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