The Review

Air America Roundup

Air America has been a big hit with Bloggers today. In adition to my commentary below, Here's a sample of what others are saying:

QandO: I doubt Al Franken is going to be the liberal Rush. He may be funny, but radio requires a lot more than "funny". It's a craft, and filling three hours a day requires a lot more than "Bush sucks, heya!"

Blogospherics: I can only wonder how Karl Rove managed to pull this off without anyone catching on until it was too late.

Feste: Maybe it's just me but cutting Livid Color's "Cult of Personality" with clips of JFK's inauguration speech is actually dissing JFK...isn't it?

Infinite Monkeys: I caught enough of Franken to conclude that a little goes a long way.

Master of None: Meanwhile, the sometimes amusing (but often bizarrely irritating) Janeane Garofalo apparently mocks herself by uttering some vitriolic comments and then pontificating on how "nice" liberals are.

Jane Galt: The chick who's on now, on the other hand, is pretty smokin'. She's also crazy.

Poliblogger: I find it amusing (and not in the way intended) that Franken continually feels the need to utilize O'Reilly and Limbaugh to get attention.

Virtuous Circle: One caller suggested that Condaleeza Rice resembled the doctor ape in Planet of the Apes. Nice start can you imagine if one of Rush’s callers said that.

Quibbles 'n Bits: So far, she's made no substantial points, but she has managed to make a massive theory linking Boeing, offshore oil rig companies, any media conglomerate, all as a massive conspiracy to keep her off the air. So far, I don't think it'll be a conspiracy that knocks her off the air...

I notice a lot of these comments were about Randi Rhodes. I'm sure we'll be hearing lots more about her. She's the Queen of the Conspiracies. People listen to her just to go slack-jawed with stupefaction.

Yeah, it's going to be some interesting radio. Not good, maybe, but interesting.

You said it, Tony

(Review) Tony Blankley of the Washington Times appears to agree with me that Kerry, the man, is not a very good asset to Kerry, the candidate.

But what may become the enduring exemplar of the Kerry style was his spontaneous expletive on the ski slopes when his Secret Service guard bumped into him by accident (while guarding him): "I don't fall down. The S.O.B. knocked me over." To instinctively say that about the man who is sworn to put himself between Mr. Kerry and a bullet, paints a lasting and contemptible character portrait. Contrast that with what Ronald Reagan said shortly after he was shot: "Honey, I forgot to duck." It was at that moment that 60 percent of the American public fell permanently in love with the Gipper. As Ernest Hemmingway put it in another time, that is grace under pressure — and Mr. Kerry doesn't have it.

Tony won't go as far as I have and predict a McGovern-style blow-out in November, but he admits that Kery has some "impressive downside potential".

No kidding. 

What would Al Franken do?

(Review) The Los Angeles Times, being a good lefty rag, has given Al Franken 750 words to advertise for Air America for free. After reading it, I have come to the conclusion that I should no longer ask myself¹, "What would Al Franken do?"

'Cause Al has just lost touch with reality.

Bush got a pass on this, as he's gotten a pass on so many other things, because there's no liberal echo chamber in this country. But starting today at noon, there will be one.

Me.

Plus the rest of us at Air America Radio, the new liberal talk-radio network, which, according to our promotional materials, "combines cutting-edge commentary with laugh-out-loud funny political satire."

Uh, yeah, Al, of course your promotional materials say that. But it's what the boys at Arbitron say that matter. Your promotional materials may say that God has descended from heaven, patted you on the back, and said, "that's my boy", for all I care. But when that Arbitron ratings book comes out, you'll notice that "God" isn't one of the listener demographics.

Good argument, though. "Our self-serving promotional materials say we're witty and talented." Well, imagine my surprise.

The 45 most powerful radio stations owned by the top five station owners broadcast more than 300 hours of conservative talk radio each weekday. They broadcast only five hours of liberal talk. Right-wing talk-radio hosts lie, distort, and bloviate, and nobody calls them on it. Not even Alan Colmes, who provides the aforementioned five hours.

The lesson here is not, as Mr. Franken evidently supposes, that corporate media has squelched the voice of the left. The lesson is that, with the exception of Spock--uh, I mean Alan Colmes--nobody listens to liberal radio hosts.

And Franken seems to be taking a dig at Spock, because he doesn't call Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity about the things they say.

Republicans are accusing us liberals of being angry. Yeah, we're angry. It's one thing for a president to lie about sex. It's another thing for a president to lie about why we are sending our young men and women into harm's way. And to dismantle our environmental protections. And to expose a CIA agent as an act of political retaliation. And to shift taxes from the children of the very rich to the children of the middle class. And … oh, there's so many other reasons to be mad. Listen to my show for a more complete accounting of them. Plus jokes.

I think this picture is more true than Franken realizes. I love the way he tosses in that last sentence. "Plus jokes." Uh-huh. I sure the humor will just flow out of the radio.

Actually, I think the paragraph above captures what the show will be like far more accurately than his marketing info. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Anger. Plus jokes.

Yeah, well, they'd better be some pretty darn good jokes.

Today, we will not merely call them on it. We will use their words against them, holding them up to the scorn and ridicule they deserve...Yes, we're angry. And yes, we're fighting back. But we're not going to do it like they do. We will be a flaming sword of justice, cutting through the turgid cacophony of right-wing talk with a blade of burnished truth. And celebrity interviews. All on a crisp, clear AM signal.

You, know, there's a reason why Colmes doesn't spend the three hours of his show doing this. Because nobody wants to listen to three hours of "Rush Limbaugh said X. He's a doody-head! Hannity said Y. He's racist! Laura Ingraham poked fun at John Kerry, and then she laughed at him!"

I can't think of a more tedious format. If I cared about what Rush said, I'd listen to him. If I wasn't bored spitless by Hannity, I'd listen to him. I do listen to Laura Ingraham, mainly because she is funny and snarky, but also because she seems like someone who might happily do something shockingly carnal with you, in much the same way that Laura Schlessinger wouldn't.

But Rush is clearly having fun doing the show. Laura Ingraham has so much fun, she practically laughs her way through half of it. The thing is, they don't spend three hours talking about somebody else's radio show. They spend three hours talking about what they believe. Colmes is a long-time radio professional, and that's why Colmes does the same thing. He knows that what Limbaugh says doesn't matter. It's what he says that brings the audience back.

Also, Colmes doesn't take himself as seriously as the pompous Franken. Franken is turning out to be the broadcasting equivalent of Richard Clarke. Or Wesley Clark. Either way, it's that whole George McClellan vibe: "I know that I can save this country, and that I alone can."

I don't think Franken's gonna be that funny. I don't think he's doing this because he thinks it'll be a hoot. No, he has this burning sense of mission about this. "You must listen to me, people! I come to bring you The Truth!" I don't think that'll package too well with the funny Imus gags. "We must increase the top marginal tax rate to 43%, and eliminate the president's capital gains tax cuts for the rich! Oh, and, hey, baby, why don't you rub your breastses on the radio for the Al-Man."

Evidently, the radio community agrees so far. They have 6 stations currently playing part of Air America's programming. Six. Nationwide. They can't even find a station in San Francisco for cripe's sake. You'd think that if there was any place in America where this would fly it would be San Francisco. But, perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps the folks In Haight-Ashbury would rather be entertained, too. You can, however, catch Rush on a San Fransisco radio station. And on 599 other stations around the country as well.

You'd better have a lot of jokes, Al, because so far, you sound like an embittered boomer, who can't wait to show the world that you're right and all these other guys are wrong. It's just so...high school. It sounds like the president of the Audiovisual Club lamenting, "Those darn jocks. If I can just show everybody I'm smarter than they are, all the pretty, popular girls will want to go out with me instead."

Yeah. Good luck with that, A/V geek.

That might be an interesting schtick for a few days, but I bet it won't last through three Arbitron books.

Oh, and I love this boffo ending:

The battle begins today at noon on KBLA, 1580 on your AM dial.

KBLA? KBLA?

You really have to live in LA to know what this means. I don't know much about Radio in New York or Chicago or Minneapolis, but I do know LA radio, because I worked in it for a few years.

KBLA is--ready for it?--the station that provides broadcasting to the Korean community of LA. Woo-hoo! Now that's what I call a built-in, prime demographic! So, his primary audience will be Korean businesspeople who vote Republican.

Oh, by the way, if you have some extra time to waste, go find the KBLA web site. Notice, I didn't say "look" at the web site. I said "find" the web site. That's a different thing entirely.

Dang, I'll just bet Franken practically takes LA by storm.

Or, at least, he would if he could actually be heard in LA. Unfortunately, despite being a 50,000 watt powerhouse, KBLA is, unfortunately, one of the most directional radio stations in the world. It can, therefore, only be heard in Santa Monica, on Walgrove Avenue, between Venice and Wilshire Boulevards.

Now, that's funny.

UPDATE:
McQ, over at QandO Blog agrees with me. Tedious. The only reason these guys are on the air is because they are being bankrolled. It is vanity radio.
__________
¹ If you have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sorry. All I can say is that Saturday Night Live used to be funny, way back in 1979. And yes, even Franken was funny.           

The Fetish of Democracy

(Review) Jonah Goldberg writes that we are locked in to elections in Iraq. And at the present moment, elections are pointless.

Almost 50 years ago, the revered sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset observed that the "more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chance it will sustain democracy."

More recently Adam Przeworski of New York University confirmed this truism by studying every attempted transition to democracy around the globe. He and his colleagues found that once a country passes $6,000 in per capita income it is virtually guaranteed to succeed in its transition to democracy. States between $3,000 and $6,000 have less than a 50-50 chance of staying democracies. And countries below $3,000 are almost bound to fail.

Why is this? The short answer is that liberty tends to come with a thriving middle class, which needs or demands stuff like relatively uncorrupt courts and bureaucracies, unions, enforceable contracts and property rights, healthcare and access to education, particularly for women....

Unfortunately, Iraq's per capita income is only between $1,500 and $2,400...

Regardless, if America were serious and free to do this the right way, we would do what we did in Japan. We'd start from scratch and build the institutions necessary for long-term success.

This is the argument I've been making for a year now. Obviously, it's not what we are going to do.

Democracy is useless by itself. Democracies can be every bit as tyrannical as any other form of government. What makes democracy work is that, for us, it's tied toi a whole host of liberal principles and philosphical ideas that have been slowly developed since the 8th century BC.

Unless you buy the whole package--Democracy, rule of law, human rights, constitutionalism--you're buying a pig in a poke. The fastest way to civil war is for 50%+1 of the population to vote--all legally and democratically, mind--to whack the other 50%-1 with mallets.

We practically worship democracy, without understanding that democracy only works when it is allied with liberal values. All democracy provides is a means of telling what people want to do. It doesn't make what they want to do the right thing.

Sticking it to Bush

(Review) Mark Gldblatt writes that the Democrats are just about to get their wish. The administration will allow Condi Rice to speak before the 911 commission publicly, and under oath.

Be careful what you ask for.

Not only will Rice make short work of Clarke, she will emerge from the hearing with conservatives flinging themselves at her feet, begging her to run for president in 2008. (There's already a website devoted to her potential candidacy even though she's said, on multiple occasions, she has no interest in the office.) And it would serve liberals right if she did decide to run, for Rice would be their worst nightmare. She would win the women's vote outright, peel away half the black vote, and set back the Democratic party for a generation.

But that's not the kind of thing liberals concern themselves with. Right now, they got her to testify. They stuck it to Bush.

It sure must feel good.

I think Goldbatt's right. It makes me wonder about the Dems, though. I know W is dumb as a post, but he sure seems to end up making them look like fools a lot. I can hardly think of a single thing his administration has wanted that it hasn't gotten.

For a moron, that W is sure successful

The message of Fallujah

(Review)

Five American troops died in a bombing Wednesday and separately, the corpses of four foreign coalition contractors were pulled out of their cars, dragged through the streets and hung from a bridge by rejoicing Fallujah residents.

The brutal treatment of the four corpses came after they were killed in a rebel attack on their SUVs in the Sunni Triangle city about 35 miles west of Baghdad, scene of some of the worst violence on both sides of the conflict since the beginning of the American occupation a year ago.

It was reminiscent of the 1993 scene in Somalia, when a mob dragged the corpse of a U.S. soldier through the streets of Mogadishu, eventually leading to the American withdrawal from the African nation.

Chanting "Fallujah is the graveyard of Americans," residents cheered after the grisly assault on two four-wheel-drive civilian vehicles, which left both in flames. Others chanted, "We sacrifice our blood and souls for Islam."

Well, for my part, I'm certainly willing to help them make that sacrifice. One notes, however, that their willingness to sacrifice themselves seems to be much stronger when their opponents are unarmed civilians. They're keen as hell to start trouble then.

With heavily armed US soldiers, not so much. I mean, they still love Allah, they just don't want to go see him right now.

This reminds of my days in law enforcement. You'd finish hassling some group of punks, get in your RMP car, and start to drive away. Invariably, as you were driving away, one of them would say something like, "Yeah, drive away, motherf***er. I was getting ready to kick your ass."

It was always funny to stop, back up, get back out of the car, and ask the guy, "You got somethin' else to say?" The guy would look at the ground, scuff his toes on the pavement, and mumble, "No."

"Uh-huh. That's what I thought."

So, when I hear how keen these guys are to sacrifice themselves to Allah, I can't help but notice that they don't actually do it. I mean, they'd like to, but the wife is on them to replaster the living room, and little Fatima has a piano recital on Tuesday, and Jamal Jr. has soccer three times a week. Plus, they're on the rebuilding committee for the mosque. It's just hard to find the time to charge into the teeth of the Americans' withering machine gun fire.

If only they had an opening in their schedule.

That aside though, this event highlights an important thing to keep in mind. Mutilating these corpses and dragging them through the streets was not accidental. It was a message, and an intentional one.

It says, "We are willing to do things without blinking that you consider horrific. You care about the humanity of your actions more than we do. Just look at what we're willing to do." Even the pictures of the event are a kind of terror that helps to reinforce the message.

We have to steel ourselves against this, and remember, that this kind of brutality is precisely why we are fighting this war in the first place. This is exactly the kind of thing we need to stamp out. It is not the result of our actions, it is the primary reason for them. It is a perfect illustration of the terrorist mindset, and it captures for us the essential reasons behind why terror must be stamped out.

No Permanent Friends

(Review) My newest TechCentralStation column is up. It's all about the diplomacy, baby.

The Watcher's Council

(Review) One of my posts has been nominated for consideration as a Watcher of Weasels Watcher's Council link of the week. Thanks for the nomination!

Job Anxiety

(Review) David Ignatius wonders why there's so much job anxiety, considering the fact that employment is relatively high.

But it's still a puzzle what's driving this intense workplace angst. People express a level of fear about jobs that isn't commensurate with what the actual data show.

Take the basic employment numbers: The American economy may be creating new jobs at a sluggish rate, as Kerry has argued. But U.S. unemployment in February was still just 5.6 percent -- down from the 5.9 percent rate of a year ago and far below the levels of major economic competitors.

By comparison, the unemployment rate in France is 9.6 percent; in Germany, it's 10.3 percent; in Belgium, it's 12.8 percent. Even in Japan, where unemployment was once almost unknown, the jobless rate is running at 5 percent. By this measure, the vitality of the American economy remains undiminished.

I think there are two factors that are responsible.

Thanks to the Internet boom and the "new economy" we became conditioned to see a 4% jobless rate as the normal rate of "full employment". It doesn't matter that this was a historically unusually high rate of employment, because it lasted for so long that it became accepted as normal.

What we never kept in mind, although we should have, was that the whole dot com deal was a bubble. Companies like Netscape were going public, even though they had little or no earnings whatsoever, and doing so at $120 per share. Price earnings ratios on many of these Internet stocks were over 100.

Twenty years ago, you couldn't have even listed a stock with numbers like those. The boys at Merrill Lynch or CS First Boston would've just sniffed disdainfully at the very idea, and would have treated your prospectus as if had been printed on yak feces.

But, as occasionally happens, there was a couple of years of "irrational exuberance", and things seemed much better than they really were. We were headed for a crash, and sure enough, by 2000, we got it.

Goodbye, $120k web developer salaries. Goodbye, office shiatsu massages.

But, we'd already been conditioned to seeing that 4% unemployment rate and hefty job creation as normal.

The crash itself was the cause of a great crisis of confidence, especially among middle-class IT people. All of the sudden, there weren't high paying jobs for as long as the sun burns hot in space. And, with a glut of IT people roaming around looking for jobs, salaries for the remaining jobs weren't much to write home about. So, you get this pool of middle-class angst about jobs.

To top it off, there aren't a lot of new jobs being created yet. Partially, this is structural. After all, where are new jobs going to come from? It's not going to be from steel making or textile mills, or farm labor. It's got to come from the more high-tech sector. Aah, but we've just gone through a tech correction that eliminated a lot of tech jobs.

And there won't be another Internet boom any time soon.

Also, companies who've been through the Internet boom also feel a bit shell-shocked. They increased IT staff, made big, splashy corporate web sites, maybe invested their pension plan in some tech stocks, then all the sudden, the bottom fell out on them. They are going to be pretty cagey about ramping up their tech infrastructure until they can see a good business reason for doing so.

I think what we're seeing--and, since we don't have any reliable statistics on this, I'm just guessing, based on anecdotal evidence--is that a large number of tech people are now self-employed. Even though corporate IT staffs have been slashed, there are any number of small and medium businesses that need IT expertise on a part-time, contract basis.

Small businesses don't have IT staffs at all, but they still need web sites, and small office networks. Medium-sized businesses may have a small IT staff, but they need help with overflow work, or development work that they can't afford to do in-house, because they can't keep a couple of programmers employed full time.

I know several people who used to be full-time IT personnel, but who are now working from home, or on a contract basis with 3 or 4 companies.

They are employed, probably full-time,but it isn't the same as being an employee. There's certainly much less feeling of security in self-employment than there is in having an office to go to every day. It can be a tough transition for many people, especially when they have to pay for their own health care, self-employment taxes, etc. Self-employment is scarier than traditional employment.

So, the job growth is there, but we just can't track it. Neither the establishment not household surveys can really put the finger on self-employment.

And I think the media is a factor, too. There's constant harping of how badly the economy is doing. It doesn't matter that the economy is doing quite well by any historical measure, much of the public noise is of the doom and gloom variety, and that doom and gloom is heightened because it's an election year, so the party on the outs its constantly hammering on it.

Combine that with newly self-employed people who are feeling a bit of trepidation about their job security, and it can be a potent force.

Trying to remember that, as recently as 1996, 6% was considered full employment is hard to do. When you're used to 4%, 5.6% looks bad, even though it's a better employment rate than we saw at any time between 1980 and 1995.

In the end, though, economics is rarely about iron laws like those of physics. It is about psychology; about greed and fear. So, to a certain extent, the statistics and facts don't really matter. Unless people feel it, it might as well not be true.

I'd vote for him

(Review) Tom Sowell describes the platform he'd run for office on

Cabinet-level departments, for example, would be reduced to just two -- the Defense Department and the State Department, with the latter purged of the weak-kneed internationalist crowd who have dominated it for so long. Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, etc., would all be abolished as just money-wasting bureaucracies serving outside special interests, instead of the people whose taxes support them.

Government subsidies would be drastically reduced, starting at the top. That is, there would be a prohibition against giving a dime of government money to anyone whose annual income or total assets exceed one billion dollars. Why should agricultural subsidies be going to Ted Turner and David Rockefeller, or "universal health care" pay for their medicine?

Who could object to cutting off subsidies to billionaires? Once that was done, however, the next step would be to cut off millionaires. Then we could proceed on down the income scale until people making a hundred grand a year could no longer expect to be subsidized with the taxpayer's money.

The great advantage of this way of proceeding is that it would rob the media of opportunities to run sob stories about how some poor person was hurt by cutbacks in some government program -- even when the vast majority of those who were hurt were the bureaucrats who run these programs and slick special interests who hide behind the poor.

By the time we got down to cutting off all government subsidies to people making $100,000 a year or more, the federal budget would probably not only be balanced but have a surplus. Of course, there would be hordes of unemployed bureaucrats being interviewed on TV, complaining that the world was going to end, without their vital contributions. But that could be brushed aside.

With all the money saved by ending vast numbers of subsidies, the government could afford to pay the kinds of salaries that would attract highly qualified people from the private sector. For example, if every member of Congress were paid a million dollars a year, that would cost less than one percent of what it costs to run the Department of Agriculture.

Well, it's a platform I would support.

It's the right thing to do

(Review) Anne Clwyd MP, writes for the Guardian that she doesn't need evidence of WMD's to know that whacking Saddam's regime was the right thing to do.

Some will continue to argue that internal repression is not a matter of legitimate concern for other countries. I disagree. There are basic human rights that must be defended. The strict adherence to state sovereignty as the defining factor in international law, far from being a guard against acts of aggression, has become a barrier that allows oppression to continue unchecked by the international community. Who would now say that it was correct not to intervene in Rwanda?

The regime cost the lives of at least 2 million people through its wars and internal oppression, and 4 million Iraqis were forced to become refugees. According to estimates from USAID, more than 270 mass graves have been found in Iraq. These alone should vindicate the war. That the world should have acted sooner, I have no doubt.

Sic semper tyrannis.

Bad polls! Bad!

(Review) John Kerry is dropping in the polls, with 51% of likely voters choosing W, instead of Kerry.

Laura Ingraham has been away from her radio show for a couple of days, but the guy filling in this morning made an interesting point.

Voters elect guys they like. And Kerry just isn't a likable guy.

One of the reasons Democrats lost the senate in the last election was that whole Paul Wellstone memorial service. When it turned into some kind of manic political rally, people just thought it was icky, a seriously unseemly thing to do.

By the same token, the Kerry "I don't fall down" thing seems to be a little one of those revelatory things that give you an insight--and not a pretty one--into the man's character.

If W had run into a Secret Service guy like that, there's no doubt he would've stopped, helped him up, and asked if he was OK, even if the Agent had been a little careless and got in his way. What we saw from Kerry, was, "That SOB got in my way. I never fall down." That's the reaction of a man who is just fundamentally not a nice guy.

Kerry's not a guy you can warm up to. And, as time goes on, it looks to me like voters are increasingly coming to think the man is an arrogant ass. I don't think that translates well into nationwide political success.

So I don't buy the argument that the coming election will be another nail-biter. I think, all other things being equal, Kerry is gonna get beaten like a red-headed step-child, and by October it'll be so obvious that the Democrats will start looking at how they can pull a Torricelli on this guy's campaign. I honestly think this is shaping up to be worse debacle than McGovern.

Unless, of course, the Washington Post finds W in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.  

IS it a "pregnancy" or a "baby"?

(Review) Will Saletan writes that pro-choice advocates need to stop denying reality. Case in point, the Unborn Victims of Violence Act.

The pro-choice people don't want to talk about "unborn children". They don't want to talk about "fetuses". They want to talk about a "woman's pregnancy". And, in some sense they have to, because when you talk about the fetus, you are talking about something other than the woman, and her body. And we can't even open the door on ROE by even the tiniest little crack.

Hence, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) came up with this gem of an amendment for the UVVA:

It says that anyone who commits one of the enumerated violent federal crimes and "thereby causes the termination of a pregnancy or the interruption of the normal course of pregnancy" will get a second punishment "the same as the punishment provided for that conduct under Federal law had that injury or death occurred to the pregnant woman."

One word is notably missing from the amendment. The word is "fetus." There is no fetus. There is only a "pregnancy."

Quite apart from any moral considerations, this type of language has a legal problem.

Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, turned that moral observation into a legal observation. "The Feinstein amendment does not punish the criminal for harming or injuring the baby," he noted. "It only punishes the criminal for 'interrupting or terminating a pregnancy.' … So if a child is injured, not killed, the pregnancy not terminated, the Feinstein amendment will not cover it." DeWine went on: "When it describes the punishment, it refers to injury or death. Whose injury or death are we talking about here? … The Feinstein amendment doesn't recognize that the interruption and termination of the pregnancy means the injury or death of the fetus, because it won't acknowledge the fetus, of course, as a separate being. … The injury or death provision has no object."

This is what happens when you deny reality. You have trouble making sense. You use words like "injury" and "death," forgetting that you've refused to acknowledge the existence of anything capable of being injured or dying.

"If a state can put someone in jail for life because they took the life of an unborn child, then we're clearly saying there is something very valuable there," Feinstein warned Thursday. She wasn't endorsing that conclusion. She was reading aloud, with disapproval and alarm, the words of a Nebraska state senator. Guess what: There is something very valuable there. And if you can't see it, we can't hear you.

Feinstein's objection is the whole key to the pro-choice argument. IF the fetus is valuable, then it follows that an abortion has a moral content, and that "terminating a pregnancy", i.e. killing a fetus has a different dimension than scraping skin off the inside of your cheek.

The last thing that pro-choice advocates want is to inject moral doubts into this debate.

But there are some realities that have to be acknowledged. As Robert Bork points out, the passage through life from conception to death is the passage of a single individual, not a discrete series of organisms called a zygote, a fetus, a child, or an adult. And the fetus is not part of the woman's body. It is a separate organism with it's own DNA. It may be in the mother's body, and dependent upon it, but it is not the mother's body. It is the body of a separate, individual organism.

When a woman is pregnant, we ask her how the baby is. We never call it a "fetus". Unless of course, we intend to kill it.

That tells me that there's a reality that cannot be denied, or covered up, and that having an abortion has a deeply moral significance, no matter how much the pro-choice advocates try to deny it.

Look, I support a woman's right to obtain an abortion, at least in the first trimester. But I acknowledge that to do so has a bit more significance than removing unwanted toenails. I think abortion is deeply immoral. I think adultery is deeply immoral too, but I don't want to see a law preventing that either. My compromise is to allow abortions before the fetus is viable, and to ban them at the point of viability, however the medical community can best define it.

The public support for abortion on demand is declining. People are troubled by abortion, and the increasingly strident attempt to deny reality on the part of pro-choice advocates isn't helping their cause.

And, as medical science keeps getting better, and the point of viability keeps getting pushed back, this is an argument that's going to make people increasingly uncomfortable.

When abortion advocates start arguing, as they have, that late term, third-trimester abortions must be kept legal, then they lose a lot of support. That's simply fanaticism, and 99% of the public accept it as such. Think about it: pro-choice advocates are already counseling terminating pregnancies in the 9th month, when the fetus is unquestionably viable. That didn't stop congress from ending partial-birth abortions, but the fact that it has advocates is extremely icky.

What happens when we come up with the ability to artificially gestate human beings, and we're able to take a 1 day-old fetus, bottle it, and bring it to term? What will the rationale for legal abortion be then?

Welcome Aboard, Richard

(Review) Richard Cohen is shocked--shocked!--to learn the UN is bigoted against Israel.

If there is such a thing as a citizen's arrest, then there ought to be such a thing as a citizen's UN resolution. That being the case, I propose a resolution condemning the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and Islamic Jihad for using naive and addled children as suicide bombers. I am waiting for France, Spain, Russia and other European governments to sign it.

Well, If I was you, I wouldn't hold my breath while I was waiting. You're liable to turn awful blue.

Bit by bit, the UN is making itself look both silly and bigoted in the place that matters most to it - the U.S. The UN's persistently one-sided resolutions, its proclivity to blame Israel for everything and the Palestinians for nothing - not even for repeatedly rejecting every peace plan offered them - reduces it to irrelevance. What would these nations do with a society that exalts martyrdom and sends children to die in an effort to kill other children? These are criminal acts - and for what? An improved peace plan? Another block of Jerusalem?

I gotta tell you this just kills me: "Bit by bit, the UN is making itself look both silly and bigoted in the place that matters most to it - the U.S."

Bit by bit? Where've you been for the last thirty years, Richard? The UN, led by the Arab states in particular, has been hammering the Israelis like cheap ten-penny nails for three decades. "Zionism is Racism" has been the official position of the UN since around 1973, and you're waking up to smell the coffee now?

It's pretty simple: If you cannot condemn the murder of innocents, especially by children, then you have no business condemning anything else. In the undiplomatic language of my old neighborhood, put up or shut up.

"Especially by children!"

Cohen is all ticked off now because the Palestinians used a dumb kid as a suicide bomber. Yeah, that's so much worse than using adults to blow up children in buses.

Using minors as suicide bombers? Why, that's just unconscionable! I mean, blowing up entire families in a Sbarro's restaurant is one thing, but when you do it using a minor, well, that's just stepping over the line.

Sorry, but it seems to me that once you've accepted the righteousness of blowing up innocent women and children in bus load lots, the issue of who you get to set off the bombs is just pretty frickin' low in the list of moral outrages.

It reminds me of the old saying that liberals don't care if an 18 year-old girl performs in an adult video, just as long as she's getting the minimum wage.

A little love for Al Franken

(Review) Talk radio host Jay Severin has some bad news for the new liberal radio network. He thinks it'll be a financial failure right out of the gate.

But take another look at that map. The death knell you see lurking is audience demographics (i.e. it's the economy, stupid). Red (Bush) vs. Blue (Gore) is a distinction of ideology, but it is also, as frankly we know, essentially a division of social class, race, and income. The red audience is largely suburban, college educated, professional, middle class; the blue (potential) audience more urban, less well educated, lower income. And this difference will matter infinitely more in the radio booth than the voting booth.

You are planning to lure conservative talk listeners? Dream on. You ignore -- or are delusional about -- the gross mismatch between your product and your customers.

Understand: Your success depends on us embracing the utterly fantastic notion that we are what's wrong with America; that our national, cultural, and personal woes stem from taxes too low, affirmative action too meek, defense too strong, and illegal aliens too few. People who believe such twaddle are for the most part home watching Jerry Springer reruns. Numerous they are. A commercially viable national talk radio audience they are not.

That's why Rush is on 600 radio stations, and the new liberal network is, as of yesterday, on 3.

The key problem with liberal radio is that is depends on the audience buying into this: "the utterly fantastic notion that we are what's wrong with America". For liberal radio to be successful, it has to be commercially viable. Telling white, middle-class listeners that they are hateful, benighted ignoramuses is not the best way to pitch for commercial success.

There's just a limit to how long people will be willing to listen to a radio host telling them every day that they are twisted and evil. That's not a matter of ideology, that's just plain old human nature and common sense.

Our Nato Allies

(Review) Mark Steyn again, this time, on our "allies" in Europe. Germany is having second thoughts about America closing her bases there, it seems.

Right now, Germany plays host to 175,000 Americans - military personnel plus their families - and reducing that number to 80-90,000 would leave a big hole in an economy that's already looking like a Swiss cheese. See the recent story in Bild: "Can't We Do Anything Any More in Germany?" Also the cover of Der Spiegel: "Germany: A Joke."

The joke keeps getting better. Karl Peter Bruch, a state official in Rhineland-Palatinate who's lobbying the Americans to change their minds, put it this way: "We realised that our installations are in grave danger. And then came the question, what can we do to make us more attractive?"

"Our" installations? As Daffy Duck famously remarked after losing yet another verbal duel with Bugs Bunny and getting his bill shot off: "Hmm. Pronoun trouble." As to what Germany can do to make itself more attractive to the Yanks, how about this? Spend less time running around playing Mini-Me to Jacques Chirac's Doctor Evil. Just a thought. And it seems to have occurred, somewhat belatedly, to Gerhard Schröder.

Probably too late to keep Bush from pulling out as many of our troops as he can. There's still a lot we can do with bilateral committments from our friends over there, but, France and Germany?

Huh.

The so-called "free world" was, for most of its members, a free ride. Absolving wealthy nations of the need to maintain credible armies softens them: they decay, almost inevitably, into a semi-non-aligned status.

Even now, the likes of Mr Bruch see the US military presence in Europe in mainly economic terms - all those German supermarkets and German restaurants that depend on American custom. But, looked at in defence terms, if Don Rumsfeld wants a light, mobile 21st-century military, the last place to base it is the Continent: given that the term "ally" is now generally used in the post-modern meaning of "duplicitous obstructionist", it's not unlikely that any future Saddamesque scenario would see attempts to throw operational restraints around the use of US forces in Europe.

This weekend, for example, nearly 60 per cent of French electors voted Socialist, Communist, Fascist or Green. Most of the rest voted for the "ruling centre-Right" - ie, Chirac. Does that sound like an "ally" that's ever again likely to grant overflight rights to the USAF? Better a nice clean flight plan direct from Missouri or Diego Garcia.

We went through this at the end of the 80s and early 90s. The Germans were oh so keen to send the Ameircans packing from Heidelberg, Kaiserslautern or Ramstein, until somebody got a look at what the tab would be for Germany in terms of economic losses when the Americans left. That changed a lot of tunes in a hurry.

Germany is in a bit a bad economic patch. It's their own fault, naturally. High wages, high costs of labor, and high benefits are not the path to job creation. Now Germany's screwed economically, and Schröder doesn't have the guts to do what's necessary to fix it.

Germany is the sick man of Europe, and too risk-averse to try any cure other than sugary placebos such as the dismal "Year of Innovation" Mr Schröder has declared 2004 to be. He has appointed an Innovation Council. The first sign of a genuinely innovative culture is that it's too busy innovating to have an Innovation Council.

Hmmm. An impoverished Germany with bankrupting financial obligations to the rest of Europe and an increasingly hostile population.

Yeah, that's what we want to see.

What about sudan?

The editors of the Dallas Morning News as well as Nick Kristoff of the New York Times are wondering if we will, yet again, stand by idly and do nothing while another genocide occurs again.

The answer, of course, is that we will. Oh, sure, we'll condemn it. We'll make the appropriate mouth noises. But military action? Not a chance.

Kristoff isn't asking for an invasion, though, to be fair.

I'm not arguing that we should invade Sudan. But one of the lessons of history is that very modest efforts can save large numbers of lives. Nothing is so effective in curbing ethnic cleansing as calling attention to it.

President Bush could mention Darfur or meet a refugee. The deputy secretary of state could visit the border areas here in Chad. We could raise the issue before the U.N. And the onus is not just on the U.S.: it's shameful that African and Muslim countries don't offer at least a whisper of protest at the slaughter of fellow Africans and Muslims.

No, you won't hear a whisper of protest. Or rather, that's all you'll hear. After all, why should we go to war over the fate of "a faraway people, about which we know little?" Besides, as is well-known violence never solves anything.

Wasn't that the Left's position on Afghanistan and Iraq?

Seven new countries join toothless, impotent alliance

(Review) Seven former Soviet-bloc nations have joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization today, in order to assist NATO in doing whatever it's supposed to do now that the the Soviet threat has evaporated.

The new countries' military forces are looking forward to close cooperation with their new allies the next time the alliance decides not to participate in military action in conjunction with the largest NATO member, the United States.

With the addition of these new seven nations, the US armed forces are no longer larger than the rest of NATO armed forces combined. Now US Forces are only larger than the 19 largest NATO allies combined.

NATO Secretary General de Hoop Scheffers said in a press release that, "These new members of NATO will contribute vitally to the key debate within the alliance, about whether we should contribute peacekeepers after America acts, or whether we should do nothing at all."

Scheffers concluded, "Oh, and by the way, we are too still relevant in world affairs."

Reaction from Moscow to the announcement was muted. Viktor Kuznetzov, press aide to President Vladimir Putin, responded to questions on the subject by saying, "Whatever."

French defense analyst Jacques Lalonde commented, "Well, zeez small nations, zey have not the moral, eh, how do you say, puissance, ze moral strength to stand up to the Americaines. Zey do not have the advantage of hundreds of years of French gloire to sustain zem. Undoubtedly, zey will be lap dogs for ze crude barbarians in America. Hopefully, zey will, 'owever, learn zere places quickly, and keep silent, rather zan oppose ze wisdom of ze policy of France."

France left the military alliance in the 1960s, but still remains part of its political councils, for reasons that mystify observers.

With the entrance of these seven new countries NATO hopes to be able to complete its "Worldwide Military Mobility" project by the year 2015. This project, if successful, will allow NATO's European partners to develop their ability to project military power anywhere on the globe without American assistance.

It is hoped that by 2015, European countries will be able to deploy as many as 30 fully-equipped soldiers anywhere in the world, along with all of the required logistical resources to keep them supplied in the field for as many as three days.

This project was first started in the early 1980s.     

Fortunately, Lao "Iron Balls" Zhang was unharmed

Photo: AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli

But the "make-up sex" ought to be fantastic

Photo: Reuters/Atef Hassan

It's a triumph of the human spirit

Photo: Reuters/Chris Helgren

Blogiversary

I almost forgot. Yesterday was my 2-year blogiversary! I can't believe it lasted this long. I thought I would lose interest and move on to something else in 6 months, tops.

I owe it all to you, the thousands of people who drop by every week or every day, just to look in. Thank you all. That is what has kept me going, lo, these many years.

Thanks for your time, your comments, your emails, and your support. 

UPDATE:

Thanks, Jon.

Book Update

Well, the completed,by-God final version of my manuscript went off to the publisher this morning. That means the 90-day clock until release is now running. From here, it goes into editorial review for two weeks, then back to me for two weeks for review. After that, cover design and production.

I think it would be a great birthday present to have the book out on my Birthday, 28 June.

Ah, some more about the book. The working title--although not, perhaps, the final title-- is Slackernomics: Basic Economics for People Who Find Economics Boring. It covers all the basics of economics, but it does so with a lot of humor.

Want a taste? Okay.

Another feature of the price system is that it forces producers to put resources to their most valued uses. This is important because, quite often, consumers demand different goods that use many of the same components.

Let’s take petroleum, for example. People don't just need gasoline; they need plastics to make computer keyboards and ugly furniture for college students. Businesses need chemicals for industrial production and dyes. Textile companies need artificial colorfast fabrics. Perverts need Vaseline.

So, in bidding for each of those items, their producers are also bidding for the petroleum required to make them. When more people buy Vaseline, Johnson & Johnson has to bid away some of that petroleum from refineries or textile mills. In turn, this increased demand in petroleum causes the price of oil to rise for everyone who uses it.

In order to keep buying oil, everyone now has to pay the price that Johnson & Johnson is willing to pay. As this raises consumer prices for these items, consumers are likely to buy less of them. For example, a consumer, noticing the increase in the cost of Vaseline, decides to spend Saturday night alone.

So, the price that Johnson & Johnson is willing to pay for oil becomes an added cost for all of the other businesses that use oil. If they want to bid away some of that oil, they have to be willing to pay the higher price. But since higher prices tend to mean lower sales, other producers will only bid away as much oil as they think they can use, now that sales are dropping.

The end result is that Johnson & Johnson ends up with a relatively larger portion of oil. In other words, the resource of oil has flowed to the highest valued product, an important…uh…medical lubricant.

Eventually, because there is an increasing supply of Vaseline, demand is affected. At some point, consumers are unwilling to buy it, because there's enough of it on the shelves. And, of course, with all this petroleum bidding going on, the price has been increasing. So, some consumers may notice that the price of Vaseline has now increased relative to, say KY Jelly, and they may decide to purchase it instead.

Of course, either way, Johnson & Johnson wins.

But, this change in demand forces the company to produce less Vaseline, which means ordering less oil. Naturally, that frees up more oil for plastics manufacturers and chemical companies at a lower price.

In forcing resources to their most valued uses, prices provide an automatically self-correcting mechanism that adjusts the use of resources at all times.

Now, these adjustments in production are all incremental. It's not an all or nothing choice between Vaseline and gasoline. Each product has its own level of demand, and only the amount of oil necessary to make each product will be used. That prevents us from being unable to find a plastic travel cup for our coffee, but being flooded with enough Vaseline to film Debbie Does Dallas with the entire population of Dallas.

Like I said, it's basic economics presented in a non-traditional way.

So, three more months. 

Democrats and Iraq

(Review) Professor David Gelernter is stupified by the Democrats' reaction to the war in Iraq.

But Democratic talk about Iraq is dominated not by the hell and horror we abolished or the pride and joy of what we achieved. Many Democrats mention Saddam's crimes only grudgingly. What they really want to discuss is how the administration "lied" about WMDs (one of the more infantile accusations in modern political history), how (thanks to Iraq) our allies can't stand us anymore, how (on account of Iraq) we are shortchanging the war on terror. But don't you understand, a listener wants to scream, that Saddam's government was ripping human flesh to shreds? Was consuming whole populations by greedy mouthfuls, masticating them, drooling blood? Committing crimes that are painful even to describe? Don't you understand what we achieved by liberating Iraq, what mankind achieved? When we hear about Saddam and his two sons, how can we help but think of the three-faced Lucifer at the bottom of Dante's hell?--"with six eyes he was weeping and over three chins dripped tears and bloody foam," Con sei occhi piangea, e per tre menti / gocciava 'l pianto e sanguinosa bava, as he crushes human life between his teeth.

I don't care about WMDs. I don't even care if we were justified, in a UN sense, to go in. In fact, nothing would make me happier than to liberate every festering hell-hole of totalitarianism in the world.

I believe that the mission of this country is to extend human freedom as far across the world as we are able. So, every time I see a Democrat like David Bonior smiling and shaking hands with the likes of Daniel Ortega, or Saddam Hussein, or snuggling up to Fidel Castro, it practically incenses me.

If you want to know why I despise what the Democratic Party has become, you need look no further than this.

The Myth of Republican Racism II

(Review) It's one thing to write nice articles about how Republican racism is a myth. But perception is reality in many ways, and as Peter Beinart points out, having Republicans associated with anything is the quickest way to get blacks to line up against it.

When pollsters ask blacks about gay marriage, they're asking in a relative vacuum. But, when the issue is raised in a state legislature or in a political campaign, its partisan implications are glaringly obvious. And the very fact that the GOP is leading the anti-gay-marriage movement de-legitimizes the issue for black politicians and black voters.

As State Rep. Tyrone Brooks, head of the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials, explained to The New York Times, "This is not about your personal beliefs. It's about a political ballgame the Republicans kicked off." The Reverend Walter Fauntroy, a black former delegate to Congress from the District of Columbia, actually supports a federal anti-gay-marriage amendment. Yet, when he went on National Public Radio this February to debate the issue, he prefaced his comments by announcing, "I'm annoyed to have to discuss this issue in an election year, because it's yet another sideshow being used by radical right-wing fiscal and social conservatives to divert attention from the critical issues."

In other words, Republicans hope gay marriage will change blacks' views of the GOP. But those views are so negative that the reverse happens - African-Americans transfer their hostility to the GOP to whatever issue the GOP happens to be supporting. This dynamic isn't confined to gay marriage. Polling shows that many blacks support school vouchers. And yet in 2002, when black Democrat Cory Booker ran for mayor of Newark, incumbent Sharpe James cited his flirtation with vouchers as evidence that he was a closet Republican. Which is one reason Booker overwhelmingly lost the city's black vote.

(Similarly, many California Latinos told pollsters in 1994 that they supported Proposition 187, which denied benefits to illegal immigrants. But, as the campaign progressed and Republican Gov. Pete Wilson became the proposition's public face, Latino support for the measure plummeted.)

Let me be blunt. This is an extraordinarily stupid reaction. It ensures that blacks get no progress whatsoever on issues that really interest them such as school vouchers. It makes blacks a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party, and yet, it provides no pressure on the Democrats to reform, because all they have to do is drag out the bogeyman of the Republican Party, and blacks will flock to the Democratic standard.

I remember reading the results of a poll taken in Russia a few years ago which asked respondents what they would prefer, to be rich themselves or to prevent their neighbor from becoming rich. Russians overwhelmingly chose to prevent their neighbor from becoming rich to becoming rich themselves.

With that kind of stupidly self-defeating attitude, you can pretty much be sure that neither of those options will be presenting itself to ordinary Russians any time soon.

Similarly, the demonization of Republicans has worked so well among blacks that Democrats can now take their votes for granted. This ensures that realistic reform on a number of issues of concern to the black community will never come out of the Democratic party. Like Russians and wealth, Blacks can now forget about the prospect of such reforms, having tied themselves firmly to the party of which those reforms are anathema.

This leads to results that defy belief. When George Wallace ran for governor the last time, he was elected with a huge majority of the black vote. This is, in case you've forgotten, the same man that said to the nation, "Segregation yesterday, Segregation now, segregation forever!" But, he was a Democrat, so he must've changed. An honest-to-God former Klansman sits in the Well of the US Senate, in the nearly human form of Robert Byrd (D--of course--WV). But, he's not a racist any more. It's only Republicans that are forever racist.

Democrats who were explicitly racist in the past are now more acceptable than Republicans who have no history of racist leanings whatsoever. And if you can't find any evidence of actual racism, then you can find it in the code words like "tax cuts" or "color-blind".

I mean, you can't even call that irrational. It is literally arational, i.e., in that it contains no rationality at all. It does nothing but ensure that Blacks will vote for politicians who will never, ever address their concerns, rather than hated Republicans who will.

I call this the "Russian Outcome".

It's for the Children!

(Review) Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) writes that the push to get the FCC more involved in rooting out indecency is a dangerous precedent, and one that might come back to bite conservatives in the butt, if they continue pushing for it.

Conservatives must understand that the powers they grant the FCC today might one day be used against them. It is not hard to imagine a future where criticism of abortion is deemed hate speech against women, or criticism of affirmative action considered an unlawful attack on minorities. It is not hard to imagine President Hillary Clinton ordering the FCC to shut down Rush Limbaugh for using the term "feminazi." Already a petition has been filed with the Justice Department to investigate The Passion of the Christ for possible hate crimes against those who dislike the film's theology! Big-government conservatives will learn that heavy-handed federal control of speech is far more likely to result in a rigidly secular, politically correct society than a moral society filled with Christian virtue.

If you don't like what's on TV turn it off. But don't sit there and complain about how horrible it is that all that sex is on TV while you unfailingly tune in to Friends and Will & Grace.

Giving the government power to regulate speech, or really, power to do anything, is always an iffy prospect. As PJ O'Rourke put it in Parliament of Whores, giving money and power to the government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenaged boys.

Sure, it sounds nice to hear the FCC will crack down on indecency, with big fines and whatnot, as long as it's Howard Stern that has to take the heat. But wait until it's Rush or Sean or Laura who start getting popped by the FCC for being "hateful" and "divisive".

But, then, of course, it'll be too late. Everybody will already have agreed that the government just has to step in and regulate decent content on the arwaves. After all, it's for the children!

Which brings me to another point. We have to stop this "it's for the children" garbage. As far as I'm concerned, the little rug rats are lucky we're not putting them out on the factory floor for 10 hours a day as soon as they hit puberty. The best way to care for the children is to teach them how to be responsible adults who can take care of themselves.

Let's leave the government to get on with the important things like building highways and killing foreigners. I think the little things, like broadcast standards, we can handle ourselves by turning off the tube and sending a message to the broadcasters.

Richard Clarke: The Last Word

(Review) Leave it to Mark Steyn to puncture the silliness surrounding the Richard Clark "revelations".

Having served both the 42nd and 43rd Presidents, Clarke was supposed to be the most authoritative proponent to advance the Democrats' agreed timeline of the last decade - to whit, from January 1993 to January 2001, Bill Clinton focused like a laser on crafting a brilliant plan to destroy al-Qa'eda, but, alas, just as he had dotted every "i", crossed every "t" and sent the intern to the photocopier, his eight years was up, so Bill gave it to the new guy as he was showing him the Oval Office - "That carpet under the desk could use replacing. Oh, and here's my brilliant plan to destroy al-Qa'eda, which you guys really need to implement right away."

The details of the brilliant plan need not concern us, which is just as well, as there aren't any. But the broader point, as The New York Times noted, is that "there was at least no question about the Clinton administration's commitment to combat terrorism".

Yessir, for eight years the Clinton administration was relentless in its commitment: no sooner did al-Qa'eda bomb the World Trade Center first time round, or blow up an American embassy, or a barracks, or a warship, or turn an entire nation into a terrorist training camp, than the Clinton team would redouble their determination to sit down and talk through the options for a couple more years. Then Bush took over and suddenly the superbly successful fight against terror all went to hell.

The Clinton Team undoubtedly had good intentions. So good, in fact, that the road to hell was widened to an 8-lane freeway with an HOV expressway and a light rail line in the median.

Republican Racism

(Review) Writing for the Claremont Review of Books, Gerard Alexander attacks the myth of Republican racism.

This is a perfect example of something I have written about before.

The left does not simply believe that the right is wrong on the issues, or that its policy prescriptions are misguided. The left holds as a matter of course that its opponents are morally deficient, simply because they disagree. Conservatives, as Charles Krauthammer recently phrased it, are evil in the eyes of the left.

In the 1994 election campaign, Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) gave us the perfect example of this belief. Only racists, he said, could be in favor of lower taxes or the death penalty. Rangel opined that people used to call it "Jim Crow", but now they call it "tax cuts."

As Alexander points out, this is a tautology.

In effect, these critics want to have it both ways: they acknowledge that these views could in principle be non-racist (otherwise they wouldn't be a "code" for racism) but suggest they never are in practice (and so can be reliably treated as proxies for racism). The result is that their claims are non-falsifiable because they are tautological: these views are deemed racist because they are defined as racist. This amounts to saying that opposition to the policies favored by today's civil rights establishment is a valid indicator of racism. One suspects these theorists would, quite correctly, insist that people can disagree with the Israeli government without being in any way anti-Semitic. But they do not extend the same distinction to this issue. This is partisanship posturing as social science.

It is an argument of convenience, rather than conviction.

Humor is Verboten!

(Review) Jon Henke points out that evidentrly, John Kerry isn't a riot of laughs.

Telling it like it is

(Review) Victor Davis Hanson just lets it all hang out.

The problem is not "getting the message out," but having the intellectual courage to tell the truth and not to be browbeaten by faux intellectuals who talk monotonously of mythical pipelines and Zionist aggression. The fact is, beneath the hype, Iraqis will soon appreciate American help and idealism far more than French perfidy. It is never wrong to be on the side of freedom — never.

Nor do we have anything to apologize about to the Europeans. We liberated the continent, sent it billions in aid, protected it from Soviet Communism, supported the EU and German reunification, created NATO in part to keep internal peace, intervened in Kosovo to stop more European genocide, and have well over 100,000 troops there still to protect it sixty years after it nearly destroyed itself. We no longer expect gratitude or even memory of the past, but we do expect maturity and not the patronizing lectures from a Spanish or French foreign minister who should know better — given the respective histories of their countries and our own during the last century.

Read the whole thing.

Larry King: The Master of Research

Hey, did anybody catch Larry King night before last? What an idiot.

Maybe you don't know, but Time's Mike Weisskopf was in Iraq. A grenade was thrown into his vehicle. Wiesskopf threw it back out, but not quite quick enough. It went off and mangled his hand. Tragic story, but good, quick thinking, Mike. Cool under pressure. Way to go. Get well soon, man.

So, anyway, King's got a big-name panel on, including Michael Issikof from Newsweek. King introduces everybody, and then goes, in his inimitable style:

KING: First of all, Michael, how are you physically?

[Three seconds of dead air on national TV]

ISSIKOF: Uh, I'm fine. Why do you ask?

KING: What did you lose?

Daylight breaks over Issikoff, who then explains that Larry has gotten him confused with his colleague, Michael Weisskopf.

I'm shrieking with laughter so hard, I'm frickin' weeping. I mean, with the busy schedule, and gulping down mega doses of Ester-C, and the charity work, and the alimony to 12 ex-wives, where does Larry get the time to do the in-depth guest research that he does?

I mean, the man's a pro.

Then there's the line: "What'd you lose?" WTF? Did he think Issikof was gona wave his bloody stump around on national TV? It was a frickin' hand, not a wallet he happened to misplace!

"So what'd you lose?" That's just tactful!

The Bottom Line

(Review) Charles Krauthammer writes that if you cut through the spins, and Richard Clarke, and all the rest of it, it comes down to this:

Look. George W. Bush did not distinguish himself on terrorism in the first eight months of his presidency. Whatever his failings, however, they pale in comparison to those of his predecessor.

Clinton was in office eight years, not eight months.

Eight years. Count 'em.

Khobar Towers. Embassy Bombings. WTC 1. The Cole.

Eight years.

But 9/11 is Bush's fault, right?

Failed Diplomacy

(Review) Mort Kondracke writes in Roll Call that the election in Spain shows that President Bush is a failure at diplomacy, and in convincing our European allies to go along with us on our campaign to whack Saddam Hussein.

If only Bush were better at diplomacy, he writes, Bush might have convinced our allies to go along with us.

I'm just not sure that's true at all. NAtions aren't buddies. They don't pal around because they like each other. "Nations" don't have feelings.

What nations have is interests. When those interests align, they become allies. When they don't, the alliance fades.

Hmmm. Sounds like another TechCentralStation Article coming on...

Thinking Clearly

(Review) Ralph Peters is thinking clearly.

* There is nothing we can do to satisfy religion-inspired terrorists. If we do not kill them, they will kill us.

* The War on Terror cannot be won decisively and will endure beyond our lifetimes. You can no more eliminate terror than you can wipe out crime or drug abuse. But - as with drug abuse and crime - you can't just ignore it, either. The goal is to reduce terrorism to a bearable level. The lack of a final victory doesn't mean the effort is useless or a failure.

* We must think, plan and act in terms of decades, not months. Even as we fight today's battles, we must think about challenges a generation ahead.

* This is a war, not law enforcement. The struggle requires every tool in our national arsenal, from commandos to cops, from diplomacy to technology, from economic sanctions to preemptive war. At different times, in different locations, the instruments of choice will vary. There is no magic solution - or even a set of rules.

* The best defense is a strong offense. We cannot wait at home for terrorists to strike. We must not waver from the current policy of taking the war to our enemies. The moment we falter, our enemies will bring the war back to us.

* Nothing will make us invulnerable. Our goal is to reduce our vulnerability to the lowest practical level - while balancing wisely between security and freedom.

* A terrorist attack on the United States is not a victory for either of our political parties or for any school of thought. It's a defeat for all of us. When the next attack occurs - as one eventually will - we must blame our enemies, not each other.

* Allies are valuable, but they are not indispensable. In the end, we must always do what is necessary, whether or not it is popular abroad.

* The Islamic world's problems are not our fault, and we are not to blame for terrorism. We cannot force other cultures to be successful, nor can we avoid their jealousy.

* There is only one measure of success that matters in the end: Can terrorists harm the United States and its citizens? While some future strikes are inevitable, the inability of terrorists to strike our homeland since 9/11 is indisputable proof that, however imperfect, our approach to the War on Terror has been working.

* Our will must always be stronger than that of our enemies. Otherwise, they'll win, despite our countless advantages. If we cannot maintain the courage for the fight, the terrorists will fill the courage vacuum. The War on Terror is a zero-sum game.

These are the truths we will be living with for the rest of our lives. You might as well learn them and accept them. Print them out and post them somewhere where you can see them every day.

This is our reality.

Leadership? We don' need no stinkin' leadership!

(Review) After watching Madeleine Albright's testimony before the 911 commission, Peggy Noonan observes:

The hearings did no damage to common-sense assumptions about 9/11. Common sense suggests that those who led the nation for eight years before 9/11 bear greater responsibility than those who led the nation for less than eight months. Nothing in the hearings disturbed that notion. In fact, I thought Ms. Albright's testimony tended to underscore it. She spoke of the "megashock" of 9/11 and repeatedly suggested there was no political will on the part of the American people before that date to attack the Taliban or invade Afghanistan.

She's right. There was no movement among voters to take out Al Qaeda. Most people didn't know what al Qaeda was. But that of course is where leadership comes in...

Mr. Clinton never wanted to pay the price. He wanted to be popular. And so he campaigned hard on child safety seats and midnight basketball. Baby issues.

And that's really what it comes down too, isn't it.

The American people don't really want to think about foreign affairs, and the threat of terror, and the dangers of nuclear proliferation. That's why he hire guys like Clinton and Bush. We pay them a quarter-mil a year to do that thinking and planning for us.

What we expect--what we have a right to expect--is that if it looks like the balloon's about to go up, they'll let us know in time. They'll draw our attention to it, and get us focused on the threat.

By the end of the 1930s, and I mean 1938-1939, FDR already knew we were going to war against Germany. It was inevitable, and anybody who'd given it five minutes thought knew it.

Americans, for the most part, hadn't given it five minutes thought. First, we're Americans, who usually only worry about foreigners when there are too many of them here. Second, we were awful busy. What with all time it took standing in soup lines with rest of the unemployed, or cobbling up a tar paper and cardboard shack so we'd no longer be completely homeless, our schedules were full.

In fact, we'd gotten pretty sick of the hash foreigners had made of everything, and were pretty much convinced that they should all go hang.

But, fortunately, we'd hired a guy like FDR to keep track of the foreigners for us. And slowly but surely, step by step, FDR convinced an unwilling, isolationist public to march toward the sound of the guns.

So, when I hear Albright, or Sandy Berger, or any of the rest of their ilk tell us that they really would've protected the country, and they really would've been tougher on terror, if only the slackers who make up the citizenry had the guts to do it, I get a bit miffed.

They were the guys who were supposed to be keeping us in the loop about this stuff. If they thought it was such an all-fired important problem, why didn't they at least drop a hint about it int he 8 years or so that they were running the show up there?

Why did I have to find out about it on the morning of 11 Sep 01?

Evidently, the spent eight years sitting around up there holding top secret meeting about international terror, all of which concluded with them shaking their heads and clucking in disappointment over us sad morons in the general public, who were just too blind to see what needed to be done.

Well, at a minimum, maybe it would've helped if you guys had pulled an FDR instead of a...well...a Clinton.

Iraq - Al Qaida

(Review) Michael Barone, the hardest working man in show business...or wait, is that James Brown? Right, Barone is the smartest man in the political media. OK, Carry on.

Anyway, Barone goes after Dick Clarke. The counter-terrorism guy. Not the American Bandstand guy.

"There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda," said former White House counterrorism official Richard Clarke to Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes. It's a statement often made by Democrats and critics of the Bush administration.

The problem is it's flat out wrong. As CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee in October 2002, "We have credible reporting that al Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs." The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes has documented copious evidence of ties between al Qaeda and Iraq.

Such evidence is not conclusive. But it is evidence. Clarke and others who state with certainty that we know of no ties between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime are simply wrong.

No, they aren't wrong. Certainly he's right that they're incorrect. But to say simply that "they're wrong" implies an honest mistake. As if they actually believe that there's no evidence of such a connection, they're just factually incorrect.

But they don't believe it. Oh, sure, there's always some pink-haired, eyebrow-pierced Starbucks customer who'll actually fall for it. But the guys who matter, guys like Clarke who've spend the last decade or more inside the belly of the beast, they know what's what.

When they tell us there's no evidence of a connection, they are simply lying, because they cannot possibly believe what they are saying is true.

It's nothing more than lying for political gain. 

Why doesn't the guy just change parties?

(Review) Zell Miller will be heading an organization called "Democrats for Bush".

OK, fine, thanks for the help Zell, but why stay with a party that you believe has abandoned the principles that made it great? Just wondering.

Going to Babylon

It looks like I'll be out in the Washington DC area the week of 9-15 May. If any of my readers are interested in having me speak before their group, then drop me a line at dale-at-dalefranks.com. I'll see if we can't work something out.

Light blogging

Blogging has been lighter than usual this week, as I'm sure you realize. But, I have a good reason, this time!

I am in the final stages of wrapping up my new book, The Armchair Economist--assuming, of course, the publisher allows me to keep the name--and getting it off to the publisher, which is an arm of Random House.

I am sick of this book. I am tired of reading it over and over. I am tired of making tiny little grammatical changes. I'm tired of reformatting the tables. And at the moment, I am especially tired of building the index. Crap, what a pain that is.

Hopefully, by next week I'll be done, it'll be off to the publisher. So, in four or five months (Months!) I'll expect all of you to be buying it on Amazon.

And copies for your friends and families. I think if you all just do a little bit extra, you can make my life a lot easier.

Don't be one of the sheep

(Review) Skeptical thinking. It's your best defense against frauds and charlatans. Even those who are trying to "help" you. Wendy McElroy writes that there are 5 questions you should ask any time you read or hear about a "study" that gets touted in the news:

Who says so? How does he know? What does the Competition say? Did someone change the subject? Does it make sense?

That last question is very important. Social studies are not a hard science. Until we get that Isaac Asimov Physchohistory deal discovered, social studies will always be flawed because people are....people.

But, by the time we're 30 or so, most of us know enough--or should--to perk our ears up when we hear something counterintuitive.

A few years ago, a "study" was released by Two economists, Card and Kruger, that purported to show that when the minimum wage was increased in New Jersey, it had no effect on minimum wage workers in the fast food industry. From there, it became a short jump to arguing that increasing the minimum wage was a benefit!

It doesn't really matter if you know anything about economics. All you have to do is ask yourself the question, if someone raises the price of something, will they sell more of it, or less?

It's not rocket science.

Of course, when economists saw this study, they knew a few things. First, it defied the vast majority of study results in this area. Second, it defied common sense, and third, that Card and Kruger were...uh...how does one say it? Well, let me put it this way: Had these two gentlemen come up with different results than the ones they published, that would have been a surprise. Somehow, they always find that employment is unharmed by rises in the minimum wage.

So, economists immediately tried to confirm their results. As it happens, Card and Kruger had based their results on telephone surveys with fast-food restaurant owners. To check up on the accuracy of such results, their critics went straight to the state's employment records.

It seems that Card and Kruger's survey respondents were misrembering. Or something. In any event, it seems their results didn't match up with the state of New Jersey's actual employment records. In fact, a rise in the minimum wage did appear to have decreased employment.

Common sense is a pretty good tool. You should try and use it as often as you can.

Richard Clarke: Manly man of action

(Review) John Podhoretz has read Richard Clarke's book. He's impressed. He's impressed as hell.

As soon as 911 occured, Clarke swung into action:

He is the man who took charge of America on 9/11 by "putting together a secure teleconference to manage the crisis," he writes on page 2.

A secure teleconference! Wow!

Yes, instant communications. At one end, people would talk, and at the other end people would hear them! And it was secure! No eavesdropping on that teleconference, no sir.

And it was Richard Clarke who put it together. In the future, perhaps all of us regular Americans will be able to have such instant communications through this "tele-phone" of which he speaks.

But, wait, there's more! Evidently, Without Mr. Clarke, our nation would have been rudderless and lost that tragic day.

Clarke says he all but ordered the president of the United States not to return to Washington on that day. ("Figure out where to move the president. He can't come back here until we know what the s--t is happening.")

By his own account, it was Clarke who gave the order to "authorize the Air Force to shoot down any aircraft . . . that looks like it is threatening to attack."

You thought it was Dick Cheney who gave that order? You were wrong - at least if you believe Dick Clarke.

Oh, and Clarke took command of the Air Force, too. ("Roger, find out where the fighter planes are. I want Combat Air Patrol over every major city in this country. Now.")

Remember when Alexander Haig created a firestorm right after the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan by claiming he was "in charge"? Well, when it comes to being "in charge," Haig had nothing on Dick Clarke, who was - so he tells us with excruciating generosity - a just and righteous ruler of America on that day.

Richard Clarke, the Secret King of America. All I want to know is, why is this man no longer in government? Without his just and benificent hand to guide us, I fear all will be lost. 

The Roots of Appeasement

The results of Spain's national elections have left many observers shocked. Not only was the result unexpected, but it's difficult to interpret as anything other than an attempt to appease the radical Islamists of Al-Qaida. Appeasement, it seems, despite its demonstrated failures, still has strong roots in Europe, and they go back nearly a century.

The First World War was a massive shock to the European psyche--a shock from which it still hasn't recovered. Prior to 1914, Europeans had developed an innate belief that human progress, trade, and science was the cure for all ills. With brief exceptions, the continent had been mainly at peace since Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. Indeed, scholarly tomes were written describing how war between the nations of Europe was now unthinkable. Europe's nations were too closely related through trade and commercial ties for war to even be physically possible for any length of time.

In August, 1914, those beliefs came tumbling down.

Equally importantly, the conduct of the war undermined another key aspect of European society, the class structure. Despite the Enlightenment and the general acceptance of equality before the law, Europe was still steeped in class differences. The upper class--well educated, groomed for leadership and government, confident in their abilities--made up the officer corps. The lower class--steady, loyal, obedient, and, most important of all, possessed of trust in their leadership--served as common soldiers and NCOs.

But the officer class was completely unprepared for the nature of modern warfare. The lack of any true mobility other than that offered by the feet of the infantryman, coupled with the hugely increased lethality of the modern battlefield, had made their traditional tactics useless. The battlefield was now peppered with automatic weapons, breech-loading artillery, and magazine-fed, bolt-action rifles. Each of these weapons had vastly greater range, accuracy, and rates of fire than even weapons of a few years before. Moving unarmored troops on foot through such an environment was an invitation to slaughter.

Slaughter accepted the invitation.

Millions of European boys had their lives spent on useless charges across the no-man's land between the trenches, right into the teeth of withering machine-gun fire. And, when that didn't work, they were ordered to do it again. And again. And again, until ten, twenty, thirty, forty thousand men a day were fed into the maw of death.

Even the thickest, cockney Tommy could clearly see incompetence that blatant.

So, WWI destroyed Europe's faith in human progress, and one of the key social foundations of their society. And, as an added plus, it did so in an atmosphere of carnage than bled Europe white, and took an entire generation of young men and ground them into the dust and mud at Ypres, Flanders, The Somme, Poland, Hungary--all across the continent.

So, perhaps it's understandable that, fifteen years later, when Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor, appeasement would be the first tactic of Hitler's potential victims. Surely, they thought, anything was better than making their sons relive the human catastrophe of the Great War. Hitler, they reasoned, could be bought off. All they needed to do was find his price. And make no mistake, this was not just a mainstream view, but nearly a universal one. And it lasted a surprisingly long time.

In 1938, after 5 years of Nazi threats of aggression, including the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the rebuilding of Germany's air force, the anschluss of Austria, and increasing threats against Czechoslovakia, appeasement was still the most popular option. When Neville Chamberlain returned from meeting Hitler at Munich--a meeting at which he essentially consigned Czechoslovakia to destruction--he was greeted in London by cheers and shouts of "Good old Neville!" And as he waved the useless paper of the Munich Agreement to the crowd and proclaimed that he had returned with "peace in our time," the crowd gave him a rousing chorus of "He's a Jolly Good Fellow."

Winston Churchill, whose warnings about the danger of appeasement had been ignored, stood in the House of Commons in opposition to the Munich Agreement. Churchill began, "I will begin by saying what everybody would like to ignore or forget but which must nevertheless be stated, namely, that we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat..."

He was drowned out by boos from the Members.

What most Europeans of the 1930s refused to recognize, was that Hitler could not be appeased. He wanted something that no one was possibly willing to give him. Hitler's goal—a goal that had been known ever since he published Mein Kampf in the 1920s, was the Repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles, the incorporation of all of German-speaking Europeans into a single Greater Germany, the elimination of the Polish nation, and the subjugation of Russia into a vast system of agricultural slavery operated solely for the benefit of its German overlords.

Short of this, the other nations of Europe had nothing to offer Hitler that he wanted. In the end, the appeasers got exactly the carnage they had sought to avoid. Even worse, when the dust had settled, not only had 50 million people had been killed, far more than died in the Great War, but a new word had also been added to the English language: Genocide.

Today, we face an equally implacable enemy. And, once again, we have nothing to offer them that they want. They want our destruction. Not personally, perhaps, although they are certainly willing to have it done. But what they really want is to destroy what we are. The Islamists believe that the idea of individual liberty leads to libertinism. What we need, they believe, is to convert to Islam, to subject ourselves to the authoritarian law of the Sharia, and to forsake democracy. Only then will we be able to live "properly" as Allah intended, subjected to his will.

How do you appease fanatics whose only desire is the complete destruction of your society, and it's replacement with their own?

One would have hoped that the 1930s would have provided valuable lessons for European leaders that would allow them to answer this question with confidence. But, evidently not. European Commission chief Romano Prodi said in the aftermath of the Spanish elections, "It is clear that using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists. Terrorism is infinitely more powerful than a year ago."

One wonders, then, what Mr. Prodi might have said in 1940, as Nazi troops occupied Norway, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Holland. Or in 1941 when, with the rest of continental Europe in their sway, German soldiers marched in a seemingly unstoppable drive to Moscow. Surely that was proof, if any were needed, that using force against Nazi aggression was not the answer.

Wasn't it? 

Administrative announcement

I have updated my blogroll, and it is even now more full of bloggy goodness. Check out the links.

That is all.

Rally 'round the Flag, Boys! The white flag of surrender, that is

(Review) So, now John Kerry really thinks it's important that we don't listen to those foreign leaders who love him with purity of soul and honor. Now all of the sudden, those lovable foreigners are getting the back Monsieur Kerry's hand.

Last Friday, Sen. Kerry finally had to raise the white flag in the ongoing exchange over the foreign leaders who secretly back his campaign. After a former Malaysian leader known for his anti-Semitic ravings publicly embraced Mr. Kerry, the senator's campaign was forced to concede that "this election will be decided by the American people, and the American people alone. It is simply not appropriate for any foreign leader to endorse a candidate." The Washington Post called Mr. Kerry's claim to have an international fan club "perhaps the most damaging boast in U.S. politics since Al Gore claimed the invention of the Internet."

What was Kerry thinking?

Well, obviously, he was thinking what he's thought most of his life, which is that US power needs to be restrained by the UN, or the French, or somebody.

But, I mean, how did he think voters would respond at being told, "foreigners want you to pick me!" I mean, let's face it, there's not a big pro-France constituency out there. There's not even one of those when France isn't torking us off, but there's certainly not one now.

Is Kerry so disconnected from what average people think that he's just tone deaf to this stuff? I mean, you'd think a Yale man from an upper crust family, and who's on his second society marriage to the foreign-born multi-millionaire heiress to an old-line manufacturing fortune would be more attuned to the attitudes of the common man, wouldn't you?

Read Lileks now

(Review) Lileks sometimes just amazes me, man.

Imagine if you woke from an operation and discovered that your tumor was gone. You’d think: I suppose that’s a good thing. But. You learned that the hospital might profit from the operation. You learned that the doctor who made the diagnosis had decided to ignore all the other doctors who believed the tumor could be discouraged if everyone protested the tumor in the strongest possible terms, and urged the tumor to relent. How would you feel? You’d be mad. You’d look up at the ceiling of your room and nurse your fury until you came to truly hate that butcher. And when he came by to see how you were doing, you’d have only one logical, sensible thing to say: YOU TOOK IT OUT FOR THE WRONG REASONS. PUT IT BACK!

That's right. It's an allegory. An allegory of the idiots who think like this:

In the future – which is right around the corner, better believe it – the machine will be smashed, and we’ll all have freedom in the true sense, which is freedom from people who don’t accept our definition of freedom. They’re stuck on old tight small private definitions, with their freedoms of “property” and freedoms to hold ideas that stand contrary to human progress. Doubleplus ungood thoughtcrime – sorry, sorry, I mean false definitions of freedom that are really about slavery, don’t you see? Slavery to old ideas that keep the new world – which is right around the corner, brother – from coming into being. It’s a world with full employment, and no industry. It’s a world of endless abundance and prosperity, without capitalism. It’s a world that has some Jews, but we’re not sure where they are and anyway they don’t count much anymore. It’s a world where the people of Iraq own the oil, and incidentally nothing runs on oil anymore, because it’s poison. It’s a world where everything in the West is so cool that China is shamed by our example and totally gets out of Tibet. Without a shot. Which would totally annoy the NRA if they knew it was coming, which it is.

And the really scary things, as Lileks points out, is that these aren't banjo-plucking, inbred yahoos. These are professors, computer programmers, etc. I mean, educated people. Of course, in many ways that goes without saying. It usually requires a post-graduate degree to acquire this level of stupidity.

Joseph Schumpeter, the early 20th century economist, wrote that capitalist society wouldn't be destroyed by outside forces. Instead, he predicted the rise of an intellectual class that would undermine and destroy capitalism from the inside. You really have to admire a guy who figured that out three quarters of century ago.

And, really, it would be fascinating to watch it happen--and it is happening today--if it wasn't for the fact that I actually live in that society.

And that's the way it is...

(Review) Walter Cronkite writes that John Kerry's attempt to flee from the "liberal" label simply defies comprehension.

When the National Journal said your Senate record makes you one of the most liberal members of the Senate, you called that "a laughable characterization" and "the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen in my life." Wow!

Liberals, who make up a substantial portion of the Democratic Party and a significant portion of the independent vote, are entitled to ask, "What gives?" It isn't just the National Journal that has branded you as a liberal. So has the liberal lobbying group Americans for Democratic Action. Senator, check your own Web site. It says you are for rolling back tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, for tax credits to both save and create jobs, for real investment in our schools. You've voted, in the words of your own campaign, for "every major piece of civil rights legislation to come before Congress since 1985, as well as the Equal Rights Amendment." You count yourself (and are considered by others) a leader on environmental protection issues. You are committed to saving Medicare and Social Security, and you are an internationalist in foreign policy.

But, hey, that doesn't make him a liberal or anything.

My question is why these guys are so scared to accept the liberal label. As Cronkite points out, a good portion of the 1988 presidential campaign was taken up by GHW Bush saying, "Mike Dukakis is a liberal." Then the Duke, wild-eyed and foaming at the mouth, yelling, "Uh-Uuuuuh! I'm not a liberal! I'm a moderate! Really! Right here in the middle with you! Just like that Juice Newton song!"

Except that the voters weren't stupid. Of course the man was a liberal. Duh.

So is John Kerry. But he sure hates being called a liberal. I suspect it's because the very term "liberal" is a vote-killer in practically everywhere outside the East Coast. American voters hear "liberal" and they instantly think "androgynous, sour, humorless, baby-aborting, hair shirts who shriek their moral superiority at us benighted Joe Blows", then pull the lever--punch the chad, touch the screen, whatever--for the other guy.

But Cronkite's right: If you are a liberal, don't run from it. Embrace it. Proclaim it. It's what you are. Maybe the electorate will like it and maybe they won't. But trying to run from your record isn't going to win you many votes. If you are so shamed of what you believe, then what business do you have trying to run the country.

At least stake out some ground and defend it, for cripes sake. "Well, you know, I voted for that before I voted against it", just isn't gonna cut it.

Richard Clarke and 60 Minutes

(Review) You could practically feel Democrats come to a climax all across the country last night as Richard Clarke spilled all to Leslie Stahl of 60 Minutes.

My reaction to his story: So what?

After the president returned to the White House on Sept. 11, he and his top advisers, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate. As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq.

"Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said to Stahl. "And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.

"Initially, I thought when he said, 'There aren't enough targets in-- in Afghanistan,' I thought he was joking.

"I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying we've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection."

Clarke says he and CIA Director George Tenet told that to Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Of course, we all remember that on Sep 12, 2001, American military forces began a massive bombing campaign against Iraq.

Oh, wait a second, I don't remember that. Huh. Maybe that's because we didn't do it!

Look, 911 was a difficult day. Tempers were short, emotions were running high, and the US Defense establishment was doing what it's paid to do, preparing to kill foreigners in job lots.

I'm also sure that the Bush Administration wanted to take a hard look at Iraq. I mean, if you were Inspector Reynaud, and were going to round up the usual suspects, Iraq would be the first guy your gendarmes would pick up.

But the administration didn't go after Iraq for more than a year and a half after 911. They did go after Afghanistan. And, despite a lack of targets, they did it pretty well, too. When the Czech intelligence service reported, with a high degree of confidence, that Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague, the White House pooh-poohed it. And when we finally did go after Iraq, you may remember that ties to 9/11 weren't at the top of the list of the administration's priorities.

Color me unimpressed.

Clarke then tells Stahl of being pressured by Mr. Bush.

"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.

"I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.'

"He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report."

Again, remember, this is still 911. It's late afternoon now. Tensions are still high. And the president drags some people in and says, "Find out if Saddam's behind this." The president never said to lie, that's just Clarke's interpretation. It wasn't what he said, you see, it was the way he said it.

Maybe other people thought differently.

Clarke tries to give the impression that the president said, "Find out if Iraq's behind this. Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink. Know what I mean? A nudge is as good as wink to a blind bat, eh?" Except he didn't actually say it like that. It was just the bad vibe he was putting off, man.

Perhaps someone else might have interpreted the conversation and vibe as follows:

BUSH: Find out if Iraq's behind this. And do it now.

LACE-PANTY BUREAUCRATS: Oh, no need for us to check on that, Mr. President. It wasn't him. No need for you to worry your pretty little head about that.

BUSH: Hey, I'm the frickin' president, morons. When I tell you to check something out, you frickin' check it out. You guys are the same people, especially you, Clarke, who had the Clinton Administration bomb a frickin' aspirin factory in Sudan. So, you go back and make double-damn sure!

LACE-PANTY BUREAUCRATS: But...

BUSH: Are you back-talkin' me, boy?

LACE-PANTY BUREAUCRATS: We'll check into that right away Mr. President.

Maybe that's how the meeting went.

Not that it matters. At the end of the day, our response against Iraq amounted to nothing.

So, what's Clarke's point? Assuming he has one. Bush was interested in blaming Iraq? Okay. Did he blame Iraq? Nope, he didn't. Eventually, the White House produced some evidence of ties between Al Qaida and Iraq, but never a direct connection to 911. So...what?

"There's a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame, too. But on January 24th, 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for, urgently -- underlined urgently -- a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack. And that urgent memo-- wasn't acted on.

Uh, he didn't want a meeting about "the impending Al Qaida attack". He wanted a meeting about the threat of terrorism Al Qaida represented. That's a wholly different thing. Phrasing it that way implies that he somehow knew about 911 and tried to warn the administration. But, he didn't get his meeting, and so thousands died.

But, number one, he didn't know about the coming 911 attacks any more than anyone else did. He knew Al Qaida was a threat. He knew they would try something, somewhere. And that's all he knew. His phrasing here is intentionally designed to give the listener the impression that the Bush Administration knew about 911 beforehand, or rather, they would have known, if they'd only listened to him.

In point of fact, he knew nothing that the Bush people didn't already know.

Number two, he did get his meeting. He got it with the Number Two guys at every cabinet department on 24 Apr 01. And what he did was say pretty much exactly what he'd been saying in the Clinton Administration. Which is what everybody already knew. "Al Qaida bad. Threatening. Have to be on our toes. Tricky bastards, the lot of them. Something'll blow up. Mark my words."

Yeah, well, thanks for the keen insights there, Dick.

Clarke is trying to paint a picture of a president who just didn't care about terrorism. But how would he know? He never met with the president.

Ah, but here we come closer to the heart of the matter. Clarke used to be a cabinet-level official in the Clinton Administration. Access to the president. A nice office. Then, all the sudden, the Bush people come in and he's no longer the cabinet-level "terrorism czar". Now he's a second-tier official who, if he's lucky, gets to meet with Paul Wolfowitz.

Any resentment there, I wonder?

So, how does he know what the president was doing about terrorism or Al Qaida? How does he even know what Condi Rice was doing? He met with second-tier guys and their underlings. So, his glimpse into the "Bush Administration" is limited to that portion of the administration that excludes the president and his cabinet-level officials.

Well, hell, I've got that much access to the Bush Administration.   

Saying what needs to be said

(Review) John Podhoretz wonders about those who can't accept the liberation of Iraq.

What is it about the liberation of 25 million people and the removal of a barbaric tyrant - a tyrant who either directly or indirectly murdered at least 1 million of his own people and waged wars that killed another million in neighboring countries - they don't like?

Why can't they celebrate the ouster of a monster who paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers $25,000 a pop - in essence helping to recruit new mass murderers by making a public offer of an insurance policy to ease any concerns a bomber might have about leaving his loved ones in the lurch?

And why do they struggle so fiercely to believe that the dictator who paid off those terrorists - and who housed others, among them the devil who pushed a wheelchair-bound American Jew off a boat into the Red Sea - had no interest in collaborating with other terrorist groups?

Have they forgotten that the dictator's refusal to abide by the terms of the 1991 ceasefire that left him in power forced the international community to keep restrictive sanctions in place against his nation - sanctions that helped contribute to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children?

Did they pay no attention when the humanitarian exception to those sanctions - the "Oil for Food" program - simply became a means for Saddam to enrich himself? Have they failed to read the news stories revealing how Saddam used "oil for food" to bribe hundreds of foreign politicians, businessmen and opinion leaders whose identities we are only now getting to know?

There was nothing good about Saddam's regime. Nothing.

And there was nothing bad about the liberation of Iraq. Nothing.

This reminds me of those "relatives of 911 victims", who, as it turned out, were part of an organization funded, at least in part by Teresa Kerry. They just couldn't contain their rage at W putting 911 images in his campaign ads.

But the really creepy thing about that--creepy and incomprehensible--is that they hate George W. Bush more than they hate the people who killed their loved ones.

What kind of poisoned political troll do you have to be to have your moral compass jimmied that far out of whack?

The Decadent Europeans

(Review) Charles Krauthammer writes that the European leadership has moved far beyond appeaement.

The really big prize is Europe. Which is why the most ominous development of the week was the post-Madrid pronouncements of Romano Prodi, the president of the European Commission.

"Clearly, the conflict with the terrorists is not resolved with force alone." Sounds reasonable until you hear Prodi's amplification of the idea just two days earlier. "We know that international terrorism wants to spread fear," said Prodi. "Fear generates not so much justice, but rather vengeance, which chooses war to answer the need of security. ... We become prisoners of terror and of terrorists." In other words, making war on terror is unjust, fearful, mere vengeance and ultimately a victory for terrorism.

If not war, then what? A centerpiece to Prodi's solution to terrorism: a new European constitution. I'm not making this up: "to defeat fear we only have democracy and politics. ... Today for us, politics means building Europe completely with its constitution and its institutions. ... "

This is beyond appeasement. This is decadence: Terror rages and we tend our garden. /blockquote>

Well, that's par for the course for Europeans. Their first response to any crisis is to look the other way and pretend it isn't happening. You'd think that a people with so much history compressed into the memory would have learned something from it.

You'd think that, but you'd be wrong.

On the other hand, when the terrorists get done with them, "rebuilding Europe" may not just be a metaphorical term, but a literal one.

And, who do you suppose they'll look to for cash?

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What's he thinking?

(Review) SO, John Kerry has decided to take a week-long break from campaigning to do a little snowboarding. Meanwhile, the Bush campaign is...campaigning.

As John Kerry was snowboarding down Idaho's Bald Mountain, the Bush-Cheney campaign was racing headlong in challenging the Democrat's credentials, a contrast that raised questions about the timing of the presumptive presidential nominee's vacation.

President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and senior administration officials have been challenging Kerry's claims of support from foreign leaders while the campaign has criticized the four-term Massachusetts senator's votes on defense and foreign policy. The campaign also has unleashed ads casting Kerry as a waffler and weak on military issues.

The timing is critical as voters' image of the Democrat is evolving. Kerry's break from the public stage is allowing his rival to fill the void and draw a picture.

You know, I think Kerry has run a pretty inept campaign so far. Four months ago, the campaign was on life support. Sure, he won the nomination, but not, I think, because he was such a good candidate, but because the others were so bad.

Howard Dean imploded. I mean, that's really the bottom line. Everybody was so focused on Dean than, when it started to become clear that he was just a little too...uh...angry to be president, Dems started looking for someone else. The "Yeeeeeeaaaaargh!" incient was just the final nail in Dean's coffin.

But, who else was available?

Joe Liberman? Too right-wingish. Even in normal times winning the Democratic nomination would have been hard for Lieberman. The nomination proces is tilted to the left in the Democratic Party, and that makes it tough for a moderate/center left guy to capture it. Bill Clinton did it, but he was a master politician. Joe Lieberman isn't. And, Clinton was a governor. Governors have a leg up in a way that congresspeople don't.

Dick Gephardt? A perennial also-ran. House members generally don't even count in presidential campaigns. And Gephardt is a multiple-time loser. Plus, nobody really wants to vote for a guy with no eyebrows. It's just creepy.

John Edwards? Nice guy and all, but no experience. 1 term in the Senate really isn't the resume you need to be elected president.

Wes Clark? He was never going anywhere. He may have been a Clinton favorite, but his track record was too wierd. Big Reagan/Bush guy in the 80's. Big W guy in 2000-2003. Now, all the sudden, a big liberal? That didn't compute. And the fact that practically every fellow US Army officer would have been pleased to whack him with a hammer didn't say good things about him.

As for the rest of the also rans, well, whatever.

No, JF'nK was really the only rational choice left.

But his campaign hasn't really impressed me. He seems so far to have done little but stumble from one controversy to another. And it doesn't help that his campaign song is the theme from "Flipper".

So, now he goes on a vacation for a week while the Bushies hammer him like a cheap ten-penny nail. I'm just saying that maybe now isn't the best time for a vacation. I'm sure the new powder is sweet, but I probably would've put off a vacation until May or June.

This is really his first appearance on the national stage as a candidate, and he's got to tell the voters who he his, and what he stands for. Nipping off to Bald Mountain, while his opponents describe him as a flip-flopping, Hanoi Jane-hugging, Northeast Liberal™ probably isn't the wisest course of action.

Right now, the only message the voters are hearing is coming from Bush-Cheney '04.

Won't they ever learn? Won't we?

(Review) Not content with banning guns officials in the Australian state of Victoria will now be banning swords. Presumably, Victorians will eventuially be deprived of kitchen knives, box cutters, forks, and nail clippers. The entire state will be like a big American Airlines flight to Boston.

I would never trust a government that wouldn't trust its citizens with weapons. The answer to criminal behavior is not to eliminate the people's means to defend themselves, it's to crack down on the lawbreaker.

A close election?

(Review) A lot of commentators are predicting that the November election will be close. "Just look at the polls", they say. "Too close to call".

Hmmph.

Hugh Hewitt apparently has other ideas.

Analyst and blog-pioneer Mickey Kaus has been warning all those who move about the blogosphere that Kerry is a horrible candidate, and the last ten days are adding mountains of evidence to Kaus' already well-documented brief. James Lileks has argued that Kerry suffers from "Senatitus"--the strange condition affecting long-serving United States Senators which proceeds from years and years of no one telling you to your face that you are making no sense whatsoever.

Both Kaus and Lileks are correct. A long career in Massachusetts politics simply means intoning respectful nods towards Ted Kennedy and mouthing Harvard seminar sentences, as prolix as they are inconsequential (and frequently self-contradicting). Kerry has trained in a political land that requires none of the skills that a campaign extending to all corners of America requires...

Kerry will carry Turtle Bay, Malibu, Georgetown, and Cambridge. His language is their language. But this act won't play in Talladega, any of the regional finals this weekend, or for very long even in the union strongholds of my hometown neighborhoods of Youngstown-Warren, Ohio.

Americans are in the middle of a war. They want a guy who knows what it means to throw high and inside, not a guy who says he voted for the $87 billion for the troops before he voted against it.

And another thing:

Prime Minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero on Wednesday described the U.S. occupation of Iraq as "a fiasco" and suggested American voters should follow the example set by Spain and change their leadership by supporting Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry in November.

"I said during the campaign I hoped Spain and the Spaniards would be ahead of the Americans for once," Zapatero said in an interview on Onda Cero radio. "First we win here, we change this government, and then the Americans will do it, if things continue as they are in Kerry's favor."

I don't think any of this kind of stuff is helpful to John Kerry. Once you get past the one-worlder, pro-UN types--about 25% of the population, there's not too many people who really like the idea much of foreigners telling us who to vote for.

Kerry, for whatever reason, isn't getting it. I think he's had a bad week, and I think the Bushies are increasingly successful in painting him as a "McGovern" Democrat--wishy-washy and weak on defense.

I'm beginning to think that this looks a lot more like 1972 than it does 2000.

Are we safer

(Review) John Kerry argues that the War in Iraq was a distraction to the war against Terror. That is was all a big mistake. Why, it's even ominously close to being another quagmire.

Karl Zinsmeister disagrees.

As they aggressively attack ancient evil and gently nurture frail shoots of a new good, our military bear many risks in Iraq. They face enemies who aim to kill them, and to panic the American public standing behind them. Our battle against Middle Eastern extremism can thus be thought of as a struggle of wills.

But demoralization can work both ways, and today it is Iraq's insurgents who are facing physical and psychological defeat. In January, U.S. forces seized a letter written by al-Qaeda's mastermind in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as it was being carried to top al-Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan. The 17-page document despairs that despite their deadly car bombs and the sporadic killing of U.S. troops, the fighters have been unable to push the Americans from Iraq, or to spark mass discord among Iraqis. The letter reports that the insurgents are having trouble convincing Iraqis to join their resistance, and mourns that American forces are "growing stronger day after day."

Al-Qaeda itself is now in shambles. Two thirds of its leaders have been killed or captured, finances have collapsed, communication has been strangled, recruiting is difficult. Iraq's Baath Party has likewise been eviscerated. And other bullies in the region have turned skittish and newly cooperative. While the U.S. will need to grapple against terror for years to come, it is finally on offense, not defense. Having brought the battle to the plotters in their own strongholds, things have turned thankfully quiet at home. And across the Middle East, the most desperate effort of a range of terrorists is now to avoid U.S. forces.

"We are at a breaking point today," Colonel Kurt Fuller of the 82nd Airborne told me in Baghdad, leaning forward for emphasis. "This insurgency is running out of steam. We see many signs that Iraqis want the violence to be over. They want to get on with their lives. They can see we are not quitting, and they are increasingly willing to come forward and help us stand up to the worst elements in their society."

We are winning. It's hard, dirty, dangerous work, but that doesn't mean we aren't winning.

On the ground in Iraq

(Review) Fred Barnes writes that, despite what you may be hearing, there is a lot more optimism in Iraq than credit is being given for.

And he looks French, too

(Review) VP Dick Cheney, at his speech yesterday at the Ronald Reagan Library, took some pot-shots at John Kerry.

In one of Sen. Kerry's recent observations about foreign policy, he informed his listeners that his ideas have gained strong support, at least among unnamed foreigners he's been spending time with. Sen. Kerry said that he has met with foreign leaders, and I quote, " who can't go out and say this publicly, but boy they look at you and say, 'You've got to win this, you've got to beat this guy, we need a new policy,' things like that.

A few days ago in Pennsylvania, a voter asked Sen. Kerry directly who these foreign leaders are. Sen. Kerry said, "That's none of your business. But it is our business when a candidate for president claims the political endorsement of foreign leaders. At the very least, we have a right to know what he is saying to foreign leaders that makes them so supportive of his candidacy. American voters are the ones charged with determining the outcome of this election--not unnamed foreign leaders.

Sen. Kerry's voting record on national security raises some important questions all by itself. Let's begin with the matter of how Iraq and Saddam Hussein should have been dealt with. Sen. Kerry was in the minority of senators who voted against the Persian Gulf War in 1991. At the time, he expressed the view that our international coalition consisted of "shadow battlefield allies who barely carry a burden." Last year, as we prepared to liberate Iraq, he recalled the Persian Gulf coalition a little differently. He said it was a "strong coalition," and a model to be followed.

Six years after the Gulf War, in 1997, Saddam Hussein was still defying the terms of the cease-fire. And as President Bill Clinton considered military action against Iraq, he found a true believer in John Kerry. The senator from Massachusetts said, "Should the resolve of our allies wane, the United States must not lose its resolve to take action." He further warned that if Saddam Hussein were not held to account for violation of U.N. resolutions, some future conflict would have " greater consequence." In 1998, Sen. Kerry indicated his support for regime change, with ground troops if necessary. And, of course, when Congress voted in October of 2002, Sen. Kerry voted to authorize military action if Saddam refused to comply with U.N. demands.

A neutral observer, looking at these elements of Sen. Kerry's record, would assume that Sen. Kerry supported military action against Saddam Hussein. The senator himself now tells us otherwise. In January he was asked on TV if he was, "one of the antiwar candidates." He replied, "I am." He now says he was voting only to "threaten the use of force," not actually to use force.

A lot of Kerry supporters make the argument that they like the fact that Kerry "matures" in his thinking. They say they prefer someone who changes his mind over the course of a decade or so to someone like George Bush, who has a mind like a steel trap.

The trouible is, we aren't talking about a guy whose vision has matured over a couple of decades, but over a couple of weeks.

His answer yesterday about his vote on the $87 billion for the troops in Iraq was a classic Kerryism, "I voted for that before I voted against it." That's pretty much like telling the arresting officer, "But I said 'No, thank you' before I bought the crack!"

They haven't quite got that "Free Press" idea figured out

Photo: Reuters/Sergei Karpukhin

Asia's Vacation Wonderland

Photo: Reuters/Adrees Latif/Files

Oh, Danny Boy, The pipes, the pipes are callin'...

Photo: Reuters/Jason Reed

You gotta hand it to those Haliburton guys, boy..."

Photo: AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

Who should we believe?

(Review) Janet Daley asks who we should believe; the new Spanish PM, or the Iraqi people?

Spain's new prime minister has said that the invasion of Iraq was a "disaster". A disaster for whom, exactly? According to a poll conducted by a collection of broadcasting organisations, including the BBC (which must have been rather startled by the results), a majority (57 per cent) of Iraq's population believe that life is better now that Saddam has gone. Just a shade under half (49 per cent) believe the invasion was right, as opposed to 39 per cent who think it was wrong. Not only do they see their immediate situation as an improvement on life under the Ba'athist regime, but more than 70 per cent are optimistic about the future, stating that they expect their lives to be even better in a year's time. A still larger proportion of Iraqis (80 per cent) think that attacks on coalition forces are wrong and should stop. Fancy that.

The Euro left hates to hear stuff like this, and Janet Daly spends a good part of the column gleefully excoriating The Independent and the Guardian over it.

Those Darn Foreign Leaders

(Review) I expect now that John Kerry is wishing he'd kept his mouth shut about those foreign leaders.

Every time Kerry was pressed to answer the charges, whether by Republicans or reporters, was time spent off his message that he's fighting for working families on bread-and-butter issues like jobs and health care.

"Obviously, any day that we're not talking about the sluggish economy is a day that John Kerry is not talking about what he wants to talk about," veteran Democratic consultant George Shelton said Tuesday. "It's preventing him from talking about what he wants to talk about."

I would like to prose a little gedankenexperiment, though.

Try to imagine how the French would react if they were told that American leaders preferred one particular french politician over another in their presidential election. How do you think the French would respond?

We all know the answer to that question. So why should we care what their leaders prefer?

Crucifixion: Not a Do-It-Yourself Project

(Review) A young man in Maine tried to cimmit suicide by crucifying himself. Unfortunately--or fortunately, depending on your point of view--a problem cropped up with his well thought out scheme.

Lt. Pierre Boucher said the man took two pieces of wood, nailed them together in the form of a cross and placed them on the floor. He attached a suicide sign to the wood and then proceeded to nail one of his hands to the makeshift cross using a 14-penny nail and a hammer.

"When he realized that he was unable to nail his other hand to the board, he called 911," Boucher said.

It was unclear whether the man was seeking assistance for his injury or help in nailing down his other hand.

I love that last line. Sure, it's gratuitous, but it's the kind of understated humor that's perfect for the story.

And, of course, the story makes it clear why crucifixion is so rarely used as a suicide method.

A Puppet State

(Review) Lee Harris, Writinf for TechCentralStation asks how Spain can now be seen as anything other than a puppet state of terrorism.

Suppose that last week's attack had not been the work of terrorists, but the work of the United States. Suppose American jets had flown over Madrid on Thursday morning and dropped a scattering of bombs on the commuter trains, killing and maiming the exact same people who were killed and maimed in the terrorist's attack. Suppose, further, that President Bush had subsequently announced that Spain would be subjected to further attacks if the Spanish voters did not vote as he wished them to vote.

Had the Spanish people docilely obeyed such a brutal command, and voted as the United States bid them vote, the world would be left in no doubt who really ruled Spain. The election would have clearly been understood as an act of collective capitulation and an abject abandonment of all claims to national sovereignty. Henceforth Spain, with good reason, would have been looked upon as a puppet state of the USA -- in the exact same way that Soviet tanks in the streets of Prague in 1967 proved to the world who really ruled the Democratic Republic of Czechoslovakia.

If a foreign agent is permitted to interfere at will with the internal affairs of a nation, then that nation no longer possesses national sovereignty -- a fact that can be immediately grasped in those cases when the foreign agent is another nation state, as in the case of the USSR and its satellites during the Cold War.

But, strangely enough, the exact same abdication of national sovereignty is no longer obvious where the foreign agent that does the interfering is not a nation state, but a shadowy international terrorist organization. Yet wherein lies the difference?

There isn't much of a difference I can see. Spanish commenters and email correspondents have told me that they would never give in to terror, and that the election results were merely an indication of disapproval for the duplicity of Aznar's government.

To which, my response is, "Who cares?"

You may characterize the reasons for the election results in any way you like. What you cannot do, however, is deny that it is a victory for the terrorists. They will certainly take it as such. Objections about motives are irrelevant. Only results count, and the results of the election in Spain are an objective loss for the fources of counter-terror.

You can try to spin like a machine lathe, but that doesn't change what our communist adversaries used to call the objective reality of the situation.

Your new leaders may declare their undying emnity for terror all they like, but when they do so, then in the next breath, announce their withdrawal from Iraq, they shouldn't expect anyone to take them seriously.

Jonah Goldberg hit the nail right on the head about this yesterday in The Corner:

Of course al Qaeda's opportunistic. Of course, it's exploiting the Iraq war. Of course Saddam wasn't Bin Laden's kind of tyrant. This is all beside the point. The fact of the matter right now is that al Qaeda will suffer a big setback if American succeeds in Iraq and it will celebrate a huge victory if America blows it. We are trying to defeat Islamic radicalism from behind Islamic radicalism's own frontlines. The complexity of al Qaeda's motives or the motives of Spanish voters are interesting, sure. Let's have a seminar about all that some time. In the meantime, the important thing is not giving the radicals the sorts of victories they had in Spain or putting Iraq in their column.

I am constantly amazed by the tendency of the nuance brigrades -- i.e. Marshall, Blix, Kerry, Prodi et al -- to hang on to their past objections to invading Iraq as if those past objections are relevant to the current situation. The war happened. And whether you were for it or against it, matters as little as whether it was right or wrong for the US to declare war on Germany after Pearl Harbor.

Results matter. The rest is just noise.

The religion of peace

(Review) Well, a big thank you goes out to Dangerous Logic for pointing me to "Ask The Imam".

No doubt you to will be keenly interested in the wealth of information you will find.

Is suicide bombing acceptable?

What is the status of women captured during jihad?

Can I join the United States Army?

How should Muslims respond to the US attack on Iraq?

Please tell me about Osama bin ladin and the Taliban.

Is it obligatory for Muslim all over the world to go for Jihad against the Jews this time to liberate the Holyland in Palestine?

Yes, I'm sure you'll find some fascinating questions and answers there. 

At last, a little daylight filters through...

(Review) Maybe the Euros are starting to get a frickin' clue. The Washington Post's Jefferson morley offers a survey of some of the Euro press' commentary.

The Islamist forces behind the Madrid bombings "confirmed that they can choose the moment and the target with a frightening precision," says the French daily Le Figaro (in French).

"The bombs of Madrid have shown us how much we are without defense and how much our knowledge of the terrorists is insufficient," says Le Figaro. "Each country can be hit, whether or not it has participated, like Spain, in the Iraq war, whether or not it has decided, like France, to forbid Islamic headscarves in the schools."

March 11, said the Milan daily Corriere della Sera (in Italian), "is going to be more important than 11 September" for Europe. The Madrid attacks they say, mark the beginning of "a European war that the [European] Union is going to have to fight from now on with a far greater degree of unity and solidarity than it has shown over the past few months."

In London, the Guardian says "emergency security meetings across Europe yesterday signaled the deepening recognition that the 200 deaths in four trains blown up in Madrid on Thursday probably constitute more than just a domestic Spanish terrorist event." The leftist London daily says no European nation will be spared, no matter what its past stance on the war on terror or Iraq.

"Only a dreamer would believe that Germany will not be attacked," say the editors of Bild, Germany's best-selling tabloid. "Islamic terrorists are waging a war against the West, not just against individual countries."

Sociologist Emilio Lamo de Espinosa says Europeans have been dreaming. Writing in Le Monde (in French), Lamo says Europeans have thought they would be spared because they haven't supported the Bush administration's policies.

"When the Americans declared war on terrorism, many of us thought they exaggerated. Many thought terrorism was not likely to occur on our premises, [inhabited by] peaceful and civilized Europeans who speak no evil of anybody, who dialogue, who are the first [to] send assistance and offer cooperation. We are pacifists, they are warmongers. . . . . Don't we defend the Palestinians? Are we not pro-Arab and anti-Israeli?"

"Can we dialogue with those who desire only our death and nothing but our death?" Lamo asks. "Dialogue about what? The manner in which we will be assassinated?"

"The war against terrorism will be long and difficult," he concludes. "It was that cretin, President Bush, who said that."

It took Hitler's betrayal of the Munich Agreement to get Neville Chamberlain to wake up and smell the coffee. Maybe 3/11 is the Czechoslovakia of this century.

I certainly hope so.

Appetizing Irish Recipes

(Review) As Saint Patrick's Day approaches, It's important that you be able to prepare your holiday foods in the apropriate, traditional Irish fashion.

As a public service, I'd like to present you with these valuable guidelines for Irish cooking.

1) Boil water.

2) Place food item in boiling water.

3) When the food item is soft, remove from boiling water.

4) Serve.

The genius of Irish cooking is that this cooking method is suitable for any meat or vegetable.

Enjoy!

Thinking about the Unthinkable

The recent events in Spain have got me thinking about what would happen if something similar were to happen here. Are Americans really any different from Spaniards? If we were faced with regular terror, how would we respond? I think this is something we should think about quite seriously, especially since a resort to terror immediately before the Spanish elections seems to have done well for the Islamists.

I have to admit, I have my doubts about our ability to maintain the vitality of our society in the face of terror.

One of the key weaknesses of democracies, it has been posited, is their unwillingness to engage in long-term struggles. Their people are decadent, their lives are too soft. When faced with a monumental struggle, eventually they will cave.

That's certainly the assessment Hitler made about the West (in those days, Germany wasn't considered a "Western" country). As it turned out Hitler was wrong. But was he wrong because of an intrinsic weakness in his indictment of Western life in general, or simply because the particular circumstances of the time had ameliorated the West's moral weakness?

Remember, whatever decadence the 1920s may have encouraged in the West, the 1930s removed. With 25% unemployment, children being forced to do work in order to support families, the dust bowl destroying agriculture in the Midwest, the 1930s were a remarkably unpleasant time, not only in the US, but in Europe as well. Our grandparents, the people who fought against Hitler, were raised in hard times. "Make it last, use it up, wear it out, or do without" was the catchphrase of the time. The 1930s were a hardscrabble time, but it was the perfect environment for preparing a generation to face the privations and dangers of war with equanimity.

But, our experience has been different. Do you know what worries many Americans today? Second-hand smoke. I gotta tell you: when second-hand smoke, which is literally a minisculely trivial issue, becomes a major health concern, then you've probably got things way too easy. And, frankly, I have doubts about whether a society that obsesses over second-hand smoke as a health and moral issue has either the fortitude or moral clarity to face a long twilight struggle against terror.

Now, maybe I'm wrong. But, I'm not made any easier when I see the leaders of the Democratic Party talk about the War on Terror. During the President's last State of the Union address, he had a line to the effect of, "I will never ask for a permission slip from other countries to defend America." The disquieting thing, the really disquieting thing, about that was that no one on the Democratic side of the aisle applauded.

Think about what that implies. I mean, really think about it. When half the country belongs to a political party whose leaders evidently aren't even sure whether or not we need the permission of our allies to defend ourselves, you have to wonder how we'd react to a massive wave of terror timed with our elections.

I know that I can't depend on my own reactions to judge how well the population in general would react. I spent the first 10 years of my adult life as an active duty soldier. And, even now, I am surrounded on a daily basis by active duty and retired marines, soldiers, and sailors. I just don't move in the same circles as most people. I move in a circle of guys (and gals) who would be perfectly comfortable picking up an M-16 and who know how to use it. That's not the type of people the vast majority of Americans know, or, quite frankly, would be comfortable spending much time with.

So, I see interviews with Spanish voters who say, essentially, "Look, I voted for the Socialists because I was afraid, and thought if we voted out Aznar's guys, the terrorists might leave us alone." And I wonder how many Americans would feel the same way.

Unlike our grandparents, we've never had a Greet Depression or Dust Bowl to toughen us up. No, it's all been Happy Meals and Star Wars and fuzzy kitties for most of us. And I'm not sure that's good enough preparation for what we may actually face.

The simple fact is that this may be the greatest test of our nation, it's values, and its persistence that we've ever known. We like to say that our grandparents were the Greatest Generation, and that they saved the world. In a very real sense, that's true. But, in reality, we were never really threatened as a people in WWII. Neither the Germans nor the Japanese were a real, long-term threat to us. Defeating them was difficult, yes, but they never had the capability to land on our shores and defeat us at home.

Today, we face an enemy that can come here and kill us in wholesale lots. No matter how good our police and intelligence services are, we are an open society. We can't secure every mall, every train station, every apartment block, every office tower. It simply can't be done.

The fact that we haven't seen another major terrorist attack in the US since 9/11 is practically a miracle. The chances that we will see others at some point in the future are so great as to make it nearly inevitable.

So I wonder, will we understand that there is no way to negotiate or reason with these people, and that there is no end save victory? Or will we, like the Spaniards, try to appease them?

In 1940, after the fall of France, the British were huddled on their small island. Their army, having left its equipment on the beach at Dunkirk following the debacle of France's defeat, was nearly weaponless. 26 miles away, across the Channel, the Germans began preparing for the Invasion of England. Winston Churchill, the new Prime Minister, went on the BBC to ask his people to do something difficult. "Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'"

I hope that he's the prime minister whose advice we follow, and not that of Neville Chamberlain. 

It was only a matter of time...

(Review) Today's must-see web site is: Foreign Leaders For John Kerry. Cute.

Not only does he look French...

(Review) Adam Wolfson writes that Kerry has a very European mind. In addition, he brings up this point, which I think is somewhat important:

According to Kerry, foreign leaders are lining up to tell him, "'You gotta win this, you gotta beat this guy [President Bush].'" And why might this be? Because, explain these foreign leaders to the Democratic nominee, "We need a new policy."

Now wait a minute, did I get that right? That foreign leaders need a new U.S. policy and that this is a good reason to vote for Kerry? I don't mean to sound heedless of the opinions of mankind, but I'm honestly not sure many Americans care whether foreign leaders want "a new policy" in this country. Last time I looked foreign leaders don't vote in U.S. presidential elections. One might add that they do not, by definition, have our best interests at heart. The protection of American citizens is neither their business nor their concern. This is as it should be, and is all obvious enough. But does Kerry get it?

Yeah, so call me a jingoistic, über-nationalist, but I don't see why the opinions of foreign leaders matter a hill of beans. It is our job to elect leaders that will best defend the rights, lives, and properties of our citizenry. The job of foreign leaders is to do the same for their citizens. These are not necessarily converging interests.

And, in case you hadn't noticed, our allies don't seem to be too concerned about making their policies conform to ours. Why is it that we have to exercise such overt caution to avoid offending their delicate sensibilities, but they get to tell us to get lost any time they want to?

Funny how that "sensitivity to our allies" thing only works one way, isn't it?

You don't wan't Osama's Endorsement

(Review) David Frum writes that, while the Spanish election results are bad news for Bush and Blair in the short run, the overall implications are a bit different

I wonder whether the results will long profit the opponents of Bush and Blair. Up until now, opponents of the Iraq war could claim any number of motives from the most high-minded to the most pragmatic. But the voters of Spain have indelibly associated the anti-Iraq position with one motive above all: fear. David Warren directs us to this quote from “a 26-year-old window frame maker who would not give his surname who … had changed his vote [at the last minute] from Popular to Socialist: "Maybe the Socialists will get our troops out of Iraq, and Al Qaeda will forget about Spain, so we will be less frightened.”

I do not think it is healthy for any political cause to come to be seen as a coward’s cause. The Spanish vote may cause Bush and Blair some trouble in the short run. Very soon though it will lead the list of events that cause John Kerry and other opponents of the war to look frightened and weak.

And if al Qaeda’s success in Spain induces terrorist groups to mount further attacks at election season in the United Kingdom or Italy or Poland, the message will be even sharper – the terrorists want the political parties of the pro-American right to lose, as they did in Spain. Logically, then, that implies that the terrorists want the parties of the anti-American left to win. That has to be a very unwelcome implication for those parties. And if the idea ever takes hold that al Qaeda is planting bombs with a view above all to defeating George W. Bush …. Well let’s just say that even Senator Kerry, much as he delights in collecting the endorsements of foreign leaders real and imaginary, would very much prefer to do without Osama bin Laden’s.

I think he makes some very good points.

Appeasement: Always the favorite policy of Europe

(Review) No matter how badly it's failed in the past, Europeans can always be counted on to call for appeasement.

"Wars such as that which has occurred in Iraq only allow hatred, violence and terror to proliferate," [Zapatero] said.

The head of the EU executive arm, European Commission chief Romano Prodi, agreed, in an interview published by Italy's La Stampa newspaper Monday.

"It is clear that using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists," Prodi said. "Terrorism is infinitely more powerful than a year ago," and all of Europe now feels threatened, he told the paper.

So, imagine it's 1940, and the Nazis have just taken over France, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg. I expect Prodi would have said much the same thing. "No, clearly the use of force against Nazism has only encouraged further violence."

Actually, if this was 1940, Prodi would probably be making his statements from Rome, and they'd be more on the order of, "We're winning! Us and our brave German allies!"

Still, I think you get the point. The fact that Al-Qaida's fighting back doesn't indicate the War on Terror is failing. It merely indicates that you're engaged in a...well...a war. And that the enemy has decided not to conveniently roll over like a weasel and expose his softer parts.

If Churchill had Prodi's attitude, he'd have surrendered to Hitler in July of 1940.

Hard to believe the Romans once ruled almost the entire known world, isn't it. Can you imagine Julius Ceasar coming back today and listening to this kind of tripe from Prodi? But, of course, as the old saying goes, The Romans didn't conquer the world by having meetings. They conquered the world by killing all who opposed them.

Prodi, I'm sure, is much more comfortable in meetings.

Hitch on Spain

(Review) When you tork of Chris Hitchens, he's liable to cut you to shreds. In Slate, today, he responds to the idea that by appeasing Al-Qaida, as Spainish voters did, you can bring yourself a measure of peace.

Many Spaniards were among those killed recently in Morocco, where a jihadist bomb attack on an ancient Moorish synagogue took place in broad daylight. The attack was on Morocco itself, which was neutral in the recent Iraq war. It seems a bit late to demand that the Moroccan government change sides and support Saddam Hussein in that conflict, and I suspect that the Spanish Communist and socialist leadership would feel a little sheepish in making this suggestion. Nor is it obvious to me that the local Moroccan jihadists would stop bombing if this concession were made. Still, such a concession would be consistent with the above syllogism, as presumably would be a demand that Morocco cease to tempt fate by allowing synagogues on its soil in the first place.

The Turkish government, too, should be condemned for allowing its Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan to visit the shattered synagogue in Istanbul after the latest mass murder (thus becoming, incidentally, the first Turkish prime minister ever to do so). Erdogan is also the first prime minister ever to be elected on an Islamist ticket. Clearly, he was asking for trouble and has not yet understood al-Qaida's conditions for being allowed to lead a quiet life. Not that he hadn't tried—he prevented the U.S. Army from approaching Baghdad through what is now known as the Sunni Triangle. He just hasn't tried hard enough.

It cannot be very long now before some slaughter occurs on the streets of London or Rome or Warsaw, as punishment for British and Italian and Polish membership of the anti-Saddam coalition. But perhaps there is still time to avoid the wrath to come. If British and Italian and Polish troops make haste to leave the Iraqis to their own "devices" (of the sort that exploded outside the mosques of Karbala and Najaf last month), their civilian cousins may still hope to escape the stern disapproval of the holy warriors. Don't ask why the holy warriors blow up mosques by the way—it's none of your goddam crusader-Jew business.

The other countries of NATO, which has now collectively adopted the responsibility for Afghanistan, should reconsider. As long as their forces remain on the soil of that country, they are liable to attract the sacred rage of the Muslim fighters. It will not be enough for Germany and France to have stayed out of Iraq. They cannot expect to escape judgment by such hypocritical means.

French schools should make all haste to permit not just the veil but the burqa, as well as to segregate swimming pools and playgrounds. Do they suppose that they deceive anybody when they temporize about God's evident will? Bombings will follow this blasphemy, as the night succeeds the day. It is written.

I find I can't quite decide what to recommend in the American case. I thought it was a good idea to remove troops from Saudi Arabia in any event (after all, we had removed the chief regional invader). But, even with the troops mainly departed, bombs continue to detonate in Saudi streets. We are, it seems, so far gone in sin and decadence that no repentance or penitence can be adequate. Perhaps, for the moment, it's enough punishment, and enough shame, just to know that what occurred in Madrid last week is all our fault. Now, let that sink in.

Why doesn't the world understand that the only acceptable appeasement to the Islamists is total surrender, and conversion to Islam?

Europe's Surrender

(Review) Mark Steyn isn't happy about what the result of the Spanish election implies about Europe. Not happy at all.

What was it all those party leaders used to drone robotically after IRA atrocities? We must never let the bullet and the bomb win out over the ballot and the bollocks. Something like that. In Spain, the bombers hijacked the ballot, and very decisively. The Socialist Workers' Party wouldn't have won, except for the terrorism.

At the end of last week, American friends kept saying to me: "3/11 is Europe's 9/11. They get it now." I expressed scepticism. And I very much doubt whether March 11 will be a day that will live in infamy. Rather, March 14 seems likely to be the date bequeathed to posterity, in the way we remember those grim markers on the road to conflagration through the 1930s, the tactical surrenders that made disaster inevitable. All those umbrellas in the rain at Friday's marches proved to be pretty pictures for the cameras, nothing more. The rain in Spain falls mainly on the slain. In the three days between the slaughter and the vote, it was widely reported that the atrocity had been designed to influence the election. In allowing it to do so, the Spanish knowingly made Sunday a victory for appeasement and dishonoured their own dead.

One also notes that, in Northern Ireland, the IRA is essentially in control. Their representatives sit in Parliament and negotiate with the government. And they still have their arms caches.

Last Friday, for a brief moment, it looked as if a few brave editorialists on the Continent finally grasped that global terrorism is a real threat to Europe, and not just a Bush racket. But even then they weren't proposing that the Continent should rise up and prosecute the war, only that they be less snippy in their carping from the sidelines as America gets on with it. Spain was Washington's principal Continental ally, and what does that boil down to in practice? 1,300 troops. That's fewer than what the New Hampshire National Guard is contributing.

The other day, the editor of Le Monde, writing in the Wall Street Journal, dismissed as utterly false the widespread belief among all Americans except John Kerry's campaign staff that France is a worthless ally: "Let us remember here," he wrote, "the involvement of French and German soldiers, among other European nationalities, in the operations launched in Afghanistan to pursue the Taliban, track down bin Laden and attempt to free the Afghans."

Oh, put a baguette in it, will you? The Continentals didn't "launch" anything in Afghanistan. They showed up when the war was over - after the Taliban had been toppled and the Afghans liberated. And a few hundred Nato troops in post-combat mopping-up operations barely registers in the scale against the gazillions of Americans defending the Continent so that EU governments can blow their defence budgets on welfare programmes that make the citizens ever more enervated and dependent.

And the point of our remaining in NATO is what, again?

Those mysterious foreign leaders

(Review) The White House is starting to press John Kerry to start naming names of those foreign leaders he says are so keen to see him win.

Administration officials continue to press Kerry to say exactly which leaders--domestic or foreign--have told the presumed Democratic presidential nominee that they back his candidacy to oust Bush.

And the White House said that if Kerry can't publicly identify anyone, perhaps the Massachusetts senator made up the whole thing.

"If Senator Kerry is going to say he has support from foreign leaders, he needs to be straightforward with the American people and state who they are," according to a White House statement. "Or the only conclusion one can draw is he's making it up to attack the president."

In a conference call arranged by the Bush-Cheney campaign, Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., said: "He clearly has an obligation to, you know, you put up or you shut up. You don't make up reckless charges and then say, well, it's really secret, I can't tell you."

But the New Englander is standing by his claim.
"I'm not making anything up at all," Kerry said in an interview, accusing Republicans of "trying to change the subject" from jobs, health care and other issues.

Ah. It's the Republicans who are trying to change the subject. I see. Funny, though, I don't remember bringing up the subject of foreign leaders until kerry started blabbing about it.

You gotta give Kerry credit for having big brass ones. He gets to make any attack he wants, but he cannot be questioned. Point out that his senate voting record shows him to be a less than enthusiastic supporter of the DoD, and you're attacking his patriotism. Point out that his opposition to the Vietnam War may have been a bit dishonest--the fraudulent Winter Soldier "investigation" comes immediately to mind--then you are attacking his patriotism.

Essentially, he wants to be immune from criticism, but wants the freedom to level any criticism he wishes about the "most lying, you know, most crooked" presidential administration of George W. Bush.

You gotta give him credit. You don't often see that level of hypocrisy so openly displayed, even in politics.

But, about those foreign leaders. Who are they? I'd really like to know. And when and where did he meet with them? As far as I can tell, he hasn't been jeting around the world much. So, where did he run into these guys? Just curious.

Campaign slogan: John Kerry: The Candidate of France

Jobs are coming!

(Review) That, at least, is the word from the Manpower Survey of hiring plans.

Roughly one in four employers plan to add workers in the second quarter of the year to keep pace with increased demand for their products or services, according to a survey of 16,000 businesses by Manpower Inc., set for release Tuesday.

"Someone looking for a job no doubt will have an easier time now than in recent memory, than in the past two or three years," said Jeffrey Joerres, Manpower's chief executive officer and chairman. "It's still going to be difficult in that companies are going to begin this process very cautiously."

If so, then takes the "jobless recovery" wind out of Kerry's sails.

It also indicates that businesses have started to wring just about all the productivity they can out of their current work force. We've seen sharp productivity gains over the last couple of quarters. But it's hard to keep that kind of productivity growth going. You can only stretch your employees so far.

You know, we've been looking for these jobs to start opening up for the last two quarters, and so far, it hasn't happened. It'll be nice to finally see some positive movement in non-farm payrolls.

The Economist Nails It

(Review) The current edition of The Economist concentrates its attention on global poverty. In doing so, the magazine's leader gives leftist thinking a smack right across the chops.

The preoccupation bordering on obsession with economic equality that one so often encounters at gatherings of anti-globalists, in the corridors of aid agencies and in socialist redoubts in backward parts of the world reflects a "lump of income" fallacy. This remarkably tenacious misconception is that there is only so much global income to go around. If the United States is consuming $10 trillion worth of goods and services each year, that is $10 trillion worth of goods and services that Africa cannot consume.

But goods and services are not just lying around waiting to be grabbed by the greediest or most muscular countries. Market economics is not a zero-sum game. America consumes $10 trillion worth of goods and services each year because it produces (not counting the current-account deficit of 5% or so of the total) $10 trillion of goods and services each year. Africa could produce and consume a lot more without America producing and consuming one jot less. It so happens that the case for more aid, provided of course that it is well spent, is strong-but the industrialised countries do not need to become any less rich before Africa can become a lot less poor. The wealth of the wealthy is not part of the problem.

To believe otherwise, however, is very much part of the problem.

Africa is not poor because America is rich. Africa is poor because its governments are incompetent and repressive.

So whenever I hear the same old Lefty cant about how America uses up 20% of the world's resources, I get a bit steamed. America, with only 4.7% of the world's population, produces 31.2% of the world's GDP. America is the source of 40.6% of the world's R&D spending, one of the key predictors of future economic success. As The Economist puts it, "America again leads the world in all dimensions of power-military, economic, cultural, scientific-by a margin out of all proportion to its population."

And when I hear someone complain that the US uses a disproportionate amount of resources, not only do I peg them instantly as a fool, but as someone who has no earthly idea how foolish they really are. A world without America would not be more equitable, except in the sense that everyone in it would be substantially poorer than they are.

If African nations, or Asian nations, or Central American nations want to be wealthy, then they can be. All they have to do is limit the scope and size of government, deregulate their markets, and trade freely with the rest of the world. We've known this to be the answer for 150 years now, ever since the British government scrapped the Corn Laws. Why the Left fails to understand it is a complete mystery to me. But it's clear they don't.

Leftist thought has consigned more people to death and starvation and tolitarian repression in the last century alone than any other idea in the history of human civilization. And still it continues. Scores, hundreds--perhaps thousands--of Africans die every day while the Left spouts the same errors, and agitate for the same failed "solutions" they have for decades.

But, at least it makes the Left feel compassionate, which is, really, the important thing.   

It all depends on what the meaning of the word "for" is

(Review) John Kerry was in Florida this week, to talk to Cuban-American voters. Well, pander to them, actually. And, evidently, he couldn't get that right, either.

''I'm pretty tough on Castro, because I think he's running one of the last vestiges of a Stalinist secret police government in the world,'' Kerry told WPLG-ABC 10 reporter Michael Putney in an interview to be aired at 11:30 this morning.

Then, reaching back eight years to one of the more significant efforts to toughen sanctions on the communist island, Kerry volunteered: ``And I voted for the Helms-Burton legislation to be tough on companies that deal with him.''

It seemed the correct answer in a year in which Democratic strategists think they can make a play for at least a portion of the important Cuban-American vote -- as they did in 1996 when more than three in 10 backed President Clinton's reelection after he signed the sanctions measure written by Sen. Jesse Helms and Rep. Dan Burton.

There is only one problem: Kerry voted against it.

He was, in fact, one of only 22 "nay" votes.

Spokesmen for Kerry have been scrambling, explaining that he favored a tougher, purer version of the bill. That was the one he voted for several months earlier. So, when he says he voted for Helms-Burton, he didn't mean that he atually voted for the final version of the actual bill.

So, essentially, Helms-Burton was a bill he supported, but voted against, much like the Gulf War in 1991. Similarly, in 2002, he voted for the Iraq War, but opposed it.

I'm not sure Kerry understands how this "voting" deal actually works.

Outsourcing works both ways

(Review) Director Mitch points out that it appears the US is getting the better end of the deal when it comes to outsourcing.

The WSJ reports (link requires paid subscription) that more jobs are outsourced TO the U.S. than are outsourced FROM the U.S. Long story short, the U.S. has a net "inflow" of $53.6 billion outsourcing jobs ($131 billion sent to the U.S. for outsourcing work versus $77.4 billion outbound). In addition:

- The U.S. inbound (more jobs here) number is up $8.4 billion from 2002 to 2003.

- The U.S. outbound (exported jobs) is up $8 billion from 2002 to 2003.

So the increase in 2002 outsourcing from the U.S was more than matched by outsourcing to the U.S.

Outsourcing is a lot trickier than a lot of people realize, and, as Mitch points out, several companies have reversed their outsourcing decisions.

First of all, there's the productivity problem. Yeah, American workers cost a lot of money, but they produce a lot more output. When it comes to unit labor costs, Americans are pretty darned competitive. I think a lot of CEOs make the mistake of thinking that, because they can move production to Bangkok, and reduce their labor rates by 85%, they'll come out ahead on that deal.

That's not always, true, however. The workers in Thailand probably aren't as productive, so the same number of workers can't make the same number of shoes in a given time as Americans can. Transporting raw materials and finished goods may take longer, because the infrastructure is poorer. In the end, lower productivity and poor infrastructure may mean that you don't save as much money as you thought.

And, of course, there's the currency risk. What do you do if the dollar becomes more expensive relative to the baht, or the ringgit? Even if your work force's pay never increases, the cost to you increases because it takes more dollars to buy the native currency in which your workers are paid.

And there's always the political risk. What if a popular general overthrows the civilian government, and throws out the foreigners and their "corrupting influences"? What if the "Democratic Socialist" party wins the national election and declares all foreign-owned companies to be nationalized? What if the cousin of the Prime Minister tells you he needs a "job" at your production facility as a "manager" making $250,000 per year, but you shouldn't expect him to spend any actual time working there?

There's a heck of a lot more to outsourcing than looking at labor costs.

There is another factor to outsourcing: Inconvenience. A few years ago, everyone in the small business community was excited that Eastern Europeans could do web development for $10 or $15 per hour instead of the $50 per hour US web designers were charging. It seemed like a great deal.

At least, until your web site went down, or your desktop application broke in the middle of the business day. Then try to get hold of your developer in Tirana, or Omsk. And, assuming you do get hold of him in the middle of the night, you'd better hope his spoken English is adequate for the task. A few incidents like those, and the instant service--and comprehensibility--of an American developer seemed like it was worth the price after all.

And despite the cries against outsourcing, people also forget that there are a lot of things we do here that are done better than anywhere else in the world, and that outsourcing benefits us. Countries all around the world outsource a multitude of tasks to the US, mainly because their own populations are too poor and benighted to get the job done. If you run a poor African, Central American, Asian, or Mideastern state, chances are that experts in telecommunications, information technology, medicine, etc., just aren't very available in your country. If you want that kind of help, there's only two places you can go: Western Europe or the US.

Global trade does not result in that "huge sucking sound" that Ross Perot envisioned. It results in advantages for both trading partners. 

Well, it's true, philosophically

Photo: Reuters

Where are the jobs? II

(Review) Bruce Bartlett makes the same point about jobs that I've been making (despite snarky comments from some of my commenters).

The employment data may be missing the increasing number of self-employed workers. This suggests that people are working, just not in ways recorded by the employment statistics, thus making employment appear lower than it is.

Theoretically, self-employment is recorded, but only in the Labor Department's household survey, which asks a sample of people whether they are employed or not. That is one reason why this measure of employment has shown strong growth. However, most economists prefer data from the payroll survey, which is culled from business-employment records. Consequently, it doesn't pick up self-employment.

Some economists argue that self-employment cannot explain the lack of job growth being recorded by the payroll survey. However, there is growing evidence that this may indeed be the case. Economist Brian Wesbury notes that there were more limited-liability corporations established in Illinois last year than any year since this form of business was allowed in 1994. He reports that 18,600 LLCs were created in 2003, a 42 percent increase over 2002.

Journalist Bill Hobbs reports similar data for Tennessee. He found that 7,412 LLCs were created in that state last year, up from 6,204 in 2002. As in Illinois, this is the largest number ever recorded.

The bottom line is that economists don't yet know why employment growth is so slow. Everything they know about the relationship between economic growth and employment suggests that the latter should be stronger than it is. Economists continue to believe that the jobs will come if growth continues at its current pace.

Say what you want about the household survey being less accurate than the establishment survey. Of course it is. But the trouble with the establishment survey is that it completely misses self-employment.

You can make all the demographic arguments you want about how immigration skews the household survey, but the fact is that it's the only clue we have, in terms of national economic data, for trying to capture the number of self-employed people. That can't be done at all with the establishment survey.

Look, economists--me included--are confused about what is actually happening in the labor market. The establishment survey shows that only about 120,000 new jobs have been created over the last year. The household survey indicates nearly a million new jobs.

It doesn't matter that the household survey is less accurate than the establishment survey. The picture we are getting from the two surveys are so different that they can't be explained by relatively minor differences in accuracy.

The household survey is telling us a story: Declining unemployment and moderate job creation. This is consistent with 4%+ rates of economic growth. The establishment survey is also telling us story: stagnant employment and productivity-fueled economic growth. This is consistent with 6%+ rises in productivity.

But these two stories are inconsistent, to say the least. Everything we know about the past, all of our experience, tells us that employment growth as measured by the establishment survey should be increasing as the economy expands.

This isn't an argument about the relative accuracy of two employment surveys. This is a serious question about why employment growth is not consistent with economic growth, according to the relationship we've known about for a couple of generations.

There are two possibilities:

1) The expected employment growth is taking place, and we are missing it because it is happening through self-employment and contract work. Unfortunately, we don't have statistics of sufficient reliability to pin this down with any accuracy. This implies, by the way, that our figures on productivity growth are flawed, because we are low-balling the number of actual workers out there, meaning that our estimates of output per worker are incorrect.

2) The employment growth is not occurring, and our long-accepted understanding of the relationship between economic and employment growth is flawed. This means that something is seriously wrong with the household survey's estimate of unemployment, and that the rate of unemployment is substantially higher--on the order of one percentage point--than the household survey indicates. (This also implies that if productivity keeps improving at the current rate, then sometime in the next 20 years, all US economic output will be produced by a single worker, resulting in an unemployment rate of approx. 99.9999999998%)

Of course, some mixture of the two could also be going on.

I am amused, however, that some of my commenters believe they have nailed the solution in a single sentence, when essentially the entire professional economic establishment in this country is still trying to figure out what's going on.  

Why does Krugman Lie?

(Review) Donals Luskin asks why the Democrats have to lie about the state of the economy. The answer: The truth wouldn't get them elected.

Why does Paul Krugman lie about the economy? For the same reason that many liberal politicians do: If they told the truth, they’d never be elected into office. But when they lie, their chances of victory are greatly improved.

Here’s the truth about what has happened to the American economy over the last year:
Since the stock market bottom one year ago last Friday, the S&P 500 has grown $2.96 trillion in market value. Corporate earnings are now at an all-time record high. Gross domestic product has grown somewhere between 5 and 6 percent. Household wealth is at an all-time record high. Interest rates are the lowest in modern history. Inflation measured by the Consumer Price Index is non-existent. Jobs have grown between 122,000 (according to the Department of Labor's “establishment survey”) and 983,000 (according to the “household survey”), and the unemployment rate has fallen from 5.9 to 5.6 percent.

These impressive economic statistics are largely the result of growth policies enacted by the Bush administration.

The liberal response? Ignore all this good news and invent a jobs crisis. Convince Americans that they shouldn’t be fooled by the fact they have jobs. Say that the jobs they have are just temporary illusions. Let Americans know that at any moment their jobs will be “outsourced” to India.

And the lies are working. In a post-9/11 world, fear is never very far beneath the surface. Appeals to insecurity can be very effective — especially when they can be linked to isolationist urges.

Also, the article contains a nice link to Jon Henke's QandO blog.

A victory for Terror

(Review) David Frum writes that the results of the Spanish election are a victory for terror.

Unlike the 9/11 attacks in the United States – which were intended as acts of propaganda to influence the Arab and Muslim world – the 3/11 attacks against Spain were acts of propaganda aimed at the local market. And again unlike 9/11, this time the terrorists succeeded brilliantly. They helped to defeat a government committed to joining the war against them – and helped elect a government whose leading members not so quietly dream of a separate accommodation.

From a human point of view, the carnage of 3/11 is a tragedy without purpose or meaning. But from a political point of view, 3/11 was aimed at a result – and it achieved it. The new socialist government of Spain will be a far less willing ally of the United States. Indeed, this attack against Spain may well succeed in pre-emptively knocking Spain out of the war in the way that Pearl Harbor was intended – but failed – to knock out the United States in 1941.

Lesson: terrorism can work. Prediction: therefore expect more of it. Expect more terrorism aimed at the United Kingdom, against Australia, against Poland, and – ultimately – against the United States. For the terrorists must now wonder: If murder can influence elections in Spain – why not in the United States?

Why not, indeed?

Dennis Boyles agrees.

The ultimate wisdom of allowing al Qaeda terrorism to determine national elections is still to be seen. But as the Socialists in Spain get "beyond the them and us, the good guys and the bad guys," and attempt to find the common ground they have with whomever killed 200 innocent citizens and wounded 1,400 others, that country's apology for supporting the war on terrorism will be heard with appreciation by al Qaeda — and ETA, the IRA, Hamas, and every other terrorist organization in the world.

Why is appeasement the standard European answer to any threat? Didn't they learn anything in the 1930s?

Steyn Speaks

(Review) Mark Steyn gets it, even if the voters of Spain don't.

Even if you'd avoided Iraq or Andalusia or British banks or Pilger or any other affront to Islamist sensibilities, you'd still be a target. As the PR guy for the Islamic Army of Aden said after blowing up that French tanker: "We would have preferred to hit a US frigate, but no problem because they are all infidels." Commissioner Keelty is confusing old-school terrorism – blowing the legs off grannies as a means to an end – with the new: blowing the legs off grannies is the end. Old-school terrorists have relatively viable goals: They want a Basque state or Northern Ireland removed from the UK. You might not agree with these goals, you might not think them negotiable, but at least they're not stark staring insane.

That kind of finely calibrated terrorism – just enough slaughter to inconvenience the state into concessions – is all but over. Suppose you're an ETA cell. Suppose you were planning a car-bomb for next month – nothing fancy, just a dead Spanish official plus a couple of unlucky passers-by. Still want to go ahead with it? I doubt it. Despite Gerry Adams's attempts to distinguish between "unacceptable" terrorism and the supposedly more beneficial kind, these days it's a club with only one level of membership. That's why so many formerly active terrorist groups have been so quiet the past couple of years. In that sense, Bush is right: It is a "war on terror", and on many fronts it's being won.

If Islamic terrorism were as rational as Irish or Basque terrorism, it would be easier. But Hussein Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah, summed it up very pithily: "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you." You can be pro-America (Spain, Australia) or anti-America (France, Canada), but if you broke into the head cave in the Hindu Kush and checked out the hit list you'd be on it either way.

So the choice for pluralist democracies is simple: You can join Bush in taking the war to the terrorists, to their redoubts and sponsoring regimes. Despite the sneers that terrorism is a phenomenon and you can't wage war against a phenomenon, in fact you can – as the Royal Navy did very successfully against the malign phenomena of an earlier age, piracy and slavery.

Or you can stick your head in the sand and paint a burqa on your butt. But they'll blow it up anyway.

All that prattle about "understanding the root causes" of terrorism, and about the "anger of poverty" and all that...it's just a load of crap.

They don't hate us because they're poor. They hate us because, despite being horrible infidels who spurn God's truth at every turn, we're still rich and successful. They woudn't hate us at all if we were mired in poverty and hopelessness. But the fact that we aren'r simply fills them with rage.

It is a positive affront to their brand of Islam that that infidels can be so wealthy and powerful, while their own, Islamic civilization is a cultural, economic, scientific, and political backwater. The shame and rage they feel is the result of their own failures, but to accept that as the truth opens the door to skeptical questions about Islam in their culture. And they simply can't have that.

There is literally nothing we can offer them that will make them stop. They don't want anything from us. Or, rather, the thing they want from us is the very thing that we can't give them: They want us dead.

And that's not negotiable.

John Kerry: Candidate of France?

(Review) John Kerry is refusing to budge in his insistence that he can't reveal the "foreign leaders" who've spoken to him about the importance of beating George W. Bush in November.

"I'm not going to betray a private conversation with anybody," Kerry said Sunday. "I have heard from people, foreign leaders elsewhere in the world who don't appreciate the Bush administration and would love to see a change in the leadership of the United States."

I'm completely unconcerned about what foreign leaders want. I certainly see no reason to care what the Europeans think. As I have often said, considering that the Europeans have spent the best part of the last century either engaged in, ignoring, or appeasing armed aggression, totalitarianism, and genocide, then requiring American military and economic might to rescue them from the results of their folly, I'm not particularly inclined to grant that Europeans have a claim to moral superiority about...well...anything.

And, if errorists were to destroy the Eiffel Tower, you can be certain that the French Ambassador in Washington would be demanding access to the President, in order to obtain our assurances of military and logitical support for France. Which, by the way, we'll give, even though by any reasonable standard, we'd be perfectly justified in telling him, "Go ask your Kraut buddies in Berlin for help, Froggy-boy."

As for our critics in most of the rest of the world, I would point out that their governments are mainly authoritarian, and hence, the criticisms of us by their officials are illegitimate without free elections, and the carping of their media is illegitimate without a free press.

And as far as the UN goes, I note that the current Chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights is Libya. That tells me all I need to know about the moral compass of that organization.

But John Kerry is proud the be the candidate of foreigners. How's this for a campaign slogan: Vote Kerry. Because foreigners know best.

The Coalition Shrinks

(Review) Spain's incoming Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, will be pulling out of the coalition in Iraq, and Bring Spanish troops home. But get this:

Zapatero said his immediate priority would be "fighting terrorism" and promised to improve ties with the rest of Europe.

Aznar's closeness to U.S. and UK leaders George W. Bush and Tony Blair was unpopular in Spain. Zapatero said he wanted "cordial" relations with the United States but hoped to restore "magnificent" ties with France, Germany and other EU members.

By "fighting terrorism", Zaptero presumably means a craven surrender to same, hoping that if he does, Spain will be spared any further attacks. Any why not? That's been Europe's standard MO for decades. Just ask the Czechs about the Sudetenland.

So, Spain leaps back into the arms of Old Europe.

Just out of curiousity, how many American troops are stationed in Western Europe?

And why?

The Joys of NMCI

(Review) For those of you who haven't experienced it, you don't know what you're missing by not being a part of the glorious rollout of the Navy/Marine Corps Internet, or as we lovingly call it, NMCI. NMCI can also stand for Numbskulls Manifesting Computer Incompetence, based on my experience.

I am a contractor software developer for the Navy/Marine Corps, so I am having to live this nightmare.

It's a good idea as far as the concept goes. Instead of every navy unit buying their own IT services, and ending up with a multitude of incompatible networks, the Navy's idea was to have a contractor come in, tear everything down, and build one single, worldwide network.

In practice, it's been a display of laughable incompetence. Senor Navy IT people are al talking about how wonderful it all is, etc, etc., etc. The usual BS.
At the level where everyone is working, however, the comments below are far more typical. Let's say that most people haven't been impressed with EDS, the prime contractor:

End contract now before it’s too late.

Forget it.

Turn over the rollout to Navy employees.

A competent prime contractor would improve service.

Stop the roll out.

Fire EDS and get another company.

Getting software/hardware is a major problem at NADEP NI [Naval Air Depot North Island, San Diego] even though your job may depend on it. All requests for this have to be approved by NMCI. This is ridiculous if one is an engineer and performs R&D work. Let's see: NADEP loves diversity and NMCI/NADEP on the other hand is too regulated and lowers computer efficiency. You people making decisions just don't get it!

Poor planning, poor execution.

Quit forcing the issues down everybody’s throats. Fix the problems first, instead of deploying a defective system.

Cancel or greatly modify the scope of NMCI.

Those of us who have locally developed GOTS [government off-the-shelf software] are being treated like ^&%$# by NMCI. You have to pledge your children to get anything done. NMCI has loaded an unbearable bureaucratic burden on us. Isn't that ironic, an outside contractor burdening government employees with red tape!

I am a software developer. It's taken two years to get permission to be an administrator of my own machine to install software on it. So, For the last two years, I have had two computers on my desk. One is the old 200MHz Pentium II that I actually did work on. The other was the new NMCI Dell laptop, that I could only use to send and receive email.

Try developing .NET applications on a 6 year-old PC. It's fun.

The most serious problem is that many locations, ours included, use a variety of custom applications that were developed locally to help them do their particular jobs. Most of this stuff is not approved for use on NMCI, so it has to die.

The fact that, without these legacy applications, it's practically impossible to do your job is immaterial. So, what we have now is a situation where a support function, IT, now determines how you will do your job. I'm pretty sure that when I was in college, they told us it was supposed to work the other way around.

Some people, of course, love MNCI. Mainly though, these are people whose only contact with the computer is Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and email. Hey, if that's all you do, NMCI is great. For anyone else, however, it's the biggest, most expensive (at least $6 billion) boondoggle I've ever seen.

The thing that really cracks me up is the way the Navy's IT people are gauging customer satisfaction. First, they are all giddy with delight at having an 86% satisfaction rate. In the private sector, an 86% satisfaction rate with IT, will get the CIO canned. But, that notwithstanding, the way they gauge it is kind of tricky. They only count negative or positive comments that come from Customer satisfaction surveys. You can only fill out a customer satisfaction survey if you have a trouble ticket duly opened with NMCI tech support.

But here's the catch. If your complaint is not directly related to an NMCI service, you can't really open a tech support ticket. For example, let's say you have a legacy software program that you use to do engineering calculations, but it has been disapproved under NMCI. Poof, it's gone. Now it takes you three times as long to do calculations, because you have to try and do it in Excel.

You may be highly dissatisfied, but you can't open a trouble ticket. There is, after all, nothing that NMCI can fix. The problem is that you don't have a piece of software you used to have. So, since you can't open a trouble ticket, you can't complain. Therefore, as far as Navy IT is concerned, your dissatisfaction doesn't exist.

But a brief look at the complaints aired at the linked article on Government Computer News should tell someone that there's a bit of a problem somewhere. 

Doesn't the Senate have to confirm this?

Photo: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque

I blame this on the influence of Bill Clinton

Photo: Reuters/Jason Reed

Because that's the kind of guy I am...

Photo: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque

Some things, you shouldn't think too hard about

Photo: AFP/Greg Wood

Krauthammer to France: Drop Dead

(Review) Charles Krauthammer delivers a vicious fisking to Le Monde editor Jean-Marie Colombani for his recent Wall Street Journal op/ed piece.

Colombani glories in Europe's post-Sept. 11 "solidarity'' with America: "Let us remember here the involvement of French and German soldiers, among other European nationalities, in the operations launched in Afghanistan to ... free the Afghans.''

Come again? The French arrived in Mazar-e Sharif after it fell -- or as military analyst Jay Leno put it, "to serve as advisers to the Taliban on how to surrender properly.'' Afghanistan was liberated by America acting practically unilaterally, with an even smaller coalition than that in Iraq -- Britain and Australia, with the rest of the world holding America's coat.

But then came Iraq. "The problem was not so much the war itself, but the fact that it was launched without U.N. approval,'' Colombani explains.

Rubbish. The Kosovo war was launched without U.N. approval and France joined it. Only two wars have ever been launched with U.N. approval: the Korean War (an accident of the Soviets having walked out of the Security Council on another matter) and Gulf War I...

Moreover, Colombani complains, George Bush "lied about the weapons of mass destruction -- the official pretext for the war -- as now publicly established by recent investigations.'' More rubbish. The investigations have established that the weapons have not been found and may not exist. The claim that the president knew so at the time, and lied about it as a "pretext'' for war, is a malicious falsehood.

"A vote for John Kerry is a vote for France." Sounds like a good campaign slogan to me.

One year on: An Assessment

(Review) Victor Davis Hanson surveys where we are, one year after the liberation of Iraq.

So here we are a year later. We fuss about the WMD "myth"; enemies scramble over its reality. We talk of our theft of third-world resources — and pay more for gas than ever before while the price of Iraq's national treasure soars. We worry that we are too involved abroad; those in Europe, Afghanistan, and Iraq claim there are not enough of us over there. And we scream at each other that we are not liked, even as those overseas express new respect for us.

No wonder, when asked for specific follow-ups about his general criticisms of the Iraqi war in a recent Time magazine interview, a resolute Kerry variously prevaricated, "I didn't say that," "I can't tell you," "It's possible," "It's not a certainty," "If I had known," "No, I think you can still--wait, no. You can't--that's not a fair question and I'll tell you why,"--employing the entire idiom and vocabulary of those who are angry about Bush's removal of Saddam, but neither know quite why nor what they would do differently.

Not that you'll ever convince the Left of any of this. Facts are unimportant. Their political belief is a faith in a very real sense, and like all fundamentalism, is immune to proof or logic.

Finding the killers

(Review) Span's government has vowed to find the killers that set of yesterday's train bombs, killing 198, and wounding 1,400.

The key question right now is who actually did it. The usual suspect are members of the Basque ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna) separatist movement. There are some problems with this theory, though ETA is usually the prime suspect for any Spanish terrorism. In this case, however, there are things that don't add up.

Batasuna, the political arm of the ETA (although they claim they are not the political arm of the ETA), states categorically that this wasn't an ETA operation. (Although, if they have no ties to ETA, one wonders how they could know this.) In addition, ETA usually strikes targets with some military or political signifigance, rather than making random strikes against the population. ETA also usually releases a public warning about their strikes to keep civilian casualties to a minimum. They also claim responsibility for them as well.

So, while ETA has to be on the top of the suspect list, there are some anomalies to this operation that are markedly different from ETA's usual signature.

An Al-Qaida splinter group, on the other hand, has claimed responsibility for the attacks. This is, however, a group that has made false claims in the past, so the jury still has to be out on that one.

Whoever is responsible the government has vowed to find them, and ensure they get the most severe sentence possible under Spanish law, i.e., life imprisonment. I'm sure the terrorists are quaking in their boots at the prospect.

Well, maybe they'll be shot while "resisting arrest". Although, shooting's to good for 'em.

A restrained Commander in Chief

(Review) To all the bush critics who think he shouldn't air a political ad showing 911 images, David Broder writes that Bush is a piker compared to everyone's favorite Democrat, FDR. How far did FDR go?

To answer that question, I went back, with help from Washington Post researcher Brian Faler, to 1944, when Franklin D. Roosevelt, almost three years after Pearl Harbor, was running for reelection. What you learn from such an exercise is that Bush is a piker compared with FDR when it comes to wrapping himself in the mantle of commander in chief.

Item: FDR did not go to the Democratic convention in Chicago where he was nominated for a fourth term. A few days before it opened, he sent a letter to the chairman of the Democratic Party explaining his availability for the nomination. And what an explanation!

"All that is within me cries out to go back to my home on the Hudson River, to avoid public responsibilities and to avoid also the publicity which in our democracy follows every step of the nation's chief executive."

But, he wrote, "every one of our sons serving in this war has officers from whom he takes his orders. Such officers have superior officers. The President is the Commander in Chief, and he, too, has his superior officer -- the people of the United States. . . . If the people command me to continue in this office and in this war, I have as little right to withdraw as the soldier has to leave his post in the line."

Item: Roosevelt delivered his acceptance speech to the convention by radio from where? From the San Diego Naval Station, because, he said, "The war waits for no elections. Decisions must be made, plans must be laid, strategy must be carried out."

Item: If FDR's politicizing of his wartime role seems blatant, what does one say of the main speakers at the convention? Keynoter Robert Kerr, then governor of Oklahoma, declared that "the Republican Party . . . had no program, in the dangerous years preceding Pearl Harbor, to prevent war or to meet it if it came. Most of the Republican members of the national Congress fought every constructive move designed to prepare our country in case of war."

So much for bipartisanship!

Item: Kerr was restraint personified compared with the convention's permanent chairman, Sen. Samuel Jackson of Indiana. As he contemplated the possibility of a Republican victory, he was moved to ask: "How many battleships would a Democratic defeat be worth to Tojo? How many Nazi legions would it be worth to Hitler? . . . We must not allow the American ballot box to be made Hitler's secret weapon."

If you accept President Bush's premise that this nation is at war with terrorism, then you have to applaud the restraint his campaign has shown so far in exploiting the attack that began that war.

Imagine the outcry if a Republican politican said something like, "A Democrat vote is a vote for Osama." There would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Even though it's true.

Hoist by their own petard

(Review) Arnold Kling writes that the economic critics of the Bush Administration's job forecasts actually appear to believe the administration is correct.

Partisan economists are attacking the Administration's forecast of rapid job growth this year, as Paul Krugman did recently. In fact, however, those attacking the Administration forecasts appear to believe them. If you were a left-leaning economist who thought that employment growth was going to be feeble, you would be making an urgent case for more economic stimulus. You would call for tax cuts and/or increases in government spending. At the very least, you would call for more interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve.

The Administration's opponents do not have a stimulus package. From that, it is logical to deduce that they judge the economy does not need one. In that case, they must believe that something close to the Administration's employment forecast is probably correct. Elementary!

In point of fact, many of the critics have an anti-stimulus package, which is to repeal the Bush Tax cuts, resulting across the board increases in taxation.

Kling makes a very important point here, and you need to understand a little macroeconomic theory before you can truly understand how devastating it is, especially from the Keynesian perspective most liberal economists (and yours truly) hold.

To simplify Keynes' General Theory in to a single fiscal policy paragraph would be to say something like the following:

In bad economic times, government can increase economic activity through fiscal policy stimulation. The government can sharply increase spending, lower taxes or both. In times of economic expansion, the government can reduce spending and raise taxes, in order to pay off the bills accumulated during the bad times.

That's a gross simplification, but it's enough to realize that if, in fact, economic times are as hard as the Democrats imply, then they should have a fiscal stimulus plan in the works which will either call for increased federal spending, a la the 1993 stimulus bill that President Clinton shepherded through Congress, or tax cuts designed to increase economic activity.

Tellingly, however, the Keynesian economists, led by Paul Krugman, have no such plan. Indeed, to the extent they do have any plan at all, it tends to be increasing taxes by eliminating the Bush tax cuts, although many of them would only eliminate those cuts on the most affluent.

That is a plan for times of economic expansion, not weak job growth.

As far as I can tell, the President's opponents are arguing that his tax cuts weren't stimulative, but their tax increases would be. This is precisely the opposite of actual Keynesian theory.

Democrats are also howling about how much larger the deficit has gotten. And after they went through all that trouble to balance the budget, too. But, isn't that exactly what Keynes prescribed for economic downturns? Isn't that what the Democrats in control of congress did with their 1993 stimulus package, with its infamous spending on "midnight basketball"?

Clearly, there is something other that generally accepted economic theory behind these criticisms.

A lot of nerve

(Review) John Kerry is jerk.

Kerry responded, informally and off camera: "Let me tell you, we've just begun to fight. We're going to keep pounding. These guys are the most crooked, you know, lying group I've ever seen. It's scary."

Yeah, well, it wasn't off-camera, he just thought it was. Of course, when asked later, could Kerry come up with a single instance of a lie?

No. No, he couldn't.

Mid-Life Crisis?

I've come to the realization that I'm not a happy guy, professionally.

I should be. I make really good money doing software development, web development, and web hosting. I have a nice house, a nice car, and pretty much all the toys I want. Computer work has really paid off for me, and even the bursting of the tech bubble left me largely unaffected. I should be happy to have a good job and to be largely free from money worries.

But, I'm not. I hate doing computer work. It was never what I wanted to do with my life.

When I got out of the Air Force in '93, I got out specifically to go into radio. Six months after I got out, I had a job as a producer at KMNY Radio in LA. Three months later, I was on the air, hosting The Business Day every morning from 9am to 1pm.

I loved doing that.

But, I hated the station's management, who, in my opinion, were a bunch of weasels. In three years I never got a pay raise. And, I wasn't making very much to begin with. There's an old saying in broadcasting:

Broadcasting, as a profession, has the second-highest average salary in the country. Take away my salary, and it's the highest. Take away Johnny Carson's salary, and its the lowest.

That's largely true. For every Rush Limbaugh or Don Imus there's a thousand guys toiling away at local radio stations for ten bucks an hour. Broadcasting has this very thin upper tier of incredibly wealthy guys, and this massive tier of low-paid guys. For three years, I toiled away at Money Radio, as one of the low-paid guys.

Now, Money Radio's management, as far as I could see, were fairly incompetent managers. They started out as a radio network on about 30 stations across the country, broadcasting from the LA Stock exchange. From that start, they managed to work themselves into ownership of a single station in Pomona that had been forced into Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The reason I left, of course, was that I could see the handwriting on the wall. What prompted me to start looking around for something else was that, all the sudden, they called us in and announced that we would no longer be broadcasting our programming 24/7. Instead, the had sold the entire period of 4pm to 4am, and would be broadcasting...wait for it...ethnic programming in Mandarin Chinese.

That's just not a good sign. When ethnic Chinese programming is a better money-maker than your own programming, something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

So I bailed.

I got a job as the Training Manager for a computer training company called Soft-Train in Irvine. I had been a Technical Training Instructor in the USAF, and my minor in college was Computer Science. I interviewed with them on a Friday and I started working for them on Monday.

I called my boss at Money Radio on Sunday afternoon and told him I wouldn't be in on Monday, because I'd found a new job, and, incidentally, had doubled my salary.

Yeah, it was short notice, and it really PO'd the station manager. But, since by that time, I hated his guts, I didn't much care.

Since then I've been in the computer business full-time. It's bought me a succession of cool cars, a rather large 5 bedroom house, and all the other trappings of middle-class success.

And I hate it.

I guess my heart attack at the end of last year kicked off a re-evaluation of where I am and what I want to be doing.

I would be a lot happier even if I could do a weekend radio show. I love doing radio, I'm pretty good at it, and I would really love to jump back in. But the awful kicker is that I probably couldn't afford to do it full-time.

And I'd like to write, too. I have been kicking around a book on basic economics for years now, and, while I have a lot of it down on paper, I can never seem to find the time to finish it. Even my weekly TechCentralStation column had to go, because my schedule is just too jammed to keep me doing it on anything like a regular basis.

I can blog, because I can always find ten minutes or so here and there throughout the day, but to actually sit down for a substantial length of time each day and write, well, that's not as easy.

Quite a choice, huh? Stay with a job I hate, but which pays well, or do a job I love, which would probably force me to sell my house?

It's funny how things turn out, I guess. I never had any intention of making a career out of computers, and yet, I've been doing it for almost 8 years.

And I hate it.

The colorful mosaic that is Russian Democracy

(Review) Russia is on the eve of a presidential election that Vladimier Putin, the current president, is heavily favored to win. That's not really surprising when you can use the whole power of the government to intimidate and harass your opponents, and the power of the state-run press to discredit them. Putin does have "opponents" in the election, mainly a set of hacks and losers who have no chance of winning.

For example, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an ultra-nationalist prankster who has been the fist in Russia's smash-mouth politics for the past decade, anointed one of his former bodyguards to run for president in his stead. The Communists, still the country's second-largest political party but in the midst of a bloody leadership battle, chose a party hack as its sacrificial goat, not even bothering to put its two-time presidential loser leader on the ballot. The country's liberal parties didn't field a candidate at all, in part as a futile gesture of protest against the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the election, but also because they knew they'd be lucky to poll in the double digits. They didn't even endorse Irina Khakamada, one of their own who is making a courageous and credible, if doomed, go of it on her own.

And--this being Russia--the opposition candidates themselves have some personal foibles that make their election...problematic.

Then there's Ivan Rybkin—the toy candidate of Boris Berezovsky, a discredited former Russian oligarch now in exile in London and an archenemy of the Kremlin—who etched his likeness in Webster's under "flake" by vanishing for five days in mid-February, explaining later that he had gone to Ukraine to hang out with friends and was unaware of the media uproar that followed his bizarre disappearance..."This is as weird as it sounds—even for Russia," remarked intelligence consultancy Stratfor.com. As if to partly redeem himself, Rybkin later claimed that he had been drugged, kidnapped, and taken to the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, where he was made the subject of what he termed a "disgusting" film. Paris Hilton meets heavyset middle-aged Russian guy, anyone?

Russia's understanding of democratic governance is, unfortunately, all too...Russian.

Meanwhile, policies and political platforms are largely irrelevant. Political dialogue rarely moves beyond sound bites that are clichéd even by the demanding standards of Soviet politics. ("Today we feel that the time of uncertainty and fearful expectations is behind us. A new period has arrived, a period in which we can create conditions for a fundamental improvement in the quality of lives," Putin inspirationally proclaimed during one speech.) The incumbent chose to not debase himself by debating other candidates—so in protest, the candidates who were not Putin refused to debate each other. When pushed to provide an election platform, Putin points to five consecutive years of economic growth and the strengthening of law enforcement organs as key accomplishments—conveniently ignoring a culture of corruption, the stalled reform program, the overwhelming poverty of much of the population, and the continued bloodshed in Chechnya.

It goes without saying—since all national TV stations are government-controlled—that coverage of the presidential campaign is all Putin, all the time. The speech marking the official launch of Putin's campaign, a month before the election, was broadcast live on national television. That many of Russia's newspapers regularly publish boisterously anti-Kremlin opinions is irrelevant, since television is the only medium that matters for the vast majority of the country's 140 million people. Indeed, Reporters Without Borders lists Russia 148th in its 166-country ranking of press freedom, behind such guiding lights as Afghanistan (134) and Zimbabwe (141).

So, essentially, his relationship with the Russian Press is the same as John Kerry's with the Washington press corps. 

Those stooges at the FDA

(Review) Dr. Henry Miller writes that the FDA appears to be a hotbed of incompetent foolishness. Foolishness for which American health suffers. The article is like a laundry list of incompetence.

Best of all it the picture TCS created to accompany the article:

The bias towards brutality

(Review) Carroll Andrew Morse writes that the Haiti situation displays one of the more troubling aspects of international law.

Ultimately, foreign military action in Haiti was deemed acceptable not because the international community will not tolerate the existence of a dictator, but because the international community will not tolerate the existence of an ineffective dictator. In terms of opening the door to foreign intervention, Aristide's mistake was a failure to keep the people of Haiti frightened into maintaining civil order. He did not go far enough in rigging elections and using street gangs to intimidate opponents. Had he been more brutally totalitarian, had he done a better job of killing the leaders of any potential rebellion while simultaneously glad-handing the diplomatic circuit, he could -- like a Fidel Castro or a Robert Mugabe -- still be in power today. This is a perverse message for the democracies of the world to send to the dictators of the world.

The international community protects "legitimate" governments, by which it means, governments that are effectively governing (or controlling the population) as the case may be. Essentially, if there is no ongoing armed rebellion in your country, your government is assumed to be legitimate.

In effect, the international community assumes that if your government exists, it's legitimate. And that is troubling to those of us who feel that legitimacy implies something far deeper than the mere fact of a regime's existence.

As a practical matter, the current definition of legitimacy means that, as Morse points out, the international community can never be a force for democratic change. The most brutal governments imaginable are protected by their "legitimacy" because civil order, rather than human rights, is the standard for legitimacy.

This is exactly backwards.

Coincidence? I think Not.

(Review) Eric Fettman writes that it looks like the press corps is keen on giving John Kerry a boost.

There was an amazing incident a couple of weeks ago: Kerry, campaigning in Dayton, Ohio, delivered a boring rendition of his economic message, leaving TV reporters without a usable soundbite. Until, that is, a producer for Dan Rather's "CBS Evening News" asked him to try again.

This time he came up with something more memorable - which was used on that night's broadcast.

That's a new one - ever hear of a presidential candidate being given a mulligan by the press? Especially when he didn't even ask for it?

That's what I would call "active assistance". But the passive assistance, i.e. judicious decisions about what not to report, can be equally effective.

The pro-Kerry tilt has also been seen in the manufactured furor over Bush's initial set of (positive) ads - the notion that he'd insulted 9/11 victims' families by using images from Ground Zero.

As The Post's editorial page noted yesterday, the objections came from a fringe group that has opposed Bush and the entire War on Terror all along - even declaring a truly insulting moral equivalence between U.S. bombing of Afghanistan and the events of 9/11.

Yes, some firefighters also objected to the ads - but those protests came from a union that endorsed Kerry's candidacy early on.

Or consider a story that first ran three weeks ago and has been the subject of scores of news articles and angry editorials: Some 40 scientists signed a letter accusing the Bush administration of politicizing science policy.

The group's spokesman and widely quoted front man was Russell Train - the perfect choice to attack a Republican president, it would seem, since he'd run the Environmental Protection Agency under Presidents Nixon and Ford.

But it took all of three seconds using the Google Internet search engine to discover something else about Train: In 2000, he was the recipient of the Heinz Award, which carries with it a gold medallion and an unrestricted $250,000 cash prize.

The award honors the work of the late Sen. John Heinz; it was set up - and is still run - by Heinz's widow, Teresa. Who just happens to be running for first lady with her current husband, Sen. John Kerry.

Not a single one of the stories and editorials about the scientists mentioned the Train-Kerry connection.

I don't mind that the press is biased really, I just wish they'd admit their bias. I think we were all better served 50 years ago when the press was run by openly partisan publishers and editors. It was, at any rate, more honest than today's press, who give us bland assurances about an "objectivity" that doesn't really exist.

Are you ready for this?

(Review) CHief Justice William Rehnquist is hinting that it's time to think about retirement, noting that he turns 80 this year.

And you thought judicial nominations were contentious now...

Steyn Speaks

(Review) Mark Steyn covers a lot of territory in today's Telegraph, starting with loopiness in the provinsial government of Nova Scotia:

Last week, for example, the government of Nova Scotia announced that it wished to clamp down on newspaper and broadcast usage of words such as "fruitcake", "nutcase", "madman", "kooky", etc, as these terms are hurtful to the mentally ill. To that end, it was offering cash rewards to citizens who reported sightings of these terms in the media. Whatever "hurt" these words do the mentally ill is less than that done to society by a state that polices your vocabulary. So I would urge any Nova Scotian reporters, disc jockeys, weather girls, etc, who read the Telegraph to use these expressions as often as possible - "You'd have to be a nutcase to go out in this weather", etc - and then get their relatives to bankrupt the government's cash-reward budget.

That's my basic rule: whatever the problem, the government's a bigger one. Those cultists at Waco may have been a bit kooky (whoops), but they didn't deserve to get immolated by Janet Reno's stooges. If she'd opened fire on a gay bathhouse instead of a Branch Davidian compound, you'd never have heard the end of it from the media Lefties.

From there, he moves on to Martha Stewart:

It's the same with Martha Stewart. Martha may, indeed, be a bitch, though she's always been rather droll and charming to me (I once baked her a cranberry pecan pie with lattice crust). But, even if she were as mean as she's painted, even if (as the government of Nova Scotia might argue) her use of fruitcake is hurtful to the domestically feeble, I'll take her and her entrepreneurial energy over some deadbeat regulators any day. Martha, it seems, will be going to jail for telling a lie. Not in court, not under oath, not perjury, but merely when the Feds came round to see her about a possible crime. They couldn't prove she'd committed a crime, so they nailed her for lying while chit-chatting to them about the non-crime. And for that they're prepared to destroy her company.

It's true that it's an offence to lie to the Feds. But, as my New Hampshire neighbours Tom and Scott, currently in my basement stretching out a little light carpentry job to the end of the winter, are the first to point out, the Feds lied to the public about Waco and Ruby Ridge (another bloodbath) for years. If the Feds can lie to the people, why can't the people lie to the Feds? Lumping Martha Stewart in with Enron and Worldcom is the most pathetic overreaching on the part of the authorities: unlike the other "corporate scandals", Martha's business isn't a flop or a fraud; it made a hugely successful contribution to the economy until a bunch of government bureaucrats decided to target it for demolition.

Then, it's on the the US budget deficit:

My objection isn't to the deficit, it's to the big wasteful government programmes that lead to the deficit. If the Dems wanted to balance the budget by cutting the spending, I'd be the first to dance up and down shaking my pom-poms. But they don't. They want to balance the budget by raising taxes, which is no help either way. I think deficits are morally neutral. If I go to the bank and ask them for a loan to buy a house, they'll look kindly on me. If I ask for a loan because I fancy a three-in-a-bed sex romp with two high-class hookers, they'll suggest I wait till I get my Christmas bonus. The portion of the deficit caused by Iraqi reconstruction is analogous to the house loan. Most of the rest - Bush's prescription drug plan for pampered seniors, the mohair subsidy, funding for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland - is analogous to the hooker blow-out. This spending has no plausible claim on the Federal Treasury: it would be objectionable even if Bill Gates personally wrote a cheque to cover the entire deficit. It's the expansion of the state that's wrong. The funding of it is secondary.

Finally, he wraps up with Haiti:

John Kerry, in quite the most stupid observation of his campaign, insisted that Bush should have sent in the troops to Haiti to prop up President Aristide - or "Father Aristide", as Kerry likes to call him, defrocking notwithstanding - because the Holy Father was "democratically elected". After a fashion. But so what? Charles Taylor, the recently retired head wacko of Liberia, was also democratically elected. The tinpot thugs of the world have got very good at being just democratic enough to pass muster: they kill a lot of people, they hold an election for the benefit of the IMF, and then, when the international observers are gone, they pick up the machetes and resume where they left off. The problem in Haiti is that the necessary conditions for civil society don't exist. Fetishising Aristide's "election" appeals to Kerry's reflexive belief that government is the be all and end all. But it isn't.

That's a pretty wide-ranging trip for a single column.

The legal decisions of heathen foreigners

(Review) Stuart Taylor writes that the trend among judges to look at foreign court decisions as precendent has some danger. There is, after all, much to choose from.

In a 1999 dissent suggesting that a death sentence should be struck down because of a delay of more than 20 years in executing the condemned man (Knight v. Florida), Breyer cited as "useful, even though not binding," the views of the supreme courts of Zimbabwe and India, as well as the European Court of Human Rights. To be sure, the Supreme Court of Canada and the U.N. Human Rights Committee had reached the opposite conclusion. But Breyer knew which conclusion he liked.

In future cases, perhaps, justices who want to narrow the First Amendment's guarantee of religious freedom may cite France's recent legislation banning all students from wearing religious symbols in public schools, the main purpose of which was to strip Muslim girls of their head scarves. And the Netherlands will come in handy for any justices who want to declare a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, assisted suicide, recreational marijuana, or prostitution.

In other words, no matter what you want to see as an outcome, the chances are that you can find a court decision somewhere in the world to support it.

The trouble is, that no matter how reasonable those decisions may be in the context of the societies in which they were made, America is not that society. It is up to us to decise our own law, not depend on foreign court decisions to do it for us.

Social Contract

(Review) Thomas Sowell has a simple rebuttal to the "equal rights" argument about gay marriage.

The last refuge of the gay marriage advocates is that this is an issue of equal rights. But marriage is not an individual right. Otherwise, why limit marriage to unions of two people instead of three or four or five? Why limit it to adult humans, if some want to be united with others of various ages, sexes and species?

Marriage is a social contract because the issues involved go beyond the particular individuals. Unions of a man and a woman produce the future generations on whom the fate of the whole society depends. Society has something to say about that.

Now, that';s where the argument should be based. The question is not whether gays have a right to marry. They don't. Marriage is not a right.

The real issue is how we, as a society, wish to handle homosexual relationships. That is best addressed through the legislative function, not the constitutional one. Personally, I support gay marriage. Others, of course, do not.

But that is something we need to hash out through public debate and persuasion, not through judicial fiat. I think if gay marriage is forced on the country by the judiciary, it'll be short-lived, because the public will rebel against it, and we'll get an FMA in fairly short order. In other words, a victory in a court battle will, inevitably I think end up in a war lost to gay marriage advocates by constitutional amendment.

Why the advocates can't see this is beyond me. The seem inexplicably keen on following a course that will end in ultimate defeat for their cause.

Sacramento: A toxic stew of bad ideas

(Review) As if things in sacramento weren't bad enough...

A proposed amendment to California's constitution would give 16-year-olds a half-vote and 14-year-olds a quarter-vote in state elections.

State Sen. John Vasconcellos, among four lawmakers to propose the idea on Monday, said the Internet, cellular phones, multichannel television and a diverse society makes today's teens better informed than their predecessors.

Well, no actually, it doesn't. It inly makes you better informed if you take advantage of it. Most teens have other things on their mind.

Moreover, I don't think that teens have the requisite experience or judgement to make informed choices. Oh, sure, maybe the A/V club geeks might, but the vast majority of teens aren't suited for intelligently voting.

And why should they be? They'll be faced with the awful choices of adulthood soon enough. Let 'em be kids, for cripes sake.

Well, let's see if they're still studying me in 500 years

I received the following email today. Frankly, it caught me a little by surprise.

Dear Mr.Franks, To introduce myself, I´m university student from the Czech Republic (Brno). I´ve been attending a course called Translation of Essays. We´ve started last week with Sir Francis Bacon, this week we translate your "Dangers of Moral Relativism", are you impressed? Incidentally, I´m supposed to present a seminar paper on your life and work etc. But I am not able to get hold of almost any material!!! Funny, isn´t it. If you know about a link where I can get some information, could you please let me know? A brief curriculum would do.

I know this e-mail sounds a little bit absurd but since you published your e-mail address I decided to try to contact you.

In case you are to busy to write back, I wish you good luck with your work.

Well, all I can say is that if universities in the Czech Republic are assigning students a study of my life and work, then I'm very hopeful about the future of the republic.

As to whether they'll be studying my writing 500 years from now, as they are doing with Sir Francis Bacon, well, we'll see.

Those artsy types are always so clever

Photo: Reuters/Vincent West

It's a win-win situation for everybody

Photo: Reuters/Peter Andrews

You have to do what feels right for you

Photo: AP Photo/Ed Reinke

"This guy waffles more than the Trickster did in '68"

(Review) John Kerry, in an interview for Time magazine. He definitively states his position on the War in Iraq.

TIME: What would you have done about Iraq had you been the President?

KERRY: If I had been the President, I might have gone to war but not the way the President did. It might have been only because we had exhausted the remedies of inspections, only because we had to—because it was the only way to enforce the disarmament.

TIME: But it turns out there was nothing to disarm.

KERRY: Well, if we had kept on inspecting properly and gone through the process appropriately, we might have avoided almost a $200 billion expenditure, the loss of lives and the scorn of the world and the breaking of so many relationships.

TIME: Would you say your position on Iraq is a) it was a mistaken war; b) it was a necessary war fought in a bad way; or c) fill in the blank?

KERRY: I think George Bush rushed to war without exhausting the remedies available to him, without exhausting the diplomacy necessary to put the U.S. in the strongest position possible, without pulling together the logistics and the plan to shore up Iraq immediately and effectively.

TIME: And you as Commander in Chief would not have made these mistakes but would have gone to war?

KERRY: I didn't say that.

TIME: I'm asking.

KERRY: I can't tell you.

TIME: Might the war have been avoided?

KERRY: Yes.

TIME: Through inspections?

KERRY: It's possible. It's not a certainty, but it's possible. I'm not going to tell you hypothetically when you've reached the point of exhaustion that you have to [use force] and your intelligence is good enough that it tells you you've reached that moment. But I can tell you this: I would have asked a lot of questions they didn't. I would have tried to do a lot of diplomacy they didn't.

[...]

TIME: Obviously it's good that Saddam is out of power. Was bringing him down worth the cost?

KERRY: If there are no weapons of mass destruction— and we may yet find some—then this is a war that was fought on false pretenses, because that was the justification to the American people, to the Congress, to the world, and that was clearly the frame of my vote of consent. I said it as clearly as you can in my speech. I suggested that all the evils of Saddam Hussein alone were not a cause to go to war.

TIME: So, if we don't find WMD, the war wasn't worth the costs? That's a yes?

KERRY: No, I think you can still—wait, no. You can't—that's not a fair question, and I'll tell you why. You can wind up successful in transforming Iraq and changing the dynamics, and that may make it worth it, but that doesn't mean [transforming Iraq] was the cause [that provided the] legitimacy to go. You have to have that distinction.

Uhh....OK.

So, let's see if I can wrap this up. If Kerry had been president, we wouldn't have gone to war. Unless we would have. Which we wouldn't. Unless he thought it was necessary. Which it wouldn't've been. But, you never know.

Oh, and diplomacy. Lots more of that. And happy Frenchmen. Having happy Frenchmen is absolutely key.

You can't even parody this. John Kerry is a perfect parody of himself. 

What's so great about the 70s?

(Review) Jim White, after seeing the new Starsky & Hutch movie, asks, "what's so great about the 70s?" As far as he can remember, they sucked.

In the new big-screen version of Starsky and Hutch, there comes a moment in which our cop heroes, bouffants bobbing and chunky cardigans flapping, leap into their red Ford Gran Torino with the go-faster flash down the side, gun the engine and head off in slick, roaring pursuit of the bad guys. Nothing wrong with it as a piece of cinema, except for this: the time is the mid-1970s, the film is a love letter to the decade that spawned the original television series on which it is based and the car into which our heroes leap is a 1975-vintage Ford. Which, in my experience, would have meant the scene ought to have concluded with the AA arriving to tow the motor away after it refused to start, despite vigorous application of WD40 and getting Huggy Bear in to give it a push.

That is what cars did in the 1970s: they wouldn't start. Or they conked out, as if guided by some malevolent map-reading gremlin, at precisely the midway point between your house and where you wanted to go. My memory of that time is littered with incidents involving us marooned on the side of the road, the bonnet up, from beneath which could be heard the intermittent growl of my dad failing to wrap an old rag round his imploded head gasket. One of the best-selling cars in the 1970s was the Austin Allegro. That really is all you need to know.

Actually, it was what most things did in the 1970s. Not a lot worked terribly well, especially in Britain. It was a decade of rubbish technology (remember the Stylophone?) It was a decade, too, of low-rent art, when Lulu covering David Bowie's The Man Who Sold the World was regarded as a cultural highlight. As for all the fashions lovingly re-created for the Starsky and Hutch movie, well, I had all that clobber. The two vice cops played by Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul were sartorial role models for adolescents round our way. The zip-up acrylic cardy, the shirt with the penny-round collars, the high waistband flares: my father wasn't wrong, I looked utterly ridiculous. Every movement I made, the cardigan would rub up enough static to power a small generator. Which was always useful, as most weeks included at least one power cut. I wore Brut deodorant and smelt like the consequences of an unfortunate chemical spillage. There was nothing cool or chic about my attire. And women were faced with a wardrobe almost as bad. Even Audrey Hepburn would have struggled to make cheesecloth blouses and stack-heeled espadrilles remotely elegant.

There have, naturally, been fashion disasters in every decade. But the cheapness, the ugliness, the cack-handedness of the 1970s look somehow chimed with the times. It always takes me aback when people talk about the good old days and I realise they mean the 1970s. Were they really around then? It seemed to me this was a decade draped in grey, a monochrome era of constant drizzle (though admittedly I was growing up in the suburbs of Manchester). There was none of the enormous, spectacular variety we take for granted now. Like food, for instance; the only time we ever came into contact with olive oil was when we had a surfeit of wax and had a couple of drops popped into the ear. Go into a supermarket in 1975 and ask the assistant where they kept the fresh tagliatelle and the most likely consequence would have been a bloody nose. They could flog you semolina, mind.

And as I remember, it was a time when everyone thought we were in permanent, unstoppable decline. Industrial decline, sporting decline, educational decline, a decline in respect for elders: there was a real sense that we were finished, couldn't cope, couldn't compete. We were useless.

It was much the same on this side of the pond. Remember the Oil Embargo? Malaise? Whip Inflation Now? Remember that in every year of the 1970s, Soviet communism took over another failed state?

One of the things that made the movie Miracle so interesting was watching how crappy things really were back then.

It took Reagan and Thatcher to change that feeling of malaise, the conviction of the 1970s that our best days were behind us.

Now, we're looking back on it like it was some happy fantasyland.

The lessons of Martha Stewart

(Review) Barbara Amiel discusses the outcome of the Martha Stewart trial for her British readers in the Telegraph. In doing so, she strikes an inappropriately cynical tone.

The jury convicted the American lifestyle diva Martha Stewart of something last Friday but one suspects they don't quite know what. "It's a victory for the little guys, who lose money in the market because of this kind of transaction," explained one of the jurors mysteriously.

Stewart's investigation and trial have cost the American taxpayer tens of millions of dollars. Hundreds of millions have been lost by pension funds and investors on the near-50-per-cent decline in value of her company's stock; Martha Stewart Living may have to wind up its affairs if her conviction stands, with the loss of jobs for about 15,000 employees, plus sub-contractors. Not so easy to see how that computes as a victory for the little people, but those who were interviewed on the streets of New York proclaimed it "the right thing to do"...

Stewart had made a sale of ImClone stock the day before the public announcement of its failure to get Federal Drug Administration clearance for its new cancer drug, and became suspected of insider trading. During the subsequent investigation, she voluntarily talked to various agencies. Silence would have served her better. There was scant evidence of insider trading so she was never charged with it, but her answers led to charges of lies, which turned into "obstruction of justice". The message of the case, if any, was to illustrate the value of "Taking the Fifth". Teaching white-collar Americans to behave like mafiosi when under investigation seems to me a dubious lesson.

OK, just because it's inappropriately cynical , doesn't mean it's not true.

And I love the quote from the juror in first 'graph. Let's see. Martha hears about some upcoming bad news, and she dumps her stock so she doesn't have to take a loss when the news goes public.

I see. And that causes the little guy to lose money, how?

There is a lesson here, and it's a conclusion I came to years ago as a young military policeman. It should be obvious, but evidently it isn't. So learn it, know it, live it: The police are not your friends.

First, all that television BS about just rambling off your rights at the time of arrest is a load of crap. In most agencies, the police are provided with little cards that have the specific Miranda warning they must give. They can't just rattle it off, they have to read it, verbatim, right off the card, lest some defense attorney get a confession tossed because the police didn't mirandize the suspect properly.

Second, if you make a written statement, the statement has the exact same Miranda warning printed on it that you initial line by line. I carried my Miranda card for years, and it tells you very, very important things. Listen to the Miranda warning:

I am [Title and Name] of the [Agency Name]. You are under arrest for the suspected crime of [Crime]. You have the right to remain silent, that is, to say nothing at all. Any statement you make, oral or written, may be used as evidence against you in a criminal trial, or other administrative or judicial proceedings. You have the right to have the counsel of an attorney, and to have the attorney present during any questioning. If you desire an attorney and cannot afford one, an attorney will be made available to you at the government's expense. If you desire, you may obtain counsel of your own choosing at your own expense. You have the right to stop questioning at any time. Do you understand these rights as I have read them to you? Do you desire an attorney? Are you willing to answer questions?

The only thing you should say to the police, unless you are completely innocent (and even then, you should confine yourself to a categorical denial of all charges, until you see an attorney), is "Yes, Yes, No."

Think about what the cops are telling you. In plain language, the Miranda Warning is:

You don't have to say a frickin' thing to me. In fact, if you do talk to me, and it helps me screw you to the wall, then that's what I'll do. I'll give you an attorney before you talk to me, so he can explain this stuff to you. If you start to talk, then come to your senses, you can shut the hell up any time you want.

Take his advice and shut up. Even the cop is telling you he isn't your friend.

I used to be amazed at the sheer percentage of people that would sit and listen to you read this to them, nod sagely, then proceed to talk themselves into a 6x9 prison cell. I would sit across the table from a guy, and would be just slack-jawed with stupefaction as he denied any wrongdoing, but then proceeded to tell me exactly how he did it.

I would smile, and nod at him to continue. But inside, I would think, "Shut the f*** up, you moron! You're sending yourself to prison for years!" Then I'd smile some more, and ask if he wanted a nice cold Coke or anything.

Oh, and don't make the mistake of thinking that the portly detective with the off-the-rack business suit and thin, 1980s, striped, rep tie is some sort of fool, who you can talk your way around. He may look blank when you mention Camus and Sartre, but he's spent a lifetime being lied to by sociopaths who are a lot better at lying than you are. He may not know much, but I guarantee that any Detective Second Grade will be able to see through your BS. This is what he does every single day, and you don't have a chance against this guy when it comes to creative dishonesty.

So, just keep your frickin' mouth shut, except for repeated demands to see an attorney. Unless you are as innocent and as pure as the driven snow, talking to the police will not help you. In fact, it is far more likely to do quite the reverse.

If Martha Stewart had kept her mouth shut, she wouldn't have to worry now about what color of fleece throw goes best with gray concrete.   

Kerry depresses me

(Review) Jack Kelly points out that John Kerry isa perfect example of why the American people distrust the Democrats on matters of National Security.

Kerry also opposed aid to El Salvador when that country was being attacked by Marxist guerrillas, and aid to the Contras, who -- with U.S. help -- ultimately freed Nicaragua from a communist dictatorship. Kerry denounced the liberation of Grenada after a bloody Marxist coup there as "a bully's show of force," though he says now he didn't oppose the U.S. intervention.

Kerry voted against the liberation of Kuwait after Saddam Hussein invaded that country in 1990. Kerry also voted against lifting the arms embargo on Bosnia when that country was being attacked by Serbs allied with Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Though Kerry voted for the 2002 resolution authorizing the United States to go to war with Iraq, he now says Operation Iraqi Freedom was a mistake...

This record has caused some to wonder if there could ever be a circumstance where a President Kerry would use American military power without seeking Kofi Annan's permission first.

We now have an answer. In a meeting with the New York Daily News on Feb. 28, Kerry said he would have sent troops to Haiti even without international support to quell a popular uprising against (now deposed) President Jean Bertrand Aristide...

Kerry would not intervene in Iraq to overthrow a tyrant who was a danger to the United States. But he would intervene in Haiti to prop up a tyrant who was an enemy of the United States. There is a depressing consistency in this.

Imagining John Kerry as commander in chief gives me the same feeling I had when I saw Alec Baldwin playing Jimmy Doolittle in Pearl Harbor.

It's just wrong.

Where are the jobs?

(Review) Ronald Brownstein argues that the low rate of job creation is John Kerry's best bet for unseating Bush in November.

But job growth has stalled again under the second President Bush. With the government report Friday that the economy produced just 21,000 new jobs in February, total employment is down by more than 2.2 million since he took office...Fewer Americans were working in January 2003 than in January 2002. Even fewer Americans were working in January 2004 than in January 2003. Manufacturing employment has declined in every single month of the Bush presidency.

These are not numbers that scream four more years.

You know, this talk about job growth, using only the non-farm payrolls number, is a new phenomenon. In the past, the key figure for labor has been the unemployment rate, not the non-farm payrolls figure. Pretty much nobody ever gave a darn about non-farm payrolls politically in any past election year.

Bush 41 wasn't dumped because non-farm payrolls weren't expanding rapidly enough. He was dumped because the unemployment rate was 8%. Non-farm payrolls might have explained why the unemployment rate was 8%, but that's essentially all they do, explain why.

Non-farm payrolls--while fascinating to economists, and important for understanding who's working where--isn't the bottom line. The bottom line is whether or not everybody who wants a job can have one, and so far, with an employment rate below 6%, it looks like the answer pretty much is yes.

A 5.7% unemployment rate is pretty low, at least in the experience of anyone under 40. For instance, we went through the entire Reagan administration without the unemployment rate ever falling below 6%, and we were giddy with delight at how wonderful the jobs picture was.

The trouble with trying to use non-farm payrolls as some sort of employment Rosetta Stone, is that it doesn't tell us some important things. Fort example, from the name alone, you've probably already figured out that it doesn't count people who are employed in agriculture. It also doesn't count doctors, dentists, plumbers, web designers, house cleaners, dog walkers, hair stylists, Hollywood actors, and any number of other people who are self-employed.

The problem right now is that the non-farm payrolls number is telling us something quite different from what the unemployment rate is telling us. The non-farm payrolls number is telling us that we've lost 2.5 million jobs. At the same time, the unemployment rate has declined from 6.4% to 5.7%. The number of "discouraged" job seekers is right in the middle of the historical trend, so, we are all left wondering why the non-farm payrolls number is telling us we have 2.5 million less jobs, and the household survey from which the unemployment rate is derived is telling us we have 2 million more new jobs.

Democrats are hitting hard on the non-farm payrolls number. I don't think it's because that statistic has gained some important relevance over the last four years that it never had in the past. I think it's because if they try to argue about the unemployment rate they'll lose.

But non-farm payrolls is only part of the picture. It's the background. The subject of the picture is the rate of unemployment.   

No monopoly on 911

(Review) Charles Krauthammer defends the presidents use of 911 iconography in his re-election campaign.

The families have suffered. They deserve compassion and respect. But they do not own 9/11. This was not a house fire. This was not a train wreck. This was an act of war. And war is a national event.

It is precisely because it was a national event that the families have been accorded such extraordinary support and attention — from the initial outpouring of generosity to the consecration of the ground zero space and establishment of a memorial to the billions of dollars of taxpayer money for their compensation.

The survivors of those who die in house fires do not get anything like this. The Oklahoma City survivors received no public compensation. Why? Because while a house fire is tragedy and Oklahoma City was terrorism, 9/11 was war. And war, sadly, belongs to everyone.

The idea that because individual Americans died, 9/11 — whether as image, event or political issue — is outside the public domain is absurd. By that logic, Franklin Roosevelt would have been prevented from invoking Pearl Harbor in his 1944 re-election campaign. In fact, he not only invoked it many times ("The American people are not panicked easily," he said in a White House radio address just five days before the election. "Pearl Harbor proved that") but visited Pearl in July 1944, at the very kickoff of his campaign.

Sept. 11 was the most important event of our time, let alone of this presidential term. Sept. 11, its aftermath and the response — the War on Terror, the Bush doctrine of going after states and not just terrorists, and the implementation of that doctrine in both Afghanistan and Iraq — are central to deciding the fitness of George W. Bush to continue in office.

I'm sure the Democrats and their partisans would love to prevent W from saying a word about the War of Terror. In fact, that's about the only chance they have of winning.

It's official

(Review) Iraqi officials, after a weekend delay imposed Friday, have signed the country's new Interim Constitution, passing it unanimously.

Council President Mohammed Bahr al-Ulloum called the signing a "historic moment, decisive in the history of Iraq"..."There is no doubt that this document will strengthen Iraqi unity in a way never seen before," said Massoud Barzani, a Kurdish leader on the council.

Here's where we'll begin to see whether it's possible for Iraq to remain a unified and free nation. Iraq has no history of popular self-government, and the traditional notion of democracy in the Arab world is "one man, one vote, one time".

If the Iraqis can make this stick, and, at the end of the day, no matter how effective our efforts are, it's the Iraqis who'll determine the success or failure of them, then we'll have accomplished something of world-historical importance here. A free and more or less democratic--and stable--Iraq in the heart of the Arab world is a dagger pointed straight at the hearts of the Oriental despotisms practiced in much of that corner of the world.

India: Traditional look. Modern sass

Photo: AFP/File/Deshakalyan Chowdhury

The San Francisco Democrats

(Review) Harley Sorenson writes for the San Francisco Chronicle that...well..he writes a lot of silly crap. But it's the kind of silly crap the left loves to hear.

The Great Divider was at it again last week, rallying his religious fundamentalist troops in their never-ending war against the principles of freedom.

This is standard boilerplate. I hear it all the time: The religious right is intent on establishing a theocracy, an outcome that must be eternally guarded against.

Even if this were true, I fail to see why it is worrisome to any great extent, considering the successes the religious right has been having for the last 40 years or so. In that time, we have eliminated prayer in public schools, implemented abortion on demand, prevented the displays of any religious symbolism on public property at Christmas, removed the 10 commandments from state courts, etc. And currently, our biggest social argument is about allowing gay marriage.

I suspect that a visitor from outer space would be less convinced that the right was waging a war against freedom, than that the secular left has been waging war--mainly successfully--against traditional religious social mores.

It's an interesting, if dishonest rhetorical device. San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom can illegally issue marriage licenses to gay couples, and have city officials perform weddings that are clearly illegal under California law. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, in apparent ignorance of the separation of powers, can order the legislature and executive to pass laws legalizing gay marriage. These things are perfectly reasonable. If conservatives object to them and argue that something like the FMA might be necessary, they are "waging never-ending war against the principles of freedom."

That is Orwellian.

What the Pretender in Chief proposed last week was not a constitutional amendment in "defense" of marriage so much as a proposal to weaken the principles of inalienable rights, equality, justice for all and the pursuit of happiness.

Oddly enough, at no time in the history US jurisprudence, or the English common law from which it is descended, has gay marriage ever been legal. Yet, somehow, this is now a fundamental civil right, despite our previous ignorance of it.

If we don't allow it right now, then we're just shredding the constitution, evidently. Under this construction, opposing viewpoints are just mistaken, they are assaults on human freedom. There is only one possible reasonable position, i.e. support for gay marriage. And if you don't hold that position, then you are morally deficient.

Doesn't he have more important tasks than stirring up the masses to diminish human rights?

The implication is that George W. Bush just woke up one day and decided some fags needed to be bashed. But, of course, that's not how this whole mess got started, is it? W didn't take on gay marriage as some sort of odd, unexpected shot right out of the blue.

This whole national debate was started by the advocates of gay marriage, who've pushed so far that they've begun engaging in outright defiance of the law in order to have it.

But Bush is the divisive one.

Nobody wants to talk about it, but the world is running out of oil. Predictions vary wildly, but some experts say we'll squeeze the last drop out of Mother Earth around 2050, perhaps sooner.

The Bush administration, shallow as it is, seems determined to cope with that oncoming threat by grabbing control of the world's remaining oil. If we have all the oil and they don't, the thinking seems to go, we'll be cock of the walk forever. Is that coping?

Yet, we haven't taken one barrel of the stuff out of Iraq. And watching gas prices go to $2.25 per gallon from $1.60 a few months ago doesn't lead me to believe we've managed to greatly increase the supply of the stuff coming from anywhere else, either.

This was the same kind of stupidity current in 1991, the last time we went to war to steal Iraq's oil. Somehow, however, despite going to war for it twice in little more than a decade, we still haven't managed to steal a drop of it.

You'd think that the Jews--oops, pardon me, I meant neoconservatives--who are really running the government could have at least managed to get an occasional tanker full out of the country in the past year, wouldn't you?

Oh, and the idea that we'll be out of oil in 2050? Not quite. We have literally centuries worth of oil shale that we haven't event touched yet. And that doesn't count additional centuries of coal.

Moreover, despite warnings for the last 40 years that the end of all known oil reserves were just twenty or thirty years away, we've somehow managed to extend the life of our known oil reserves, either through new discoveries, or through new technologies that allow us to get much more oil out of currently known reserves.

And even if that weren't true, I suspect that, in 50 years, petroleum won't be quite as important as it is today. In the past two decades, we've seen some amazing leaps in battery technology, for instance, and research on hydrogen power and even nuclear fusion proceeds apace.

On the home front, our economy is in shambles. Every level of government is struggling -- unsuccessfully -- to meet its commitments. The state of California, wallowing in debt, is seeking to fix its problems by going further into debt.

This is delusional. The unemployment rate is still 5.6%, which is historically associated with what we used to call "full employment". Economic growth, at last look was at an annualized pace of 4.1%. Maybe this is bad news in some bizarro reverse-world, but by every historical measure it's pretty damn good news.

This reminds me of the Clinton campaign bemoaning the "worst economy since Herbert Hoover" in 1992. (I'm sure how we all remember that in 1991, the unemployment rate reached 25% as wave after wave of banks failed, and one-half of the population lost their life savings.)

That was stupid then, and it's stupid now.

As I said in my recent post on Populist Leftism, it is simply irrational. Known fact and historical experience is irrelevant to people like this. But it's Christians who they decry as fundamentalist.

"It's the worst economy since Herbert Hoover is I say it is", seems to be the argument from the left. Well, you may say the law of gravity doesn't apply to you, but I wouldn't suggest leaping off any tall structures.  

Social Security Ideologues

(Review) Paul Krugman is hopping mad that some ideologues have been sniping at Social Security, trying to use scare-mongering in order to implement the president's Reckless Scheme™ of privatization. It's all a bunch of hogwash, says Krugman.

Social Security's problem, such as it is, is a matter of demography: as the population ages, the number of retirees will rise faster than the number of workers. As a result, benefit costs will rise by about 2 percent of G.D.P. over the next 30 years, and creep up slowly thereafter. By comparison, making the Bush tax cuts permanent would reduce revenue by at least 2.5 percent of G.D.P., starting now. That — combined with the fact that Social Security, unlike the rest of the federal government, is currently running a surplus — is why the Bush tax cuts are a much bigger problem for the nation's fiscal future than the Social Security shortfall.

Oh. I see. So, really, it's all Bush's fault.

The trouble with being Paul Krugman, though, is that you have people like Donald Luskin fact-checking you. And as Luskin writes:

Here's an example of the kind of "alarming report" that Krugman warns against:

In 2010 ... the boomers will begin to retire ... The budgetary effects of this demographic tidal wave are straightforward to compute, but so huge as almost to defy comprehension ... Yet if you think even briefly about what the Federal budget will look like in 20 years, you immediately realize that we are drifting inexorably toward crisis; if you think 30 years ahead, you wonder whether the Republic can be saved.

That "alarming report" was "generated" in 1996 by Paul Krugman himself, and it was published by an "ideologically driven institution" called the New York Times.

But, 1996 was before Krugman's harrowing descent into madness.

I'm Stumped

(Review) Well, After giving the employment numbers a careful look, I admit it: I don't know what the heck is going on. I just don't.

I mean, it's obvious that employers are still reluctant to add new hires, and they're squeezing every drop ofproductivity out of their current staff. But the why is beyond me.

For months we've seen all these precursors to hiring, such increases in temporary workers, only to be disappointed by the non-farm payroll numbers.

But, it seems like the only organizations currently hiring are governments, which accounts for the entire 21k new jobs.

This is clearly a surprise to just about everyone. The consensus estimate for today's report was 125k. We were 100k short.

The unemployment rate remained unchanged, though. And the rate at which disappointed job seekers are dropping outof the labor force is pretty much in its historical median range. So, there are about 2 million people who, according to the household survey, consider themselves to be employed, but who aren't working at jobs counted as non-farm payrolls.

As far as I can tell, no one really knows what's happening in the labor market. Maybe those 2 million employed people are doing consulting work, web design, plumbing, or what have you. But we don't really have any way to actually know, because we just don't collect that kind of data, so a lot of the employment market is just opaque to us.

But this wierd disconnect between the low unemployment rate and the low rate of job creation is hard to understand.

Bush lied...by telling the truth

(Review) Debra Saunders got to ask John Kerry a few questions at the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board meeting. She asked him to outline precisely how bush lied to him.

Kerry's answer was that Washington insiders believed that Bush didn't mean what he said. "I think that you had a hard-line group (then Pentagon adviser) Richard Perle, (Deputy Defense Secretary) Paul Wolfowitz and probably (Vice President Dick) Cheney. But when Brent Scowcroft and Jim Baker (former advisers to the first President Bush) weighed in, very publicly in op-eds in the New York Times and the (Washington) Post, the chatter around Washington and (Secretary of State Colin) Powell in particular, who was very much of a different school of thought, was really that the president hadn't made up his mind. He was looking for an out. That's what a lot of people thought."

What about what Bush said to the U.N.? That was "rhetorical," Kerry answered. And "a whole bunch of very smart legitimate people" not running for president thought as he did. "So most people, actually on the inside, really felt that (Bush) himself was looking for the way out to sort of satisfy Cheney, satisfy Wolfowitz, but not get stuck." Kerry continued, "The fact that he jumped and went the other way, I think, shocked them and shocked us."

So Kerry was "misled" because he believed that Bush didn't mean what Bush said.

Talk about your dirty tricks...The scariest part is that Kerry looked as if he believed what he said.

Essentially, Kerry's position is that Bush "misled" him by doing precisely what he said, rather than Clintoning out of the whole thing at the least minute.

That isn't evidence of presidential deception. That's something we call "self-deception".

The Modern Inquisition

(Review) Arnold Kling writes that Galileo's inquisitors were models of probity and common sense compared to the economic idiocy that our members of Congress spout when economists cross them.

To close the deficit, economists talk about a "menu of pain." As Niall Ferguson and Laurence Kotlikoff put it, "We could either, starting today, raise income taxes (individual and corporate) by 69 percent; or we could raise payroll taxes by 95 percent; or we could cut Social Security and Medicare benefits by 56 percent; or we could cut federal discretionary spending by more than 100 percent (which, of course, is impossible)."

Raising taxes to cover the gap may also be impossible. That is because raising tax rates by a given percent does not raise tax revenues by an equivalent amount. For example, if you were to raise personal tax rates significantly, families with children would find it a losing proposition to have both parents work while paying for child care. Consequently, a large segment of the workforce would drop out, and the government would lose that revenue.

The structure of entitlements, in which contributions and benefits are not linked, is fundamentally unsound. It is inherently risky, because of the temptation of Congress to add benefits without finding the means to pay for them. The result is that we face a very large deficit, primarily in Medicare, over the next thirty years or more.

Economists tell Congress unpleasant truths, and Congressmen call for the economists to be fired, a la Gregory Mankiw and Outsourcing, or Alan Greenspan and Social Security. That doesn't change the unpleasant truth, however.

Two Americas

(Review) Hugh Hewitt writes that John Edwards is right about one thing: There are two Americas.

The dividing line between Americans runs between those who are serious about the world and the nation and those who are silly on these subjects.

Silly people listen to Michael Moore. Silly people issue marriage licenses to couples ineligible to receive them because they feel that it is important to do so. Silly folks think Dick Cheney is still running Halliburton and that Halliburton is running the war. Silly people make ads for websites that feature George W. Bush morphing into Hitler. Silly people think we've got Osama bin Laden stashed away in a cave waiting for a September debut. Silly people look to Maureen Dowd for insight into the world.

Now under normal circumstances this isn't a bad thing. You can, after all, simply ignore the silly people, who generally do no real harm.

But sometimes, too many people begin slipping over into silliness. People who you'd otherwise regard as rational adults. That's when things get dicey.

Because many Americans have slipped into the silly category, the rest of us are beginning to forget that those folks are indeed silly. Some people once thought of as serious have adopted silly positions. Such as, for instance, Madeleine Albright speculating that the United States has Osama under wraps. We respect the office she once held and resist branding Albright as silly. And thus some small bit of credibility becomes attached to her bizarre thought-process.

We get so used to the silliness that we forget that it is nonsense on stilts.

You know, Kerry's initials are JFK

(Review) Peggy Noonan has a delightfully snarky ptofile of John Kerry in the Wall Street Journal. Some choice tidbits:

The other day I watched a clip of Mr. Kerry's famous testimony to Congress on Vietnam 30 years ago. Have you ever heard it? It was a total JFK impersonation--"hoff" for half, etc. In the pictures that exist of Lt. Kerry in Vietnam he seems startlingly similar in pose, squint and physical attitude to pictures of John Kennedy with his crew in World War II. PT boats, Swift boats; "Mahs-CHEW-sitts," the initials JFK . . .

If you saw a generation of Republican candidates doing a physical imitation of Ronald Reagan or George Bush the elder, would you find it weird? I think you would. The only person in politics who has ever tried to morph himself into Ronald Reagan was Al Gore in his first debate with George W. Bush. He even wore makeup that echoed the heightened color of Mr. Reagan's cheeks. He wound up looking not like Mr. Reagan but like a turn-of-the-century madam in a San Francisco whorehouse, but that's not important...

Many intelligent people think Kerry will decide to pick Hillary Clinton for vice president. This is almost touchingly absurd. First of all, Hillary isn't waiting at home for the guy to call. If she wants it she'll let him know, but she doesn't want it. Why should she? She's already been president, as it were. She's already worked hand in hand in a White House with a guy who wasn't as sharp as she was.

All of it is really quite good. Noonan's on a roll.

Weapons? We don' need no stinkin' weapons!

(Review) The editors of USA Today beleive we need a modern, high-tech fighting force. The best way to obtain this, they believe, is by cancelling the newest, high-tech weapons systems.

They start by congratulating the Pentagon for killing the Comanche helicopter, then make some other suggestions for program cuts.

F/A-22 stealth fighter. A favorite of the Air Force, the aircraft is slated to soak up another $5 billion in development costs next year alone. The F/A-22 is designed for air-to-air combat against Soviet warplanes. Such a capability no longer is a high priority. What's more, the Air Force already has a second fighter in development, the Joint Strike.

First, the F-22 wasn't designed to go against Soviet warplanes, or rather, it is, even if true, irrelevant. The F-22 was designed to go against any next-generation fighter aircraft. It's purpose was to marry stealth technology into a supersonic air-superiority fighter, and to provide a replacement for the aging F-15 and F-16 fleets, both of which are nearly 30 years old!

And the talk about the Joint Strike Fighter is simply foolish. The JSF is a ground attack aircraft. The F-22 is ain air superiority fighter. Those are two entirely different combat roles. They are simply not equivalent planes, because they each do different things. The Navy and Marines need the JSF because Air-to-Ground and Close Air Support taskings are their most common combat roles. The USAF needs it to replace the 30 year old A-10, which was supposed to be retired a decade ago, and the F-15 Strike Eagle, the two-seat, air-to-ground strike version of the F-15.

The F-22 does things the JSF can't do, and vice-versa.

V-22 transport. The Osprey, a battlefield aircraft that takes off and lands like a helicopter but flies like a plane, has great appeal. But crashes during development have claimed 30 lives and raised doubts about the technology. Vice President Cheney tried to abandon it when he was defense secretary in 1989, but the Marine Corps and its allies have kept the developmental program alive.

Again, the central problem here is that the Marines are trying to replace a 30-40 year-old helicopter fleet. The USMC is still using CH-53 helicopters made in the 60's to transport troops. In other words, Marines are being ferried around today in the same helicopters their fathers were transported in during Vietnam!

So, kill the Osprey. Don't try to think about fixing what, if anything, is wrong with the aircraft. Just scrap it.

Now tell me what the MArines will be using to get their guys to the battlefield in 10 years.

Uh-huh. That's what I thought.

We have huge fleets of 30-year old crap still flying, and it needs to be replaced now. It's too late to go back to the drawing board, and we certainly don't want to kill weapons systems because, like the F-22, they're »far more advanced than we need«.

That's simply a stupid argument. We don't need the F-22 right now, fighting against suicide bombers. But, since my amazing mental powers aren't working right now, I can't guarantee that we won't need it tomorrow. The future is not predictable, and the proper procurement choice is to have the most advanced stuff possible on hand at any given moment.

If you don't need it, having it isn't a crisis. If you do need and you don't have it, that's a crisis.

How much do you "contribute" to Social Security

(Review) Take a look at you last pay stub. No, go ahead. I'll stay right here 'til you're done.

Ok, now multiply that by the number of times you get paid each year. Now, multiply that by the number of years left until you can retire. Finally, add the amount that you estimate you have already paid into social security. This total is what we will call the Grand Total. Remember it.

Now, read this:

On Jan. 31, 1940, a check, number 00-000-001, for $22.54 was issued to Ida May Fuller of Ludlow, Vt., making her the first recipient of recurring monthly Social Security payments. Then, in an act of dubious citizenship, she lived to 100, dying in January 1975, having received $22,000 in benefits. That did not matter because in 1940 there were 42 workers for every retiree. Today there are 3.2 to 1. In 2030 there will be 2.2 to 1. Nowadays parents have fewer children than they used to, the children are geographically more dispersed, and their sense of obligation is attenuated by distance and divorce.

Since 1963, medical costs have grown faster than the economy. And given the dynamism of medical science that is multiplying expensive diagnostic and therapeutic technologies -- pharmacological and others -- medical costs are likely to grow even faster relative to the economy.

Kerry and Edwards simply recoil from contemplating the consequences of these facts, hoping, like Dickens's Mr. Micawber, that something will turn up. The Bush administration has a plan (individual accounts investing a portion of Social Security taxes) for coping with the facts, but no discernible plan -- certainly none it will discuss -- for economies that will make possible paying the transition costs. All of which suggests that entitlement reform remains one of those contentious issues that cannot be debated in an election year or the year before one. Meaning: ever.

Now, take your Grand Total and kiss it goodbye. 'Cause it's already gone, baby.

Aren't convinced yet? Okay, try this:

According to Laurence J. Kotlikoff of Boston University, the present value of the gap between promised outlays and projected revenue is $51 trillion -- more than four times the nation's annual GDP. Today the household wealth of Americans -- the value of their houses, 401(k)s, cars, refrigerators, toasters, socks, everything -- is about $42 trillion. In impeccable Greenspan-speak, the government's truth-teller said that "significant structural adjustments" will be necessary.

In other words, even if every one us went out, sold everything we owned, and lived in the streets as homeless people, we'd still be $9 trillion in the hole. And I know Larry Kotlikoff. If he says it, you can take it to the bank.

Thank goodness for those Democrats who are standing up to prevent the president from touching social security with his "reckless schemes", huh?

Because it woudn't be right to let him cause, you know, a funding crisis, or anything. Not when everything's so peachy right now.

No need for any reform here. Nope. No, sir.

Pick Kerry, and get waffles for free!

(Review) Michael Grunwald helpfully provides a list, which even he admits isn't complete, of John Kerry's flip-flops. As the subhead of the story goes, "If you don't like the Democratic nominee's views, just wait a week."

Evidently, they got their economics degree through one of those email deals

(Review) You simply have to read this entry from the DNC's blog slowly to get the full flavor of its stupidity.

Today, after it was reported that America's economy grew by only 4.1% in the final quarter of 2004, Bush Commerce Secretary Don Evans tried to gloss over the bad news by noting that "conventional economic measures may not be sufficiently capturing the full strength of our recovery."

Only 4.1%?! Only?!

Listen, in a mature industrial economy 3% is considered the trend rate of growth. Jon Henke at QandO points out that this is a growth rate that's better than 9 out of the 19 quarterly growth rates of the 90s boom.

This isn't just stupidity, this is stupidity on toast.

Even better, one of the commentors to this blog entry, a certain Eli Blake, wiped the drool off his chin and whipped out his red crayon to scribble:

1: Correction: the figures are that the economy grew at an annualized rate of 4.1% since the same quarter last year. A growth rate of 4.1% by itself during a quarter would be very good. But taken as a yearly rate, it is mediocre at best (just keeping slightly ahead of population growth).

Are you really sure about that math there, Eli? 'Cause if our population growth rate is 4%, that means that by the year 2022, the population will have doubled, resulting in 567 million Americans.

You sure you don't wanna check that math? I mean, there were 135 million Americans in 1942, and 280 million in 2000. So doubling the US population, even with a great honkin' baby boom in the middle, took 58 frickin' years.

Now you're implying we can double the population in 18 years. With half of us already over 40 years of age.

I guess I better get busy.

This, my friends, is why so many people refer to the Democrats as the "stupid party".  

Blatant Anti-Romanism

(Review) I haven't written about Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ, mainly because I am, despite--or because of--my fundamentalist, pentecostal, Christian upbrining, almost entirely areligious.

And because I haven't seen it.

But John O'Sullivan, who has, writes that the film's critics, keen to delve into the supposed anti-semitism of the film, miss something important entirely.

Pilate was not a decent fellow but a contemptible villain. These reviewers have seized on the different portrayals of Pilate and the Jewish high priest, Caiaphas as evidence that Gibson's film is anti-Semitic.

Pilate is portrayed as a sympathetic character, they argue, who wants to spare the innocent Christ but who yields to the demands of Caiaphas and the mob that He should be crucified. Caiaphas, however, harbors no such reluctance. He agitates clearly for Christ's death. And this is undoubtedly what Gibson's film shows — just as it is also undoubtedly the account in the Gospels.

But is it anti-Semitic? For what the critics miss is that this account makes Pilate a far worse villain than Caiaphas. After all, Caiaphas believed that Christ had committed the ultimate sin of blasphemy by claiming to be the Son of God. As a leading representative of religious laws that condemned adulterers to death by stoning, he was almost bound to call for His execution. Caiaphas is making a terrible mistake. He may also have corrupt political motives for his actions. But he is plainly sincere in believing that, however conveniently, he has the law of God on his side.

Pilate is on much weaker ground. He condemns to death a man he believes to be innocent — and he does so, moreover, in a shifty manner that seeks to fix all guilt for the murder on Caiaphas and the mob and to exculpate himself.

From the standpoint of the New Testament, according to the traditional teaching of the Christian church, and in Mel Gibson's movie, Pilate is by far the greater villain. And if any charge of bigotry can be sustained against Gibson, it is that of anti-Romanism since in addition to Pilate's murderous cowardice, the Roman soldiers are shown gleefully enjoying their torture of Christ.

Even as I child, I always thought the scriptural account made Pilate out to be a weasel. His wife warns him not to have anything to do with Jesus, because she's had nightmares about the whole thing. He pleads with the crowds to crucify Barabbas, who was, by all accounts, a fairly nasty fellow, instead of Big J.

Yet, in the end, he washes his hands of Jesus' blood, which is a pretty neat trick since he's the only guy who can actually order a crucifixion. I always thought he was contemptible.

All Pilate had to do was mobilize the troops, given the crowd a taste of the gladius, and they would've meekly enjoyed a piping hot cup of STFU.

Caiaphas and the majority of the Sanhedrin I always thought of as fools maybe, and somewhat corrupt and rigid, but, by their standards the J-man was a blasphemer. There was, of course, nothing for it but to have him bumped off.

But Roman law was, at least at that stage of the Empire, still supposed to be about justice, and Pilate knowingly had Jesus whacked despite his innocence, in order to try and keep the civil discord down to a dull roar.

And, of course, the sad thing is that it didn't work. I mean, look at the message he sent to the crowd. "Hey people, this guy is innocent. He hasn't broken Roman law. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm gonna have him stiffed, but, hey, I'm really upset about it." What kind of message do you think that gave the crowd about Roman "justice".

And don't think the Jews didn't get the message. Pilate ended up having to have mass crucifixions of troublemakers anyway, and eventually, an outright rebellion that ended up with the Romans destroying Jerusalem and driving the Jews into exile. So, putting the crowd to the sword on that Friday wouldn't've hurt anybody.

Well, nobody Roman, I mean. It would've been a bit touch on the crowd, obviously.

Of course, if you're a Christian, you know that Jesus had to die that day. God had already made it clear to him that his sacrificial death was a necessity. "Sorry, Son, but letting 'this cup pass' from you would be a real deal-breaker for me."

The fact that Pilate was a cynical, amoral weasel just helped speed things along. But it doesn't make him any less contemptible, though. 

Nick Kristoff on Gay Marriage

(Review) Nice piece today by Nick Kristoff, comparing gay marriage to interracial marriage (Kristoff, who shares a Pulitzer with his Chinese-American wife, Sheryl WuDunn, heartily recommends miscegenation), showing how attitudes change over time.

Shakespeare's "Othello" used to be among the hardest plays to stage in America. Although the actors playing Othello were white, they wore dark makeup, so audiences felt "disgust and horror," as Abigail Adams said. She wrote, "My whole soul shuddered whenever I saw the sooty heretic Moor touch the fair Desdemona."

"Sooty heretic". Well, that about says it all, huh?

In the last half-century, there has been a stunning change in racial attitudes. All but nine states banned interracial marriages at one time, and in 1958, a poll found that 96 percent of whites disapproved of marriages between blacks and whites. Yet in 1997, 77 percent approved...

Mr. Bush is an indicator of a similar revolution in views — toward homosexuality — but one that is still unfolding. In 1994, Mr. Bush supported a Texas antisodomy law that let the police arrest gays in their own homes. Now the Bushes have gay friends, and Mr. Bush appoints gays to office without worrying that he will turn into a pillar of salt.

Social conservatives like Mr. Bush are right in saying that marriage is "the most fundamental institution in civilization." So we should extend it to America's gay minority — just as marriage was earlier extended from Europe's aristocrats to the masses.

Neatly done. It's hard to think of a more compelling argument, or one that goes to the heart of fairness.

And, for those who are concerned about protecting traditional marriage, Kristoff offers these observations.

Conservatives can fairly protest that the gay marriage issue should be decided by a political process, not by unelected judges. But there is a political process under way: state legislatures can bar the recognition of gay marriages registered in Sodom-on-the-Charles, Mass., or anywhere else. The Defense of Marriage Act specifically gives states that authority.

Yet the Defense of Marriage Act is itself a reminder of the difficulties of achieving morality through legislation. It was, as Slate noted, written by the thrice-married Representative Bob Barr and signed by the philandering Bill Clinton. It's less a monument to fidelity than to hypocrisy.

If we're serious about constitutional remedies for marital breakdowns, we could adopt an amendment criminalizing adultery. Zamfara, a state in northern Nigeria, has had success in reducing AIDS, prostitution and extramarital affairs by sentencing adulterers to be stoned to death.

Short of that, it seems to me that the best way to preserve the sanctity of American marriage is for us all to spend less time fretting about other people's marriages — and more time improving our own.

It's the old "speck in the neighbor's eye, beam in my own" argument. You know, the one Jesus talked about.

Remember, it's the diamonds you're looking at

(Review) I love the caption Yahoo! News pictures has for this photo:

This detail photograph shows the diamond-studded dress from Randi Rahm worn by Maria Menounos, 'Entertainment Tonight' host for the Oscar Arrivals telecast, on the red carpet at the 76th annual Academy Awards (news - web sites) in Hollywood, California February 29, 2004. The one-of-a-kind dress is emblazoned with 3,000 hand-sewn round, princess and marquis-cut colored stones totaling two thousand carats, weighs 2.5 lbs and is worth $2.5 million. REUTERS/Mike Blake

Mmmmm, diamonds...

Is Iraqi Democracy doomed before it can even start?

(Review) Daniel Pipes thinks so. Most people have taken the compromise wording of the Iraqi Interim Constitution that the Sharia would be "a source" rather than "the source" of Iraqi law to mean a victory for moderates.

Pipes, however, sees it differently.

This appears to be a successful compromise. It means, as council members explained in more detail, that legislation may not contradict either the ''universally agreed upon tenets of Islam'' or the quite liberal rights guaranteed in other articles of the interim constitution (including protections for free speech, free press, religious expression, rights of assembly, and due process, plus an independent judiciary and equal treatment under the law).

But there are two reasons to see the interim constitution as a signal of victory for militant Islam.

First, the compromise suggests that while all of the sharia may not be put into place, every law must conform with it.

As one pro-sharia source put it, ''We got what we wanted, which is that there should be no laws that are against Islam.'' The new Iraq may not be Saudi Arabia or Iran, but it will include substantial portions of Islamic law.

Second, the interim constitution appears to be only a way station; Islamists will surely try to gut its liberal provisions, thereby making sharia effectively ''the source'' of Iraqi law. Those who want this change -- including Ayatollah Sistani and the Governing Council's current president -- will presumably continue to press for their vision. Iraq's leading militant Islamic figure, Muqtada al-Sadr, has threatened that his constituency will ''attack its enemies'' if sharia is not ''the source.''

When the interim constitution does take force, militant Islam will have blossomed in Iraq.

I hope he's wrong. Unfortunately, he rarely is when it comes to this sort of thing. 

Gay Marriage: Our newest weapon in the War on Terror

(Review) Christopher Hitchens writes that, no matter what else you may feel about it, gay marriage does have the attractive result of driving our Islamist enemies even madder than they already are.

When I become bored or irritated by the gay marriage battle--and I do, I sometimes do--I like to picture the writhing faces and hoarse yells of the mullahs and the fanatics. Godless hedonistic America, not content with allowing divorce and pornography, has taken from us our holy Taliban and our upright Saddam. It sends Jews and unveiled female soldiers to our lands, and soon unnatural brotherhood will be in the armed forces of the infidels. And now the godless have an election where all they discuss is the weddings of men to men and women to women!

Take that, Osama!

The anti-democratic nature of the Left

(Review) Jonah Goldbewrg writes that, for all the lip service the Left gives to having more "democracy", they sure seem to shy away from it when their pet issues are at stake. Hence, their preference for a "Living" constitution.

Most of the liberals invoking the inviolability of the Constitution in the debate against the FMA are the same liberals who generally invoke the doctrine of a "living Constitution," which demands that we constantly "reinterpret" the document.

For example, in 2000 when asked what kind of judges he'd appoint, Al Gore replied, "I would look for justices of the Supreme Court who understand that our Constitution is a living and breathing document, that it was intended by our founders to be interpreted in the light of the constantly evolving experience of the American people."

Are you cottoning on to my confusion yet? Liberals believe that the Constitution shouldn't be literally changed but they advocate a constantly changing meaning for what's already in the document.

It's so much simpler, you see, to get some tame judges to declare that the Constitution protects your pet issue than it is to go to the people and request democratic change. Especially if you consider the public to mainly be made up of benighted, racist homophobes who will never be convinced to do the "right" thing.

I guess all that democracy talk is just fine, but only as long as you're winning, huh?

I guess it's OK for judges to read into the Constitution a meaning, such as the "right" to gay marriage, that no one else has discovered for the previous two and a quarter centuries, but amending the document itself, by 3/2 majorities in both houses of Congress and 3/4 of the state legislatures, well, that would just be wrong.

Don't get me wrong, I'm against both a court-created right to gay marriage and a constitutional amendment to prevent it, I just find the Left's constitutional position to be laughably hypocritical.

For what it's worth

(Review) Clinton political advisor and noted foot-fetishist Dick Morris writes that the Democrats made a big mistake last night in picking Kerry.

The lieutenant governor of Mike Dukakis will not wear well before the American people. His votes on taxes, terrorism and the death penalty will demonstrate that he is another in a long line of Massachusetts liberals who appear at first blush to be winners but who soon fade into also-rans.

Kerry has missed more than a third of the votes in the Senate during the current 108th Congress. This year, he has missed almost all of them. Voters will not be tolerant of a man who picks up his paycheck and doesn't do the job.

Bush is doing exactly the right thing in pouncing on Kerry the moment the polls close on Super Tuesday with negative ads that define him as the extreme liberal he is. Already, according to pollster Scott Rasmussen, 51 percent of voters feel that their taxes will go up if Kerry wins.

In the coming weeks, Bush will hammer at Kerry until we look back and wonder why we ever thought the Massachusetts senator could have won in the first place.

By then, of course, it will be too late. The nominating process is so frontloaded that the Democrats will be stuck with the flawed Kerry candidacy for months as he slowly twists in the wind.

And another thing. Even though I've never believed that a lot of money can buy you a political office, I also know that having a lot of money is useful.

At the moment, George W. Bush has $140 million. John Kerry has -$1 million. Do the math.

Bush is gonna hammer Kerry like a cheap ten-penny nail for being a Taxachussetts liberal, while Kerry, one million in the hole, will have to sit there and take it.

Kerry has to hope for the situation in Iraq, or the War on Terror goes seriously south, to give him a shot at the presidency. That's an advantage for Kerry, because so much of what happens there is completely out of Bush's control.

Outside of that, though, Kerry doesn't fill anybody with scintillant delight.

He's not a real senator, he just plays one on TV

(Review) Well, that's not true, John Kerry is actually a senator. But he seems like a caricature of one, and Jeff Jacoby writes that doesn't make his election to the presidency any easier.

As spring and summer give way to fall, it will gradually dawn on many of them that Kerry isn't actually saying anything. What was true of the first President Bush, they will discover, is true of Kerry: He has no "vision thing." He has a sonorous answer to every question, but the more he talks -- and he talks a lot; his default setting is "filibuster" -- the less voters will be able to put their finger on why he wants to be president or whether anything about him is more than an inch deep.

I'm not sure I can take another eight months of Kerry saying, "Bring. It. On."

Just kill me now.

The people have spoken

(Review) The california ballot propositions, of which there were very important issues at stake, appear to have been correctly decided.

Prop 55: It's for the children!™

Not tonight it isn't. 52.4% NO

Prop 56: We won't raise your taxes! No, Really, We really, really promise not to! Unless you say it's OK by passing this proposition.

Well, it's not OK. 63.5% NO

Prop 57: Rolling our short-term debt into 30-year bonds so we can afford to pay the frickin' things.

Not that we have much choice. 60.4% YES

Prop 58: Note to Sacramento: Don't even think of trying this crap again.

No borrowing, no spending increases over revenues, build a rainy day fund. 71.% YES

Sometimes, my faith in the electorate is restored. 

UPDATE:

And sometimes it isn't. In a come from behind win, Prop 55 actually passed with 50.6% of the vote. What is it about Californians that makes them congenitally unable to say no to a school bond, no matter how big it is. So, when the Lej asks for higher taxes to pay off the $15 billion in debt we've just approved, keep your trap shut. You bought, you get to pay for it.

Well, actually, I do, too, which kinda steams me.

Populist Leftism: Our social cancer

I have been reading the new book by best-selling Military Sci-Fi author (and former paratrooper) John Ringo. The new book, co-written with Linda Evans is called The Road to Damascus. It describes how a peaceful, commercial republic is driven to civil war through the politics of populism and envy. Knowing a bit about how John thinks, I can't help suspecting that he's trying to say something about our society, in addition to telling a gripping story. I can't help but draw the parallels in my own mind either.

I am increasingly concerned that we are on the verge of sacrificing our liberty on the altar of leftist populism. Indeed, to a great extent, we have already done so, and have for the past thirty years, been edging closer to a totalitarian society.

Now, many of you will be immediately inclined to dismiss this as shrill complaining, or some far right-wing over-reaction. I am not, however, a right-winger, except perhaps as far as national defense issues go. Otherwise, I am strictly libertarian, and support a variety of non-right-wing things, like legalizing drugs, prostitution, and gambling, supporting gay marriage, and supporting a woman's choice to have an abortion, at least in the first trimester. But, if I'm not precisely a man of the Right, I am certainly not a man of the Left.

Why, you may ask, am I afraid of the ascendancy of the Left? What is so damaging about the Left's ideology that makes me hate and fear it so? Quite simply, I believe that modern Populist Leftism (which for convenience, I will refer to as PL) will destroy our civil society, and replace it with totalitarianism. Indeed, I believe that PL must lead inexorably to totalitarianism by its very nature, because the philosophical principles upon which it is based are antithetical to both self-government and personal liberty.

A list of PL's three most critical weaknesses, each of which I shall address in due course, would contain the following:

1) It is irrational, by which I mean that it promotes and maintains a variety of economic and social beliefs that are at variance with established facts. Indeed, in many ways, PL is not merely irrational, but anti-rational.

2) It promotes a dangerous concept of government.

3) It promotes social ideas that cause divisions and resentments between racial, class, and gender groups.

Irrationality is a dangerous condition, especially in a society like that of the West, which is fundamentally based on advancements in science and technology. Modern technological society simply cannot be maintained in a climate of Luddism, no matter how pleasingly disguised it is.

Listen to the Democratic presidential candidates discuss trade, which mainly seems to be a matter of "disloyal" companies "exporting jobs" overseas. There is so much economic and political nonsense in that one sentence, it's hard to know where to begin. We have known about the theory of comparative advantage for 150 years, more or less. There is a vast body of empirical historical evidence that refutes this idea of "fair" or "managed" trade, and yet the PL line persists.

In fact, the entire economic policy of the PL is taken, either in whole or in part, from Marx. There is no need to attempt any sort of refutation of Marxist though in the space available to me here. If you are interested, I recommend Socialism: An Economical and Sociological Analysis by Ludwig von Mises', which can be more easily obtained here) and contains the most complete and closely-reasoned refutation of socialist thought in existence.

Yet, in a larger sense, we really have no need to find an academic refutation of Marxist thought. The fact of Marxism's worldwide collapse should be all the information we need. But, evidently, it is not. I constantly run into people who claim that real Marxism has never been implemented, and that it was perverted into something else in the USSR. The obvious reply is that if Marxism is so faulty it can be so easily perverted, then Marxism contains a serious fundamental flaw. Such a reply is completely lost on Marx's proponents.

In social policy, look at the PL idea of gun control. No gun control measure, no matter how stringent, has managed to reduce gun crime in New York, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago, etc., etc. Yet, the standard PL line any time some highly publicized gun-related event occurs at any time, anywhere, is to call for more gun control. Evidence of past failure is not taken by the PL, as it would in a rational paradigm, as an indication of ineffectiveness. British authorities are now learning that even an outright ban on guns all across the whole country—which is an island--has been spectacularly ineffective at either curbing criminal access to guns, or reducing violent crime. Criminals overwhelmingly obtain weapons through the black market, or by theft. Control of legal sales, therefore, is ineffective at curbing criminal access to guns. Yet law-abiding citizens now face waiting periods of up to 21 days before they are allowed to purchase a firearm.

PL policies are simply not predicated on rational evidence or historical experience, but rather on ideological suppositions that are immune from proof. In another context, we would refer to such ideological suppositions as a "religion".

In some cases, adherents to PL thought go even farther. There is a movement in American universities to declare, without any empirical evidence whatsoever, the existence of a "feminist" mathematics or "black" physics, in which rigorously proven answers are not necessary. Indeed, to this coterie of academics, the very idea of empirical proof is a construct of the racist patriarchy. Yet, rather than being tossed out of the university as anti-rational foolishness, these professors have tenure, and spend their days proving that Western, male logic is a false construct. This kind of thinking requires a profound denial of reality.

And why should we be surprised, when so much of PL thought is nothing other than a denial of reality to one extent or another?

The second danger inherent in the ideology of PL is the concept of government it promotes. Rather than conceiving of government as a means of protecting persons and their property from the predations of another, the PL concept defines government as a tool for perfecting humanity. The PL assumes that human nature is perfectible, and that the power of government can be harnessed to achieve this perfectibility. Rather than taking a pessimistic view of human nature, PL is utopian. By definition, this means that, for the PL, the power of government is not best used in preventing you from doing evil, but requiring you to do good. There is a vast difference between those two concepts. Under such a concept, the power of government is limitless as a practical matter, which invites the most egregious abuse.

So far, the pattern of behavior for every human government animated by utopian ideals has been the same. If the people prove immune to perfectibility—and, so far, they always have—then the government is entitled to take sterner action to force people to be "good" however the leadership defines that. Eventually, the government becomes one where everything that is not mandatory is forbidden, and where the order is enforced with the gulag, the konzentrationslager, or the executioner taking care of the more noticeably imperfectible.

Every flirtation with utopianism in human history has ended in totalitarianism. Why?

Well, that's simple. If you run a utopian society, and discover that your population is not responding by perfecting themselves, then you have to ask what is wrong. Either your philosophy is faulty, which means that your government is illegitimate; or the population is actively resisting, which means that they are dangerous counter-revolutionaries. If you agree with the former, it results in your removal from power, and spending the rest of your days as a deeply unpopular figure. If you agree with the latter, you get to keep the big palace, drive around in a Mercedes limousine, and take your sweet, sweet—and just--vengeance on those traitors who are trying to destroy your beloved country.

Historically, political leaders have chosen the latter. The pay's better, the perks are good, and people have to do what you say. Or else.

That's not the type of historical example that fills me with optimism when I see one of the two major parties succumbing to PL as their governing ideology.

Finally, PL promotes class, gender, and racial animosity. Nearly every issue in the PL ideology is framed as a conflict between one of these three groups. Tax cuts? Ah, they're for the wealthy, who, after all, are rich, and can afford to pay their fair share. Ending Affirmative Action? Clearly, you're a racist who just wants to keep black people poor and ignorant. Pro-Life? You want to deny women's rights. No doubt you think the only suitable place for a woman is barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.

The fact that there are rational arguments for these policies is completely ignored. We can argue over the rightness or wrongness of the following propositions:

Taxes: The bottom 50% of taxpayers pay only 3.6% of all taxes. In essence, any tax cut is a tax cut for the rich, since they are the only ones actually paying taxes. The poor, since they pay almost nothing, have already received their tax cut.

Affirmative Action: Quite apart from the fact that race should be a forbidden category of discrimination, it's unfair that the children of a multimillionaire like, say Johnny Cochrane, get preferential treatment in college admissions, while shoeless white children of unemployed West Virginia coal miners are ignored because they after all, are children of white privilege. Affirmative Action should target the underprivileged.

Pro-Life: Even an unborn child should have some rights. Does the "right" to an abortion last right up to 30 seconds before natural birth? There must be some rational limit where we can say the right of an unborn child not to be killed trumps the right of the mother to control her own body.

But the PL ideology is uninterested in having these arguments. It is easier to demonize you for even holding certain views, than it is to make rational or moral arguments.

This, of course, amounts to nothing more than denigrating the humanity and intentions of your political opponents, which is the first step towards totalitarianism. "You must agree with me, or you are not just incorrect, you are morally flawed. Perhaps you should even be prevented from expressing such hateful opinions…" And, in many places dominated by the PL ideology, such as university campuses, with their extensive speech codes, you are already prohibited from publicly stating some opinions. Indeed, you can't even reliably know whether a particular opinion is or is not prohibited, until the university's disciplinary board rules. So perhaps it's better if you say nothing at all. Especially when your opinion on every issue determines whether you are a race, gender, or class enemy. Once every issue is framed in such terms, frank and productive dialogue between racial, gender, or class lines becomes essentially impossible.

Such an environment promotes a culture of grievance, where every group perceives its problems as the result of another group's hostility. Somehow, understanding between groups is magically supposed to flower in such a culture.

But, don't hold your breath waiting for it.

As I watch the Democratic party veer farther and farther to the left (Bill Clinton was a pause in the movement, not a swing of the pendulum in the other direction), I grow less hopeful about the future of this country.

The PL already has a stranglehold on education, and hence, in the future electorate. We graduate children from high school who are functionally illiterate, but who know beyond doubt that animals have "rights", and that capitalism destroys the environment. One hundred years ago, the average high school graduate spoke and wrote in English, Greek, Latin and probably German, knew algebra and trigonometry, and would have laughed uproariously at the very thought that he had a moral imperative to become a vegan. But, if you really want to control a society, and do it for a long time, then dumb down education, and ensure it contains a requisite amount of indoctrination, and you can control a society for generations.

I don't want to believe that our best days are behind us. I don't want to believe that the increasing pervasiveness of PL thought is the signal of our imminent decline.

But I find it difficult to conclude otherwise.
 

Yes on 57 & 58

(Review) The editors of the Christian Science Monitor agree with me that we need to poass Props 57 and 58, to get California's finance back on track.

Consider the alternatives. If Republicans like state Sen. Tom McClintock had their way, it would take budget cuts of more than 13 percent to avoid the bond. But the GOP governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, faced an entrenched Democratic legislature. And if Democrats like state Treasurer Phil Angelides were to decide, they would raise taxes, and still leave a need to borrow.

Walking through these alternatives it's clear why the governor and California legislators settled on the bond measure, Proposition 57, and then coupled it with another measure, Proposition 58, to set state government on the straight and narrow from here on out. Prop. 58 mandates a balanced budget: no more borrowing to cover deficits. (Too bad it doesn't go further and cap spending to match population growth and inflation).

A few other tidbits should tip the scale in favor of these propositions. The Legislature had already planned on, and passed, a $10 billion-plus bond, though it's likely to be found unconstitutional. Prop. 57 incorporates that amount, but in a legally sound way. The new bond would also be issued at a time of low interest rates.

Like I said earlier: We've already been screwed once by the Lej. Unless we pass this proposition, we'll get screwed again, this time by higher taxes. At a time when the cost of living and the cost of business is already so high that it's driving businesses out of state, I don't think this is a good time to raise $8 billion in new taxes.

Combatting public ignorance

(Review) Thomas Sowell writes that it's vital, especially in an election year, for economists and other economically literate citizens to educate our more benighted fellow citizens.

Some years ago, the distinguished international-trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati was visiting Cornell University, giving a lecture to graduate students during the day and debating Ralph Nader on free trade that evening. During his lecture, Prof. Bhagwati asked how many of the graduate students would be attending that evening's debate. Not one hand went up.

Amazed, he asked why. The answer was that the economics students considered it to be a waste of time. The kind of silly stuff that Ralph Nader was saying had been refuted by economists ages ago. The net result was that the audience for the debate consisted of people largely illiterate in economics and they cheered for Mr. Nader.

But mr. Nader--and Mr. Kerry--are still peddling that "silly stuff", and voters are still buying.

The Temptation to vote yes

(Review) Debra Saunders finds herself in the same conundrum that I'm in over Proposition 56. Is it better to deny Sacramento the ability to raise taxes at will in order to restrain the tax-happy Democrats in the Lej, thereby ensuring they remain in the majority? Or is it better to let the aging San Francisco hippies have their way, raise taxes until the state's economy tanks, thereby destroying them as a political force for a generation?

Ah, decisions, decisions.

Assemblyman Joe Canciamilla, D-Pittsburg, surprised me when he said, "I haven't broadcast my position. I'm not supportive of Proposition 56." On a philosophical level, the two-thirds requirement doesn't bother Canciamilla; it's what would happen if it were lifted that scares him.

Lawmakers would push for tax hikes. The pressure on the governor would be overwhelming. So, first, legislators would raise taxes on tobacco, alcohol and the affluent. But it wouldn't stop there, Canciamilla continued, because raising the "sin'' taxes and increasing taxes on the rich don't "generate much income."

"It will get us into a death spiral," he said and likely would result in an end to the Democratic majority within four years -- OK by me -- as well as passage of a new initiative to limit taxes a la Proposition 13.

*sigh*

It's tempting to vote "yes", but there's something about the term "death spiral" that bothers me. It would be sweet to see them destroy their own political careers over the enthusiasm for socialism, but, unfortunately, it would be millions of Californians who'd end up paying the most serious price for their malfeasance.

I guess it's better to vote "no" on 56, and ensure that adult supervision keeps the Dems from trashing the state's economy.

But the temptation...

Here's the living room. Have a seat. Please, pay no attention to the elephant standing there.

(Review) Robert Robb writes that the Democrats listened to Alan Greenspan's testimony on Social Security, nodded judiciously, then went straight into deep denial.

John Kerry said the answer was to repeal President Bush's tax cuts for the rich, which Kerry defines as anyone making more than $200,000 a year.

But there is nothing about increasing taxes today that makes a dollar available to pay Medicare and Social benefits in the future. The only effect of raising taxes today is to reduce what the federal government currently borrows.

That arguably would increase the federal government's debt capacity in the future. But that is only relevant if Kerry proposes to borrow money to pay for Medicare and Social Security benefits once payroll taxes are insufficient.

These deficits begin small, and debt financing could cover them in the short run. But they grow exponentially, as the ratio of workers to retirees continues to deteriorate.

According to Greenspan, the cost of Social Security and Medicare will expand from 7 percent of GDP today to 12 percent in 2030. That represents a 25 percent increase in federal spending.

Simply put, the combination of debt and tax increases necessary to pay programmed future retiree benefits is economically unsustainable.

John Edwards reprised his populist economic themes, saying that it was an "outrage" for Greenspan "to suggest that we should extend George Bush's tax cuts on unearned wealth while cutting benefits that working people earn."

Edwards' view that investment income is "unearned" betrays a demagogic ignorance about, or hostility toward, the role of capital formation in economic progress. But let's play out his demagogic game.

Right now, low- and middle-income "working people" are being taxed to pay retirement and health care benefits for "wealthy" seniors. What's fair about that?

The same thing that Edwards proposes to do about it: Nothing.

Social Security as it now exists is simply financially unsustainable. It doesn't require a PhD to figure it out. Anybody with a 4-function calculator can do the math.

We can either raise taxes sharply, cut benefits sharply, or fundamentally restructure the entire program. Sticking your fingers in your ears, and singing loudly, "La la la la la la" whenever somebody mentions the problem isn't going to fix it, and it isn't going to change the menu of available choices.

Just Like Churchill

(Review) Andrew Sullivan writes that there some disturbing parallels between George W. Bush in 2004 and Winston Churchill in 1945.

Wartime leaders have always faced the worst fear: defeat in battle. But in democracies at least, war leaders also confront another danger: success. The qualities that make for great statesmanship in wartime — determination, a single focus on victory, a black-and-white conviction of who is friend or foe — can often seem crude or overbearing when peace comes around. The most dramatic example of this in Western history is Winston Churchill. It is no exaggeration to say that without him, Britain may well have been destroyed by Hitler. He was the difference between victory and defeat. But almost the minute that victory was declared, the voters turned on their hero. He lost the postwar election. Even more striking, he lost it in one of the biggest landslides in Britain's parliamentary history. He wasn't just defeated. He was buried.

I wonder if the lesson of Churchill now haunts the office of Bush political strategist Karl Rove. For something not completely dissimilar seems to be happening to George W. Bush. Since just after the capture of Saddam, Bush's ratings have been slumping. And this is less surprising than it appears. The paradox of the war against terrorism is that the more the President succeeds, the more politically vulnerable he gets. The fewer the terrorist incidents, the more remote the fear, the less necessary the war seems and the more dispensable the war President appears. If he responds to this by insisting that the enemy is still powerful and dangerous, he runs the risk of seeming to concede that he hasn't managed to curtail the threat. Or, worse perhaps, it seems as if he's whipping up fear and panic for his own electoral advantage. And after the failures of intelligence with respect to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Bush's credibility on unknown threats is already eroded...

The other Churchill parallel is equally unnerving. Churchill was a Tory as much as the current Bush is a conservative. But during wartime, Churchill expanded government to mobilize the country to fight Hitler. By doing so, Churchill helped legitimize Big Government. So the Labour government that succeeded him was the most left-wing in Britain's history. It favored high taxes, nationalized industries and created socialized medicine. The Tories, because they had backed Big Government in wartime, had little credibility in opposing these policies. Similarly, Bush has expanded government more aggressively than any President since L.B.J. (another war leader). Vast new military and security spending has been accompanied by a bank-breaking new entitlement in Medicare. When Bush now criticizes Kerry on spending and the size of government, he has little credibility with the voters. And so the chances of a very liberal Democratic Administration have escalated.

Bush may very well be a victim of his own success in the War on Terror.