I've mentioned that I love the way the President occasionally makes liberals literally froth at the mouth, even worse than the last transformative conservative president (Reagan) did. Here is the most recent example from the press conference:
Michael Allen: Mr. President, with no opponent, how can you spend $170 million or more on your primary campaign?Ha.President Bush: Just watch.
On the other hand, CBS's John Roberts apparently is vying to be Helen Thomas:
Q Thank you, Mr. President. Building sort of on that idea, it's impossible to deny that the world is a better place in the region, certainly a better place without Saddam Hussein. But there's a sense here in this country, and a feeling around the world, that the U.S. has lost credibility by building the case for Iraq upon sometimes flimsy or, some people have complained, non-existent evidence. And I'm just wondering, sir, why did you choose to take the world to war in that way?I didn't get to see this one on CSPAN, but I can only presume that "John" was trying to interrupt the President as he was giving his answer, and that the President finally had enough.THE PRESIDENT: You know, look, in my line of work, it's always best to produce results. And I understand that. The -- for a while the questions were, could you conceivably achieve a military victory in Iraq? You know, the dust storms have slowed you down. And I was a patient man because I realized that we would be successful in achieving our military objective.
Now, of course, the question is, will Iraq ever be free, and will it be peaceful? And I believe it will. I remind some of my friends that it took us a while to go from the Articles of Confederation to the United States Constitution. Even our own experiment with democracy didn't happen overnight. I never have expected Thomas Jefferson to emerge in Iraq in a 90-day period.
And so, this is going to take time. And the world will see what I mean when I say, a free Iraq will help peace in the Middle East, and a free Iraq will be important for changing the attitudes of the people in the Middle East. A free Iraq will show what is possible in a world that needs freedom, in a part of the world that needs freedom.
Let me finish for a minute, John, please. Just getting warmed up. I'm kind of finding my feet. (Laughter.)
Saddam Hussein was a threat. The United Nations viewed him as a threat. That's why they passed 12 resolutions. Predecessors of mine viewed him as a threat. We gathered a lot of intelligence. That intelligence was good, sound intelligence on which I made a decision.
And in order to placate the critics and the cynics about intentions of the United States, we need to produce evidence. And I fully understand that. And I'm confident that our search will yield that which I strongly believe, that Saddam had a weapons program. I want to remind you, he actually used his weapons program on his own people at one point in time, which is pretty tangible evidence. But I'm confident history will prove the decision we made to be the right decision.
Hold on for a second. You're through. John.
Am I just naive to think that you can ask good questions and do your job as a journalist without being an uncivil ass to the President (whether he is a Democrat or a Republican)?
Here's a silly line from Robert Novak:
It was not just that the Bush administration dispatched 12 Cubans who hijacked a boat to the tender mercies of Fidel Castro. What inflamed pro-Bush Cuban-Americans in south Florida is that the United States negotiated with the communist dictator to impose 10-year prison sentences. This sudden agreement between Washington and Havana could cost George W. Bush a second term.I don't like the administration's handling of this (relatively minor) issue, but it's not going to cost anyone a second term. Indeed, had the President acted much differently, most of the Bush-hating press and blogging contingent would be beating up the President for playing to the Cuban-American bloc for purely partisan reasons. It wouldn't have been, but that would have been the message.
Novak is an experienced political pundit, and he shouldn't throw out lines like the one in bold. It's understandable when Matt Welch proclaims that the gay marriage issue will lead to the President's defeat or Glenn Reynolds worries that glow sticks and not invading Saudi Arabia may lead to electoral ruin (one word: not), but Novak should know better.
Maybe this was just intended to call attention to the issue, and I think substantively he has some good points. But he could have made them with less hyperbole.
This may be a heretical question for a blogger to ask, but could anyone explain to me why this article is posted in the usually outstanding Washington Times book review section?
I know, blogs are the new thing that all the kids are playing with, but they are not books, and this is not a review. Shouldn't it be in a different section?
And while we're at it, shouldn't the headline have been excised of a word (undersiege) that is not truly a word?
Maybe the editors were on vacation and the interns were running things this past weekend.
Taking a cue from this (silly) exercise by Stewart Margolis, Orrin Judd has come up with his own list of definitions. Very good stuff (as usual).
Of course Matt Welch had to weigh in for the Reason crowd on why felons should be allowed to vote, thereby following in the footsteps of fellow social libertarian Glenn Reynolds. And he finally gets to the point in the second paragraph (in true Reason fashion):
It's worth thinking about, isn't it? Maybe even worth getting involved in local politics over. And maybe putting down that joint and thinking about the politics of criminal law from time to time. And, ultimately, thinking about one's own behavior:Then there's the drugs. Use a crack pipe, commit a felony. Snort a line of coke? Felony in 37 states, according to this nifty Robert Wood Johnson Foundation chart. Possession of meth is felonious in 36 states; a single hit of ecstasy in 26.
Guilty yet? If somehow not, then look up your state criminal code and check twice. For what I'm guessing is the vast majority of us who have committed a felony at least once, here's a question: Should we be banned from voting in elections, forever?
Maybe that last bit of advice is best. Personal responsibility is one of those things conservatives and libertarians ought to be able to agree on. Except when the issue of drugs comes up. Ho hum.As Glenn Reynolds put it succinctly last week: "Don't have so many felonies." While waiting for that longshot to come in, it will be worth tracking hopeful new developments at the statehouse level. And staying out of trouble.
Look, there probably are too many crimes designated as felonies, although I take some issue with the notion a "vast majority" of us are unconvicted felons. But if the social libertarians really think the issue of voting rights for convicted felons makes for a good issue among the general electorate, I hope they take it up. The Dems seem to be on a suicide march towards 2004, and I'm all for giving 'em a little more fuel for their journey.
The Financial Times (quite a good newspaper, despite this) runs an article with the following headline:
Pentagon 'was not ready for postwar Iraq'
The story uses Paul Wolfowitz's briefing on his trip to Iraq as a taking off point to report how badly things are going. As you might imagine from the headline, the article conveys the notion that Wolfowitz himself was fairly downbeat, and the situation on the ground is not good.
Unfortunately, the article totally misrepresents the Wolfowitz briefing, which we linked on Wednesday and which can be found here.
If anything, Wolfowitz comes back fairly optimistic about what the United States has accomplished and will accomplish in Iraq, while admitting that, yes, there have been some surprises.
Whether you good readers agree with the Wolfowitz assessment or not, wouldn't you at least agree that the FT article, which purports to be news reporting, is highly slanted, to the point of being misleading?
Thank goodness "old media" doesn't fully control information any more, and that Wolfowitz's actual press conference was available almost immediately in a number of formats (CSPAN, web, etc). Give us the facts, and we can judge for ourselves, thank you very much.
There are a couple of additions/changes to the blogroll to announce.
Gideon Strauss has moved off of blogspot to a more reliable host, with domain name GideonStrauss.com (please update and go offer your congratulations)
and
James Clarke maintains a good conservative weblog that I only recently discovered, Right On Everthing (you'll be hearing more from Mr. Clarke shortly).
Enjoy.
Angry Clam discovered an, erm, interesting study done by our friends out in Berkeley that help us clarify what contributes to conservatism:
- Fear and aggression
- Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
- Uncertainty avoidance
- Need for cognitive closure
- Terror management
We assume the opposite of this, what liberals are, would then be:
- Foolhardiness and cowardice
- Tolerance of ignorance
- Uncertainty appreciation
- Fear of coming to a conclusion
- Tolerance of terror
They don't seem to say as much in their report, but one can assume that it's true because:
They also stressed that their findings are not judgmental.
So long as we understand their lumping Hitler and Reagan together in the conservative camp, along with some other unlikely figures:
They noted that [Stalin, Khrushchev and Castro] might be considered politically conservative in the context of the systems that they defended. The researchers noted that Stalin, for example, was concerned about defending and preserving the existing Soviet system.
So do we grade them on a curve for at least realizing that Castro is bad?
President Bush from the Rose Garden today:
Yesterday, in the city of Mosul, the careers of two of the regime's chief henchmen came to an end.It really makes the Lefties froth in that deranged way of theirs when he talks like that.
I love it.
Rep. Richard Gephardt has now missed 356 of 397 House votes this year.
Senator John Kerry has missed 150 of 290 votes.
Way to fight for the little people, guys!
A big thanks to Ipse Dixit for keeping track. Like Mr. Harris, we would like our refund from these AWOL legislators.
We take some shots at former President Clinton here (it's a conservative website after all). But I'll give him props when he makes sense. And this makes sense (although you can almost sense Larry's disappointment):
andKING: President, maybe I can get an area where you may disagree. Do you join, President Clinton, your fellow Democrats, in complaining about the portion of the State of the Union address that dealt with nuclear weaponry in Africa?
CLINTON: Well, I have a little different take on it, I think, than either side.
First of all, the White House said -- Mr. Fleischer said -- that on balance they probably shouldn't have put that comment in the speech. What happened, often happens. There was a disagreement between British intelligence and American intelligence. The president said it was British intelligence that said it. And then they said, well, maybe they shouldn't have put it in.
Let me tell you what I know. When I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for. That is, at the end of the first Gulf War, we knew what he had. We knew what was destroyed in all the inspection processes and that was a lot. And then we bombed with the British for four days in 1998. We might have gotten it all; we might have gotten half of it; we might have gotten none of it. But we didn't know. So I thought it was prudent for the president to go to the U.N. and for the U.N. to say you got to let these inspectors in, and this time if you don't cooperate the penalty could be regime change, not just continued sanctions.
I mean, we're all more sensitive to any possible stocks of chemical and biological weapons. So there's a difference between British -- British intelligence still maintains that they think the nuclear story was true. I don't know what was true, what was false. I thought the White House did the right thing in just saying, Well, we probably shouldn't have said that. And I think we ought to focus on where we are and what the right thing to do for Iraq is now. That's what I think.
KING: What do you do, Mr. President, with what's put in front of you?That's almost statesmanlike. And it certainly puts this "scandal" in its proper context (i.e. it's not a scandal at all). And the part I bolded is important. The Nine Dwarves don't seem to have any foreign policy plans of their own, and seem all too happy when things go wrong for the Bush Administration. Being gleeful when things go badly is probably not going to be a successful electoral strategy. Former President Clinton understands that well.CLINTON: Well, here's what happens: every day the president gets a daily brief from the CIA. And then, if it's some important issue -- and believe me, you know, anything having to do with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons became much more important to everybody in the White House after September the 11 -- then they probably told the president, certainly Condoleezza Rice, that this is what the British intelligence thought. They maybe have a difference of opinion, but on balance, they decided they should leave that line in the speech.
I think the main thing I want to say to you is, people can quarrel with whether we should have more troops in Afghanistan or internationalize Iraq or whatever, but it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted for stocks...
DOLE: That's right.
CLINTON: ... of biological and chemical weapons. We might have destroyed them in '98. We tried to, but we sure as heck didn't know it because we never got to go back in there.
KING: Yes.
CLINTON: And what I think -- again, I would say the most important thing is we should focus on what's the best way to build Iraq as a democracy? How is the president going to do that and deal with continuing problems in Afghanistan and North Korea?
We should be pulling for America on this. We should be pulling for the people of Iraq. We can have honest disagreements about where we go from here, and we have space now to discuss that in what I hope will be a nonpartisan and open way. But this State of the Union deal they decided to use the British intelligence. The president said it was British intelligence. Then they said on balance they shouldn't have done it. You know, everybody makes mistakes when they are president. I mean, you can't make as many calls as you have to make without messing up once in awhile.
Another tip of the hat to NRO for posting this one.
Here are some interesting comments from Jay Nordlinger:
The Bush Administration doesn't need to overdo it, but I do agree that it needs to defend its policies from time to time. As for the Nine Dwarves, they are doing a fine job of making fools of themselves on a daily basis (like Gephardt yesterday, assaulting the President's "machismo" in front of a backdrop that looked like a morgue, even as Saddam's murderous sons were being killed by our forces), and there will be plenty of video clip reminders (for later) of goofy things they've said when they think nobody but the Loony Left is paying attention. The Bushies tend to disengage from politics during the summer (until after Labor Day), but I imagine the communications shop will be hard at it in another month or so.Democratic rhetoric is escalating, and it is alarming even people like me, who wouldn't mind seeing the marginalization of the Democratic party. Loopiness in one of the two parties in a two-party system is perhaps not great for the country. John Kerry said, the other day, "Never should young Americans have to put on a uniform and go to the Middle East to defend America's interest in oil." That's the sort of talk you would expect from a bad leftist professor, not a U.S. senator — and one running for president, at that.
And this oil talk is in addition to all the "Bush lied" stuff — which, of course, amounts to a charge of treason. One candidate, as you know — Sen. Bob Graham, who was a sober moderate before he entered the Democratic primaries — has talked seriously of Bush's impeachment.
The Democratic rhetoric may be nutso, but that doesn't mean it will not have an effect on the American public. The media, of course, are only too happy to magnify this rhetoric. Bear in mind that those who opposed the war from the beginning have to justify their position: by saying a) that the Iraq campaign was unnecessary, brought about by official prevarication, and/or b) that the aftermath (i.e., the Allied occupation and organization) is a disaster.
Again, this is crazy talk: but the Bush administration, and its supporters, are going to have to defend the Iraq campaign, and the general War on Terror, time and time again. They have to do so more or less unceasingly. Because the Democrats and their allies in the media agitate against the administration unceasingly. Bush and Company can't afford to rest. Tony Blair can't come to these shores to give a stirring, irrefutable address every week. We Americans are going to have to do some talking and reminding and arguing ourselves. The Iraq campaign was part of a Bush doctrine that says, "We will make no distinction between terrorists and the regimes that abet them." Sept. 11 was not very long ago, in strict scientific time, but it is ancient history in the minds of some.
If the Bushies don't get moving, the crazy talk may begin to stick. The Tet offensive was a disaster for America's enemies in Vietnam, but the more Walter Cronkite played it the other way, the more reality was turned on its head.
(Update) Speaking of the Loony Left, here's something from Charlie Rangel last night on Fox, referring to the elimination of Saddam's sons (courtesy of NRO):
RANGEL: I really think that these are two of the rottenest bums that have ever been described to me, but do you know something? We have a law on the books that United States should not be assassinating anybody.Answer: Yes. That the Dems think otherwise -- and keep saying it, flaunting it even -- is going to bite them in the arse in a big way in 2004. It's not 1968 any more.HANNITY: It was no assassination. It was a firefight. It was a war situation, Charlie.
RANGEL: Well, I thought that whether or not it was a war -- we didn't declare war. We had a preemptive strike against Iraq. And a lot of the people who thought that this so-called war would be justified based on the evidence.
All I am saying is -- what you have to understand is that, you know, we tried to assassinate Castro and we paid dearly for it. And when you personalize a war and when you're saying that you're killing someone's kids, then they in turn would think that they kill somebody.
You know, what you do in the heat of battle is one thing. What you do when you target a personality and say he's dead -- I guess the question would be, are you going to sleep any safer tonight knowing that these two bums are dead?
Apropos of our recent comments on one Shadia Drury, I noticed while visiting the Claremont blog earlier that Ken Masugi links to a pretty pointed critique of Professor Drury's "work" on Strauss that he wrote in 1998. The link wasn't quite right, but the essay is here.
Masugi wrote this in 1998, yet was already anticipating some of the nitwits who have recently written about Strauss:
To put her case in a nutshell: Leo Strauss had some bright students, who in turn had other bright students (Weekly Standard publisher William Kristol, to cite the best example) who had considerable influence in the shaping of contemporary conservatism’s theory and practice. For Miss Drury, Washington, D.C. is Kristol City, dominated by the ideas of William’s father Irving and mother Gertrude Himmelfarb. Other prominent neoconservative Straussian revolutionaries include William Bennett, Alan Keyes, George Will, Newt Gingrich and Justice Clarence Thomas. Any connection to Strauss or one of his students, however tenuous, earns that political figure the derisive title, "Straussian."Irresponsible and delusional. That pretty well sums it up, and ought to sound vaguely familiar by now.(In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I advised Clarence Thomas, when he was chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, on the articles and speeches Miss Drury cites as reflecting the influence of Strauss student Harry Jaffa, with whom I studied. The author does not cite any Supreme Court opinions to support her labeling of Mr. Thomas as a Straussian. Suffice it to say that Justice Thomas’ jurisprudence is highly principled and looks toward the Founding, and if that is enough to earn one this label, then so be it).
If this description of the Straussians as the "dominant ideology of the Republican-Party" already sounds delusional, Miss Drury’s distortion of Strauss himself is utterly irresponsible: "Strauss points out that the greatest philosophers, those who manage to rise above convention altogether, are pederasts." Her footnote cites not any statement of Strauss’, but rather the views expressed by the comedian Aristophanes in Plato’s "Symposium."
Quite a bit of discussion followed on blogs after Drudge linked that Michael Ramirez political cartoon that appeared in the LA Times.
The Claremont Insitute's Thomas Krannawitter says much of that discussion was off the mark. And those Claremont guys are hardly a bunch of lefties.
Still, a political cartoon that has to be explained and interpreted can't really be said to have hit the mark, even if the cartoonist didn't intend the message quite a few people inferred.
Al Hunt, the hopelessly liberal WSJ columnist, is (big surprise!) all excited about Howard Dean.
Orrin Judd, on the other hand, has this to say:
The "real Dean" was a very popular governor in a Left-of-center New England state but by the end of his stay in office had somehow managed to revive a Republican Party that to this day has no superior personalities or particularly adept politicians at the top, yet still has the governor's seat and half the legislature..
Have the Dems simply become the Delusional Party? Does that happen when you are out of power for a while and are the party that exists to exercise power?
Just seen on Fox News Sunday:
Tony Snow: In your view, was the war against Iraq justified?
Senator Jay Rockefeller (D): Hard to say.
Keep it up, Dems. It's gotta be a sure way to lose in 2004 to be the Party of Iraqi Mass Graves!
I ran across this little piece on the Leo Strauss "controversy" about the time the site got hacked, and never did anything with it. It's a much better overview than some of the more recent things that have appeared in print, although it's a stretch to call Wolfowitz a student of Strauss (he was a student of Wohlstetter). And it accurately reproduces Shadia Drury's nutball theories on Strauss:
Prof. Drury, who has spent 20 years studying Strauss's ideas, was recently awarded a federally funded Canada Research Chair position -- worth $200,000 a year for seven years -- to continue work on political theory at the University of Regina. She calls Strauss's teaching the bedrock of U.S. neo-conservatism, probably the most powerful ideological influence in the government of George W. Bush.It's hard to believe she's spent twenty years "studying" Strauss's ideas and came up with that. Maybe she'll take the time actually to READ Strauss sometime in the next twenty years, and put herself on the way to understanding him. I'm not holding out much hope, however."The major themes of neo-conservatism echo the political ideas of Leo Strauss -- his sense of crisis, his dread of nihilism, his antipathy to liberalism, his religiosity, his elitism, his populism, and more," she writes in Leo Strauss and the American Right. On the phone from Regina, she adds that what is most insidious about Strauss is his notion of "esoteric writing."
Strauss believed many great theorists disguised the implications of their ideas, either for self-preservation in uncertain times or because they feared that society would disintegrate if everyone realized their implications. Because of this, Prof. Drury says, Straussians in politics tend to be deceptive, believing the full implications of their ideas are too explosive to share with the masses.
"Straussians believe there are two truths," she says. "One for those who can handle the dark reality, and Pablum for the others."
Her antogonist at Calgary, however, does seem to have read Strauss:
Prof. Cooper says he doesn't consider himself a Straussian, but has read almost everything Strauss wrote and credits him with reviving interest in close study of the classics. He says most of Strauss's critics have "no imagination." What Strauss actually argued, Prof. Cooper maintains, is that apparent contradictions in the writings of brilliant thinkers can be explained if one gets deep enough inside their heads.Actually, I would argue that critics like Drury have WAY TOO MUCH imagination, to the point of imagining things that are nowhere present in Strauss's actual writing. But Professor Cooper is right to focus on Strauss's techniques of textual analysis. That was Strauss's major contribution to the discipline. But I guess it's just not sexy to engage in close textual analysis these days, and it probably doesn't win one a distinguished research chair."If you understand it the way that Strauss says the authors were meant to be understood, it's an 'Aha!' experience," he says.
Such is the state of the academy these days.
So, you Joe Lieberman fans, here's your self-described (self-promoting) Conscience of the Senate in action:
After offering the NAACP another apology for skipping the candidates' forum and then ticking off his own civil rights credentials, Lieberman praised the NAACP for its work during the Florida recount. That's when things became absurd. "We didn't realize at the time, Al Gore and I, that we not only needed Kweisi Mfume fighting for justice here in Florida counting votes," Lieberman said, "we need him on the Supreme Court where the votes really counted. Maybe that'll happen some day."If the New Republic's Jason Zengerle thinks this immoderate, I wonder what most average Americans think of a potential Justice Kweisi Mfume. Or a potential President Lieberman.So Lieberman--a man who once questioned affirmative action--is now saying that he'll put Kweisi Mfume--a man who, according to his biography on the NAACP website, has not even attended law school--on the Supreme Court?
(tip of the hat to David Cohen for this one)
Senators Evan Bayh (D) and Trent Lott (R) appeared on the Bill O'Reilly program tonight. I caught part of it as I was flipping channels, and heard Senator Bayh state that the American people might like to know, in light of the flap over Niger, Iraq, and Uranium, that the bigger news was that there were several other sources of intelligence underlying the belief that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium from Africa.
Senator Bayh, one of the more sensible Democrats on national security, said this. I guess he can be frank since he is not vying for his party's presidential nomination. Maybe those Dems who are NOT on the Senate Intelligence Committee ought to give Senator Bayh a shout, and tone down their rhetoric.
Likelihood of that happening? Not good.
I had the same reaction as David yesterday when I heard about the American soldiers in Iraq who were criticizing their leadership. I can understand the frustration with not coming home in a timely manner, but soldiers just shouldn't pop off like that, given the circumstances (and there should be repercussions for doing so).
Sgt. Hook had this to say in David's comments:
I can understand the low morale as the soldiers probably just found out about not coming home as scheduled. Kind of like a punch in the gut I suppose. NO EXCUSE. They certainly ought to be brought up on charges as their comments are prejudicial to the good order and discipline of the armed forces- and in a warzone! They are gottdamned lucky I'm not their First Sergeant. By the time I'd be done with them, they'd be begging for a court martial.I concur.
Most news junkies and political bloggers understand that Saudi elites have indirectly (perhaps even directly) aided and abetted international terrorism against the United States.
All that's really in dispute is the extent to which it has happened.
What to do about it, of course, is an entirely different problem.
There is the contingent that writes sexy posts advocating that the United States take over the place (many of these folks are the same ones who are paranoid that John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge are conspiring to take their glow sticks away and analyze their Kroger shopping habits).
Sure. Good idea. Just one question -- when we're done occupying the place, to whom shall we turn it over?
The problem remains, while certain elements of the Saudi royal family have indeed helped fund and promote international terror, other Saudi royals really do value a strong relationship with the United States (they are, unfortunately, somewhat frozen out of power at the moment). And the bigger problem is, what would replace the Saudi royals should they be toppled -- heaven forbid toppled by a "democratic" revolution akin to the one that toppled the Shah in Iran -- would be far more hostile to the United States than the current bunch, however hard that is to imagine.
And that's problematic. Because contrary to the suggestions of Den Beste, there is no crude producer with sufficient spare export capacity to make up for a significant Saudi shortfall at this time. Iraq's infrastructure is devastated and they don't even have E&P fiscal terms, let alone an exploration regime! PDVSA is a mess under El Commandante. Russia doesn't have the spare capacity (yet). Canada's oil sands are undeveloped, costly, and environmentally prohibitive at the moment.
And I'm coming up short when I try to think of other regimes that could help offset a major supply disruption. So there's one good reason that American action is limited.
That's not to say Saudi Arabia isn't a strategic problem. It's a huge problem. The Saudi royal family continues to grow, and continues to suck more and more of the nation's hydrocarbon wealth. Meanwhile, there's an underclass that's growing rapidly (42% of the population is 14 or younger -- think about that!) and doesn't enjoy much in the way of economic opportunity. When they see the fat Saudi royals living off the "Kingdom's" wealth and not exactly living as virtuously as Allah might have hoped, do you think they're ripe for recruitment by radical Islamists? Violent Islamists who wish both the Saudi royals and the United States harm?
The Saudi royals realize the predicament they're in. They just don't quite know how to deal with it. Crown Prince Abdullah is hopeful that getting American troops out of the Kingdom will allow him to placate Islamists. But that won't be enough. He also realizes that hydrocarbon revenues must be jacked up. That's why you are seeing the Saudis actually think about a limited opening for natural gas (the on-again/off-again natural gas initiative), and why supermajors are hopeful that will lead to a much more lucrative opening in crude. The Saudi royals need more cash, to support their lavish lifestyles, but more importantly, to boost the standards of living of those who might suddenly find political Islam's message much more appealing than the Kingdom's.
Den Beste is hopeful that the United States is preparing for a more aggressive Saudi Arabian policy. Unfortunately, I see few signs that is the case. It should be the case, mind you, as Robert Baer makes clear in this interview (and in the excellent print article upon which it is based, unfortunately not available online). And in five years, Iraqi (or Iranian) production could ramp up enough to allow us to confront this threat more directly. That's good, because in five years, that burgeoning underclass in Saudi Arabia is going to be coming of age. That's when things are really going to become volatile.
"Boy the media is really reaching for more WMD "scandals". Just look at this title, "CIA: Assessment of Syria's WMD exaggerated." Woah! Sounds big huh? Know what the crux of the story is? "Anonymous sources" claim that John Bolton was going to exaggerate the threat of Syria's WMD today, but the speech was postponed. Yes, Bolton didn't actually say anything today, but he was going to exaggerate -- really he was -- the anonymous sources say so! Bolton was going to lie & people were going to die! Impeach Bush and Bolton now! Now! Wait -- does Syria have oil? They do? No blood for oil!" -John Hawkins
The guys at Claremont are taking stock of bloggers who reject nature as a standard of morality (and who unwittingly, or perhaps wittingly in the case of one or two, reject natural right).
The Claremont camp (of which I'm rather fond), of course, looks to the Declaration as one of the nation's central political (and even moral) documents, and its focus on the laws of nature and of nature's God. The study of those topics has occupied the mind of Harry Jaffa for pretty much his entire career. It's not entirely surprising that lawyers and journalists with blogs have not pursued those topics as far as Jaffa. So, even though some of the comments to the post are entertaining, they may be a little harsh.
(07-17-03 Update) Scott Johnson of Powerline (Claremont North?) deals with the topic as well.
Senator Bob Graham has been highly critical of President Bush on Iraq. But as Sean Hackbarth finds, Senator Graham's comments on Iraq don't reflect very favorably on him as a leader.
Indeed, Graham seems to be adopting almost the same approach as John Kerry, which Christopher Hitchens has deemed the "elect me, I'm gullible" approach.
That's not a very compelling reason to replace an incumbent President, guys. So I encourage you, by all means, continue!
The Dems are flailing about badly, so badly that political tactics have completely replaced any political strategy derived from principle.
Peter Schramm describes this approach as Overstatement On Everything Insignificant, and predicts it won't serve the Dems well.
The Bush Niger-uranium scandal is about to lose its legs, even during this slow news cycle.
Why?
Because when Michael Kinsley's sniveling on the topic surpasses even his own quite high standards of pedantry, it's a sign. That's effectively Jane Galt's conclusion.
So now, the Dem argument has evolved to: we don't like the President, he's a liar, AND he's not as smart as us. And I thought the "Bush is an idiot" meme had died.
I will admit the Administration has been pretty inept handling this issue. It should have been put to bed days ago, and should not have been allowed to overshadow what should have been a higher profile trip to Africa. Maybe a call to Karen Hughes is in order?
Here's a great observation from Jed Babbin on Senator Bob Graham, one of the Nine Dwarves who continues to attack President Bush for being deceptive:
When Tim Russert asked Sen. Bob Graham on Sunday's Meet the Press if Graham would drop the Senate half of his dual candidacy to make his bid for the Dem vice presidential nomination more credible, Graham refused to answer. Again and again -- five times by my count -- Graham refused to answer the same question. But he said that the president hides too much, and that Americans have to guess about the basis for the president's decisions.I hope not. On the other hand, maybe he could put up a LiveJournal. You know, to compete with the blogging candidate, Howard Dean.Graham's criticism of Dubya's openness is odd: almost as odd as Graham himself. Graham is a guy who maniacally -- there's no other word for it -- keeps detailed secret notebooks about everything he does, to the level of recording for posterity startling facts that he brewed coffee and dressed in a gray suit that morning. Do we really want a president who is so obsessive about his own actions that he take notes on what he ate for breakfast?
If you've tried to get to the site for the past few days, you probably figured out that something was terribly wrong.
It turns out that Friday morning, the server the site was on got hacked. Big time. Numerous sites were affected, including this one and several personal sites under my main account.
Anyway, the host had to rebuild the OS and restore all the accounts. At some point along the way, he decided blogs were to blame, and banned all blogs on the server. He effectively told those holding blog accounts that he knew about on the server to get lost. He wouldn't even let us log in to retrieve backups and such.
Now, that's certainly his prerogative, and I hold no particular animus towards him for that business decision. I don't think it will solve his problems, because he's provided no evidence that blog scripts were responsible for the security breach. The only script that my hacked sites had in common was Movable Type, and some of the other sites that got hacked did not use MT at all. So, I suspect the security problem was elsewhere. He can tell his clients it's resolved by banning the blogs, but I suspect he might have more problems.
All of that's just intended as background to explain why posts (specifically on the front page) -- and especially some comments -- are missing on this restored version. I had a master backup I did myself on July 6, and I was able to restore from it. And I was able to recreate all of the lost blog posts by using google's cache and manually re-entering them. Unfortunately, the comments to those posts are lost, and in some case, the permalinks are different now (so if you've linked to one of those old posts, you may not get what you thought you linked to). I apologize for that. And I'm probably not going to be able to recover all of the lost items from the front page. I'm actually fairly thankful that I had relatively recent backups of my own to restore. Let that be a lesson to make frequent backups. Those of you on cpanel servers can back up your mySQL databases easily, and I would suggest doing so. You just never know when the bad guys are gonna target you.
Anyway, I think everything is working here again. We're now with a host in a datacenter in Dallas TX. I think connectivity from across the U.S. is going to be much better because of the central location, and the server is MUCH zippier. Plus it's in Texas. :) Look for the positive, right?
Thanks for visiting everybody.
(Update) The former host has since made available backups of the sites. Now that I largely have things working here, not sure if it's worth restoring to those, but at least it's an option.
It's not been heavily reported in the United States -- because it's much more fun to report on the Nine Dwarves and their outlandish claims -- but Tony Blair is standing by that British intelligence assessment that Iraq tried to obtain Uranium from sources in Niger even though the White House has backtracked from it:
Mr Blair told a committee of MPs on Tuesday that the evidence about the Niger link "did not come from these so-called forged documents. They came from separate intelligence."Fascinating. For two guys that are accused of lying to the world, they sure don't seem to have their stories straight!The allegations, he said, were not "fantasy." He pointed out that in the 1980s, Iraq had bought uranium from Niger.
The Foreign Affairs committee asked what this other intelligence was but has not been told.
Courtney links to an article today about the "Bush lied about WMD" argument. You know the argument:
Now, the leftists throw in arguments about oil and goodness knows what else. Conservatives pull out the quotes wherein various Clintonites assert the existence of WMD in Iraq. This is all good, but lets look at the "Bush lied" argument from a different angle.
The "Bush lied" argument has to assert that 1. Bush knew there were no WMD in Iraq and 2. continued to push the argument to "drag us into war." If Bush were so evil, why would he stop there?
If President Bush were so evil as to lie about WMD, we would have already been told that they found WMD. One week after Baghdad was secured we would have been told that chemical rounds were found in bunkers. They would have invited international inspectors in to verify this. This story would be dead.
How would this be so easy? I happen to have first-hand information concerning fake chemical weapons. I'll tell you almost exactly how to fake it.
In my job escorting international inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, one of the things I was trained on was use of the Portable Isotopic Neutron Spectroscopy (PINS) system. It does a test on something to determine if it's a chemical agent. This system uses a radioactive source that emits neutrons. You put this source near the thing you think contains chemical agent. The neutrons come off the source, go into your container, and collide with neutrons inside your suspected chemical agent. When these neutrons collide, they emit gamma rays at various energy levels depending on the chemical elements (important - not compounds but elements) in your container. These energy levels are measured by a detector. A computer aids in the determination of the chemical element and it's proportion of the total elements inside your container.
A chemical agent is a chemical compound, that is the chemical elements have been combined in a reaction. By being a compound, you can determine what percentage a given element should be in a given volume. That is, if a chemical agent is Bis(2-chloroethyl)sulfide, you know that a certain percentage of the container is sulfur (let's say 33%), another third is chlorine, and another third is ethyl. (Note: I'm making up the percentages, but the concept is correct.)
This is the key weakness of any non-destructuve evaluation of a chemical agent. It's also just about the only way your're going to go about it. Working with chemical agent is a little dangerous you see, and scientists aren't too keen on using a taste-test method.
So how do you fake it? Get a metal container. Fill it with one-third each sulfur, chlorine, and ethyl. Close the container. These elements aren't dangerous by themselves. They aren't dangerous just mixed together. (Once again, this is a made-up example - don't go mixing these things together in your garage.) They only become a chemical agent when they have been combined in a certain chemical reaction at certain times and temperatures. Like this, they're nothing.
So what's the point? PINS does not know the difference. You could set your container in front one of the best 54Bs in the Army (Nuclear, Chemical, Biological Defense NCOs) and they wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a simulant and the real thing. The UN inspectors wouldn't know the difference either.
Has this ever been really tried? Yup. We got our training on the PINS system at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. Not having any chemical weapons there, how did we train? We used simulants, just like the ones I described. You could take those as checked in baggage on a commercial flight to Saudi Arabia, rent an SUV, drive to an abandoned depot in Iraq, fill some artillery shells and then bingo. Wait till the Army 54Bs arrive and point them in the right direction. Heck, if we're going to lie, may as well make it a big one. Pay some locals to point out the bunkers, they could say they used to work there. If I was an Iraqi farmer, I'd probably take you up on the offer. There'd be headlines everywhere and the Dems would be quiet about it.
So, Bush lied about the WMD? Bull. The longer we go without finding WMD, the more convinced I am that he didn't lie. There were WMD in Iraq, I know this for a fact, almost as first-hand information. They're gone. They need to be found. All these weasels who are trying to help their own political careers on this should be regarded as the scumbags they are; bottom dwellers who would disregard the national security of this country for moving up the Democrat machine ladder. Dirtbags.
Kevin, can I curse in my columns? I think I really need to.
I made the connection after a discussion with Democrat Greg Wythe the other evening. He was talking about Kerry's accessibility from every wing of the party perhaps getting him the nomination. We both agreed that Kerry would likely not prove to be an exceptionally strong (or moderately strong, or non-weak) candidate.
The conventional wisdom agrees with both of us insofar as Kerry is concerned, though Kerry's supporters obviously don't. It reminded me of someone, but I couldn't remember for the life of me who.
Then I remembered Bob Dole. In fact, the parallels between the 2004 and 1996 election are rather stark. You have the protectionist fringer (Dean, Buchanan), the one who could win if they got the nomination but is not generally inspiring (Edwards, Alexander), the career politician who is strong on paper but weak on the campaign trail (Graham, Lugar), and the presumptive frontrunner with the resume and no actual chance of actually winning, John Kerry and Bob Dole.
No sooner do I start drawing parallels than I run across Gideon's Blog which makes the same connection. Not only that, draws a bunch of other parallels that I didn't and then, unlike me, actually uses the information to a practical end.
I still think Kerry is the most likely nominee in 2004, for the same reason Dole was the GOP nominee in 1996, and Mondale the Democrat nominee in 1984. Kerry is acceptable to every major Democrat interest group, has an established record, the right biography, a lot of support from party mandarins, etc. etc. He's an obvious loser, and the press hates him, but none of the alternatives are obvious winners, and they each have more fatal flaws than he does: Lieberman is too right-wing and is running a terrible organization; Dean is too left-wing and has no real support among blacks or unions; Gephardt is old, tired and a proven loser; Edwards is too blow-dried, knows nothing and is in danger of losing his home state; Graham is, well, Graham, a strange man getting stranger by the day. Dean's current surge actually makes Kerry more plausible as the nominee, just as Tsongas' surge made Clinton more plausible. In 1992, Clinton assumed he'd be running as the right-winger against Cuomo as the left-winger. With Cuomo out, Bob Kerry flailing, and the obviously unelectable Tsongas surging from the (fiscally conservative) right, Clinton could grab the center and the nomination in spite of the bimbo eruptions. Going into this election, Kerry was probably worried about getting tagged as the liberal against the likes of Lieberman, Edwards and (on the war at least) Gephardt. But with Dean surging, Kerry becomes the acceptable centrist - certainly liberal enough to win the nomination, but enough of a centrist alternative to Dean to be more palatable in the general election. If this were 1968 for the Democrats, and the party looked like it was spinning out of control, I could imagine Hillary swooping in like Bobby Kennedy did. But politics have changed, the Democratic Party has changed, and I just don't see it happening. This is 1988 and Kerry is Michael Dukakis. He even has a nutty wife like the Duke did. My money is still on him.
All in a blog post about Condee Rice. Well done.
It's been a bad day for the Bush haters.
Scott points out that the great Halliburton "scandal" turns out not to have been a scandal at all.
Kate notes that the uranium/Africa issue may have gotten its legs from Saddam himself (and James Robbins treats the issue further here).
John reports that the U.S. has arrested a number of folks with potential ties to terrorism as a result of information gleaned from Iraq (so much for Iraq "distracting" us from the war on terror).
And Orrin finds that even the NY Times, if read carefully, is admitting that the Iraq war has had an impact on Middle East terror not unlike that predicted by proponents of said war.
Maybe the Dems should just go back to sifting through decades-old legal records to see if they can find another DWI.
I've never hiked the Appalachian Trail, but I understand that it has a fairly extensive system of trail huts, some quite nice, some barely more than a lean-to.
Most of these trail huts are, for the most part, hard to get to. They're intended as stopover points for backpackers actually IN the backcountry.
So would you believe it if I told that one of those remote Appalachian Trail huts was recently rebuilt, and the builders actually had to install a wheelchair ramp to comply with the Americans With Disabilities Act?
Fine, don't believe me.
But James Panero just got back from hiking the AT, and has posted all the details over at the New Criterion's Armavirumque weblog.
No doubt, the ADA was enacted with the best of intentions and has improved the quality of life for many disabled persons. But what ever happened to common sense?
In any case, as a backpacker, I'm envious that Mr. Panero got to see this bit of political buffoonery out in the beautiful backcountry. It's just unfortunate that even the most rugged backcountry is subject to said buffoonery these days.
HD Miller calls this fellow The Stupidest Man in the World. I can't disagree.
Every success story, of a hard-working British or German entrepreneur, means that others die of disease or hunger. It will always be like that - as long as the world economy is a market-place of aggressively competing nations. Economic competition means, by definition, harming the weakest party in each transaction. The loser can only compensate for this, by finding an even weaker party to compete against. In the last decade, some of the rich western countries, above all the United States, have become extremely competitive. All of that competitive power ultimately falls on the shoulders of the weakest inhabitants of this planet, and it kills them.
When neoliberal politicians call for a strong and competitive economy, they are calling on you to crush the economy of the poorest countries and regions. In the present world order, each employee (certainly in the private sector) is a soldier, in the national economic army. And for an army, "more hard work" means "kill more enemies".
The poor are not our enemies. If neoliberals were good people, they would weaken their national economies, not strengthen them. They are not good people. But you are not powerless against the neoliberal ethic. You can do something. You can choose morality above market...
As many people are aware, Buddy Ebsen died recently. Buddy was known primarily for playing Jed Clampett in the TV show Beverly Hillbillies. What is less known is that Ebsen was an outspoken conservative. In an age where it's assumed everyone in Hollywood is liberal, it's worth recognizing that such was not always the case.
For Irene Ryan and Buddy Ebsen, who played Granny and Jed, the program was as much an affirmation of their own conservative politics as it was a satire of American materialism. In interviews conducted in 1968, both announced their support of Ronald Reagan’s candidacy for Governor of California, their contempt for the welfare system, and distaste for protestors. As Ebsen put it, "Hippies are the greatest conformists." Interviewer Edith Efron perceived these real-life political remarks as extensions of the actors’ roles. Granny, like Ryan herself, notes Efron, is a symbol of America’s individualism and strength.
I loved Beverly Hillbillies reruns when I was growing up. It's worth noting that contrary to the way they are often remembered, the Clampett's (Jethro excepted) were far from stupid. They were certainly ignorant of the ways of the Los Angeles of the day, but it's worth noting that the feeling was, and is, pretty mutual, when it comes to urbanites' views of rural America.
While Ebsen might be just as much a nutbar as "Conservatives-should-be-stoned-to-death" Alec Baldwin or "Democrats-killed-Kennedy-cause-he-was-Catholic" Michael Moriarty, it is nonetheless worth noting that political Hollywood was not always in the sorry state it presently is.
"Core Democrats have an emotional investment in the idea that George W. Bush is an idiot; if conservatives believe they are conservative because they have more common sense than other people, liberals believe they are liberal because they are smarter than other people. At the heart of their hatred of Bush is snobbery. Gephardt, Lieberman, Graham, and Edwards don't exude this snobbery. Dean and Kerry do. This could give whichever of them survives New Hampshire an edge with core Democrats. The Democrats' problem is that at least 70 percent of voters do not share their contempt for Bush and find it off-putting. Outside a Bush fundraiser last week one protester's sign read, "France was right." That is not a winning slogan in an American election." -Michael Barone
Thanks to Kevin for the tip of the hat. I've been following redistricting in excruciatingly painful detail for a few years now. It's a mark of how low I've fallen in my political junkiedom that I find this stuff so interesting. I'm sure my family is planning an intervention soon, but fortunately my parents are becoming addicted to Fox News so maybe they won't notice.
Here are a few random thoughts on redistricting and the resources available:
Jay Nordlinger has posted an interesting observation today:
The other day, I was perusing some Bush speeches, and re-read his State of the Union address from 2002. You remember: the one in which he listed Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as an "axis of evil."
Or did he? I was shocked to discover that he was far less narrow than that. He talked about those three regimes, yes. And then he said, "States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world."
I expressed my shock to David Frum. He was decidedly unshocked, saying that he had explained this in interview after interview, without making much headway (it would seem). People are always asking, "Gee, if Bush put Iraq, Iran, and North Korea on the list, why didn't he include" . . . name your own country. And that's exactly what we can do, mentally, or out loud for that matter: name our own countries, within "states like [the three], and their terrorist allies," who do indeed constitute that axis of evil. So you can vote for Syria, Saudi Arabia . . . help yourself.
At the risk of sounding Straussian -- isn't it interesting what a little close textual analysis can do? Especially when dealing with political leaders who generally mean what they say.
Favorite line from an NRO columnist in a while:
The family that calumniates together, stays together.
It only makes sense in context, so go read Nordlinger.
You can take a peek at the current plan for redistricting in the state of Texas via this highly sophisticated GIS interface (warning: I had to resort to IE, as it won't work with my install of Mozilla Firebird).
I think I could play around for a few hours with it.
A tip of the hat to contributor Rob Booth for posting a link to it on his main site.
I forgot about it in the leadup to Independence Day, but a few days before the Fourth, Matt Welch posted his assessment of why Bush will lose in 2004, largely based on the notion of Bigot Eruptions -- his example being Bill Frist's proposal of a constitutional amendment in defense of marriage.
So, a traditional view of marriage is bigotry?
Nice.
But I'm just wondering -- if this is so awful, why didn't the issue bite President Clinton in the arse after he signed the Defense of Marriage Act(because that's actual law, as opposed to proposing an amendment)? Where was the outrage?
*silence*
It was inevitable that President Bush was eventually going to lose some support from warbloggers of liberal and libertarian persuasion. The man is a conservative after all. So I can understand the frustration of some of those folks. But that doesn't mean 2004 will turn on so-called Bigot Eruptions, or that wishing President Bush will lose will necessarily make it so.
Of course the upcoming election isn't going to turn on this issue. President Bush is going to coast to re-election unless there is a significant setback in terms of 1) the economy, 2) national security, or 3) unforeseen administration scandal. The power of incumbency is such that, barring one or more of those three, the only real question is going to be the size of the President's victory, and whether it is a victory of the nature of Reagan's 1984 "Morning in America" triumph, in which the Gipper selfishly ensured himself a tremendous personal mandate at the expense of expending time and resources on GOP candidates nationwide, or a victory in which President Bush campaigns heavily for GOP candidates across the board, much as he did in 2002, and sacrifices his margin of victory for the sake of a broader governing majority.
(Update) I just discovered that Matt elaborates his position somewhat in the comments section of Richard Bennett's post on the topic. There's also this great line from John Thacker:
It's kind of sad that I've had to explain to libertarians and others that one of the problems of ignoring the democratic and federalist route, and taking away all your opponents' other options is that your opponents might just use the one option they have left.
Too true.
Eve Tushnet is not impressed with Michael Kinsley's recent thoughts on privatizing marriage.
Not at all:
Right after the bit I quoted above, Kinsley says, "Regarding children and finances, people can set their own rules, as many already do." No $#@!, Sherlock. That's part of the problem.Go read it all.How could anyone look at marriage in America today and think it needs to become more ad hoc, more centered on the individual contracting adults and not on the children and the wider society, more do-it-yourself?
With ongoing commitments in dozens of countries (see the Robert Kaplan cites in this post) that have relevance either to the war on terror or American strategic interests, the last thing an American military stretched thin needs is to commit itself to a "peacekeeping" mission in Liberia designed by the State Department and French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin. For one thing, there's no peace to keep (by U.N. peacekeeping rules) at the moment, as the WSJ points out:
Bloody Liberia is certainly a tragedy, by now a familiar one in Africa. The nation's despotic leader, Charles Taylor, is fighting off two guerrilla bands financed by neighboring countries, and three million Liberians are caught in the crossfire. In other words, the U.S. interest here is entirely humanitarian, much as it was in Somalia in 1992 and 1993. We aren't opposed to such interventions in principle, but they have to be done right.The situation is so potentially unstable that the simple insertion of American forces in a U.N. "peacekeeping" role is a recipe to get American soldiers killed. Unfortunately, I've yet to see much more detail from the proponents of such an action.That means doing more than what the U.N. seems to want, which is separating the warring factions without taking sides. While the U.N. vaguely talks about elections next year in Liberia, the outlines of any settlement still need to be drawn. Will the U.S. be able to really intervene and sort out the good guys from the bad? And will U.S. troops actually be able to shoot the killers?
One danger is that the U.S. could get caught in the middle between equally unsavory factions. A former rebel himself, Mr. Taylor has been indicted by a special court in Sierra Leone for war crimes from his role in that country's conflict. But he refuses to leave Monrovia, notwithstanding Mr. Bush's insistence again Thursday that he do so. The rebel factions are also not obvious heroes, and could set to fighting each other if Mr. Taylor does depart.
I think the WSJ has it right, when they propose the following:
Instead of feckless U.N. "peacekeeping" à la Bosnia, the model to follow is what the British did in Sierra Leone in 2000 after the U.N. botched the job. Jesse Jackson (yes, that one) brokered a peace deal in 1999, giving amnesty to Foday Sankoh's rebels and bringing in the U.N.'s blue helmets. Sankoh's trademark was to hack off the hands of civilians, but the Reverend Jackson compared him to Nelson Mandela. (Jesse is also pals with Mr. Taylor.)A regional solution would be ideal, even if it required some U.S. special forces advisors. And Charles Taylor's exit is certainly a worthy goal of U.S. statecraft. But the notion of plopping U.S. forces into Liberia to be sitting ducks is not at all appealing.The rebels soon tore up the peace deal, and a year later British paratroopers had to storm Sierra Leone to free dozens of U.N. peacekeepers held hostage. The British put Sankoh in jail, disarmed the rebels and set the stage for elections. A fragile but democratic new government is now trying war criminals. The British got most of their small but robust force out quickly.
This is not the way U.N. "peacekeeping" forces operate, however, which is why we'd prefer that Mr. Bush offer other kinds of assistance. One way would be to airlift other countries' troops in for the job--for example, the French. France has extensive imperial experience in Africa, most recently in the Ivory Coast. If the French are unwilling, this is also a chance for Liberia's African neighbors to police their own region. The U.S. has trained the military in Nigeria, the main West African power, to handle these sorts of missions.
The case of the Paintball 11 -- covered in some detail here by Tim Cavanaugh for Reason -- raises all sorts of questions about securing American liberties while at the same time attempting to secure the homeland from radical Islamic terrorism. How far the government goes is properly a matter for debate. Arguably, it probably was not vigilant enough in paying attention to radicals who wanted to learn how to fly, but not land, jumbo commercial aircraft. That lesson may prompt overreaction by the government today. Time will tell.
But the most important question to draw from the Paintball 11 case is not the one Cavanaugh does:
For all the questions Ismail Royer's case raises about prosecution and circumstance, extremism and moderation, perception and reality, the most important may be whether religious belief should ever be considered politically neutral.Huh? I'm not certain what that even means, but surely whatever it is must be several levels of abstraction removed from the important political and legal questions immediately at hand in this case.
Still, it's an interesting account (with links) of the matter.
Is Irving Kristol's National Interest abandoning its neoconservative roots (it can actually make an accurate historical claim to the adjective) and going paleo?
Nicholas Antongiavanni thinks that might be the case, and asks who will defend America's foreign policy against the ongoing paleo critique. Go leave him some feedback.
Orrin Judd isn't buying into the whole "We're Too Nice" notion of Dem decline:
But since the collapse of big government liberalism in the late '70s and the ensuing victory of the intensely ideological Ronald Reagan, Democrats have been devoid of any ideas, except for when they retreat to bad ones, like the Hillarycare health plan. Until they manage to come up with a new set of ideas or return to an unambivalent belief in a more-socialized America, they are going to suffer from the kind of self-pity that Mr. Traub bathes in here and that characterized conservatives during their decades in the wilderness.It may take a 2004 clobbering for the Dems to start coming to grips with their relatively new minority status. It must be difficult for the party of governmental activism to accept. There ought to be a Twelve-Step program or something.
Brent Bozell recounts his recent appearance on the insipid Fox and Friends program, in which he and the hosts had a good laugh at the expense of Baghdad Bob. Apparently, CNN's Eason Jordan wasn't as amused (although it's good he's watching Fox -- but I'd recommend Brit Hume):
Let's not forget that Mr. Jordan's personal "confession" in the NY Times back in April seemed to be motivated by the psychological need to come clean after his network ignored the sins of Saddam over the years in order to maintain its preferred status in the country. I've no doubt he thought his crews were in some danger -- and Mr. Bozell may inadvertently be helping Mr. Jordan spin that topic with this column -- but CNN always had the choice to pull its people and report the truth. In other words, CNN could have exposed the tyrant and protected its crews.I got that answer about an hour after the show when I took the call from Eason Jordan, CNN's Chief News Executive. He had caught the interview and wasn't amused. In Jordan's view, Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf was no flunky, no mere "spokesman" for Saddam. Al-Sahaf was one of this dictator's inner circle, and every bit as evil and bloodthirsty as his boss.
Jordan pointed to CNN's own report back in April about this man. It's a story we'll need to ignore if we want to continue to laugh about him.
It didn't.
It's good that Mr. Jordan has come to his senses belatedly, but he could spare others the haughty lectures on the nature of Saddam's regime
Charles Kuffner has an interesting observation with regard to Senator Frist's proposal for a constitutional amendment that would disallow gay marriage:
That's true enough, so far as it goes. But it doesn't consider that we have largely replaced the Founders' constitutional view of individual rights being protected by restrictions on what the government may do (at the national level, by the U.S. constitution, at the state level by state constitutions) with the Progressives' far more expansive view of rights secured, in many cases, through judicial fiat and state action.The other thing that catches my eye about this proposal, as well as the on-again, off-again anti-flag-burning amendment, is that unlike almost every other amendment to our Constitution, it explicitly restricts individuals' rights rather than limiting government powers.
In that sense, the Frist amendment isn't proposed so much as to restrict an individual "right" as to restrict creation of said rights through extraconstitutional judicial fiat. Now, Senator Frist hasn't quite framed the issue in that manner, and conservatives, despite all their/our bellyaching about liberal judicial activism, rarely manage to frame issues that way. The Conservative Observer (Marcus Tullius Cicero) regularly raises the question of how to recover an American constitutionalism that has gone far off track at his blog and in comments here. Frist's proposal is a mere pinprick compared to the radical approach the Conservative Observer would take. But radicalism may be required. Or at least a willingness/ability to articulate the greater constitutional issue.
I have, in the past, tried to defend the French. I hold no brief for them, but I've always felt that disagreement on foreign policy issues, and even their troublesome obstructionism, does not justify putting them in a category with our bona fide enemies. Nor do I think what we did for them sixty years ago should automatically translate into agreement with everything we do.
John Cole links to a blogger who notices something unusual about the D-Day Memorial at Normandy.
I guess those that say they've forgotten our contributions in World War II weren't so off-the-mark after all.
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