Sobering Thoughts |
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Comments on politics, the culture, economics, and sports by Paul Tuns.
I am editor-in-chief of "The Interim," Canada's life and family newspaper, and author of "Jean Chretien: A Legacy of Scandal" (2004) and "The Dauphin: The Truth about Justin Trudeau" (2015).
I am some combination of conservative/libertarian, standing athwart history yelling "bullshit!"
You can follow me on Twitter (@ptuns).
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Wednesday, December 31, 2003
Some predictions for 2004 Howard Dean wins Democratic nomination. Picks either New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson. Other names bandied about near the Democratic National Convention will include Senator Hillary Clinton (of course), Indiana Senator Evan Bayh and former Colorado Senator Gary Hart. Dean will pronounce it unjust that Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm, who was born in Canada, cannot be on the ticket. No US Supreme Court retirements. President George W. Bush wins the general election with 44 states -- 45 if Dean is not the nominee. (440-98 electoral votes with Dems getting DC, California, Hawaii, Maryland, Peoples Rep. of Mass., Vermont and Washington State -- they won't keep Vermont without Dean.) GOP pick up 4-6 Senate seats and 18-27 House seats if Dean is the Democratic standard-bearer, 3 Senate seats and 9-15 House seats if Clark upsets Dean for the party's nomination. Non-Hispanic, non-black Texas Democrats get creamed in the general election. There will be no terrorist attack on US soil. Paul Martin is elected Prime Minister in Canada. The Conservative Party of Canada will win 95-105 seats. Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty will continue to break (suspend) promises. Eventually he will repeal parts of the Taxpayers Protection Act. Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is nominated for but does not win an Oscar. Madonna and Britney Spears will each do something outrageous. Alone. Media laps it up. Fox News continues cable news domination. New York Yankees edge out the Red Sox for American League championship but will not the World Series. San Francisco Giants beat the Yankees in six. For more predictions, check out NRO. My favourite (likely) prediction is Jonah Goldberg's: "Bill Clinton is caught saying something disparaging about Howard Dean or Al Gore — or both — 'by accident' as a way to signal his displeasure at the Dean boomlet without 'officially' interfering in the race." Every contributor who makes a call on the US election says Bush wins and likely with 53 or 54%. I'm not courageous enough to put a number on my election call. Monday, December 29, 2003
Belated Christmas treat The Derb has a selection of politically incorrect Christmas carols (isn't that redundent?). Included are the Seven Days of Kwanza, Battle Hymn of the Multicultural Republic and God Rest Ye Merry Democrats. Some samples: From The Seven Days of Kwanza: On the seventh day of Kwanzaa my true love gave to me Seven Jackson shake-downs, Six insults to Thomas, Five votes for Al! Four Baraka poems, Three profiling protests, Two slots at Yale, And a hook-up to BET. O Come All Ye Faithful (Adeste Fidelis) O come, all ye faithful, Take your Ten Commandments, Hide them, O hide them Where no-one will see. If you believe in Absolute morality — Then you're just too judgmental, Your faith's too fundamental, Your rock so monumental Has no place in here! From The Battle Hymn of the Multicultural Republic Mine eyes have never noticed any difference at all — Black, brown, or white; gay, bi, or straight; or thin or fat or tall; Male, female, or transsexual — they're constructions soci-al: We must celebrate each one. Glory, glory, there's no difference! Yet still, we'd better give some preference. To enrich our own learning experience, Till critical mass is here (You have to read the rest) Sunday, December 28, 2003
Comments Send comments to paul_tuns@yahoo.com. Paulitics will be back up and running (sporadically), probably Monday evening or Tuesday morning. On television journalism The late David Brinkley, a broadcaster, on television journalism, as quoted by George F. Will in his, Will's, end of the year review in the December 22 Newsweek: "When there is no news, we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were." Handicapping the next election Papal election, that is. Writing in the Washington Times, Roger A. McCaffrey, a publisher of Catholic books, explains how a rule change implemented by Pope John Paul II (that after 28 ballots, the new rules requires just 51% of the College of Cardinals to support an individual to become pope instead of the usual two-thirds), the leftist Italian cardinals (but I repeat myself) standing as a block and an understanding of history (seeing JP II as a left-centre pope, elected pope in 1978 as a left-centre alternative to the conservative Cardinal Giuseppe Siri of Genoa) leads to one conclusion: the next pope will be a leftwinger from Italy. I find journalism that covers the choosing of the next pope essentially as a presidential election with candidates appealing to ideological and regional interests to be entirely wrong-headed. McCaffrey's no different, although he asserts (without proof) that the next conclave will be the most political. Great insight into the mind of liberal Inadvertent as it may be, The New Republic's Michelle Cottle wrote in the December 22 issue's (dead tree version) Washington Diarist column that "I may not be able to change the world around me. But I can willfully disregard whatever aspects of it I find inconvenient." Have you ever seen such an admission by a liberal that they ignore reality when it does fit their worldview? Saturday, December 27, 2003
LA Times reaches new low in Baathist sympathizing, er, um, reporting Considering what lows the media profession, including the Los Angeles Times, has stooped to, this is quite the indictment. But its accurate. The paper sympathetically portrays Ahmed Rahal, a Palestinian who sympathized with Saddam Hussein (well, more than that, he became the first Palestinian general in Saddam's Iraq) and who wanted to bring the Baathist paradise to his home in the West Bank. But he, like many Palestinians, made the mistake of connecting their to Saddam Hussein's vision of pan-Arabism. Now, Rahal is left watching TV -- "He avidly follows the attacks of anti-American insurgents on Al Jazeera television and feels a kinship with them" the Times reports -- and dreaming of joining his family in exile in Jordan. While reading this will lead to a better understanding of Israel's and America's enemies in the Middle East, it will also guarantee a better understanding of this paper's bias when it comes to Israel. No sane newspaper would have permitted a reporter to pen a sympathetic account of this man. In defense of profits In the November issue of Ideas on Liberty (dead tree version), Walter Williams dissects the idea that people should be put before profits. Not to be overly reactionary, but first, some facts. According to Williams, after-tax profits represent (on average) just 6% of each dollar a company brings in. Without profits, there would be no interest in taking risks, providing services and employing people. Profits forces producers to "behave themselves" by not wasting inputs. (As Buckminister Fuller said "Pollution is nothing more than an unharvested resource.") Most importantly, profits guide "resources to their highest-valued uses" as determined not by the government, but by people. Williams offers the example of "price-gauging" entrepreneurs who sold plywood at higher prices in Florida following Hurricane Andrew in 1992. But without the higher prices (and thus profits), national plywood production would not have increased and plywood would not have been re-routed to Florida. That is, plywood would have been used for (relatively) frivolous home-improvement projects instead of the necessary rebuilding of parts of Florida. (As Adam Smith noted, "It is not from the benovolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.") Williams says, "In a free economy, the pursuit of profits and serving the people are one and the same." The Cardinal on GMF When Cardinal Renato Martino is not making foolish comments about Saddam Hussein, he can make some very smart ones about genetically modified foods. According to the December issue of American Enterprise (dead tree version), earlier this Fall Martino said "It is immoral to possess the tools for winning the war against hunger in the world and not use them because of political considerations." Frum, Black on FDR If you have a lot of time on your hands, the NRO interview by David Frum with Conrad Black on Black's book on FDR is worth reading. The interview is best described as the Coles Notes of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, so if you don't have time for that 1200-page monster (which is worth the investment of time and money) read the interview. Two snippets, both from Black: "I came to realize that the smartest businessmen, such as Bernard Baruch, Thomas Lamont, Jesse Jones, and even Joseph Kennedy and Averell Harriman, saw that Roosevelt saved 90% of the culture, profitability, and prerogatives of American business, by distributing 10% of its icing to the disadvantaged, to secure their adherence to the American capitalist system. Once I read his comment to Frankfurter that he was "the greatest friend the profit system ever had" and saw that American capitalism flourished better after Roosevelt than before him, my views of his economic and social programs have not evolved much: second or third class economics but first class catastrophe avoidance." And: "FDR's foreign policy views were a combination of those of his two great mentors: Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. He learned from TR the value of a robust foreign policy and from Wilson the need to cloak it in some measure of idealism. Americans liked to be strong, but just, particularly with some plausible universalist and epochal scale to their intentions." This sounds a lot like President George W. Bush and indeed Black says that FDR's most successful predecessors have followed his foreign policy model, although Black names others (Truman, Nixon and Reagan) but not Bush. Still, in this sense, as Black says later in the interview, the Paul Wolfowitz wing of the Republican Party are the true inheritors of FDR's legacy, not the Democrats. Jacko thinks its okay to sleep with children Under certain low-bar considerations, which he claims to meet. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that in response to a question from 60 Minutes' Ed Bradley about whether or not it is all right to sleep in the same bed with children considering that the pop star is charged with performing lewd or lascivious acts upon a child under 14 that Michael Jackson replied "of course" it is "If you're going to be a pedophile, if you're going to be Jack the Ripper, if you're going to be a murderer, it's not a good idea. That I am not." Jackson also says that he cannot return to his California ranch/child-luring den of sin Neverland because the police search of it has rendered it merely a house and not a home. Ahhhhh. 2003 -- Winning the War on Terror, Part II This is a week late, I know (I'm on holidays, for crying out loud), but last Sunday the Washington Post reported that "The 'Bush Doctrine' Experiences Shining Moments." Dana Milbank said that within the span of a week, President George W. Bush's foreign policy successes meant victories for the War on Terror/Expanding the Empire of Liberty. It began "with the capture of Saddam Hussein" and ended "with an agreement by Libya's Moammar Gaddafi to surrender his unconventional weapons." In between, "France and Germany set aside their long-standing opposition to the war in Iraq and agreed to forgive an unspecified amount of that country's debt," "Iran signed an agreement allowing surprise inspections of its nuclear facilities" and "Syria had seized $23.5 million believed to be for al Qaeda." While these events do not mean victory for the Bush administration or the War on Terror, they are nonetheless victories in particular battles in that war. And Richard Perle, bona fide member of the Neocon Cabal that is prosecuting the War on Terror, knows why: "It's always been at the heart of the Bush Doctrine that a more robust policy would permit us to elicit greater cooperation from adversaries than we'd had in the past when we acquiesced ... With the capture of Saddam, the sense that momentum may be with us is very important." Meanwhile, the Democrats and their megaphone CNN are trying to explain why Libya's capitulation or Saddam's capture doesn't mean much. Nice try. 2003 -- Winning the War on Terror, Part II This is a week late, I know (I'm on holidays, for crying out loud), but last Sunday the Washington Post reported that "The 'Bush Doctrine' Experiences Shining Moments." Dana Milbank said that within the span of a week, President George W. Bush's foreign policy successes meant victories for the War on Terror/Expanding the Empire of Liberty. It began "with the capture of Saddam Hussein" and ended "with an agreement by Libya's Moammar Gaddafi to surrender his unconventional weapons." In between, "France and Germany set aside their long-standing opposition to the war in Iraq and agreed to forgive an unspecified amount of that country's debt," "Iran signed an agreement allowing surprise inspections of its nuclear facilities" and "Syria had seized $23.5 million believed to be for al Qaeda." While these events do not mean victory for the Bush administration or the War on Terror, they are nonetheless victories in particular battles in that war. And Richard Perle, bona fide member of the Neocon Cabal that is prosecuting the War on Terror, knows why: "It's always been at the heart of the Bush Doctrine that a more robust policy would permit us to elicit greater cooperation from adversaries than we'd had in the past when we acquiesced ... With the capture of Saddam, the sense that momentum may be with us is very important." Meanwhile, the Democrats and their megaphone CNN are trying to explain why Libya's capitulation or Saddam's capture doesn't mean much. Nice try. 2003 -- Good year in the War on Terror Con Coughlin has a column in the Daily Telegraph noting that the West is winning the War on Terror. A snippet: "Many of bin Laden's key aides have been killed while others are in American custody - including some of those responsible for planning the September 11 attacks - and have revealed many details about al-Qaeda's methods and infrastructure to their interrogators. This information has resulted in many terror attacks being foiled, including a planned attack on the British embassy in Yemen and a repeat run of the September 11 attacks, with a hijacked civilian airliner crashing into Las Vegas over Christmas. Foiled terrorist attacks, of course, do not generate as much publicity as those that are successful, but even within the narrow confines of the war against al-Qaeda, the past two years have hardly been a wash-out. Then one must take into account this year's successful overthrow of Saddam Hussein who, for more than three decades, worked with a rainbow coalition of 'global reach' terrorists, including Abu Nidal, Carlos the Jackal and, of course, al-Qaeda. (Even Germany's notorious Baader-Meinhof gang was trained in Baghdad in the 1970s.) And whatever conclusions the Iraqi Survey Group reaches on the state of Saddam's various weapons of mass destruction programmes when it reports early next year, at the very least it will conclude that Saddam had retained the infrastructure to manufacture some of these weapons." Oh, yeah, and Libya, too. Coughlin says that with the volatile situation in Iraq and a presidential election next year, new fronts in the War on Terror, new vistas in the Empire of Liberty, are not going to be opened soon. But Syria's Bashir al-Asad may want to re-consider his relationship with terrorists. I can wait 'til 2005 for the next stop in the WoT Tour -- Damascus. Tuesday, December 23, 2003
France is irrelevant If any proof were needed that France is no longer the diplomatic power it has pretensions to be, read the Daily Telegraph's account of the French reaction to the deal Libya made to dismantle its WMD program: "France congratulated Britain and America yesterday for persuading Libya to surrender its weapons of mass destruction and admitted it had been kept in the dark throughout the talks. Dominique de Villepin, the foreign minister, took his hat off to London and Washington's 'exemplary' diplomatic efforts over the past few months that led to the Libyan leader Col Gaddafi's surprise announcement on Friday, calling it a victory for 'the entire international community.' But he was forced to admit in Le Figaro that France knew nothing of the nine months of secret negotiations. 'We were not kept informed'" M de Villepin said. His disclosure underlined the continuing mistrust in relations between the English-speaking powers and France, which made much of its opposition to war in Iraq." It is more than distrust; it is incongruity of power. New York Times gets it The need for free trade, that is. Its editorial yesterday endorsed CAFTA: "Ten years after entering into a free trade agreement with Mexico, the United States has negotiated a similar deal with four Central American nations — Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras. Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic may yet join 'Cafta.' Though its terms are far from perfect, the proposed agreement deserves Congressional support. It is hard to energize a pro-trade lobby to counter the political clout of vocal protectionist interest groups, especially in an election year. But this deal should be judged on its merits." Usually the vocal protectionists have the Times at their disposal as a megaphone but not this time. Why? In its world vs. US worldview, the Times is reliably on the world's side. And this time, that worldview brings them to the right conclusion (for the wrong reasons), namely that whatever its flaws and "asymmetries," CAFTA means more to "Central America's fledgling democracies than to the United States." In fact, recognizing that trade restrictions hurt Central America, the Times prescribes more free trade -- tear down these sugar import quotas, the paper inveighs. The Times calls this free trade with an asterisk and concludes (after commenting on newtextile restrictions) "Weaving protectionist clauses into a free trade agreement only cuts its value." We welcome aboard the New York Times to the free trade train. Monday, December 22, 2003
In this case, it makes sense to put the cart before the ass Arnold Kling argues in his TechCentralStation column that while some say the "Howard Dean phenomenon was caused by the candidate's discovery of how to use the Internet. I believe that it was the other way around. It was the militant leftwing movement on the Internet that created Dean." Kling says that an angry Left-wing mob has taken control of the Democratic primary and claimed Dean as their candidate. The Left wins because centrist voters are not motivated enough to get involved in this election. This thought-provoking column is worth reading. Thank you Captain Obvious From the annals of "couldn't think of anything but the obvious" school of headline writing, the Oakland Tribune offers this: "Gibson's Jesus movie bound to cause more controversy." Gibson, however, is not purposefully courting controversy. He just wants to make a film that is faithful to the teachings of the Gospels. "I hope it makes them reflect," Gibson said of people who will watch The Passion of the Christ. "The movie is about faith, hope, love and forgiveness. If it stirs those things up in people, it will be a success." Old Europe is literally becoming old Europe Christmas is the time of a miracle birth but as Mark Steyn notes in the Daily Telegraph of Luke's view of children coming into this world, they are all miracles. Europe, however, is suffering a dearth of such miracles: "Confronted with all the begetting in the Old Testament, the modern mind says, 'Well, naturally, these primitive societies were concerned with children. They needed someone to provide for them in their old age.' In our advanced society, we don't have to worry about that; we automatically have someone to provide for us in our old age: the state. But the state - at least in its modern European welfare incarnation - needs children as least as much as those old-time Jews did. And the problem with the European state is that, like Elisabeth, it's barren. Collectively barren, I hasten to add. Individually, it's made up of millions of fertile women, who voluntarily opt for no children at all or one designer kid at 39. In Italy, the home of the Church, the birthrate's down to 1.2 children per couple - or about half 'replacement rate.' You can't buck that kind of arithmetic." (Israel is facing the same problem, with Arabs out-producing Jews: "It's remarkable that, having survived the Holocaust, the Jewish people should now be in danger of not surviving their survival of the Holocaust." Steyn says that soon Arabs and Palestinians will stop demanding their own state and demand one-man-one-vote in the state that they're in, in which case Israel will cease to be.) "Demography is not necessarily destiny," says Steyn, but neither is it ever inconsequential. Steyn says of the constitutional wrangling of EU types, "it seems amazing that no Continental politician is willing to get to grips with the real crisis facing Europe in the 21st century: the lack of Europeans." Old Europe may soon be the land mass formerly known as Europe. I'm agnostic about whether this is a negative development. Sunday, December 21, 2003
Winning the War on Terror Everybody wants to be on the winning side and the War on Terror is no different. Unless, of course, you're Noam Chomsky, Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, France, Saddam Hussein. Okay, almost everybody wants to be on the winning side. Perhaps it would be better to say, sane people want to be on the winning side and that's why we don't see the Democratic Party leadership or the academic and European Left signing up for the War on Terror. But who has? Muammar Gadaffi (to use The Observer's spelling). He has agreed to, according to that paper, provide "detailed intelligence on hundreds of al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremists as part of a deal to end its isolation as a pariah nation." Moammar Gaddafi's (to use the Washington Post's spelling) willingness to side with the winners may have been inspired by watching, as that paper editorialized, the "United States and Britain demonstrat(e) in Iraq that evasion and defiance of a demand for disarmament would invite armed intervention." Still, right now Kaddafi (or Qaddafi -- Saddam has 17 look-alikes, Gaddafi has 17 ways to spell his first and last name) is on the side of the angels and Dean, Clark, France, et al are not. On Saddam's capture and other aspects of a good week for Dubya -- and Iraq Mark Steyn says in his Chicago Sun-Times column, "A good week, I'd say, for cowboy 'unilateralists'." On Senator John Kerry (and others of his ilk who Saddam Hussein should be tried to the "international community"), Steyn says: "Kerry doesn't get it: If it had been left to Kofi Annan, the French, Germans, Russians, Canadians, Arabs and all but two of the nine Democratic Presidential candidates, Saddam Hussein wouldn't be being inspected for lice by American medics, he'd still be sitting on his solid gold toilet in his palace reading about the latest massive anti-Bush demonstrations in Le Monde. The Iraqi people don't want to place their future in the hands of an 'international community' that found it more convenient to allow Saddam to go on torturing them." Clark candidacy, RIP Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby has a great column on the incredible shrinking credibility of retired General Wesley Clark. Jacoby notes the frolicking good time Clark had with Ratko Mladic in 1994 and the excuses Clark later offered for not being able to apprehend Mladic once he was (later) indicted. The reason? Having to work it all out multilaterally. Apparently, the French were a pain in the backside then, too. Jacoby also notes Clark's willingness to go after Saddam Hussein, at least until retired General Wesley Clark became Democratic candidate Wesley Clark. If the Democrats think that the way to win elections is with Clintonian-style evasions and duplicity, Clark appears to be their man. But for most Americans, his inconsistencies and willingness to blame others will not fly in 2004. Turkey/al-Qaida link Adnan Ersoz, a terrorist involved in last month's Istanbul bombing, admits al-Qaida gave $150,000 to help fund the operation. Also, it is rumoured that the CIA asked Turkish Airlines to cancel one of its flights because it was expected to be used as a WMD against a military target near Adana. With failures like these ... The Derb on Libya giving up its WMD. Actually, its about Dubya's successful foreign policy initiative to make the world a little more safer: "So let's see: 3/4 of the way through his first administration, George W. Bush has put two dictators out of business and, without firing a shot, persuaded a third to dismantle his WMD. And the Democrats' case against administration foreign policy is... what, again? Kabul, Baghdad, Tripoli. On to Pyongyang and Tehran!" Saturday, December 20, 2003
Christmas vacation I will be away but near enough a computer to occasionally blog. Stop in from time to time. Ditto for Paulitics. Biggest non-story in recent memory is a nice segue into a comment on education Mary Kate and Ashley are headed to New York University. According to an AP report, they will be "enrolled next fall at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, a college within NYU that allows students to tailor their own curriculums." That sentence illustrates what is wrong with our post-secondary education system. That there is a place where students can go for "individualized study" at a university so that such students can choose their own curriculum when they should be getting guidance as to what is worth studying, is all that needs to be said about what is wrong with our universities (or as Professor Graeme Hunter calls them, the multiversity). Hillary for veep. Morris paints the scenario In his New York Post column, former Bill Clinton advisor and the world's most famous toe-sucker Dick Morris says that Howard Dean should nominate Senator Hillary Clinton as his running mate next year. Why on earth would he do this? Noting that much of the Democratic Party apparatus is in the hands of Clintonistas, Dean will want to "avoid the McGovern problem - getting knifed in the back by his own party leaders?" How does he avoid that? "Take a hostage, Hillary, and put her on the ticket." Morris says that she would instant credibility, help him reach out to the party's centre (she's the party's centre?), add the excitement of having a woman on the ticket (she's a woman?) and ensure the support of the Clintonistas. "Dean will remember how Reagan united his fractured party by putting his defeated primary opponent, George W. Bush on his ticket in 1980. While Dean's nominal opponents are named Gephardt, Kerry, Clark, and Lieberman, his real adversary all along has been Clinton." So why would her Hillaryness agree? The CW is that former vice president Al Gore has been catapulted back into the top tier with his endorsement of Dean. If Dean picked anyone else -- General Wesley Clark, for instance -- that person would join Hillary and Gore as the front-runners for 2008. But becoming the veep nominee herself in 2004 would give Hillary an edge (again) over Gore. This is all Morrisian analysis, which means that it makes for better reading than it does real analysis so take it for what its worth, which probably is not much. Media loves Lord For now. Bernard Lord seems like a nice, moderate New Brunswick boy. The media will play him up as not as conservative as Stephen Harper, a candidate who can bridge the Canadian Alliance-Tory gap and who can bring new supporters to the party. But be forewarned: the moment Lord were to win the Conservative Party of Canada leadership, he would be viewed as too conservative for Canada. The media would have succeeded in getting a candidate that is 1) less conservative and therefore more palpable to themselves and 2) less conservative and therefore less likely to generate the grassroots support during the campaign that a party needs at election time. The conservative movement in this country cannot take its lead from the Globe and Mail for that paper's interests and the interests of our movement are not the same. Friday, December 19, 2003
Worth checking out The Canadian outfit, the Centre for Cultural Renewal has a blog. Ian Benson, CCR's executive director appears to be the only writer. Why CentreBlog? "Cultural Renewal as a possibility. False Rhetorics exposed. Critical analysis of role of religions in relation to culture and 'faith' (religious and non) examined." UnReagan-like Ontario socialists Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty wants to increase the province's revenues without breaking his no new taxes campaign promise so he will raise user fees instead. Of course, user fees are just taxes for particular services. McGuinty said "I don't want to raise taxes. It is not my intention to raise taxes." So he'll call a tax a user fee and all is fine. He refused to answer Canadian Press queries of whether a user fee is actually just a tax. Also, notice the Clintonian phrasology of "not my intention." Soon he will non-intentionally raising taxes or, at the very least, he does not intend to raise taxes at this time. McGuinty also said "We are looking at new and creative ways to raise revenue. Maybe we're offering some services that we should be charging for that we're not (currently) charging for." If the government is providing services for which there should be a charge, shouldn't the free market be providing the services instead? Reaganesque German socialists The Guardian reports that Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats have passed a 10 billion euro tax cut to jump start Germany's anemic economy. Schroeder said "This is a signal that Germany is on the move ... Our country is resolutely taking on the challenges posed by the 21st century." Apparently having a European edition of the Wall Street Journal is paying off. More than one way to kill a (former) tyrant Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer on "Killing Him Softly," him being Saddam Hussein, of course: "In the old days the conquered tyrant was dragged through the streets behind the Roman general's chariot. Or paraded shackled before a jeering crowd. Or, when more finality was required, had his head placed on a spike on the tower wall. Iraq has its own ways. In the revolution of 1958, Prime Minister Nuri Said was caught by a crowd and murdered, and his body was dragged behind a car through the streets of Baghdad until there was nothing left but half a leg. We Americans don't do it that way. Instead, we show Saddam Hussein -- King of Kings, Lion of the Tigris, Saladin of the Arabs -- compliantly opening his mouth like a child to the universal indignity of an oral (and head lice!) exam. Docility wrapped in banality. Brilliant. Nothing could have been better calculated to demystify the all-powerful tyrant." Liberals on letting Saddam live Just a thought: would liberals favour executing Saddam Hussein if he, say, committed "hate crimes" against homosexuals? Best case for capturing Osama bin Laden The Derb in The Corner: "Capturing Osama bin Laden, always very desirable, is now also an electoral imperative. If he were to show up on our TV screens around the middle of next year with a US Army medic shining a flashlight down his throat, the Democrats would be polling in single digits." Thursday, December 18, 2003
Infertility and marriage When conservatives argue that marriage cannot be extended to homosexual couples because the purpose of marriage is procreation, those who seek to redefine marriage come back with the "what about infertile heterosexual couples" argument. My best argument against this retort is that sexual relations between opposite-sex partners does not mock the procreative purpose of sex. Jennifer Roback Morse has her own highly personal rebuttal to the retort. Two highlights: "I am convinced that understanding the natural, organic purposes of marriage provides the key insight for helping them navigate the difficulties ahead of them. For merely having sex is not the measure of their marriage, and neither is successful procreation. Appreciating spousal unity, the other natural purpose of sexuality, has the potential to direct them toward a fruitful love, even if children are not among the immediate fruits." And: "The key to whether they [infertile couples] found peace was not whether they eventually had children. The key wasn't whether their children came through assisted reproductive technology, or by adoption. The crucial issue was whether they let go of controlling all outcomes. The need to 'have it your way,' so deeply imbued in our consumer culture, is positively destructive to married life." Are there enough abortion pills and are they easy enough to get? The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has spoken up on over-the-counter distribution of the abortifacient morning-after pill Plan B. (Cathy Cleaver Ruse, Director of Planning and Information for the USCCB Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities: "American women and children do not deserve this reckless experiment on their lives.") Its nice to see the USCCB deserve the second "c" of their acronym because a popular joke has it that the second "c" stands for communist. Anyway, two advisory committees of the Food and Drug Administration have voted to allow the MAP to be distributed OTC. One of those committees is the Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs. There is a whole committee for reproductive drugs? What to do about Saddam I'll offer my mega dittos to Adam Daifallah's comment: "My view on this is pretty much the same. Let the Iraqis deal with Saddam's fate. He should be tried publicly and if the Iraqis decide on capital punishment, fine. If they don't, thats OK too. (I favour the former; preferrably in Firdos Square in Baghdad by his old statue.)" William F. Buckley addresses not only the punishment but the trial -- and the idiots who think that procedure is everything: "The very idea that Saddam Hussein needs the niceties of Blackstone's laws prescribing judicial procedure and the means of protecting the innocent is a surrender to epistemological pessimism: the notion that you can't ever really prove anything. Built into that nihilist surrender is doubt about first principles. If there is anybody in town who believes that Saddam Hussein is not guilty of crimes however described, what we need to worry about is him, not Saddam. The notion that we should be immobilized by the kind of skepticism that demands full-blown trials with judges from Jamaica and amici curiae from Russia and France tells us that a lot more is riding here than the fate of Saddam Hussein." Ditto that, too. Exposing anti-Christmas grinches Check out The Grinch List which has a far-from-complete list of the corporate and government grinches and an article about the trend to deny the Christmas season its proper name. The list, by the way, has a write-up of the anti-Christmas sins of the entities described and my favourite is its skewering of the Discovery Store: "The Discovery Store carries 'holiday ornaments.' They indicated that they did not want to offend those who don't celebrate Christmas under their limited corporate mantra of diversity and multiculturalism." It is funny but predictable that companies who deny the existence of Christmas still want our Christmas spending. No matter what, those who celebrate Christmas should not buy "holiday ornaments" from companies that do not acknowledge Christmas, no matter how much those ornaments look like they belong on our Christmas trees. Grinch List also has a wonderful essay on maintaining our heritage when it comes to Christmas and a list of those companies that don't deny that heritage. Heretic view The Daily Standard's Jonathan V. Last catalogues the problems with Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Last is not completely wrong but he does over-state his case and he misses the forest for the trees: whatever particular problems there are, they do not make the Return of the King a bad movie. I will agree with him that the movie seems hurried and that the passing of time -- events that take days and weeks -- is poorly handled. The movie would have been better if it were four hours long instead of three, but this problem will (I hope) be corrected (somewhat) in the DVD. But for his heresy of criticizing the final instalment of LOTR, Last should be faced to meet the army of Orcs on his own. Building a bike path to the future Great Mark Steyn column in yesterday's Wall Street Journal is now available on-line. Essentially Steyn identifies how the Left has changed so the Left could stay the same and he (with apologies to Chesterton) finds that once you don't believe in one big thing you'll believe in a lot of little things. Steyn on liberalism in 21st century America: "David Brooks, visiting Burlington in 1997 in search of what eventually became his thesis 'Bobos in Paradise,' concluded that the quintessential latté burg was 'relatively apolitical.' He's a smart guy but he was wrong. All the stuff he took as evidence of the lack of politics -- pedestrianization, independent bookstores -- is the politics. Because all the big ideas failed, culminating in 1989 in Eastern Europe with the comprehensive failure of the biggest idea of all, the left retreated to all the small ideas: in a phrase, bike paths. That's what Bill Clinton meant when he said the era of big government was over; instead, he'd be ushering in the era of lots and lots of itsy bits of small government that, when you tote 'em up, works out even more expensive than the era of big government. That's what Howard Dean represents--the passion of the Bike-Path Left." How about the morning-before pill? Great satire from Scrappleface: "A Food and Drug Administration (FDA) panel has approved over-the-counter sales of the so-called 'morning-before' pill. Although experts disagree over how the pill works, it seems to prevent unwanted pregnancy by attacking the problem at its source in the human brain. The drug is an emergency pre-emptive contraceptive known as 'Plan A,' which, when taken 48-72 hours before potential unprotected sex, is 100 percent effective in preventing pregnancy. Rather than causing a quick abortion, like the so-called 'morning after' pills, Plan A works on the cerebrum in the brain to actually keep women from getting into sexual situations in the first place. 'It seems to knock some sense into them, clinically speaking,' said one unnamed FDA researcher. 'After taking Plan A, our test subjects intuitively understood what men were really thinking. They no longer believed the words "I love you" when it was just an inducement to sexual activity. In fact, they avoided situations where they might be alone together with any man to whom they were not married.' Scientists continue to work on a male version of the drug, also known as the 'personal responsibility' pill." For the real-life story on which the satire is based, check out LifeSite's coverage of a Food and Drug Administration panel calling for the "morning-after pill" to be distributed over-the-counter. The important point LifeSite makes: that despite media coverage implying OTC status for the MAP is a done deal, final decision is not expected for several months. About that new Conservative Party of Canada Reliably unreliable Bourque News says that New Brunswick Premier Bernard Lord (PC) will run for the leadership despite just weeks ago denying any interest in leading the party. And yesterday, Bourque News reported that former Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day is not ruling out a run for the leadership: "I never say never, Pierre, and right now I am watching the race develop with interest." The last CA leader, Stephen Harper will announce on January 12 that he is seeking the new party's leadership, which is a lot like announcing now that he is leadership candidate. One person certain not to run is former Tory leader Robert Stanfield. If Lord and Day join Harper and entry-date announced candidate Jim Prentice, who ran for the Tory leadership last spring, this will be a real race and give the party greater credibility. It's a good time to be a Canadian conservative I can't remember a time I've ever said that. Ever even thought that. We use to have two political parties which was either one too many or, as Mark Steyn used to say, way too few. Let's see what unity delivers. But while we had two political parties, for the past eight months, we've had no magazine, and for a year or so before that, a magazine that was lost in the woods. That is about to change. Ezra Levant is bringing back to life the spirit of Alberta Report in The Western Standard. Read all about it in Levant's Calgary Sun column. Wednesday, December 17, 2003
Check out Paulitics Several posts on endorsements, Christian Science Monitor says Dean-Bush could be close and Louisiana Senate. All at Paulitics. Loony Left watch According to WorldNetDaily, "Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told Fox News Channel analyst Morton Kondracke yesterday she suspects President Bush knows the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and is simply waiting for the most politically expedient moment to announce his capture." Yes, she told it off camera. Yes, Kondracke should be careful about speaking "out of school." Yes, whatever and what else. But the most important issue Albright's outburst raises is this: has the Left gone that crazy, that conspiratorial? Yes. Where do they get these ideas? I was once told that the Left accuses the Right of all kinds of awful things because that is what they would do themselves given half the chance. If this explanation is true -- and I think there is much truth in it -- then such comments as those made by Albright tell us more about the Left -- and their psychology and their win-at-all-costs gamemanship -- than it does about the Bush administration or any other of their targets. Obligatory LOTR post Jonah Goldberg on Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, in The Corner: "Usually the noticeably aging actors have to be corralled back with offers of more money, more screen time, or, shudder, more creative control. Who knows what would have happened if Viggo Mortensen, Elijah Wood, and Ian McKellen had been allowed to indulge their personal politics? At best, teams of U.N. magic-rings inspectors would have been dispatched to Mordor before any fighting began. And, since Orcs appear to be all of one sex, and male, perhaps McKellen would have insisted on a brief cameo of an Orc marriage." Tuesday, December 16, 2003
Excellent Washington Times editorial on abortion Ditto what the Washington Times says, which is essentially that the pro-life movment has the momentum in the United States following the partial-birth abortion ban (and other pro-life measures over the past 15 months) and that the National Right to Life Committee is taking its eye off the ball when it supports the Bush administration-supported prescription drug benefit. The Times says the NRLC would be better off educating the public about the next pro-life issue, the over-the-counter distribution of the abortifacient morning-after pill. Blair on where Saddam's trial should be held CNSNews reports that British Prime Minister Tony Blair says that Saddam Hussein should be tried in Iraq and that he could be executed: "Any trial of Saddam should be by the Iraqi government for the Iraqi people." Why? "Where his rule meant terror and division and brutality, let his capture bring about unity, reconciliation and peace between all the people in Iraq." Art criticism imitating real-life punditry This portion of a review of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, by Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post, describes why it is important that the US finally captured Saddam Hussein and why he must be executed: "In this version, Sauron has taken the form of the Lidless Eye, and he looks like something off a secret Masonic document, an eye bathed in fire and floating in space. Like the many effects in the film it's impressive, but it's static. We want a villain whose ritual death will delight us. (On the other hand, when someone takes out one of the Ringwraiths by driving a sword through his face, I liked that a lot!) Watching what is essentially a structure tip into the flames lacks dramatic impact." Monday, December 15, 2003
Sullivan on stupid post The Capture quotes Scroll down and under ten Galloway Awards, Andrew Sullivan lists the desperateness and stupidity of those that would deny President George W. Bush this victory. This, on the other hand, is a great poster Great anti-gun control poster can be seen here. (Hat tip to Operation Self Defense) This is just really stupid You have to see it for yourself. Deanian idolatry has gone too far. Dean's own Blog for America thinks it's link-worthy. Daifallah on The Capture Adam Daifallah is an editorial writer with the National Post. Today he gave "The Last Word" commentary on Global National News: "So the rat was found in a rat hole. What a relief. Saddam Hussein will never be able to terrorize the Iraqi people again. What can we expect in Iraq now that Saddam has been captured? We can expect more good news in the days to come. Assuming Saddam will talk, we'll find out what really happened to his weapons of mass destruction. We'll get intelligence on the guerrilla attacks plaguing the occupation forces. The Iraqi people will hopefully themselves prosecute the tyrant for his 30 years of torture and murder. And we'll find out more about his work with al-Qaida and other odious terrorist organizations. But most importantly, it means peace of mind for people of Iraq. When I was in Iraq in May, just after the war ended, the people were still scared, nervous, unsettled. They didn't want to cooperate with the Americans because they feared the return of Saddam. Now that anxiety is gone. Iraqis will feel free to help in the building a new civil society for their country based on democracy, freedom and human rights. Had critics of the war had their way, Saddam would still be in power, wreaking havoc on his own people. Instead, he is in American custody, looking haggard, defeated and beaten. Somehow, this result seems a lot more just." Not all the jackasses were hiding in holes in Tikrit Former Rep. Dick Armey says that conservatives believe what they see and liberals see what they believe. For liberals, the story that is apparent to everyone else in the world is never the whole story and thus they dream up conspiracies. The Associated Press reports that Rep. Jim McDermott (D, WA) told a Seattle radio station that the US military could have found Saddam Hussein "a long time ago if they wanted." The timing, of course, was political: "There's too much by happenstance for it to be just a coincidental thing." Liberal, conspiracy-minded Democrats should beware that campaigning in make-believe land won't get you real world votes. The predictability of Kofi Annan UN Secretary General Kofi Annan says it would be wrong to execute Saddam Hussein, master executioner of the Iraqi people. The lighter side of The Capture Larry Miller on The Daily Standard: "Ah, Saddam, Saddam, Saddam. What has it all come to, eh, my friend? All those palaces, all those solid gold toilets, all those deliciously terrified looks in people's eyes. All that hard work, and you just wind up looking like Jerry Garcia after a show." Very funny essay. Who else but Miller would find that the "Most important aspect of Hussein's capture: Could you grow a beard like that in seven months? I don't think I could. I mean, you've got to hand it to him: A full head of black hair, and he looks like Aristotle in a week." I'm not looking forward to the post-embarrassment age Tina Brown wrote in the Washington Post last week: "The success of society babe Paris Hilton's reality TV show 'The Simple Life,' hard on the heels of the bootleg porn tape showing her steamily in flagrante delicto with her dirtbag then-boyfriend Rick Solomon, proves once again there is no such thing as bad press. We live in the post-embarrassment age." Put aside for a moment that The Simple Life was a success despite the sex tape. Oh, sorry, the point is that you can't put aside the sex tape. TSL was a success not despite but because of the tape. The publicity was priceless. A little (more) embarrassment for a gal not embarrassed enough to avoid being taped in flagrante delicto in the first place, is a small price to pay for (greater) stardom. But considering President Bill Clinton could still show his face in public after he stained a young intern's dress, why shouldn't a party-going tramp cash-in on what should make young girl's her age blush? The point Brown never makes is this: we live in a post-embarrassment age because we have lost our ability to blush -- there is nothing to be embarrassed about when there are no standards. Speaking of cheap shots In a column on NRO about cheap shots that Democrats, France, the media, etc... have made on the administration for not capturing Saddam Hussein over the past nine months, Jim Geraghty has one of his own: "Thankfully, former Illinois senator and current long-shot Carol Moseley Braun is still willing to find the dark lining on the sliver cloud. 'The capture of Saddam Hussein is good news for the people of Iraq and the world,' Braun said in released statement, e-mailed by spokeswoman Loretta Kane from a yahoo account. 'But it does not change the fact that our troops remain in harm's way; and we are no closer to bringing them home'." Chronicles blog, RIP I reported last month that Chronicles blog Cultural Revolutions Online has been dormant since mid-September. You would think that the events of this weekend would have them up and running again. You would be wrong. Kieko, RIP Scrappleface begins its satirical coverage of the demise of the one-time movie star cum fishbait thusly: "A decade-long, multimillion dollar effort to 'Free Willy' has finally succeeded." Will on where Saddam should be tried Washington Post columnist George F. Will has a column on whether Saddam Hussein should be tried by the people he wronged (the Iraqis) or by those who did everything in their power to prevent Saddam from being removed from power (the international community of France, Germany and Russia). Will concludes Iraq and finds that such a trial might be an important nation-making moment: "The attempts of 'internationalists' to hijack Hussein's prosecution are partly for the purpose of derogating the importance and legitimacy of nation-states generally. But Iraqi nationhood -- currently tenuous as a political and psychological fact -- can be affirmed by entrusting it with the trial. By serving Iraq's national memory, the trial can be a nation-building event." Hitchens on The Capture A meandering column by Christopher Hitchens in The Mirror, but he makes an important point that answers the question, How does this change the war for Iraq from this point forward?: "Meanwhile, the whole enterprise of re-making Iraq is greatly clarified by the certain knowledge that there's no going back." Cameron for the prosecution Mark Cameron, a traditionalist Catholic, makes the Catholic case for executing Saddam Hussein: "I have no doubt that the scale of Saddam's crimes against humanity merits the death penalty, but I would point out that a good case could be made for execution even under the modern Catholic limitation of capital punishment to cases where bloodless means are inufficient to 'defend human lives against an aggressor and to protect public order and the safety of person.' (CCC #2267) A Saddam in prison might give some hope to Baathist remnants and terrorist groups that he could escape or be released, or traded in a prisoner exchange for high enough ranking hostages. Undoubtedly keeping him alive in some sort of desert version of Spandau Prison would also keep alive the insurgency for more months or years, which would unnecessarily cost dozens of innocent lives." The importance of The Fence Because life is precious and cannot be put at risk for public relations stunts, er, I mean the search for diplomatic solutions while the killing continues. Check out this presentation from the Israeli ministry of foreign affairs. As David Mader notes, "it conveys a reality - the proximity of Israeli towns to Palestinian terrorists - that is too often lost on foreign audiences. The map is instructive, but the repetition of the walking time between the pre-1967 border and Israeli targets of terror is the most illuminating." Kudos to Lieberman Senator John Kerry (UltraD, People's Republic of MA) was on Fox News this morning illustrating why he is irrelevant. While he gave the president credit for The Capture, in the same breath he criticized Bush's foreign policy (need to tackle North Korea, need to worry what France will think, blah blah blah). Senator Joseph Lieberman (D, CT), on the other hand, said the obvious: capturing Saddam Hussein is a good thing, plain and simple: "Hallelujah, praise the Lord. This is something that I have been advocating and praying for for more than twelve years, since the Gulf War of 1991. Saddam Hussein was a homicidal maniac, a brutal dictator, who wanted to dominate the Arab world and was supporting terrorists." Whereas Kerry tried to score political points by saying that Bush must abandon his "utilitarianism" [sic] and accept an international court to try Saddam, Lieberman made justice not geopolitics the central consideration in trying the former dictator: "This evil man has to face the death penalty. The international tribunal in The Hague cannot order the death penalty, so my first question about where he's going to be tried will be answered by whether that tribunal can execute him. If it cannot be done by the Iraqi military tribunal, he should be brought before an American military tribunal and face death." And only then at the end of his release did Lieberman address the politics of the situation -- and not in a political way, but in the Zell Miller-reminding-his-party way that the Democrats must remain relevant and live up to its responsibility of being a national party: "This news also makes clear the choice the Democrats face next year. If Howard Dean had his way, Saddam Hussein would still be in power today, not in prison, and the world would be a more dangerous place. If we Democrats want to win back the White House and take this country forward, we have to show the American people that we're prepared to keep them safe." The difference between Saddam's Iraq and the new Iraq The New York Times reports that four members of the Iraqi Governing Council met with the captured Saddam Hussein -- or as the Times insists, Mr. Hussein. Mowaffak al-Rubaie was one of the council members and he said "I was in his torture chamber in 1979 and now he was sitting there, powerless in front of me without anybody stopping me from doing anything to him." Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, said "The most important fact: Had the roles been reversed, he would have torn us apart and cut us into small pieces after torture ... This contrast was paramount in my mind — how we treated him and how he would have treated us." Sunday, December 14, 2003
Goldwater would be spinning in his grave Now, I know that the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC) is hardly an authoratative source on political labelling, but in an report about sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein, CBC reporter Robin Rowland says that politically the author moved from the Left to the Right and came eventually to support "Barry Goldwater for president in 1964 (some political analysts consider Goldwater the first neo-conservative)." What political analyst would consider Goldwater a neo-con? Saddam is in trouble Writing in the Daily Telegraph, historian John Keegan says now that Saddam Hussein has been captured, it is time to execute. The charge: "...He may, de facto, have been head of state but, by fleeing his capital and office at the outset of the last Gulf War, he effectively abandoned whatever constitutional status he enjoyed. The power vacuum he left has been filled by the creation of the Iraqi Governing Council, which, very conveniently last week, announced the establishment of a tribunal empowered to try any Iraqi citizen - and that Saddam unquestionably is - for crimes under domestic law. Prima facie, Saddam has to answer for many crimes, including murders he has himself committed, large-scale episodes of murder and torture of his fellow citizens, and organised extermination of minorities, particularly Kurds and Marsh Arabs, inside his own country." There are two types of people ... In The Corner, Tim Graham explains the other kind: "Had to razz my sister-in-law in Minnesota as she called at 3 PM and said 'Oh my God! I just heard! I was watching MTV...' This demonstrates how the Other Half lives, those who get their news almost entirely by accident." 'We got him' With these words by Paul Bremmer, the war for Iraq changes (it does not end). Jed Babbin has the best column on this development. The one bad side of this capture is that it overshadows this important column in the Sunday Telegraph by Con Coughlin possibly linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11. (What a time to be away from the computer. More later.) Friday, December 12, 2003
Light blogging For the rest of the weekend. Out of town, access to the computer limited. If there is time, probably updates on Paulitics. VDH on Iraq Victor Davis Hanson in The Corner on Iraq: "But again the key is not to look at the present from the present but rather to imagine what it most likely will appear like ten years from now." A very good but rather long read that looks (as historians are wont) at the past (Greece, the Civil War, World War II) and the lessons about power it provides. Essentially VDH says that while there continues to be attacks on Americans in Iraq and not all the world has lined up to pat the US on the back, eventually most sane people and principalities want to be on the winning side. If you get excited by punctuation There is a great little review in The Economist of what seems like a great little book Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss. Maybe it is because I'm a nerd that I like these types of books (although I will use the excuse that I must because I'm an editor), the review is actually quite funny and fun, despite the seriousness of the issue. The reviewer notes one lovely anecdote that Truss trots out: "Harold Ross, a former New Yorker editor, and James Thurber rowed frequently over commas. Thurber, who disliked them, usually lost. He was once asked by a correspondent why there was a comma in the sentence, 'After dinner, the men went into the living room.' 'His answer,' says Ms Truss, 'was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation."This particular comma," Thurber explained, "was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up"'." And, yes, that quotation is properly punctuated. One last comment about punctuation, an error that I, as editor, see often. People do not know how to handle decades. It is not the 1950's or even 50's but '50s. In this case, the apostrophe takes the place of missing numbers or letters. There is nothing possessive about the 1950s nor is any letter being replaced just before the "s". Just a pet peeve of mine. I'm curious to see if Ms. Truss addresses this issue in her book. Best comment on the Martin cabinet My comment is simply this: uninspired. I might post more on this as I think about it in broader terms than I have today, which is simply the impact this has on social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage. (Reminder: my day job is editor of The Interim, Canada's life and family newspaper.) But generally a collection of nobodies replacing a collection of losers. David P. Janes says very little (but a lot) of Sheila Copps not getting a cabinet post; he posts her picture under the title "Nobody's Baby." That's it. More on Bartley It is certainly a testament to the man and the journalist that the late Robert Bartley, editor of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, the most important editorial page in America, is being remembered the way he has. The Weekly Standard has an article by the godfather of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol. Kristol notes that Bartley was early on a reader of Kristol's journal Public Interest. Obviously Bartley was always a man who took ideas seriously and his prescience in recognizing PI's importance goes a long way to explain why Bartley did what he did at the WSJ, namely to help lead the American public (or at least that portion of it that reads the WSJ) to take ideas seriously. Kristol explains Bartley's role in putting one idea -- supply side economics -- into action. While Kristol disapproves of the term (favouring, instead, the economics of growth), he outlined how the ball got rolling with Bartley and Jude Wanniski, (skipping over Arthur Laffer and Robert Mundell) then Jack Kemp and eventually Ronald Reagan. The rest, as they say, is history and Kristol makes this judgement about that history: "Converting the Republican party to the new economics was Bartley's finest hour." Adam Daifallah links to this item in the New York Sun. Sun editor Seth Lipsky gave a speech to his newsroom so his staff would better understand one of the great newspapermen (Bartley was no mere editor) of our age: "Bartley’s standard for honesty carried over into his own conduct of journalism. In the 1980s, he turned down one of the most prestigious prizes in economics, the Prix Rueff, because it was funded by Lewis Lehrman, who was politically involved. And when the Founders’ Association, a charity of which I am a director, gave Bartley its medal in lifetime achievement for his long defense of Israel, he sent back the check for the cash component of the prize, with a note that he might want someday to say something about The New York Sun." Lastly, Peter Brimelow remembers Bartley, the man who invited him to come down to the WSJ from Canada. Brimelow encapsulates nicely the position of the paper's editorial page in recent political history and also airs his disagreement on immigration policy with that same editorial page. Thursday, December 11, 2003
On fiscal conservatism This is a very important issue. The idea that government will confiscate enough of its people's hard-earned income to cover their wreckless spending qualifies as fiscal conservatism is a troubling new journalistic trend. Tim Graham comments on this in The Corner: "To win the battle of defining conservatism, conservatives are going to have to reject the notion that balanced-budget socialism can be defined as "fiscally conservative." Fiscal conservatism should be defined as a preference for low taxes and strictly limited government." Defending this term is vital if conservatism is to be a political force in the future. Will not on campaign finance reform A little disappointing that today's George F. Will Washington Post column is not on yesterday's US Supreme Court decision upholding the key provisions of McCain-Feingold. Over the past several years, Will has written numerous columns condemning the dubious constitutionality of, the philosophy behind and political consequences of campaign finance reform laws. However, Will, has a great column asking several difficult and, most likely, alien questions of the Democratic presidential candidates. They are alien because the candidates have so tailored their message to the Democratic activist voters of Iowa and New Hampshire -- voters, it should be added, that are more political because of their first caucus/primary in the nation status -- that the candidates may have lost touch with most Americans. Will poses questions about foreign policy and economics that require more than cliche-ridden boilerplate, including this one: "Is it pure coincidence that in 1983-84, as today, the nation was deep into the first term of a tax-cutting Republican administration?" Will concludes: "In the past nine presidential elections (1968-2000), the 11 states of the former Confederacy, plus Kentucky and Oklahoma, have awarded 1,385 electoral votes. Democratic candidates have won just 270 (20 percent) of them. Which Deanisms -- the war is bad, same-sex civil unions are good, Americans are undertaxed -- will be most helpful to Democrats down there?" Sad day for freedom Yesterday, the US Supreme Court upheld the core provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance restrictions (formerly known as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act). If you care to read the Court's defense of this travesty of justice, click here. In its decision on McConnell v. Federal Election Commission there are some particularly worrisome findings by the majority that the restrictions are not burdensome, that money corrupts the system, and that there is not any discrimination in the law when it allows special interests to raise so-called soft money for registration drives (etc...) but not political parties. (Most of these points are made in the first 85 pages.) In a nutshell, this is what the Court did (in the words of Kenneth Starr, who represented the plaintiff, Senator Mitch McConnell, during a Washington Post online Q&A): "Today's decision upheld virtually the entirety of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), including its two most important components: the restrictions on the raising and spending of non-federal funds, or so-called 'soft money,' by national and state political parties, and the restriction on broadcast advertising that refers to federal candidates by corporations and unions within specified periods before federal elections." Samizdata's Robert Clayton Dean has two great points about this terrible decision. First, "It does not take many words to apply the simple phrase 'Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech' to overturn legislation; it does, however, take many, many words to obfuscate the meaning of that phrase sufficiently to uphold legislation that, in part, prohibits the airing of campaign commercials in the weeks before an election." Relatedly, "Campaign finance regulation is nothing more than state limitations on the use of resources to distribute political speech, which is to say, state limitations on political speech." Rick Hasen writes at his Election Law Blog that even as an advocate of the campaign finance restriction law, he has concerns about "the Court's cursory dismissal of First Amendment arguments" and that while it ultimately reached the correct conclusion (Hasen is, of course, wrong about this) it reached it "too easily." Hasen writes: "I think the Court should have given more careful treatment to some of the First Amendment concerns. If not, the danger is that self-interested legislation makes its way through very easily under the guise of campaign finance reform." He goes into greater detail in his posting. For two other heavy-on-the-legalese posts by Hasen, see this one on the issue of whether Title II is over-broad (Hasen mistakenly argues that it isn't) and this one on the problems with the vagueness of several terms when it comes to soft money restrictions. Also, just to note, as Eugene Volokh points out, if Justice Sandra Day O'Connor hadn't change her view, er, legal opinion on soft-money contributions since her stated opposition to such restrictions in an 1990 decision, this provision of McCain-Feingold would have been struck down. (Or as the Washington Post put it, the decision was made "with Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in the decisive role.") John Fund's Opinion Journal column says that this decision confirms O'Connor's status as a judicial activist. Fund also notes Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent, in which he says: "The first instinct of power is the retention of power, and, under a Constitution that requires periodic elections, that is best achieved by the suppression of election-time speech. We have witnessed merely the second scene of Act I of what promises to be a lengthy tragedy." God bless Justice Scalia. Importantly, Kenneth Starr, in his Q&A with the Post discusses whether McConnell supersedes the already too-restrictive Buckley decision: "Unfortunately from our point of view, as of today, McConnell v. FEC itself is arguably the leading precedent on campaign finance law! As for the Court's 1976 decision in Buckley v. Valeo, which upheld restrictions on campaign contributions but struck down restrictions on expenditures, only two Justices by my count (Justices Scalia and Thomas) plainly indicated their willingness to overturn Buckley. All of the other Justices seemed to work from the premise that Buckley was still good law, but concluded that Buckley supported their respective positions. (Interestingly, the Chief Justice was on the Court when Buckley was decided, and largely voted with the majority in that case.)" We'll now see if American democracy is well served by what James Bopp, general counsel at the James Madison Center for Free Speech, calls "an orgy of incumbent protection," which is the best description of the effect of restricting campaign contributions. More on Bartley A nice column by the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan. She says that Bartley was conservative when conservative wasn't cool and optimistic. Although Nooan doesn't put it this way, she is in effect saying Bartley was the journalistic version of Noonan's old boss Ronald Reagan. The column concludes: "He was unillusioned and yet optimistic, felt human agency could change a great deal, and loved America in a way so Midwestern and ingrained that he never had to mention it or show it. It was just there, like his soft gray hair. He was one great man. He was a great American. The Founders would have loved him. So many of us are grateful that George W. Bush, earlier this month, gave Bob the presidential Medal of Freedom, our country's highest civilian honor. Well given. Freedom never had a better friend." Opinion Journal has fine sampling of Bartley's writing and, truth be told, I like his older stuff better than his weekly offerings of recent years. Bartley at his absolute best (October 14, 1968): "In our time, liberalism has come to mean dependence on the powers of central government to solve nearly all problems. This has stemmed from a view of man holding that any evil he displays is merely the result of his environment, and that his innate good will be released by the simple step of giving him ample money, housing and other worldly goods. Thus, the liberal creed has come to demand an almost religious 'commitment' to using the government to uplift the poor; not so much as a way to help the unfortunate, but as an answer to all the problems of mankind." Bartley at his near best (June 25, 1984): "The technological arguments against [missile] defense are mainly foils for the underlying philosophy that has dominated our strategic deployments and arms-negotiating strategies for a generation--the notion that defense is bad, that it is good if each side can destroy the other entirely." Wednesday, December 10, 2003
Unsafe at any height LifeSite Daily News has a story on the dangers of flying while using oral contraceptives. The Archives of Internal Medicine published a study today that finds that women who use birth control pills have a fourteen-fold increase in their risk of potentially life-threatening blood clots (thrombophilia). American Life League President Judie Brown told LifeSite "Warning signs should be posted in every airport," about The Pill's potentially dangerous effects. Brown added, "The birth control pill is simply bad medicine, regardless of how you look at it. And now we learn that from 35,000 feet, the view is even worse." The warnings might be especially apt in airplane washrooms where eager members of the mile high club congregate. The cure for AIDS is more capitalism This is a little late for World AIDS Day but as they say, better late than never. Especially when it is the thoughts of Johan Norberg (scroll down to December 1 to "Growth is the Cure"): "Today is World AIDS Day, and everybody will be talking about the need for a quick fix, the need for cheap medicines for example. But it’s important not to see the AIDS problem in isolation. The need for controlled distribution of drugs, and to take them in specific intervals requires better health care infrastructure. And the drugs are strong, so you need to be well-nourished to take them, so you need better access to food as well. And you need more political and economical emancipation for women, so that they can say no to ruthless men. And furthermore, malaria, diarrheal diseases and acute respiratory infections kills millions more than AIDS. So we need other drugs as well, better health care, more information, and sanitation. All of this takes resources, wealth and growth. What the poor need is not cheap drugs, but the wealth to get the drugs and everything else they need. Free trade is more important than free drugs." First Clark, now Brison's gone After the 1997 federal election which elected a Liberal majority supposedly because of a fractured right, there was the usual talk about re-uniting the right. Toronto Sun columnist Peter Worthington said he was all for re-uniting the two parties but only if Reformers could have a veto of which Tories joined. In the aftermath of this week's merger of the Canadian Alliance, the reincarnation of the Reform Party, and the Tories, the latter are purging themselves. The latest is socially liberal and openly gay Tory MP Scott Brison who has announced he has jumped ship to the Liberals just one day after announcing he would not seek the Conservative Party of Canada's leadership. How one can seriously consider running for the leadership of a party and several days later leave that party is beyond my comprehension but clearly the new party is better off without his ilk (by which I mean socially "progressive" intolerant types and not someone who is openly gay). See also Adam Daifallah's thoughts on why the new party won't miss Brison. For starters, Daifallah says, "Brison has revealed himself as a two-faced, unprincipled, shameless, spineless, opportunistic dork." Robert Bartley, RIP Robert Bartley, the man who revitalized the way America looked at the editorial page -- or at least the Wall Street Journal's -- passed away today at the too-young age of 66. Bartley was an important journalist and a vital figure within the conservative movement in the early 1980s when his editorial page led to the acceptance of the idea of supply side economics. His book The Seven Fat Years chronicles the success of Reaganomics and is by all accounts the best book to do so. I have links to several articles on Bartley below. The WSJ's announcement from today that Bartley had passed away. A wonderfully succinct tribute from Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: "Robert Bartley was an articulate and most effective advocate of free markets, indeed freedom generally. His thoughtful voice will be sorely missed." Robert Novak's essay in the Weekly Standard on Bartley from January of this year: "The second and more important reason is his enormous impact on public policy. Without Bartley and his newspaper, supply-side economics would have been stillborn. His muscular foreign policy sounded the death knell of isolationism on the right. His relentless assaults on Bill Clinton's ethics set the standard for Republicans. He has not permitted conservatives to forget such unpleasant issues as tort reform and school choice." Last week Bartley has honoured by President George W. Bush with the highest honour given to civilians, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Bush said, "Robert L. Bartley is one of the most influential journalists in American history. As a reporter, author, editorial page editor, and columnist, he helped shape the times in which we live. A champion of free markets, individual liberty, and the values necessary for a free society, his writings have been characterized by profound insights, passionate convictions, a commitment to democratic principles, and an unyielding optimism in America. The United States honors him for his contributions to American journalism and to the intellectual and political life of our Nation." Lastly, Christopher Buckley remembers his first meeting with Bartley. This toast from 1997 can't be summed up easily or even cut up into a tasty morsel, so you're going to have to read the whole thing. Yet more good news from Iraq The US army has apparently killed Colonel Ghanem Abdul-Ghani Sultan al-Zeidi during raids in Mosul. Colonel al-Zeidi was a senior officer in the Saddam Fedayeen, a group suspected of co-ordinating the attacks on Americans in post-Saddam Iraq. While the US military would not comment on al-Zeidi specifically, a spokesman said there were raids Wednesday against "35 separate targets" and that they did indeed capture suspected Saddam Fedayeen members. Sullivan on Kerry Andrew Sullivan summarizes (scroll way down) why Senator John Kerry (UltraD, People's Republic of MA) has not caught on with voters: "He's the only candidate you just know for sure would be a terrible president - indecisive, vain, out-of-touch and incapable of rising to the occasion. Dean, Lieberman and Gephardt all strike me as men who could grow in the office. Not Kerry. He's Gore, without the charm." A fair question Joshua Muravchik writes in the December Commentary about his experience at a conference in Greece that hosted university-age students from Greece and Turkey, Bosnia and Serbia, Israel and her Arab neighbours. At one point, he says: "... there was a dinner at which the students, grouped by country, exhibited or performed something of their native culture. When the Palestinians' turn came, Gevara [a Palestinian who claimed he was harassed by Israeli security at the airport] led off. After showing an artifact of some kind, he picked up a fist-sized stone he had brought and said, 'These are the stones we throw at our oppressors.' Next came the Palestinian-American, who opened with the remark that 'nothing is more important to us than family.' At this point, Ruthie called out: 'Not even your stones?'" The reaction of the Greek hosts was great upset with Ruthie even though there reason behind her inquiry. If Palestinians (many but by no means all) are practicing suicide attacks on Israel, is it not fair to wonder if they hatred for the Jewish state is greater than their love of family? The challenge ahead in the Middle East Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar at AEI, has a wonderful essay in the December Commentary about "Listening to Arabs." Muravchik encapsulates the problem in the Middle East with Islamic cultures: "The most remarkable person I met at the symposium was Ali, an Iraqi exile living in Morocco. In the formal session, while others deflected responsibility or made alibis, he asserted: 'Our societies have failed to move into the modern world because we have accorded no importance to the acquisition of knowledge'." Predominantly Islamic countries, especially Islamic Arab countries, have a frustration borne of envy -- the envy of watching a world progress around them, with developments in the sciences and the arts, personal freedoms and representative governments. (As Ralph Peters writes in yesterday's New York Post, "God has blessed America. This isn't the decayed civilization of the Middle East.") Islamic countries end up backwards not because they eschew the luxuries of modernism but because they don't understand them. The good news in Iraq Two pieces of good news, in fact. The first is that Japan has approved the use of 1,000 troops in Iraq for "reconstruction" purposes. So, will those on the Left continue their complaints about American unilateralism. Sure, because in their mind, the Japanese don't count; Japan doesn't have a Security Council veto. Regardless of the Left's obstinacy, the Daily Telegraph sees the significance: "In pushing through this mission, Mr Koizumi is taking a great risk. Most of the public and the main opposition group, the Democratic Party, oppose it. Even his coalition partner, Komeito, has misgivings. The Japanese were shocked by the murder of two of their diplomats in Iraq last month. Imagine their reaction if the SDF were to take or inflict casualties. It requires courageous leadership to move beyond the prevailing consensus in an attempt to give Japan a political voice commensurate with its economic strength." The second story is more significant. Reuters reports that US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has cited national security concerns in excluding firms from countries that opposed the liberation of Iraq (read: Canada, Old Europe, Russia) from bidding on 24 reconstruction contracts worth $18.6 billion. The contracts cover electricity, communications, public buildings, transportation, public works and security and justice. Wolfowitz said of the restrictions: "It is necessary for the protection of the essential security interests of the United States to limit competition for the prime contracts of these procurements to companies from the United States, Iraq, coalition partners and force contributing nations." In other words, up your France and Germany. Tuesday, December 09, 2003
If you tax it, they will come A Toronto Star editorial said on Monday: "SARS is gone. Toronto's glittering theatres and sports arenas stand ready to entertain. Its museums brim with cultural treasures. And its calendar is packed with festivals and special events. But international travellers and convention organizers still turn away from this city." How to fix this problem? According to the editorial (and Toronto's new mayor comrade Miller and many tourism-related or tourism dependent businesses), the answer is to tax visitors' stays hotel rooms. The idea is that a $2 a room tax would pay for "a coherent, well-funded, and permanent campaign selling Toronto around the world." The Star says that the $3.1 billion area tourism industry stands to lose $600 million in 2004 but really how does anyone know that?. And is the best way to encourage people to come to Toronto to make their stay here more expensive? Perhaps we can advertise that in Miller's Toronto they will pay tolls on roads as they drive from the downtown up the DVP to the Ontario Science Centre or across the city to the Toronto Zoo. That should really make tourists flock to our great city. Now put aside the question of whether the tax would be a disincentive to staying at a Toronto hotel; assume for a minute that it attracts tens of thousands of tourists. Isn't taxing tourists for an advertising campaign to help Toronto businesses best described as a form of corporate welfare? Why not, when auto plants threaten to shut down, have the government pay for Ford's or GM's commercials? A hotel tax is an indefensibly bad idea. Pro-abortion violence The media is usually quick to report any allegation of violence against abortuaries. This item shows that intimidation and harassment is a two-way street. A threat was recently called into the Choices Medical Clinic, a crisis pregnancy centre in Wichita, on December 3. The caller threatened to blow up the Choices centre, which is located next door to the abortion facility of the infamous late-term abortion specialist George Tiller. So far, no New York Times or CNN story on the issue. Comments and notice I was particularly busy blogging today so expect a much lessened output over the next few days. That said, whenever I say that, I continue to blog excessively. Just a reminder that comments can be sent to paul_tuns@yahoo.com. Scrappleface on Kerry The incomparable Scrappleface says that Senator John Kerry has lowered expectations in New Hampshire where he currently trails Howard Dean (depending on the poll) by 20-30 points: "Aides to Democrat presidential hopeful John F. Kerry say that their candidate will be 'in the thick of things' after the January 27 New Hampshire primary if Mr. Kerry 'can still fog a mirror.' 'As long as his body is above room temperature it will be a win for Kerry,' said campaign spokesman Michael Meehan. 'On the heart monitor, we're looking for a wiggle above flatline. No matter what the ballot box numbers are, if Senator Kerry is still breathing on January 28, he's still in the hunt as far as we're concerned'." John Lennon, RIP retrospective The beatification (metaphorical, to be sure) of slain singer/songwriter/Beatle John Lennon has long been a project of sentimental music fans and lefties everywhere. The fact is, when teamed up with Paul McCartney, the Beatles rolled out rock hit after rock hit but as a single artist Lennon was good but not great. However, Lennon is adored not just or even primarily for his music but for his causes which were the trendy, leftish causes most artists wore on their sleeves in the 1970s. Surprisingly, Lennon did not get a Nobel Peace Prize for dreaming up the idea of bedding his wife in Montreal to raise awareness for the cause of peace. Perhaps there is a sick irony in this long-haired, unwashed, peacenik getting gunned down in front of his own posh apartment complex. Yes, he hated capitalism but surely enjoyed its fruits. Yesterday was the anniversary (20-somethingth, but who really cares) of Mark Chapman gunning down Lennon. Joel Engel wrote in the Daily Standard yesterday about the hypocritical and juvenile lyrics of Lennon's leftist anthem Imagine. It is worth looking at, but consider whether Lennon really meant what he wrote and sang "Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can / No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man / Imagine all the people, sharing all the world." Engel says, "Let's begin implementing the third stanza's message by splitting up the royalties to this copyrighted song." But then Lennon would never have lived in the Dakota, would he? |
