia (30%), France (15%), and China (10%)—three of the five permanent members of the UNSC, other than the US and UK.
the Iraqi “sticks” included not only redirecting those contracts to other more “pro-Iraqi” companies, but held the threat of forfeiture of foreign debts
– totaling between approximately $116-250 billion. Saddam expressed confi dence that France and Russia would support Iraq’s efforts to further erode the UN sanctions Regime.
It just goes on and on. These are only a handful of quotes from the first half of the first of the three sections of the Duelfer report.
The U.N. as a whole, and many of its key member nations individually, can be bought and paid for by vicious totalitarian dictators. No idealistic nation--and America remains one of these beyond a doubt--can allow itself to be bound by the whims of such a corrupt and evil body.
John Kerry's assertion that he wants to work more closely with such a body and with such foreign nations should disqualify him for the presidency in the mind of any idealistic American.
Some thoughts on Duelfer:
First, I had the misfortune to be stuck driving my pick-up around yesterday to get to some off-site meetings, and it lacks XM Satellite Radio (which graces my better half's car). That means I was stuck listening to NPR for my news/commentary fix (AM talk radio is just not my bag, baby).
Sigh.
NPR's take on Duelfer (care of their one-sided guest-list with an LA Times "journalist" at its center): We now know there are no WMD in Iraq, so we were wrong to go to war over a year ago.
Two obvious problems present themselves: 1) Nobody knew then what we know now, and it is the most basic of fallacies to gloss over that point 2) Their argument would be invalid even if we had known Saddam wasn't sitting on massive stockpiles of the bad stuff, for reasons ably exposited by Charles over at LGF.
I wish I knew enough to know what to make of this article (via Rantburg) about the Iraqi mobile weapons-labs. I've seen arguments that those labs turned out to be for filling hydrogen weather balloons. The author of this new article, however, quotes unnamed "analysts" who say that the configuration of the labs is not in keeping with that purpose. I'd have to learn a lot more about the subject before making a judgment, but I link to the article because it is the first time that I know of that someone has provided photographs of the workings.
I'll be on KION radio 1460AM in Salinas California tomorrow morning at 8:35AM pacific time. The topic is the compelling international evidence on the merits of parental choice and competition between schools. If successes like the Dutch nationwide school voucher program were more widely known, Americans would be clamoring for a real live education marketplace to which all families have access.
They don't seem to have a webcast, but if you're in the neighborhood ring up the station and we can chat.
That's what Dick Cheney just said to John Edwards during the vice-presidential debate. To paraphrase, he said: "In my capacity as the vice-president, I am also president of the United States Senate, and as a result I am in the Senate on most Tuesdays. Senator, the first time I ever saw you was when you walked on the stage tonight."
Here is the difference between this debate and last week's presidential debate, in a nutshell: George Bush was too poor a debater to illuminate the failings in the senatorial records of John Kerry and John Edwards. Dick Cheney is not.
He has repeatedly handed Edwards his head, as with the above comment and with his repeated factual rebuttals of Edwards on Iraq (such as pointing out that Edwards is explicitly choosing to ignore Iraqi casualties when he says the U.S. has suffered 90% of the casualties in that country).
The difference, in other words, is that when the Bush/Cheney record and plan on defense and foreign policy is ably defended it trounces the Kerry/Edwards record and plan.
As for crazy stuff like Bush's desire for a federal ban on gay marriage, at least Cheney has the wisdom and the dignity to disagree.
I wish there were a true liberal candidate on the ballot who was consistently strong on defense and strong on human freedom. There isn't. At this point in history, Bush/Cheney is simply the better choice on the most decisive issues of the day.
[Maybe next time there'll be a Rudy Giuliani/Joseph Lieberman ticket.... In my dreams.]
I recently delivered a presentation at the Cato Institute conference: "Creating a True Marketplace in Education." If you'd like to have a gander at the commentary I wrote about the event for the Mackinac Center, please drop on by.
Here's a teaser:
Next year will be the 50th anniversary of economist Milton Friedman’s seminal essay "The Role of Government in Education." Friedman argued that state-owned and state-operated public schools are not the best way for governments to guarantee universal access to a quality education. Instead, he suggested that governments allow a competitive education marketplace to develop and then ensure that all families had the means to participate in it.
Friedman’s thesis has spawned countless education reform proposals over the past half-century — education vouchers, tuition tax credits, education savings accounts — but thus far no consensus has been reached on the most effective approach. There is still no detailed agreement on the necessary conditions for stable, effective education markets.
Last Tuesday, I joined a group of economists, education policy analysts and school-choice advocates at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., to begin working toward such an agreement. When the panelists were asked to list the requirements for a competitive education industry, there was considerable overlap among their answers:
[...]
Given that CBS and the DNC have spent the last week trying to scare young people into thinking that President Bush has a "secret plan" to bring back the draft, I thought that now would be a good time to revisit this tidbit from a 1972 Coshocton Tribune profile of Kerry:
Radical? Not really. He favors military conscription…
That may be too much glass house for even the father character from My Big Fat Greek Wedding to keep clean.
John Kerry undeniably showed himself to be the better debater last week, but he's not running for Debater in Chief, he's running for president. However much it may rankle the rest of the nuanced world, I'll be voting based on the candidates' positions, not their felicity of expression.
As a result, I thought it would be profitable to have a look at John Kerry's website to read the National Security Plan he mentioned during the debate.
Following the National Security link under the heading "Plan for America," brought me to a platitudinous 483 word summary that has neither supporting links nor footnotes in the text (would it have been that hard to add relevant links?). Fortunately, there are some "National Security Plans" links on the right-hand side of that page. Unfortunately, they're not much better.
Take, for example, Kerry's plan for "Winning The Peace in Iraq." Each of the points made in this two-page commentary is either a promise upon which Kerry cannot plausibly deliver, a regurgitation of the current Bush administration policy, or a position that validates the harshest criticisms made against him.
Kerry promises, for instance, to get other nations to "share the burden" in Iraq with NATO troops (and hence with the funding to equip and deploy them). He does not explain--he has never explained--how he will accomplish this miraculous feat. France and Germany have already said no.
Kerry wants to help the Iraqis set up a stable, democratic government. Does this mean that Kerry will be voting to re-elect president Bush, whose administration has been working assiduously toward that goal for well over a year?
Kerry wants to "give other countries a stake in Iraq's future" by "letting them bid on [American taxpayer-funded] contracts." Uh, NO! The French, Germans, and Russians, in particular should not be receiving U.S. taxpayer dollars in Iraq after all they've done and said over the past few years. France and Russia are implicated in having supplied weapons to Saddam right up to the Iraq invasion, both are implicated in the UNSCAM Oil-for-Fraud ripoff, and, most recently, French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin told journalists that "The Iraqi insurgents are our best allies." Also in the past few days, the French government has said it will not attend a summit meeting on Iraq unless the throat-slitting, anti-democracy terrorists are also invited.
John Kerry accuses president Bush of having offered financial assistance to the nations who have sent troops to fight and die alongside of Americans in the liberation of Iraq. But Kerry wants to offer taxpayer money to nations whose "best allies" are the very people killing our servicemen and -women.
I will never vote for such a man.
UPDATE:
Looks like PoliPundit beat me to the "Debater-in-Chief" title :-).
Wizbang and others have done a fine job demonstrating that the "reasoning" used in the Hailey report is, well, unreasonable.
Cobbling together an approximation of the CBS Bush memos on a computer one letter at a time, using multiple different computer fonts, does nothing to show that they were ever typed on a period typewriter. This is so patently obvious that I've begun to have meta-suspicions about the Hailey report.
Is it really plausible that such shoddy reasoning could have been produced by a University professor? A credentialed scholar who regularly strolls the hallowed halls of academe? I quake at the very thought. Surely there must be some other explanation.
To whit, I have decided to perform a textual analysis of the Hailey report to PROVE that it could not be the product of a professor, and certainly not of an English professor (as the author is purported to be).
Consider the following excerpts from the Hailey report:
Interactive Media Research Laboratory is a small university lab…. Among other things, it is investigates archival and authentication problems.
If they were typed, did appropriate technologies exist at the time to have been typed then?
Example a selection typed with an IBM Selectric typewriter
Worn type will be especially prone to being effected [sic] by patterns in the paper or platen.
Differences between the above font and that used in the Bush memos are consistent with making the above font compatible with a proportional typewriter.
Proportional spacing permits a “one” to exits in space designed for a “one”
IBM is already on record, saying that the typewriter capable of producing proportional text has been available since 1944.
Surely we can all agree that this cannot be the work of a professor of English.
Hence, we must assume that the Hailey report is inauthentic.
(wink)
Wizbang is covering an interesting coda to the Rathergate story. A professor in Utah has done an analysis of the CBS memos claiming that he has been able to reproduce them (the web pages in question have mysteriously disappeared, so no link for now). Oddly, however, the way he reproduced them was by using a computer typeface that was created in 1974, two years after the memos were supposedly written. Not only that, but that font, ITC American Typewriter Condensed Medium, was made as an homage to classic typewriter fonts. It is not an exact replica of any real typewriter font. AND...there are very clear differences between that font and the font used in the CBS forged memos, the most obvious of which is the number "4." In the reproduction made by the professor, the "4" has a foot. In the memos, it does not.
But wait! There's more...The House of David catches another problem with the professor's analysis: he compares the on-screen version of Times New Roman with the memos, instead of the printed-out version. Meanwhile, Shape of Days checks the memos against Adobe's American Typewriter Std Condensed, and can't get a match with that either.
Here's the last bit of weirdness: if you search Google for the name of the place where this professor supposedly works (the "Interactive Media Research Laboratory" at the University of Utah), you only get 36 hits. The ones that go that group's actual website are currently non-functioning, a couple are from the University of Utah's English department, and the rest of the links are blog links from the last day or so. Could it be that this professor is a sort of digital Willy Wonka, and is actually conducting some kind of research into how the blogosphere works? That would almost make more sense than the ham-handed reproduction attempts.
UPDATE (12:48PT 10/01/04):
No, apparently this was a real attempt at verifying the memos. 60 Minutes producer Mary Mapes was counting on them to as a defense. Wizbang has the goods.
UPDATE II (3:24PT 10/01/04):
A Bluegrass Blog has a very interesting post regarding some of the work Mary Mapes did when she was still with KIRO TV in Seattle.
UPDATE III (12:08am PT 10/06/04): Reader NOYBW points out that I have confused Dr. Hailey's workplace - he's with the Interactive Media Laboratory at Utah State, not the University of Utah. Hence my limited findings when Googling him. Thanks for the correction.