From Galley Slaves:
What Bush Didn't Say
President Bush's speech was generally successful, if somewhat disposable. It did what he needed it to do. But he left out two topics which would have made it better, and which could only have helped his election chances.
(1) Abu Ghraib: There was no mention of the subject which gummed up the works in Iraq for so long. The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib was not an earth-shaking scandal, but it is important, and by talking about it, Bush could have shown how American ideals are just that--values that even we sometimes fail to live up to. He could have shown serious moral purpose by confronting Abu Ghraib in his speech, and he would have been able to further honor the hundreds of thousands of American troops in Iraq who have conducted themselves with nothing but courage and dignity.
(2) The nature of our enemies. John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, and Ron Silver all gave speeches that were remarkable in the clarity of their language. They explained that we are engaged in a war between Islamist extremists and western civilization. This is not a conflict simply between America and some faceless, evil terrorists. Our enemies have a coherent ideology and goal. They do not simply "hate freedom." It goes much deeper than that.
The problem with couching the current conflict in the terms Bush prefers is that their ambiguity lends them to misuse. It becomes easy for those who wish us to appease the Islamists to simply declare that this is a war between America and Islam, and that America is at least partially at fault.
President Bush should have spoken about the nature of the terrorists, about who they are and what they believe. He should have listed the countries where they have recently plied their bloody trade: America, Israel, Turkey, Indonesia, the Philippines. He should have pointed to Russia, where Islamist terrorists have struck again and again, and last night were holding a school full of children hostage.
This war is bigger than America--it is truly a global war. Our enemies understand that. And it would have been helpful to our body politic for the president to say so.
posted by Jonathan V. Last
Saturday, September 04, 2004
From timesofindia.indiatimes.com:
School siege prompts horror, self-criticism in Arab world
CAIRO: Images of dead, wounded and traumatized Russian children being carried from the scene of a rebel school siege have horrified the Arab world, prompting forthright self-criticism and fresh concern about an international backlash against Islam and its followers.
Arab leaders, Muslim clerics and ordinary parents across the Middle East denounced the school siege as unjustifiable. Some warned such actions damage Islam's image more than all its enemies could hope. Even some supporters of Islamic militancy condemned it, though at least one insisted Muslims were not behind it.
``Holy warriors'' from the Middle East have long supported fellow Muslims fighting in Chechnya, and Russian officials said nine or 10 Arabs were among militants killed in the siege.
Middle East security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was too early to know the nationalities of the Arabs among the dead militants. However, a prominent Arab journalist wrote that Muslims must acknowledge the painful fact that Muslims are the main perpetrators of terrorism.
``Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture,'' Abdulrahman al-Rashed, general manager of Al-Arabiya television, wrote in his daily column published in the pan-Arab Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. It ran under the headline, ``The Painful Truth: All the World Terrorists are Muslims!''
Al-Rashed ran through a list of recent attacks by Islamic extremist groups - in Russia, Iraq, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen - many of which are influenced by the ideology of Osama bin Laden.
``Most perpetrators of suicide operations in buses, schools and residential buildings around the world for the past 10 years have been Muslims,'' he wrote. Muslims will be unable to cleanse their image unless ``we admit the scandalous facts,'' rather than offer condemnations or justifications.
``The picture is humiliating, painful and harsh for all of us.''
Arab TV stations repeatedly aired footage of terrified young survivors being carried from the school siege scene, while pictures of dead and wounded children ran on front pages of Saturday's Arab newspapers.
Ahmed Bahgat, an Egyptian Islamist and columnist for Egypt's leading pro-government newspaper Al-Ahram wrote that the images ``showed Muslims as monsters who are fed by the blood of children and the pain of their families.''
``If all the enemies of Islam united together and decided to harm it ... they wouldn't have ruined and harmed its image as much as the sons of Islam have done by their stupidity, miscalculations, and misunderstanding of the nature of this age,'' Bahgat wrote.
Other Islamists were more cautious in their criticism.
Mohammed Mahdi Akef, leader of Egypt's largest Islamic group, the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, said the siege did not fit the Islamic concept of ``jihad,'' or holy war, but took care not to characterize it as terrorism.
``What happened ... is not jihad because our Islam obligates us to respect the souls of human beings,'' Akef said. ``Real jihad should target occupiers of our lands only like the Palestinian and Iraqi resistance.''
Ali Abdullah, an Islamic scholar in Bahrain who follows the ultraconservative Salafi stream of Islam, condemned the school attack as ``un-Islamic,'' but insisted Muslims weren't behind it.
``I have no doubt in my mind that this is the work of the Israelis who want to tarnish the image of Muslims and are working alongside Russians who have their own agenda against the Muslims in Chechnya,'' said Abdullah, reviving an old conspiracy theory altered to fit any situation.
Some contributors to Islamic Web sites known for their extremist content praised the separatists and predicted the Islamic fighters across Egypt would avenge the killings of Muslims elsewhere.
Heads of state from around the region condemned the attack. It struck a chord with parents, including Jordan's King Abdullah II, who denounced it on state-run television.
``As a father, I can tell you that all the fathers and mothers in Jordan pray humbly to God to stand by their counterparts in Russia in their grief,'' said Abdullah, whose wife is expecting their fourth child.
School siege prompts horror, self-criticism in Arab world
CAIRO: Images of dead, wounded and traumatized Russian children being carried from the scene of a rebel school siege have horrified the Arab world, prompting forthright self-criticism and fresh concern about an international backlash against Islam and its followers.
Arab leaders, Muslim clerics and ordinary parents across the Middle East denounced the school siege as unjustifiable. Some warned such actions damage Islam's image more than all its enemies could hope. Even some supporters of Islamic militancy condemned it, though at least one insisted Muslims were not behind it.
``Holy warriors'' from the Middle East have long supported fellow Muslims fighting in Chechnya, and Russian officials said nine or 10 Arabs were among militants killed in the siege.
Middle East security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it was too early to know the nationalities of the Arabs among the dead militants. However, a prominent Arab journalist wrote that Muslims must acknowledge the painful fact that Muslims are the main perpetrators of terrorism.
``Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture,'' Abdulrahman al-Rashed, general manager of Al-Arabiya television, wrote in his daily column published in the pan-Arab Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. It ran under the headline, ``The Painful Truth: All the World Terrorists are Muslims!''
Al-Rashed ran through a list of recent attacks by Islamic extremist groups - in Russia, Iraq, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen - many of which are influenced by the ideology of Osama bin Laden.
``Most perpetrators of suicide operations in buses, schools and residential buildings around the world for the past 10 years have been Muslims,'' he wrote. Muslims will be unable to cleanse their image unless ``we admit the scandalous facts,'' rather than offer condemnations or justifications.
``The picture is humiliating, painful and harsh for all of us.''
Arab TV stations repeatedly aired footage of terrified young survivors being carried from the school siege scene, while pictures of dead and wounded children ran on front pages of Saturday's Arab newspapers.
Ahmed Bahgat, an Egyptian Islamist and columnist for Egypt's leading pro-government newspaper Al-Ahram wrote that the images ``showed Muslims as monsters who are fed by the blood of children and the pain of their families.''
``If all the enemies of Islam united together and decided to harm it ... they wouldn't have ruined and harmed its image as much as the sons of Islam have done by their stupidity, miscalculations, and misunderstanding of the nature of this age,'' Bahgat wrote.
Other Islamists were more cautious in their criticism.
Mohammed Mahdi Akef, leader of Egypt's largest Islamic group, the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, said the siege did not fit the Islamic concept of ``jihad,'' or holy war, but took care not to characterize it as terrorism.
``What happened ... is not jihad because our Islam obligates us to respect the souls of human beings,'' Akef said. ``Real jihad should target occupiers of our lands only like the Palestinian and Iraqi resistance.''
Ali Abdullah, an Islamic scholar in Bahrain who follows the ultraconservative Salafi stream of Islam, condemned the school attack as ``un-Islamic,'' but insisted Muslims weren't behind it.
``I have no doubt in my mind that this is the work of the Israelis who want to tarnish the image of Muslims and are working alongside Russians who have their own agenda against the Muslims in Chechnya,'' said Abdullah, reviving an old conspiracy theory altered to fit any situation.
Some contributors to Islamic Web sites known for their extremist content praised the separatists and predicted the Islamic fighters across Egypt would avenge the killings of Muslims elsewhere.
Heads of state from around the region condemned the attack. It struck a chord with parents, including Jordan's King Abdullah II, who denounced it on state-run television.
``As a father, I can tell you that all the fathers and mothers in Jordan pray humbly to God to stand by their counterparts in Russia in their grief,'' said Abdullah, whose wife is expecting their fourth child.
From townhall.com:
The Zell factor
by Kathleen Parker
NEW YORK - Note to Dr. Howard Dean: About that Bubba vote? Two words. Zell Miller.
Wonder no more what gets the good ol' boys' juices flowing, and don't pay no never mind to them talking heads on this particular question. The answer is simply this: real men taking charge, talking straight, telling truth, and leaving the girlie men to fuss about the nuances of terrorist sensitivity.
Miller's fiery, brimstone-studded speech on the penultimate night of the Republican convention was a quintessential testosterone moment that got professional harrumphers flustered and swing voters inspired. While pundits wondered whether Zell was over the top, too hot or too tough, Heartland Americans (and not a few journalists who shall remain unnamed in the interest of job security) were high-fiving and arm-pumping yessssssssss.
Out beyond the Beltway and other bluster zones, Americans have been waiting for someone to articulate the unvarnished truth. To them, the crossover senator from Georgia was a burning bush. Sure, he spoke Republican and was hyperbolic in condemning John Kerry. Hawkish and hawk-faced, his blunt speech wasn't just red meat; it was steak tartare.
But his Marine anger and paternal sincerity rang true, while the message he delivered - in the voice of father, grandfather and great-grandfather - spoke to deeper truths that many Americans feel even if they haven't been able to articulate them precisely. The world changed on Sept. 11, 2001, and the old default modes no longer work. The old political templates and loyalties do not apply.
That understanding prompted Miller to abandon his Democratic Party to endorse President George W. Bush for re-election. Saying he believes Bush is the best man for this historic and dangerous moment, Miller spoke to and for other like-minded parents, as well as for other ticked-off vets.
"And like you, I ask which leader is it today that has the vision, the willpower and, yes, the backbone to best protect my family? . There is but one man to whom I am willing to entrust their future, and that man's name is George W. Bush."
It's a certainty that speeches like Miller's don't play well in certain sophisticated circles. He's got that funny accent, after all. And, in the vernacular of his native South, t'weren't nothin' nuanced about Miller's speech. Likewise, however, there's nothing nuanced about terrorists who hijack airplanes and plow them into buildings; who blow up buses filled with children; who sever the heads of kidnap victims for prime-time enemy recruiting films.
What such times call for are the qualities and strategies Miller colorfully described: "No matter what spider hole they may hide in or what rock they crawl under, George Bush wants to grab terrorists by the throat and not let them go to get a better grip."
That sounds about right. One can argue with others - or oneself if you're Kerry - about how the Democrats would have handled Sept. 11, whether they would have taken the war to Iraq, or how they might negotiate current vulnerabilities. But I suspect Miller's passionate recitation of Kerry's Senate voting record against most military spending, as well as his own voluntary exile from a party he claims puts partisanship above national security, produced a new wave of closet Republicans.
That is, voters who may register Democrat and talk liberal, but who know in their hearts that life is fragile in unfamiliar ways and who prefer the devil they know. Hoping that profoundly bad guys will play nice if we ratchet up our sensitivity is a lethal fantasy, the consequences of which are now being demonstrated for France and Russia.
Following Wednesday night's performance, commentators wondered portentously whether Miller's speech might have (lights flicker as thunder clashes nearby) Unintended Consequences. Most likely it had the exact consequences Miller and Republican organizers had hoped for. Witness Ohioans in the wings.
As Chris Matthews of "Hardball" challenged Miller about some of his claims, provoking Miller to say he wished men could still challenge each other to duel, pollster Frank Luntz was interviewing a group of Ohio swing voters, who described Miller's speech as: fantastic, very upbeat, energetic, surprising, focused on the family, powerful but one-sided, intellectual, dynamic and on-target. Only one woman said he was "totally overboard."
In other words, Miller played well in places where spin is a cycle on the washer. If there were any Bubbas undecided before Miller, there aren't anymore. You can bet your duck blind on that.
©2004 Tribune Media Services
The Zell factor
by Kathleen Parker
NEW YORK - Note to Dr. Howard Dean: About that Bubba vote? Two words. Zell Miller.
Wonder no more what gets the good ol' boys' juices flowing, and don't pay no never mind to them talking heads on this particular question. The answer is simply this: real men taking charge, talking straight, telling truth, and leaving the girlie men to fuss about the nuances of terrorist sensitivity.
Miller's fiery, brimstone-studded speech on the penultimate night of the Republican convention was a quintessential testosterone moment that got professional harrumphers flustered and swing voters inspired. While pundits wondered whether Zell was over the top, too hot or too tough, Heartland Americans (and not a few journalists who shall remain unnamed in the interest of job security) were high-fiving and arm-pumping yessssssssss.
Out beyond the Beltway and other bluster zones, Americans have been waiting for someone to articulate the unvarnished truth. To them, the crossover senator from Georgia was a burning bush. Sure, he spoke Republican and was hyperbolic in condemning John Kerry. Hawkish and hawk-faced, his blunt speech wasn't just red meat; it was steak tartare.
But his Marine anger and paternal sincerity rang true, while the message he delivered - in the voice of father, grandfather and great-grandfather - spoke to deeper truths that many Americans feel even if they haven't been able to articulate them precisely. The world changed on Sept. 11, 2001, and the old default modes no longer work. The old political templates and loyalties do not apply.
That understanding prompted Miller to abandon his Democratic Party to endorse President George W. Bush for re-election. Saying he believes Bush is the best man for this historic and dangerous moment, Miller spoke to and for other like-minded parents, as well as for other ticked-off vets.
"And like you, I ask which leader is it today that has the vision, the willpower and, yes, the backbone to best protect my family? . There is but one man to whom I am willing to entrust their future, and that man's name is George W. Bush."
It's a certainty that speeches like Miller's don't play well in certain sophisticated circles. He's got that funny accent, after all. And, in the vernacular of his native South, t'weren't nothin' nuanced about Miller's speech. Likewise, however, there's nothing nuanced about terrorists who hijack airplanes and plow them into buildings; who blow up buses filled with children; who sever the heads of kidnap victims for prime-time enemy recruiting films.
What such times call for are the qualities and strategies Miller colorfully described: "No matter what spider hole they may hide in or what rock they crawl under, George Bush wants to grab terrorists by the throat and not let them go to get a better grip."
That sounds about right. One can argue with others - or oneself if you're Kerry - about how the Democrats would have handled Sept. 11, whether they would have taken the war to Iraq, or how they might negotiate current vulnerabilities. But I suspect Miller's passionate recitation of Kerry's Senate voting record against most military spending, as well as his own voluntary exile from a party he claims puts partisanship above national security, produced a new wave of closet Republicans.
That is, voters who may register Democrat and talk liberal, but who know in their hearts that life is fragile in unfamiliar ways and who prefer the devil they know. Hoping that profoundly bad guys will play nice if we ratchet up our sensitivity is a lethal fantasy, the consequences of which are now being demonstrated for France and Russia.
Following Wednesday night's performance, commentators wondered portentously whether Miller's speech might have (lights flicker as thunder clashes nearby) Unintended Consequences. Most likely it had the exact consequences Miller and Republican organizers had hoped for. Witness Ohioans in the wings.
As Chris Matthews of "Hardball" challenged Miller about some of his claims, provoking Miller to say he wished men could still challenge each other to duel, pollster Frank Luntz was interviewing a group of Ohio swing voters, who described Miller's speech as: fantastic, very upbeat, energetic, surprising, focused on the family, powerful but one-sided, intellectual, dynamic and on-target. Only one woman said he was "totally overboard."
In other words, Miller played well in places where spin is a cycle on the washer. If there were any Bubbas undecided before Miller, there aren't anymore. You can bet your duck blind on that.
©2004 Tribune Media Services
From The New York Post:
WHEN THE KILLERS COME FOR THE KIDS
by Ralph Peters
September 4, 2004 -- THE mass murder of children revolts the human psyche. Herod sending his henchmen to massacre the infants of Bethlehem haunts the Gospels. Nothing in our time was crueler than what the Germans did to children during the Holocaust. Slaughtering the innocents violates a universal human taboo.
Or a nearly universal one. Those Muslims who preach Jihad against the West decided years ago that killing Jewish or Christian children is not only acceptable, but pleasing to their god when done by "martyrs."
It isn't politically correct to say this, of course. We're supposed to pretend that Islam is a "religion of peace." All right, then: It's time for Muslims to stand up for the once-noble, nearly lost traditions of their faith and condemn what Arab and Chechen terrorists and blasphemers did in the Russian town of Beslan.
If Muslim religious leaders around the world will not publicly condemn the taking of children as hostages and their subsequent slaughter — if those "men of faith" will not issue a condemnation without reservations or caveats — then no one need pretend any longer that all religions are equally sound and moral.
Islam has been a great and humane faith in the past. Now far too many of its adherents condone, actively or passively, the mass murder of school kids. Instead of condemnations of the Muslim "Jihadis" responsible for butchering more than 200 women and children in cold blood, we will hear spiteful counter-accusations about imaginary atrocities supposedly committed by Western militaries.
Well, the cold fact is that Western soldiers, whether Americans, Brits, Russians or Israelis, do not take hundreds of children hostage, then shoot them in cold blood while detonating bombs in their midst. The Muslim world can lie to itself, but we need lie no longer.
The tragedy in southern Russia occurred thousands of miles from the United States, but, in essence, that massacre happened next door. The parents, teachers and students kept for days without water or food in a sweltering school building before being butchered were our children, our sisters, our wives, our parents.
The mass hostage situation wasn't about Chechen rebels (and at least 10 Arabs) opposing the Russian government. It was a continuation of the universal struggle between good and evil. And there is no doubt which side is evil, scorned though the word may be by our own elite.
How can any human being with a shred of conscience dismiss what occurred in that school as anything less than evil?
The attack in Beslan wasn't about Russia's brutal incompetence in Chechnya — as counter-productive as Moscow's grim heavy-handedness may have been. It was about religious bigotry so profound that the believer can hold a gun to a child's head, pull the trigger and term the act "divine justice."
We will hear complaints that the Russian special forces should have waited — even after the terrorists began shooting children. Negotiations are the heroin of Westerners addicted to self-delusion. Who among us would have waited when he or she saw fleeing children cut down by automatic weapons? The urge to protect children is as primal as any impulse we ever feel.
Make no mistake: No blame attaches to the Russians for the massacre at that school. The guilt is entirely upon the Islamic extremists who have led the religion they claim to cherish into the realms of nightmare.
There will be repercussions. Having suffered the hijacking and destruction of two passenger jets, a deadly bombing at a Moscow subway station and a massacre in a primary school all in less than two weeks, the Kremlin will have learned to rue the day it imagined that there was anything to gain by opposing American efforts against terrorists, whether Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein.
As they inevitably do, the terrorists reminded the world of their heartless barbarism. Even if France manages to beg the release of its kidnapped journalists in Iraq, it has begun to sense its vulnerability. And all Europeans with a vestige of sense will recognize that the school seizure in Russia could easily repeat itself in Languedoc or Umbria, Bavaria or Kent.
An attack on children is an attack on all of humanity.
No matter what differences Western states discover to divide them, the terrorists will bring us together in the end. Their atrocities expose all wishful thinking for what it is.
A final thought: Did any of those protesters who came to Manhattan to denounce our liberation of 50 million Muslims stay an extra day to protest the massacre in Russia? Of course not.
The protesters no more care for dead Russian children than they care for dead Kurds or for the hundreds of thousands of Arabs that Saddam Hussein executed. Or for the ongoing Arab-Muslim slaughter of blacks in Sudan. Nothing's a crime to those protesters unless the deed was committed by America.
The butchery in Russia was a crime against humanity. In every respect. Was any war ever more necessary or just than the War on Terror?
And what will terror's apologists say when the killers come for their own children?
Ralph Peters is the author of "Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World."
WHEN THE KILLERS COME FOR THE KIDS
by Ralph Peters
September 4, 2004 -- THE mass murder of children revolts the human psyche. Herod sending his henchmen to massacre the infants of Bethlehem haunts the Gospels. Nothing in our time was crueler than what the Germans did to children during the Holocaust. Slaughtering the innocents violates a universal human taboo.
Or a nearly universal one. Those Muslims who preach Jihad against the West decided years ago that killing Jewish or Christian children is not only acceptable, but pleasing to their god when done by "martyrs."
It isn't politically correct to say this, of course. We're supposed to pretend that Islam is a "religion of peace." All right, then: It's time for Muslims to stand up for the once-noble, nearly lost traditions of their faith and condemn what Arab and Chechen terrorists and blasphemers did in the Russian town of Beslan.
If Muslim religious leaders around the world will not publicly condemn the taking of children as hostages and their subsequent slaughter — if those "men of faith" will not issue a condemnation without reservations or caveats — then no one need pretend any longer that all religions are equally sound and moral.
Islam has been a great and humane faith in the past. Now far too many of its adherents condone, actively or passively, the mass murder of school kids. Instead of condemnations of the Muslim "Jihadis" responsible for butchering more than 200 women and children in cold blood, we will hear spiteful counter-accusations about imaginary atrocities supposedly committed by Western militaries.
Well, the cold fact is that Western soldiers, whether Americans, Brits, Russians or Israelis, do not take hundreds of children hostage, then shoot them in cold blood while detonating bombs in their midst. The Muslim world can lie to itself, but we need lie no longer.
The tragedy in southern Russia occurred thousands of miles from the United States, but, in essence, that massacre happened next door. The parents, teachers and students kept for days without water or food in a sweltering school building before being butchered were our children, our sisters, our wives, our parents.
The mass hostage situation wasn't about Chechen rebels (and at least 10 Arabs) opposing the Russian government. It was a continuation of the universal struggle between good and evil. And there is no doubt which side is evil, scorned though the word may be by our own elite.
How can any human being with a shred of conscience dismiss what occurred in that school as anything less than evil?
The attack in Beslan wasn't about Russia's brutal incompetence in Chechnya — as counter-productive as Moscow's grim heavy-handedness may have been. It was about religious bigotry so profound that the believer can hold a gun to a child's head, pull the trigger and term the act "divine justice."
We will hear complaints that the Russian special forces should have waited — even after the terrorists began shooting children. Negotiations are the heroin of Westerners addicted to self-delusion. Who among us would have waited when he or she saw fleeing children cut down by automatic weapons? The urge to protect children is as primal as any impulse we ever feel.
Make no mistake: No blame attaches to the Russians for the massacre at that school. The guilt is entirely upon the Islamic extremists who have led the religion they claim to cherish into the realms of nightmare.
There will be repercussions. Having suffered the hijacking and destruction of two passenger jets, a deadly bombing at a Moscow subway station and a massacre in a primary school all in less than two weeks, the Kremlin will have learned to rue the day it imagined that there was anything to gain by opposing American efforts against terrorists, whether Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein.
As they inevitably do, the terrorists reminded the world of their heartless barbarism. Even if France manages to beg the release of its kidnapped journalists in Iraq, it has begun to sense its vulnerability. And all Europeans with a vestige of sense will recognize that the school seizure in Russia could easily repeat itself in Languedoc or Umbria, Bavaria or Kent.
An attack on children is an attack on all of humanity.
No matter what differences Western states discover to divide them, the terrorists will bring us together in the end. Their atrocities expose all wishful thinking for what it is.
A final thought: Did any of those protesters who came to Manhattan to denounce our liberation of 50 million Muslims stay an extra day to protest the massacre in Russia? Of course not.
The protesters no more care for dead Russian children than they care for dead Kurds or for the hundreds of thousands of Arabs that Saddam Hussein executed. Or for the ongoing Arab-Muslim slaughter of blacks in Sudan. Nothing's a crime to those protesters unless the deed was committed by America.
The butchery in Russia was a crime against humanity. In every respect. Was any war ever more necessary or just than the War on Terror?
And what will terror's apologists say when the killers come for their own children?
Ralph Peters is the author of "Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World."
Kerry's showing he just can't take the heat
by Mark Steyn
Both candidates gave speeches late on Thursday night. George W. Bush was more or less expected to. John Kerry didn't have to, but reported for duty even though nobody wanted him to. Unnerved by sagging numbers, he decided to start the post-Labor Day phase of the campaign three days before Labor Day. The way things are going, Democrats seem likely to be launching the post-election catastrophic-defeat vicious-recriminations phase of the campaign round about Sept. 12.
At any rate, less than 60 minutes after President Bush gave a sober, graceful, droll and moving address, Kerry decided to hit back. In the midnight hour, he climbed out of his political coffin, and before his thousands of aides could grab the garlic from Teresa's kitchen and start waving it at him, he found himself in front of an audience and started giving a speech. As in Vietnam, he was in no mood to take prisoners: ''I have five words for Americans,'' he thundered. ''This is your wake up call!''
Is that five words? Or is it six? Well, it's all very nuanced, according to whether you hyphenate the ''wake-up.'' Maybe he should have said, ''I have four words plus a common hyphenated expression for Americans.'' I'd suggest the rewrite to him personally, but I don't want him to stare huffily at me and drone, "How dare you attack my patriotism."
By about nine words into John Kerry's wake up call, I was sound asleep again. But this was what he told Ohio's brave band of chronic insomniacs:
''For the past week, they attacked my patriotism and my fitness to serve as commander in chief. Well, here's my answer. I'm not going to have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve.''
Oh, dear . . . growing drowsy again . . . losing the will to type . . . what's he saying now?
''Two tours of duty''
Ah, yes. As usual, he has four words for Americans: I served in Vietnam. Or five words if you spell it Viet Nam.
So we have one candidate running on a platform of ambitious reforms for an ''ownership society'' at home and a pledge to hunt down America's enemies abroad. And we have another candidate running on the platform that no one has the right to say anything mean about him.
And for this the senator broke the eminently civilized tradition that each candidate lets the other guy have his convention week to himself? Maybe they need to start scheduling those Kerry campaign shakeups twice a week.
There was an old joke back in the Cold War:
Proud American to Russian guy: ''In my country every one of us has the right to criticize our president.''
Russian guy: ''Same here. In my country every one of us has the right to criticize your president.''
That seems to be the way John Kerry likes it. Americans should be free to call Bush a moron, a liar, a fraud, a deserter, an agent of the House of Saud, a mass murderer, a mass rapist (according to the speaker at a National Organization for Women rally last week) and the new Hitler (according to just about everyone). But how dare anyone be so impertinent as to insult John Kerry! No one has the right to insult Kerry, except possibly Teresa, and only on the day she gives him his allowance.
Several distinguished analysts have suggested that the best rationale for a Kerry presidency is that it would be a ''return to normalcy'' -- a quiet life after the epic pages of history George W. Bush has been writing these last three years. Even if a ''return to normalcy'' were an option, I doubt whether John Kerry would qualify. As we saw in those two Thursday speeches, Bush takes the war seriously but he doesn't take himself seriously -- self-deprecating jokes are obligatory these days, but try to imagine Kerry doing the equivalent of Bush's gags about mangled English and swaggering. The president is comfortable in his own skin, which is why he shrugs off the Hitler stuff. By contrast, Kerry doesn't take the war seriously because he's so busy taking himself seriously. If ''return to normalcy'' means four years of a grimly humorless, touchy, self-regarding Kerry presidency, I'll take the war.
That's surely why Kerry is running his kamikaze kandidacy on biography rather than any grand themes. Senator Kerrikaze is running for president because he thinks he should be president -- who needs a platform? One of the most revealing aspects of the campaign this last week were the interviews given by his various surrogates. Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic National Committee chairman, went on Hugh Hewitt's radio show and was asked about the swift boat veterans' ads, and he laughed and blustered and stalled and floundered. That sounded weird. This thing's been going on a month now, and the Kerry campaign still hasn't come up with a form of words to deflect questions about it. If they had an agreed spin, McAuliffe and Co. would be out using it. But the seared senator feels it's lese majeste even to question him. He can talk about Vietnam 24/7, but nobody else is allowed to bring it up.
Sorry, man, that's not the way it works. And if he thinks it does, he's even further removed from the realities of democratic politics than he was from the interior of Cambodia. Instead of those military records the swift boat vets are calling for, I'd be more interested in seeing his medical ones.
As for Bush, to be sure at one level his convention was a ''soft-focus infomercial,'' just as Kerry's was. But the infomercial came into sharp focus just often enough to clarify, piercingly, the differences between the parties. On opening night in Boston, the Democrats staged a tasteful, teary candlelight remembrance of those who died on 9/11. On opening night in New York, the Republicans put up one speaker after another -- John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Ron Silver -- resolved that those thousands of innocents shall not have died in vain.
I remember a couple of days after Sept. 11 writing that weepy candlelight vigils were a cop-out: the issue wasn't whether you were sad about the dead people but whether you wanted to do something about it. Three years on, the two conventions drew the same distinction. If you want passivity and wallowing in victim culture, the Dems will do. If you want to win this thing, Bush is the only guy running.
Copyright © The Sun-Times Company
by Mark Steyn
Both candidates gave speeches late on Thursday night. George W. Bush was more or less expected to. John Kerry didn't have to, but reported for duty even though nobody wanted him to. Unnerved by sagging numbers, he decided to start the post-Labor Day phase of the campaign three days before Labor Day. The way things are going, Democrats seem likely to be launching the post-election catastrophic-defeat vicious-recriminations phase of the campaign round about Sept. 12.
At any rate, less than 60 minutes after President Bush gave a sober, graceful, droll and moving address, Kerry decided to hit back. In the midnight hour, he climbed out of his political coffin, and before his thousands of aides could grab the garlic from Teresa's kitchen and start waving it at him, he found himself in front of an audience and started giving a speech. As in Vietnam, he was in no mood to take prisoners: ''I have five words for Americans,'' he thundered. ''This is your wake up call!''
Is that five words? Or is it six? Well, it's all very nuanced, according to whether you hyphenate the ''wake-up.'' Maybe he should have said, ''I have four words plus a common hyphenated expression for Americans.'' I'd suggest the rewrite to him personally, but I don't want him to stare huffily at me and drone, "How dare you attack my patriotism."
By about nine words into John Kerry's wake up call, I was sound asleep again. But this was what he told Ohio's brave band of chronic insomniacs:
''For the past week, they attacked my patriotism and my fitness to serve as commander in chief. Well, here's my answer. I'm not going to have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve.''
Oh, dear . . . growing drowsy again . . . losing the will to type . . . what's he saying now?
''Two tours of duty''
Ah, yes. As usual, he has four words for Americans: I served in Vietnam. Or five words if you spell it Viet Nam.
So we have one candidate running on a platform of ambitious reforms for an ''ownership society'' at home and a pledge to hunt down America's enemies abroad. And we have another candidate running on the platform that no one has the right to say anything mean about him.
And for this the senator broke the eminently civilized tradition that each candidate lets the other guy have his convention week to himself? Maybe they need to start scheduling those Kerry campaign shakeups twice a week.
There was an old joke back in the Cold War:
Proud American to Russian guy: ''In my country every one of us has the right to criticize our president.''
Russian guy: ''Same here. In my country every one of us has the right to criticize your president.''
That seems to be the way John Kerry likes it. Americans should be free to call Bush a moron, a liar, a fraud, a deserter, an agent of the House of Saud, a mass murderer, a mass rapist (according to the speaker at a National Organization for Women rally last week) and the new Hitler (according to just about everyone). But how dare anyone be so impertinent as to insult John Kerry! No one has the right to insult Kerry, except possibly Teresa, and only on the day she gives him his allowance.
Several distinguished analysts have suggested that the best rationale for a Kerry presidency is that it would be a ''return to normalcy'' -- a quiet life after the epic pages of history George W. Bush has been writing these last three years. Even if a ''return to normalcy'' were an option, I doubt whether John Kerry would qualify. As we saw in those two Thursday speeches, Bush takes the war seriously but he doesn't take himself seriously -- self-deprecating jokes are obligatory these days, but try to imagine Kerry doing the equivalent of Bush's gags about mangled English and swaggering. The president is comfortable in his own skin, which is why he shrugs off the Hitler stuff. By contrast, Kerry doesn't take the war seriously because he's so busy taking himself seriously. If ''return to normalcy'' means four years of a grimly humorless, touchy, self-regarding Kerry presidency, I'll take the war.
That's surely why Kerry is running his kamikaze kandidacy on biography rather than any grand themes. Senator Kerrikaze is running for president because he thinks he should be president -- who needs a platform? One of the most revealing aspects of the campaign this last week were the interviews given by his various surrogates. Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic National Committee chairman, went on Hugh Hewitt's radio show and was asked about the swift boat veterans' ads, and he laughed and blustered and stalled and floundered. That sounded weird. This thing's been going on a month now, and the Kerry campaign still hasn't come up with a form of words to deflect questions about it. If they had an agreed spin, McAuliffe and Co. would be out using it. But the seared senator feels it's lese majeste even to question him. He can talk about Vietnam 24/7, but nobody else is allowed to bring it up.
Sorry, man, that's not the way it works. And if he thinks it does, he's even further removed from the realities of democratic politics than he was from the interior of Cambodia. Instead of those military records the swift boat vets are calling for, I'd be more interested in seeing his medical ones.
As for Bush, to be sure at one level his convention was a ''soft-focus infomercial,'' just as Kerry's was. But the infomercial came into sharp focus just often enough to clarify, piercingly, the differences between the parties. On opening night in Boston, the Democrats staged a tasteful, teary candlelight remembrance of those who died on 9/11. On opening night in New York, the Republicans put up one speaker after another -- John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Ron Silver -- resolved that those thousands of innocents shall not have died in vain.
I remember a couple of days after Sept. 11 writing that weepy candlelight vigils were a cop-out: the issue wasn't whether you were sad about the dead people but whether you wanted to do something about it. Three years on, the two conventions drew the same distinction. If you want passivity and wallowing in victim culture, the Dems will do. If you want to win this thing, Bush is the only guy running.
Copyright © The Sun-Times Company
Friday, September 03, 2004
From the San Francisco Chronicle:
Deserving victory
by Debra J. Saunders
New York -- THE CONVENTIONAL talk about the Republican National Convention was that, like the Philadelphia convention in 2000, this would be a parade of moderates putting a kinder face on (what by implication is mean) conservatism. Instead the 2004 convention has been a parade of moderates and conservatives putting themselves on the line for President Bush because they believe that he is right about the most important issue before America today: The war on terrorism, which in this room includes the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.
That sentiment was clear Thursday night when Gen. Tommy Franks endorsed George W. Bush for president because he doesn't believe "we should retreat into a defensive posture and hope that the terrorists don't attack us again."
Actor Ron Silver put it well when he told me he supports the GOP ticket because, "I'm a 9/11 person and not a Sept. 10 person." Silver has been a supporter of abortion rights but, he noted, "If we don't get this thing right, then the rest of it doesn't make much of a difference."
The difference between Boston and New York could not be starker.
A New York Times/CBS News poll in July found that three-quarters of Democratic voters and 86 percent of Boston delegates opposed the war in Iraq. Yet both John Kerry and John Edwards voted for the resolution authorizing force in Iraq in 2002.
The same poll found that 19 percent of GOP voters and 3 percent of GOP delegates oppose the war. Those delegates are in harmony with Bush and Veep Dick Cheney, even if 51 percent of all voters polled oppose the war.
That's the central difference between the GOP and the Democrats: The Democrats were willing to -- no, they chose to, by nominating Kerry -- sell out their core issue in order to beat George W. Bush.
That's how fanatical their hatred is.
Republicans, on the other hand, are willing to lose an election for a cause they believe in. Bush knew when he began that the war in Iraq could cost him the election, but he did what he thought was best. And he still isn't flinching.
"He may lose this election. But the principle of how he conducts himself is more important than if he wins or loses the election," said California GOP Chairman Duf Sundheim.
Let me be clear: I am not arguing that Bush is not political -- he is political. He's president. I am arguing that the Democratic Party has become so political that it stands for absolutely nothing. Dems know it, so they nominate men who also stand for nothing -- but raw ambition.
Kerry won the nomination because many Democrats believed they had to pick a pro-war candidate in order to beat Bush. They were able to look at Kerry's vote against the Persian Gulf War and determine that he did not believe his 2002 Iraq vote and does not mean the pro-war statements he has made during the campaign.
Some of the very folks who bellow, "Bush lied," are crossing their fingers in the hope that Kerry lied.
"I don't think the Democrats have confidence in the American people," Republican National Committee Chairman Marc Racicot noted. That's why the Democrats are "angry."
And many Democrats think that they're going to lose. A famous wartime poster had Winston Churchill's face looming over the words, "Deserve victory." You deserve victory when you believe in a cause so much that you are willing to take risks for it.
This year, the Democrats abandoned their principles, implying either that they don't trust the America people to appreciate their message, or that they don't trust their message. Democrats aren't willing to take risks, but they are willing to choose someone whom they want to mislead the public. For that alone, they deserve to lose, and I think they know it.
E-mail Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@sfchronicle.com.
Deserving victory
by Debra J. Saunders
New York -- THE CONVENTIONAL talk about the Republican National Convention was that, like the Philadelphia convention in 2000, this would be a parade of moderates putting a kinder face on (what by implication is mean) conservatism. Instead the 2004 convention has been a parade of moderates and conservatives putting themselves on the line for President Bush because they believe that he is right about the most important issue before America today: The war on terrorism, which in this room includes the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan.
That sentiment was clear Thursday night when Gen. Tommy Franks endorsed George W. Bush for president because he doesn't believe "we should retreat into a defensive posture and hope that the terrorists don't attack us again."
Actor Ron Silver put it well when he told me he supports the GOP ticket because, "I'm a 9/11 person and not a Sept. 10 person." Silver has been a supporter of abortion rights but, he noted, "If we don't get this thing right, then the rest of it doesn't make much of a difference."
The difference between Boston and New York could not be starker.
A New York Times/CBS News poll in July found that three-quarters of Democratic voters and 86 percent of Boston delegates opposed the war in Iraq. Yet both John Kerry and John Edwards voted for the resolution authorizing force in Iraq in 2002.
The same poll found that 19 percent of GOP voters and 3 percent of GOP delegates oppose the war. Those delegates are in harmony with Bush and Veep Dick Cheney, even if 51 percent of all voters polled oppose the war.
That's the central difference between the GOP and the Democrats: The Democrats were willing to -- no, they chose to, by nominating Kerry -- sell out their core issue in order to beat George W. Bush.
That's how fanatical their hatred is.
Republicans, on the other hand, are willing to lose an election for a cause they believe in. Bush knew when he began that the war in Iraq could cost him the election, but he did what he thought was best. And he still isn't flinching.
"He may lose this election. But the principle of how he conducts himself is more important than if he wins or loses the election," said California GOP Chairman Duf Sundheim.
Let me be clear: I am not arguing that Bush is not political -- he is political. He's president. I am arguing that the Democratic Party has become so political that it stands for absolutely nothing. Dems know it, so they nominate men who also stand for nothing -- but raw ambition.
Kerry won the nomination because many Democrats believed they had to pick a pro-war candidate in order to beat Bush. They were able to look at Kerry's vote against the Persian Gulf War and determine that he did not believe his 2002 Iraq vote and does not mean the pro-war statements he has made during the campaign.
Some of the very folks who bellow, "Bush lied," are crossing their fingers in the hope that Kerry lied.
"I don't think the Democrats have confidence in the American people," Republican National Committee Chairman Marc Racicot noted. That's why the Democrats are "angry."
And many Democrats think that they're going to lose. A famous wartime poster had Winston Churchill's face looming over the words, "Deserve victory." You deserve victory when you believe in a cause so much that you are willing to take risks for it.
This year, the Democrats abandoned their principles, implying either that they don't trust the America people to appreciate their message, or that they don't trust their message. Democrats aren't willing to take risks, but they are willing to choose someone whom they want to mislead the public. For that alone, they deserve to lose, and I think they know it.
E-mail Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@sfchronicle.com.
From National Review Online:
What It Takes
Bush builds on his strengths and addresses his weaknesses.
by Ramesh Ponnuru
New York, N.Y. — I take Bush's aides seriously when they say that the point of the convention was less to get a "bounce" in the polls — although they would like that, of course — than to lay the foundation for a successful fall campaign. President Bush's speech Thursday night may not have been inspiring. But it methodically built on his strengths and shored him up where he has been weak.
For people with concerns about his swagger, or his bluntness, Bush needed to humanize himself by being self-deprecating — while also reminding people that they like his conviction. For people worried about his being inattentive to domestic policy, he had to lay out a domestic agenda — while also burnishing his national-security credentials.
But he did more than list domestic policies, as some commentators are saying. He also provided a framework within which Americans could make sense of those policies. Bush understood, better than most pundits, that his problem on the economy is not captured by a "jobs number" or the price of oil. What worries people is the insecurity that has attended economic change. Bush argued that our response to that insecurity should neither be a populist attempt to try to stop change nor a liberal attempt to expand government to provide security. Rather, it should be an expansion of freedom that allows people to provide security for themselves. Bush's program is fairly ideological: Personal accounts for Social Security trump money for community colleges in any rational calculation of these things. But it was presented in non-ideological terms. (Bush's line about how personal accounts will be owned and thus impossible to take away is a surely deliberate echo of FDR's comment about how no politician would ever be able to get rid of Social Security.) The president's accomplishment here should not be underestimated.
Bush avoided doing anything rash on tax reform, merely committing himself to simplification of the code. Permanently abolishing the estate tax would be enough to achieve that: I've been told that it makes up about 5 percent of the code, and its interaction with other parts of the code makes up another 5 percent. For that matter, making all the tax cuts permanent, and thus imparting stability to it over time, would simplify the code. So would moving away from having multiple layers of taxation for savings and investment. Here Bush just needs to do what he's already done, only better.
The foreign-policy section of his speech was also strong. Before the convention, I would have said that Republicans needed to take on the WMD mess head-on. But without doing that, Bush managed to make the case for the Iraq war better than anyone else at the convention but John McCain. He made both the still-defensible case about the long-term threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and the case for a "forward strategy of freedom" in the Mideast. And he hit Senator Kerry on his indefensible vote against $87 billion for the post-Saddam effort in Iraq. That vote was Howard Dean's gift to the Republican party, and it cannot be mentioned enough for Bush's purposes.
The convention may not give Bush a lead he can hold. The lead may switch back and forth, as in 2000. But what can be ruled out is a scenario in which the incumbent trails the challenger through the fall. That is now less likely than a sustained Bush lead. And Kerry finds himself in a trap. If he talks about domestic issues, he leaves the charges about his war record and his antiwar record unanswered — and disappoints his base. If he responds to those charges, he is stuck in the past — and more negative than the president acceptance speech was. Thursday night's rally was a sign that Kerry is being led by his followers. Their panic is overwrought, but it could be self-fulfilling. This is what it means to be in a trap, a trap that got tighter Thursday night.
What It Takes
Bush builds on his strengths and addresses his weaknesses.
by Ramesh Ponnuru
New York, N.Y. — I take Bush's aides seriously when they say that the point of the convention was less to get a "bounce" in the polls — although they would like that, of course — than to lay the foundation for a successful fall campaign. President Bush's speech Thursday night may not have been inspiring. But it methodically built on his strengths and shored him up where he has been weak.
For people with concerns about his swagger, or his bluntness, Bush needed to humanize himself by being self-deprecating — while also reminding people that they like his conviction. For people worried about his being inattentive to domestic policy, he had to lay out a domestic agenda — while also burnishing his national-security credentials.
But he did more than list domestic policies, as some commentators are saying. He also provided a framework within which Americans could make sense of those policies. Bush understood, better than most pundits, that his problem on the economy is not captured by a "jobs number" or the price of oil. What worries people is the insecurity that has attended economic change. Bush argued that our response to that insecurity should neither be a populist attempt to try to stop change nor a liberal attempt to expand government to provide security. Rather, it should be an expansion of freedom that allows people to provide security for themselves. Bush's program is fairly ideological: Personal accounts for Social Security trump money for community colleges in any rational calculation of these things. But it was presented in non-ideological terms. (Bush's line about how personal accounts will be owned and thus impossible to take away is a surely deliberate echo of FDR's comment about how no politician would ever be able to get rid of Social Security.) The president's accomplishment here should not be underestimated.
Bush avoided doing anything rash on tax reform, merely committing himself to simplification of the code. Permanently abolishing the estate tax would be enough to achieve that: I've been told that it makes up about 5 percent of the code, and its interaction with other parts of the code makes up another 5 percent. For that matter, making all the tax cuts permanent, and thus imparting stability to it over time, would simplify the code. So would moving away from having multiple layers of taxation for savings and investment. Here Bush just needs to do what he's already done, only better.
The foreign-policy section of his speech was also strong. Before the convention, I would have said that Republicans needed to take on the WMD mess head-on. But without doing that, Bush managed to make the case for the Iraq war better than anyone else at the convention but John McCain. He made both the still-defensible case about the long-term threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and the case for a "forward strategy of freedom" in the Mideast. And he hit Senator Kerry on his indefensible vote against $87 billion for the post-Saddam effort in Iraq. That vote was Howard Dean's gift to the Republican party, and it cannot be mentioned enough for Bush's purposes.
The convention may not give Bush a lead he can hold. The lead may switch back and forth, as in 2000. But what can be ruled out is a scenario in which the incumbent trails the challenger through the fall. That is now less likely than a sustained Bush lead. And Kerry finds himself in a trap. If he talks about domestic issues, he leaves the charges about his war record and his antiwar record unanswered — and disappoints his base. If he responds to those charges, he is stuck in the past — and more negative than the president acceptance speech was. Thursday night's rally was a sign that Kerry is being led by his followers. Their panic is overwrought, but it could be self-fulfilling. This is what it means to be in a trap, a trap that got tighter Thursday night.
In spite of the fact that Hanson seems to be oblivious to book shipping dates or the attendant publicity around the release of DVDs, this is an excellent piece from National Review.
Brace Yourself
The months ahead will be momentous.
by Victor Davis Hanson
The summer and fall have been and will be momentous: national political conventions, elections slated in Afghanistan and here at home, the Olympics, high gas prices, and near cultural hysteria, whether measured by Fahrenheit 9/11 or the Swift-boat ads. But brace yourself — this is only the beginning.
We should expect not only the dirtiest election in years, but also some real challenges the United States has not experienced since 1941.
HYSTERIA
Almost every day, al Qaeda suspects or affiliated terrorists are arrested somewhere in the world. Islamic fascists blow up Israelis, behead Nepalese, murder Russians children in schools and on the street, and kidnap French journalists (so much for appeasement). They want to destroy trains in New York as they did in Madrid. They seek to ruin democracy in Kabul and Baghdad and take down Russian airliners. Nearly each week they are caught forming cells in Europe and the United States — all akin in their desire for theocracy, incoherent demands, partiality for barbarous methods of killing civilians, and hatred of Western-style liberalism and freedom.
Now we learn that they may well turn their attention to targeted assassinations here at home — in the manner in which Osama bin Laden took out General Massoud of the Northern Alliance on the eve of the September 11 attacks, and like the various efforts to incinerate General Musharraf in Pakistan. The problem is not only that such efforts would be aimed at short-circuiting the nerve center of the United States, but also that previous reckless talk on the part of some cultural elites at home would only accentuate the turmoil.
The 2002 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Nicholson Baker, is due out with Checkpoint — an extended dialogue on killing (in a variety of strange ways) George Bush. Last year, comedian Rick Hall played to full houses in the U.K., performing his newest composition, “Let's Get Together and Kill George Bush.” A so-called pacifist group announced its sponsorship of a rather violent-sounding off-Broadway “guerilla comedy” entitled, I’m Gonna Kill the President.
This is stupid — and dangerous. Al Qaeda has announced its intentions play on perceptions of Western decadence and nihilism. Should the terrorists strike at our leaders, there will be a national accounting over the failure of those on the left to condemn such extremism. Alfred A. Knopf, for example, is promoting Baker’s book as a cris du coeur — “in response to the powerless seething fury many Americans felt when President Bush decided to take the nation to war.”
“Seething”? The radical Left is courting disaster and threatens to destroy the credibility of liberals who are apparently fearful of condemning the madness in their midst — this “cry of the heart” to save Saddam Hussein from the wrath of an imperialistic and bullying United States. When upscale protestors swear at delegates and parade obscene signs in New York while John Kerry goes windsurfing in shades and racing gloves, you have a recipe for disaster for wannabe populists.
OIL
We should also accept that the terrorists have finally caught on to just how fragile the world’s oil supply is. The global economy is recovering. India and China are becoming voracious energy importers. The United States will neither tap all of its own ample reserves nor embark on a new round of fuel-efficiency standards. Global speculators and investors are hypersensitive to even the slightest disruption in supply.
Thus we see daily attacks on facilities near Basra and in Kurdistan. The point of these bombings is not to shut down oil exportation altogether, but to make it clear that petroleum demand and supply is a fragile equation, requiring countries to pay exorbitant prices to unsavory regimes and causes, and to embrace political concessions.
It would be naïve of us to think that a Venezuela, a Saudi Arabia, or an Iran will ever unite with us to stop such terror, when the direct result of such uncertainty is an enhanced position for their regimes and cash windfalls in the tens of billions of dollars. We should assume instead that within a year or two we may well see a series of coordinated attacks on Russian or Middle Eastern petroleum facilities and tankers, as well as efforts to knock out or flip over a large exporting country; and we should plan right now for that eventuality. Greater fuel efficiency of our cars coupled with careful drilling in the Arctic is the obvious compromise, along with more nuclear power and continued work on hybrid fuels.
NUCLEAR IRAN
Get ready for a nuclear Iran — and perhaps sooner than we think. Oil exporters don’t burn off their natural gas and then complain that they need reactors to light their streets. Only Jimmy Carter believes that. Indeed, an ideal storm has arisen that has given the Tehran theocracy unforeseen opportunities to press ahead.
The ongoing fighting in southern Iraq — astutely aided and abetted by the mullahs — gives the impression that the United States is not ready or willing to pressure the Iranians to desist. Anti-war hysteria in the United States, they assume, assures them of a temporary pass: A fragile petroleum market cannot take another Middle East war. “Preemption” and “unilateralism” are now no longer doctrines but caricatured profanities. And a Europe that appeased Saddam for cash will be outright fawning when faced with three-stage, nuclear-tipped rockets pointed at Brussels.
The furor over North Korea convinces Teheran of the attention — and bribery — to be had by threatening to go nuclear. America will soon have to face the fact that while we were hypnotized over Kerry’s medals and George Bush’s National Guard service, Iran quietly and methodically created and hid away enough bombs to threaten the world’s oil supply and much of the West itself. And the president who confronts a nuclear Iran will be demonized by the global Left in a manner that makes the present Bush-hatred look tame.
HE’S BACK
Michael Moore is only temporarily dormant, and, as we just saw, he is starting to froth and rumble. It has been a little while since he was in the spotlight with Fahrenheit 9/11 — a near-fatal quiet for an egomaniac of his caliber. He inaugurated the present cycle of American viciousness right after 9/11 (lamenting that Republicans were not more in evidence at the 9/11 World Trade Center) and never really stopped — calling Americans “stupid,” praising the beheaders in Iraq as “Minutemen,” and slurring Bush as a “a drunk, a thief, a possible felon, an unconvicted deserter, and a crybaby.” For the moment his presence has been trumped by the Swift-boat veterans, whose mainstream third-party ads have done more harm to Kerry than Moore’s creative slumming ever did to Bush.
But it is worse than that. Michael Moore is a greater albatross around John Kerry than any Republican ever could have wished — providing tit-for-tat exemption for outside groups on the right to emulate his methodology, but without his counterproductive, buffoonish, and repulsive antics. Moore is the Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin of our times, and thus might do for John Kerry what the latter two and their followers did for Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern.
So get ready for another Moore belly-flop into the American political cesspool. It is too late to make another propaganda film before the elections, but we will see his hand in a variety of media, with his characteristic allegiance to untruth, hysteria, and malice.
DEMOCRATIC IMPLOSION
Finally, this election promises to be a turning point in American political history, but not in terms of the usual pundits’ reckoning of a red/blue standoff and the specter of a divided country’s future once more decided by the courts. The voting won’t come to that, but may well lead to a lopsided new division. The close presidential polls we see now mask a larger trend that has been nearly unceasing the last 20 years: the growing popularity of conservative thinking, which has been far more successful than the boutique liberal ideology in capturing the aspirations of working Americans.
The Democratic party of Harry Truman is moribund. We saw that all through the primary and convention. Democratic “populism” now consists of a screeching preppie Al Gore or Howard Dean, backed with money from Hollywood and George Soros — or John Kerry skiing in Sun Valley or windsurfing while resting up at one of his many homes. The result is that, despite the controversy over the war, the post-9/11 jitters, and the hysterical reactions to George Bush, most Americans tend to distrust those who claim allegiance with “the people.”
Thus if the Democrats lose the next election, they must confront the bitter fact that the House, the Senate, the presidency, and soon the Supreme Court are lost — and lost mostly to the dominant influence of their most vocal and wealthy supporters in Hollywood, the universities, the media, and the foundations who have privileged an agenda that is out of touch with most of those whom they never see nor wish to see.
It might have been neat the last two years to read of Soros money pouring into anti-Bush movements or the various theatrics of Answer, Not In Our Name, and Moveon.org. But most Americans who channel-surfed their televised rallies were disgusted by the hate and the weird fringe groups that showed up to trash the United States. Witness the protests at the recent convention in New York: Again, guerrilla street theater juxtaposed with sailing off Nantucket are not the images Democrats wish to convey while Islamofascists blow up and behead innocents in Russia, Israel, Kabul, and Iraq.
The party hierarchy reflects only its accumulated years in law school — the Clintons, Ted Kennedy, Al Gore, John Edwards, John Kerry — slicers and dicers who redefine the word “is” and view the world in terms of words rather than action. When a smug John Edwards flashed his smile and thought he was reentering the televised courtroom to dissect the president’s use of “catastrophic,” we knew that his old legalese, not ideas about fighting terrorists, is about all he has to offer. But, Senator Edwards, we are not a jury that can be talked into voting for millions of dollars for you in claims. We are a people in a real war for our very existence who want to be led to victory.
If Bush wins in November, and I think he will, then there will be recriminations and fury of the like we have not seen since the Right imploded after 1964. For many of us lifelong Democrats, the very sight of Michael Moore perched next to Jimmy Carter at the convention in Boston says it all — the sorry coming together of conspiratorial anti-Americanism and self-righteous appeasement.
We are not at the end of history, but rather at its new beginning. All the old truths — conventional warfare, the Atlantic alliance, petroleum-based affluence, conventional political debate, etiquette, principled disagreement, and the old populist Democratic party are coming under question. And the only thing that is clear from what will follow is that it will all be loud, messy, full of surprises — and occasionally quite scary.
Brace Yourself
The months ahead will be momentous.
by Victor Davis Hanson
The summer and fall have been and will be momentous: national political conventions, elections slated in Afghanistan and here at home, the Olympics, high gas prices, and near cultural hysteria, whether measured by Fahrenheit 9/11 or the Swift-boat ads. But brace yourself — this is only the beginning.
We should expect not only the dirtiest election in years, but also some real challenges the United States has not experienced since 1941.
HYSTERIA
Almost every day, al Qaeda suspects or affiliated terrorists are arrested somewhere in the world. Islamic fascists blow up Israelis, behead Nepalese, murder Russians children in schools and on the street, and kidnap French journalists (so much for appeasement). They want to destroy trains in New York as they did in Madrid. They seek to ruin democracy in Kabul and Baghdad and take down Russian airliners. Nearly each week they are caught forming cells in Europe and the United States — all akin in their desire for theocracy, incoherent demands, partiality for barbarous methods of killing civilians, and hatred of Western-style liberalism and freedom.
Now we learn that they may well turn their attention to targeted assassinations here at home — in the manner in which Osama bin Laden took out General Massoud of the Northern Alliance on the eve of the September 11 attacks, and like the various efforts to incinerate General Musharraf in Pakistan. The problem is not only that such efforts would be aimed at short-circuiting the nerve center of the United States, but also that previous reckless talk on the part of some cultural elites at home would only accentuate the turmoil.
The 2002 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Nicholson Baker, is due out with Checkpoint — an extended dialogue on killing (in a variety of strange ways) George Bush. Last year, comedian Rick Hall played to full houses in the U.K., performing his newest composition, “Let's Get Together and Kill George Bush.” A so-called pacifist group announced its sponsorship of a rather violent-sounding off-Broadway “guerilla comedy” entitled, I’m Gonna Kill the President.
This is stupid — and dangerous. Al Qaeda has announced its intentions play on perceptions of Western decadence and nihilism. Should the terrorists strike at our leaders, there will be a national accounting over the failure of those on the left to condemn such extremism. Alfred A. Knopf, for example, is promoting Baker’s book as a cris du coeur — “in response to the powerless seething fury many Americans felt when President Bush decided to take the nation to war.”
“Seething”? The radical Left is courting disaster and threatens to destroy the credibility of liberals who are apparently fearful of condemning the madness in their midst — this “cry of the heart” to save Saddam Hussein from the wrath of an imperialistic and bullying United States. When upscale protestors swear at delegates and parade obscene signs in New York while John Kerry goes windsurfing in shades and racing gloves, you have a recipe for disaster for wannabe populists.
OIL
We should also accept that the terrorists have finally caught on to just how fragile the world’s oil supply is. The global economy is recovering. India and China are becoming voracious energy importers. The United States will neither tap all of its own ample reserves nor embark on a new round of fuel-efficiency standards. Global speculators and investors are hypersensitive to even the slightest disruption in supply.
Thus we see daily attacks on facilities near Basra and in Kurdistan. The point of these bombings is not to shut down oil exportation altogether, but to make it clear that petroleum demand and supply is a fragile equation, requiring countries to pay exorbitant prices to unsavory regimes and causes, and to embrace political concessions.
It would be naïve of us to think that a Venezuela, a Saudi Arabia, or an Iran will ever unite with us to stop such terror, when the direct result of such uncertainty is an enhanced position for their regimes and cash windfalls in the tens of billions of dollars. We should assume instead that within a year or two we may well see a series of coordinated attacks on Russian or Middle Eastern petroleum facilities and tankers, as well as efforts to knock out or flip over a large exporting country; and we should plan right now for that eventuality. Greater fuel efficiency of our cars coupled with careful drilling in the Arctic is the obvious compromise, along with more nuclear power and continued work on hybrid fuels.
NUCLEAR IRAN
Get ready for a nuclear Iran — and perhaps sooner than we think. Oil exporters don’t burn off their natural gas and then complain that they need reactors to light their streets. Only Jimmy Carter believes that. Indeed, an ideal storm has arisen that has given the Tehran theocracy unforeseen opportunities to press ahead.
The ongoing fighting in southern Iraq — astutely aided and abetted by the mullahs — gives the impression that the United States is not ready or willing to pressure the Iranians to desist. Anti-war hysteria in the United States, they assume, assures them of a temporary pass: A fragile petroleum market cannot take another Middle East war. “Preemption” and “unilateralism” are now no longer doctrines but caricatured profanities. And a Europe that appeased Saddam for cash will be outright fawning when faced with three-stage, nuclear-tipped rockets pointed at Brussels.
The furor over North Korea convinces Teheran of the attention — and bribery — to be had by threatening to go nuclear. America will soon have to face the fact that while we were hypnotized over Kerry’s medals and George Bush’s National Guard service, Iran quietly and methodically created and hid away enough bombs to threaten the world’s oil supply and much of the West itself. And the president who confronts a nuclear Iran will be demonized by the global Left in a manner that makes the present Bush-hatred look tame.
HE’S BACK
Michael Moore is only temporarily dormant, and, as we just saw, he is starting to froth and rumble. It has been a little while since he was in the spotlight with Fahrenheit 9/11 — a near-fatal quiet for an egomaniac of his caliber. He inaugurated the present cycle of American viciousness right after 9/11 (lamenting that Republicans were not more in evidence at the 9/11 World Trade Center) and never really stopped — calling Americans “stupid,” praising the beheaders in Iraq as “Minutemen,” and slurring Bush as a “a drunk, a thief, a possible felon, an unconvicted deserter, and a crybaby.” For the moment his presence has been trumped by the Swift-boat veterans, whose mainstream third-party ads have done more harm to Kerry than Moore’s creative slumming ever did to Bush.
But it is worse than that. Michael Moore is a greater albatross around John Kerry than any Republican ever could have wished — providing tit-for-tat exemption for outside groups on the right to emulate his methodology, but without his counterproductive, buffoonish, and repulsive antics. Moore is the Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin of our times, and thus might do for John Kerry what the latter two and their followers did for Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern.
So get ready for another Moore belly-flop into the American political cesspool. It is too late to make another propaganda film before the elections, but we will see his hand in a variety of media, with his characteristic allegiance to untruth, hysteria, and malice.
DEMOCRATIC IMPLOSION
Finally, this election promises to be a turning point in American political history, but not in terms of the usual pundits’ reckoning of a red/blue standoff and the specter of a divided country’s future once more decided by the courts. The voting won’t come to that, but may well lead to a lopsided new division. The close presidential polls we see now mask a larger trend that has been nearly unceasing the last 20 years: the growing popularity of conservative thinking, which has been far more successful than the boutique liberal ideology in capturing the aspirations of working Americans.
The Democratic party of Harry Truman is moribund. We saw that all through the primary and convention. Democratic “populism” now consists of a screeching preppie Al Gore or Howard Dean, backed with money from Hollywood and George Soros — or John Kerry skiing in Sun Valley or windsurfing while resting up at one of his many homes. The result is that, despite the controversy over the war, the post-9/11 jitters, and the hysterical reactions to George Bush, most Americans tend to distrust those who claim allegiance with “the people.”
Thus if the Democrats lose the next election, they must confront the bitter fact that the House, the Senate, the presidency, and soon the Supreme Court are lost — and lost mostly to the dominant influence of their most vocal and wealthy supporters in Hollywood, the universities, the media, and the foundations who have privileged an agenda that is out of touch with most of those whom they never see nor wish to see.
It might have been neat the last two years to read of Soros money pouring into anti-Bush movements or the various theatrics of Answer, Not In Our Name, and Moveon.org. But most Americans who channel-surfed their televised rallies were disgusted by the hate and the weird fringe groups that showed up to trash the United States. Witness the protests at the recent convention in New York: Again, guerrilla street theater juxtaposed with sailing off Nantucket are not the images Democrats wish to convey while Islamofascists blow up and behead innocents in Russia, Israel, Kabul, and Iraq.
The party hierarchy reflects only its accumulated years in law school — the Clintons, Ted Kennedy, Al Gore, John Edwards, John Kerry — slicers and dicers who redefine the word “is” and view the world in terms of words rather than action. When a smug John Edwards flashed his smile and thought he was reentering the televised courtroom to dissect the president’s use of “catastrophic,” we knew that his old legalese, not ideas about fighting terrorists, is about all he has to offer. But, Senator Edwards, we are not a jury that can be talked into voting for millions of dollars for you in claims. We are a people in a real war for our very existence who want to be led to victory.
If Bush wins in November, and I think he will, then there will be recriminations and fury of the like we have not seen since the Right imploded after 1964. For many of us lifelong Democrats, the very sight of Michael Moore perched next to Jimmy Carter at the convention in Boston says it all — the sorry coming together of conspiratorial anti-Americanism and self-righteous appeasement.
We are not at the end of history, but rather at its new beginning. All the old truths — conventional warfare, the Atlantic alliance, petroleum-based affluence, conventional political debate, etiquette, principled disagreement, and the old populist Democratic party are coming under question. And the only thing that is clear from what will follow is that it will all be loud, messy, full of surprises — and occasionally quite scary.
From Time magazine:
The Case For Bush
In a post-9/11 world, the President shows the political courage that wartime demands
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
The United States has two of the most centrist political parties in the democratic world. It rarely matters who wins. Things turn out all right regardless. Not this time. This time there is a war on. And when there is a war on, particularly a war with so much at stake, elections matter.
And what matters? Having a President who understands the war and has the political courage to make the necessary decisions. Everything else is trivial.
The war broke out on 9/11 and George W. Bush understood its meaning immediately. He understood that the old cops-and-robbers approach—bringing perpetrators "to justice"—was not only wrong but also dangerous. Up till then, it had lulled us into believing we were doing something about terrorism.
Bush acted. He declared war. Not just on terrorists—the old way—but on states as well. States that harbor terrorists, states that aid and abet terrorism, states that hunger for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It all looks obvious now. It was not then. It was new: radical, dangerous and absolutely necessary.
The Michael Moore Democrats are having a jolly time with the President's reaction during those first seven minutes on 9/11. What counts is the first 100 days. The first 100 days witnessed the single most important victory ever in the war on terrorism: the conquest of Afghanistan, the installation of a pro-American government and the decimation and scattering of al-Qaeda. It seems easy now. It was not.
It was risky and required great political courage. Afghanistan was the graveyard of empires. Rugged, mountainous, impenetrable, recalcitrant and peopled by an enemy hardened and fanatical, it was considered unconquerable.
Bush led. And succeeded. He did it by mobilizing the American people within 10 days with one of the great speeches in modern American history, an address to Congress so compelling that 19,000 hockey fans in a Philadelphia arena stopped the game so he could be heard and they could be led. He did it by approving a military plan of audacity and originality. He did it knowing that the United States was going to war practically alone.
John Kerry tells us we have to wage a more sensitive war where we acquiesce more to "allies." O.K., let's talk allies. Which is the single most crucial ally in the war on terrorism? France? Germany? Russia? No. Pakistan. Pakistan made possible the destruction of the Taliban, and has been turning over to us the most important al-Qaeda figures ever captured. How did Bush turn the world's foremost supporter of the Taliban into our most critical ally against them? Sensitivity? Two days after 9/11, Bush had his Secretary of State deliver an ultimatum to the Pakistanis: Join us or else. They joined. That is leadership.
Bush was rewarded for this extraordinary first victory with overwhelming popular support. He could easily have spent the next two years lavishing attention on domestic affairs, ostentatiously opening a bioterrorism triage center in every clinic in every hamlet in America. Punctuate that with regular announcements about the hunt for al-Qaeda, and he could have coasted to re-election as Father Protector.
Instead, he took on Iraq. Everyone knew that Iraq would be difficult and dangerous. But Bush believed that Saddam Hussein and the threat he represented had to be removed. Our postwar troubles have made us believe, as if under amnesia, that the choice was between war and some kind of sustainable equilibrium. It was not. The tense post-Gulf War settlement was unstable and creating huge and growing liabilities for America. First, Iraqi suffering and starvation under a cruel and corrupt sanctions regime was widely blamed on the U.S. Second, the standoff with Iraq made necessary a large American garrison in Saudi Arabia, land of the Islamic holiest places—in the eyes of many Muslims, another U.S. provocation. Indeed, these two offenses were cited by Osama bin Laden as the chief justification for his 1998 declaration of jihad against America. Most important, the sanctions "containing" Saddam were collapsing.
That would have produced the ultimate nightmare: a re-energized and relegitimized regime headed by Saddam—and ultimately, even worse, his sons—increasingly Islamicizing its Baathist ideology, rearming and renewing WMD programs, and extending its connections with terrorist groups. The threat was not imminent. But it was ominous and absolutely inevitable. Bush, correctly, thought it necessary to remove it. It was obvious to all that this second war would jeopardize his presidency. He risked his entire political future for it nonetheless.
He could have played it safe, Kerry-like: nuancing the issue to death, kicking the problem into the future. He did not. That is leadership. That is political courage. That is what wartime demands.
And that is why he should be re-elected.
The Case For Bush
In a post-9/11 world, the President shows the political courage that wartime demands
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
The United States has two of the most centrist political parties in the democratic world. It rarely matters who wins. Things turn out all right regardless. Not this time. This time there is a war on. And when there is a war on, particularly a war with so much at stake, elections matter.
And what matters? Having a President who understands the war and has the political courage to make the necessary decisions. Everything else is trivial.
The war broke out on 9/11 and George W. Bush understood its meaning immediately. He understood that the old cops-and-robbers approach—bringing perpetrators "to justice"—was not only wrong but also dangerous. Up till then, it had lulled us into believing we were doing something about terrorism.
Bush acted. He declared war. Not just on terrorists—the old way—but on states as well. States that harbor terrorists, states that aid and abet terrorism, states that hunger for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It all looks obvious now. It was not then. It was new: radical, dangerous and absolutely necessary.
The Michael Moore Democrats are having a jolly time with the President's reaction during those first seven minutes on 9/11. What counts is the first 100 days. The first 100 days witnessed the single most important victory ever in the war on terrorism: the conquest of Afghanistan, the installation of a pro-American government and the decimation and scattering of al-Qaeda. It seems easy now. It was not.
It was risky and required great political courage. Afghanistan was the graveyard of empires. Rugged, mountainous, impenetrable, recalcitrant and peopled by an enemy hardened and fanatical, it was considered unconquerable.
Bush led. And succeeded. He did it by mobilizing the American people within 10 days with one of the great speeches in modern American history, an address to Congress so compelling that 19,000 hockey fans in a Philadelphia arena stopped the game so he could be heard and they could be led. He did it by approving a military plan of audacity and originality. He did it knowing that the United States was going to war practically alone.
John Kerry tells us we have to wage a more sensitive war where we acquiesce more to "allies." O.K., let's talk allies. Which is the single most crucial ally in the war on terrorism? France? Germany? Russia? No. Pakistan. Pakistan made possible the destruction of the Taliban, and has been turning over to us the most important al-Qaeda figures ever captured. How did Bush turn the world's foremost supporter of the Taliban into our most critical ally against them? Sensitivity? Two days after 9/11, Bush had his Secretary of State deliver an ultimatum to the Pakistanis: Join us or else. They joined. That is leadership.
Bush was rewarded for this extraordinary first victory with overwhelming popular support. He could easily have spent the next two years lavishing attention on domestic affairs, ostentatiously opening a bioterrorism triage center in every clinic in every hamlet in America. Punctuate that with regular announcements about the hunt for al-Qaeda, and he could have coasted to re-election as Father Protector.
Instead, he took on Iraq. Everyone knew that Iraq would be difficult and dangerous. But Bush believed that Saddam Hussein and the threat he represented had to be removed. Our postwar troubles have made us believe, as if under amnesia, that the choice was between war and some kind of sustainable equilibrium. It was not. The tense post-Gulf War settlement was unstable and creating huge and growing liabilities for America. First, Iraqi suffering and starvation under a cruel and corrupt sanctions regime was widely blamed on the U.S. Second, the standoff with Iraq made necessary a large American garrison in Saudi Arabia, land of the Islamic holiest places—in the eyes of many Muslims, another U.S. provocation. Indeed, these two offenses were cited by Osama bin Laden as the chief justification for his 1998 declaration of jihad against America. Most important, the sanctions "containing" Saddam were collapsing.
That would have produced the ultimate nightmare: a re-energized and relegitimized regime headed by Saddam—and ultimately, even worse, his sons—increasingly Islamicizing its Baathist ideology, rearming and renewing WMD programs, and extending its connections with terrorist groups. The threat was not imminent. But it was ominous and absolutely inevitable. Bush, correctly, thought it necessary to remove it. It was obvious to all that this second war would jeopardize his presidency. He risked his entire political future for it nonetheless.
He could have played it safe, Kerry-like: nuancing the issue to death, kicking the problem into the future. He did not. That is leadership. That is political courage. That is what wartime demands.
And that is why he should be re-elected.
The C-Word at Wesleyan U
By Mike Adams
If John Wesley were alive today, there is no doubt that he would be pleased with the quality of education students are getting at Wesleyan University.
Just a few minutes on the university website shows that Wesleyan deserves its strong academic reputation. Those U.S. News and World Report rankings just don’t lie.
For example, students at Wesleyan can join the “c*** club,” which was formed to help reclaim the c-word and imbue it with a new meaning. Some of the 35 original members of the student organization were upset that the word “vagina” translated to “sheath to a sword” in Latin. Because of the warlike reference, they decided that “vagina” would not be as good as the c-word. So they formed a club, convened a meeting, and sat around saying the c-word all night long.
One of the c-club’s founders told the school newspaper she “didn’t come to Wesleyan and think, ‘I want to be a Vagina Warrior.’” But she admitted that she feels like she has since become a vagina warrior.
At the first meeting of the c-club, the group’s aims were stated as “mak(ing) sure that women’s bodies are safe and sacred, get(ting) a dialogue going on campus, and hav(ing) women (know) how to be pleasured and to pleasure themselves.”
This involved organized activities aimed at helping c-clubbers find their clitorises. They also handed out vibrators on campus, held a sex toy workshop, and brought a masturbation expert to campus. Members also came up with a “vagina-licious song” and co-sponsored a “vagina art party.”
A “women’s only party” was also sponsored by the group. There, women painted each others’ bare chests and took Polaroid pictures of their vaginas in the bathroom (a strange development, indeed).
But, of course, it isn’t fair to judge Wesleyan University by the conduct of a few overzealous vagina warriors. It is also important to look at various speakers and programs sponsored by the university as a whole. And, not all of those activities focus on the vagina.
For example, one Wesleyan speaker (also an alumna) gave a talk at Wesleyan entitled, “My life as a feminist pornographer.” Co-sponsors of the event from the Wesleyan Queer Alliance informed the crowd that the guest speaker had “her own signature line of butt plugs.” The school paper said that no other Wesleyan graduate had ever achieved such an “honor.”
Instead of being a pornographer, this noted alumna had wanted to be “a dyke activist lawyer for the downtrodden.” But she credits a professor of History and American Studies for leading her into the pornography profession. You can trust that your children will get wise counsel if they attend Wesleyan University.
In addition to the signature sex toys, Wesleyan’s proud alumna started conducting sodomy workshops after graduation. There, she has even taught septuagenarians how to have anal sex. People of all ages can depend on her expert anal-ysis.
And, of course, the school paper rewards the success of graduates, but only when they have really made it big. Wesleyan’s feminist pornographer was described in the school paper as “a great model for Wesleyan students.”
Naturally, all of this talk about sodomy and vaginas has raised some concerns at Wesleyan University. In fact, some people in the university community were offended by the notion that having a vagina automatically means that you are a woman. To combat that crazy notion, Wesleyan added a trans-gendered monologue to The Vagina Monologues (TVM). In the words of the play’s director, TVM “is supposed to be about vaginas not only women and those two are not necessarily the same thing.”
The student newspaper observed that it was “fitting” that the inclusion of a trans-gendered monologue in TVM became a “hot issue” at Wesleyan. The paper saw an important need to correct the “common misconceptions about the implications of having – and of loving – a vagina.”
I don’t know that much about the implications of having and loving a vagina. But I do know John Wesley would be ashamed of Wesleyan University.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mike S. Adams is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina - Wilmington.
By Mike Adams
If John Wesley were alive today, there is no doubt that he would be pleased with the quality of education students are getting at Wesleyan University.
Just a few minutes on the university website shows that Wesleyan deserves its strong academic reputation. Those U.S. News and World Report rankings just don’t lie.
For example, students at Wesleyan can join the “c*** club,” which was formed to help reclaim the c-word and imbue it with a new meaning. Some of the 35 original members of the student organization were upset that the word “vagina” translated to “sheath to a sword” in Latin. Because of the warlike reference, they decided that “vagina” would not be as good as the c-word. So they formed a club, convened a meeting, and sat around saying the c-word all night long.
One of the c-club’s founders told the school newspaper she “didn’t come to Wesleyan and think, ‘I want to be a Vagina Warrior.’” But she admitted that she feels like she has since become a vagina warrior.
At the first meeting of the c-club, the group’s aims were stated as “mak(ing) sure that women’s bodies are safe and sacred, get(ting) a dialogue going on campus, and hav(ing) women (know) how to be pleasured and to pleasure themselves.”
This involved organized activities aimed at helping c-clubbers find their clitorises. They also handed out vibrators on campus, held a sex toy workshop, and brought a masturbation expert to campus. Members also came up with a “vagina-licious song” and co-sponsored a “vagina art party.”
A “women’s only party” was also sponsored by the group. There, women painted each others’ bare chests and took Polaroid pictures of their vaginas in the bathroom (a strange development, indeed).
But, of course, it isn’t fair to judge Wesleyan University by the conduct of a few overzealous vagina warriors. It is also important to look at various speakers and programs sponsored by the university as a whole. And, not all of those activities focus on the vagina.
For example, one Wesleyan speaker (also an alumna) gave a talk at Wesleyan entitled, “My life as a feminist pornographer.” Co-sponsors of the event from the Wesleyan Queer Alliance informed the crowd that the guest speaker had “her own signature line of butt plugs.” The school paper said that no other Wesleyan graduate had ever achieved such an “honor.”
Instead of being a pornographer, this noted alumna had wanted to be “a dyke activist lawyer for the downtrodden.” But she credits a professor of History and American Studies for leading her into the pornography profession. You can trust that your children will get wise counsel if they attend Wesleyan University.
In addition to the signature sex toys, Wesleyan’s proud alumna started conducting sodomy workshops after graduation. There, she has even taught septuagenarians how to have anal sex. People of all ages can depend on her expert anal-ysis.
And, of course, the school paper rewards the success of graduates, but only when they have really made it big. Wesleyan’s feminist pornographer was described in the school paper as “a great model for Wesleyan students.”
Naturally, all of this talk about sodomy and vaginas has raised some concerns at Wesleyan University. In fact, some people in the university community were offended by the notion that having a vagina automatically means that you are a woman. To combat that crazy notion, Wesleyan added a trans-gendered monologue to The Vagina Monologues (TVM). In the words of the play’s director, TVM “is supposed to be about vaginas not only women and those two are not necessarily the same thing.”
The student newspaper observed that it was “fitting” that the inclusion of a trans-gendered monologue in TVM became a “hot issue” at Wesleyan. The paper saw an important need to correct the “common misconceptions about the implications of having – and of loving – a vagina.”
I don’t know that much about the implications of having and loving a vagina. But I do know John Wesley would be ashamed of Wesleyan University.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mike S. Adams is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina - Wilmington.
Thursday, September 02, 2004
From www.washingtontimes.com
'Swift' surge
By Lawrence Kudlow
At the start of the Republican Convention, major media outlets all reported a slight improvement in George W. Bush's polling numbers. The Los Angeles Times poll has Mr. Bush ahead nationwide, and also shows him opening slight leads in key battleground states of Ohio, Wisconsin and Missouri.
Clearly, the Swift Boat veterans are having a major impact on this presidential race. In truth, not one of the political pundits saw this coming. Perhaps John Kerry should have anticipated it. But his tepid, halting and, as usual, flip-flopping responses made him seem totally unprepared.
And the worst may be yet to come for Mr. Kerry: Two other surveys show the impact of the Swiftees could be even greater than established polling data suggest.
The Tradesport.com survey shows Mr. Bush opening an absolutely incredible 58-42 percent lead over Mr. Kerry. Two weeks ago, this survey had them locked at 50. Similarly, the Iowa Electronic Market has Mr. Bush surging with a 55 percent to 45 percent lead over his opponent. That's also up from a dead heat only a few weeks ago.
These are startling numbers. They suggest the charges of the Swift Boat veterans and Mr. Kerry's weak response in his first major trial by fire have rescrambled the election deck chairs and may have completely blown the lid off the race.
One thought to take away from this is the importance of leaving the door open to the views of any and everyone when it comes to politicking. It's a question of free speech, really. Nobody should be prevented from expressing his views -- and no one should be prevented from financing his beliefs through so-called independent interest groups.
Stopping the so-called 527 groups would be a big mistake. As long as financing is disclosed immediately on the Internet, why shouldn't Americans have the right to say and fund anything they want?
Of course, we're only hearing about the evil 527 groups now that Mr. Kerry has felt their bite. The Kerry camp says a Bush conspiracy led to the Swiftees unfairly attacking his record. But Mr. Bush never came out against the 527s until the Kerry camp (and the campaign-finance-reforming John McCain) pressured him to do so. Anyway, Mr. Bush himself dismisses the idea Mr. Kerry lies about his war record.
Without question, a key reason for Mr. Bush's weak showing in the polls during most of this election season has been the constant slamming of the George Soros-type 527 groups. These folks have lied about and slimed the president's record. And their assault has dwarfed that of the Swift Boat veterans.
Before the Swiftees came on the national scene, nine of the 10 wealthiest 527 campaign groups were Democratic. Only the conservative-leaning Club for Growth made the list of the top 10 soft-money political advocacy groups.
The Swiftees, however, are catching up. So far, the Swift Boat veterans have done most of their damage with less than a million bucks. But now Washington insiders say the group will be backed by Progress America, a 527 organization that has already raised about $25 million.
Well, let the games begin. American politics is a bloodsport. As we are learning, these political charges and countercharges can have a significant impact on the race. Good. Voters around the country will decide the merits of the 527 campaign ads, and take their decisions to the voting booth. The candidates may not like it, but they have to take it. It goes with the territory.
Actually, I would suggest the assault on John Kerry by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has electrified this race, creating far more interest than there was previously. Instead of stifling political perspectives, government should get out of the way -- then we can have a full hearing of all points of view.
On the first Tuesday of November, the voters will decide.
Lawrence Kudlow is a nationally syndicated columnist and is chief executive officer of Kudlow & Co., LLC, and CNBC's economics commentator
'Swift' surge
By Lawrence Kudlow
At the start of the Republican Convention, major media outlets all reported a slight improvement in George W. Bush's polling numbers. The Los Angeles Times poll has Mr. Bush ahead nationwide, and also shows him opening slight leads in key battleground states of Ohio, Wisconsin and Missouri.
Clearly, the Swift Boat veterans are having a major impact on this presidential race. In truth, not one of the political pundits saw this coming. Perhaps John Kerry should have anticipated it. But his tepid, halting and, as usual, flip-flopping responses made him seem totally unprepared.
And the worst may be yet to come for Mr. Kerry: Two other surveys show the impact of the Swiftees could be even greater than established polling data suggest.
The Tradesport.com survey shows Mr. Bush opening an absolutely incredible 58-42 percent lead over Mr. Kerry. Two weeks ago, this survey had them locked at 50. Similarly, the Iowa Electronic Market has Mr. Bush surging with a 55 percent to 45 percent lead over his opponent. That's also up from a dead heat only a few weeks ago.
These are startling numbers. They suggest the charges of the Swift Boat veterans and Mr. Kerry's weak response in his first major trial by fire have rescrambled the election deck chairs and may have completely blown the lid off the race.
One thought to take away from this is the importance of leaving the door open to the views of any and everyone when it comes to politicking. It's a question of free speech, really. Nobody should be prevented from expressing his views -- and no one should be prevented from financing his beliefs through so-called independent interest groups.
Stopping the so-called 527 groups would be a big mistake. As long as financing is disclosed immediately on the Internet, why shouldn't Americans have the right to say and fund anything they want?
Of course, we're only hearing about the evil 527 groups now that Mr. Kerry has felt their bite. The Kerry camp says a Bush conspiracy led to the Swiftees unfairly attacking his record. But Mr. Bush never came out against the 527s until the Kerry camp (and the campaign-finance-reforming John McCain) pressured him to do so. Anyway, Mr. Bush himself dismisses the idea Mr. Kerry lies about his war record.
Without question, a key reason for Mr. Bush's weak showing in the polls during most of this election season has been the constant slamming of the George Soros-type 527 groups. These folks have lied about and slimed the president's record. And their assault has dwarfed that of the Swift Boat veterans.
Before the Swiftees came on the national scene, nine of the 10 wealthiest 527 campaign groups were Democratic. Only the conservative-leaning Club for Growth made the list of the top 10 soft-money political advocacy groups.
The Swiftees, however, are catching up. So far, the Swift Boat veterans have done most of their damage with less than a million bucks. But now Washington insiders say the group will be backed by Progress America, a 527 organization that has already raised about $25 million.
Well, let the games begin. American politics is a bloodsport. As we are learning, these political charges and countercharges can have a significant impact on the race. Good. Voters around the country will decide the merits of the 527 campaign ads, and take their decisions to the voting booth. The candidates may not like it, but they have to take it. It goes with the territory.
Actually, I would suggest the assault on John Kerry by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has electrified this race, creating far more interest than there was previously. Instead of stifling political perspectives, government should get out of the way -- then we can have a full hearing of all points of view.
On the first Tuesday of November, the voters will decide.
Lawrence Kudlow is a nationally syndicated columnist and is chief executive officer of Kudlow & Co., LLC, and CNBC's economics commentator
From the website of Chronicles magazine. Especially appropriate in this week of the release of The Passion of the Christ on DVD.
The Triumph of Tradition
by Tom Piatak
"When violence breaks out, Mel Gibson will have a much higher authority than professors and bishops to answer to." So predicted Boston University’s Paula Fredriksen in one of the opening salvos in the year-long campaign to kill Mel Gibson’s film masterpiece, The Passion of the Christ—a campaign that was, in equal measure, hysterical, disingenuous, ignorant, and unsuccessful. As of this writing, The Passion has grossed over $360 million in the United States (making it the seventh top-grossing domestic film in history) and over $200 million overseas. The result is not the "violence" Fredriksen predicted but numerous stories of people being moved to return to Christ and, in a few instances, even to confess to unsolved crimes.
Just about everything the critics said about Gibson’s film was wrong. Starting with Fredriksen, the critics assumed the pose of objective historian, lecturing us ad nauseam that all scholars believe that the Romans alone were responsible for the Crucifixion; that Pilate was such a brutal tyrant that what the Gospels wrote about him was certainly false; that no one in first-century Jerusalem spoke Latin. But Raymond Brown, the late doyen of liberal biblical scholars, wrote in his Death of the Messiah that, "When the Jewish, Christian, and pagan evidence is assembled, the involvement of Jews in the death of Jesus approaches certainty"; that Pilate "was not a ferociously cruel governor" and the Gospels’ "descriptions of Pilate with their variations are not inherently implausible"; and that Pilate’s cohorts included the Secunda Italica Civium Romanorum—troops who spoke Latin, not Greek.
We were also repeatedly warned that Passion plays regularly lead to antisemitic violence, even though these warnings were invariably devoid of evidence that any particular Passion play had, in fact, led to violence. The reaction to Gibson’s film strongly suggests that these warnings were at least misplaced, if not baseless. A poll taken by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research showed, in fact, that Gibson’s film was more likely to lessen belief in Jewish culpability for Jesus’ death than the reverse. Such a result is surprising only if one believes, as do Gibson’s critics, that the Gospels themselves are antisemitic.
The critics also scorned Gibson for focusing on the Passion, not on Christ’s teachings or His Resurrection. Lawrence Frizzell, one of the first academics to attack Gibson, wrote that "Emphasis on the Passion . . . does not convey any insight into the means whereby the Gospels show that the work of forgiveness is accomplished." So much for J.S. Bach’s Passions, Joseph Haydn’s Seven Last Words, Michelangelo’s Pietà—not to mention the countless Crucifixions painted by nearly every master from Giotto up to the 18th century, including such diverse artists as Rubens and Rembrandt, Velazquez and El Greco, Tintoretto and Titian, Delacroix and Poussin, and even Gauguin and Dali. So much, too, for St. Francis of Assisi. As Jaroslav Pelikan notes in Jesus Through the Centuries, the great focus of Francis’ devotion was the Passion, and Bonaventure wrote in his biography of Francis that "Christ hung upon his Cross, poor and naked and in great pain, and Francis wanted to be like him in everything." It is a shame that such simpletons as Bach and Saint Francis did not have Lawrence Frizzell to show them the way.
Complaints about the violence of Gibson’s film suggest that the critics were simply ignorant both of the Western artistic tradition and of centuries of piety focused on the Passion, both of which have emphasized the physical nature of Christ’s sacrifice. As Jonathan Chaves has written, Gibson’s Christ was less battered than Matthias Grünewald’s in his renowned Isenheim Altarpiece, and nothing in Gibson’s film matched the bitter grief shown by Saint Mary and Saint John as they contemplate the crucified Jesus in Grüne-wald’s painting. Nothing in Gibson’s film, either, compares to the malevolence expressed by the faces surrounding Christ in Hieronymus Bosch’s Christ Carrying the Cross and Christ Crowned With Thorns.
Unlike his critics, Gibson was aware of the Western artistic tradition. He has spoken of his debt to such artists as Caravaggio, Mantegna, Masaccio, and Piero della Francesca. The result of Gibson’s study of other depictions of the Crucifixion was a film that was profoundly visual and evocative of Western art. As Chaves wrote,
"The stations of the cross proceeded across the screen like a series of engravings or woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer or Martin Schongauer; or paintings by Duccio di Buoninsegna, Fra Angelico, Francisco de Zurbaran or Guido Reni; or wall paintings or icons on the iconostasis of any of the monastery churches at Mt. Athos."
The New York Times’ Daniel Wakin, writing on April 18, described Gilbert Fuentes, a visitor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit on Byzantine art who was inspired both to return to his faith and to visit the exhibit because of Gibson’s film: "It really touched me, the way [H]e suffered. It makes me want to research more of it." Mr. Fuentes was particularly drawn to Venetian artist’s Michele Giambono’s The Man of Sorrows, painted around 1420-30, which he found, in a way, more powerful than the Gibson film: "You’re able to be one on one. You can stand here and meditate on it."
The tradition uniting Giambono and Gibson remains a fruitful one because it ultimately leads back to the Gospels. By contrast, the best that can be said for the tradition embraced by Gibson’s academic critics—the historical-critical approach to the Bible—is that not everyone who is exposed to it automatically loses his faith. It is a sterile tradition, inspiring no one, creating no art, leading nowhere.
Gibson’s film is also a vindication of orthodox Christianity. Though condemned by a handful of liberal churchmen, it was warmly embraced by believers of all denominations. Significantly, all of the criticism of Gibson’s film came from countries where Christianity is either on the defensive or actually dying. In the Third World, where the Faith is growing, no one condemned it. Instead, it was embraced by the entire episcopate of the Philippines and the leading churchmen of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and South Africa. Gibson’s depiction of Christ was thoroughly orthodox. As Kenneth Woodward wrote in the New York Times, Gibson’s Jesus
"doesn’t promote social causes. . . . He certainly doesn’t crusade against gender discrimination, as some feminists believe he did, nor does he teach that we all possess an inner divinity, as today’s nouveau Gnostics believe. One cannot imagine this Jesus joining a New Age sunrise Easter service overlooking the Pacific."
Those who prefer a New Age Jesus (or no Jesus at all) were shocked by Gibson’s film, which, for a moment, caused a welcome shift in our national discourse from endless chatter over such trivialities as Janet Jackson’s "wardrobe malfunction" to matters of real importance. It is hard to imagine a film about any other historical figure having such an impact. Whether one believes in Him or not, Jesus remains the central figure in history. And Gibson’s depiction of His last hours will continue to be watched long after all of Gibson’s critics are forgotten and their efforts to deconstruct the Gospels have come to naught.
Tom Piatak writes from Cleveland, Ohio.
The Triumph of Tradition
by Tom Piatak
"When violence breaks out, Mel Gibson will have a much higher authority than professors and bishops to answer to." So predicted Boston University’s Paula Fredriksen in one of the opening salvos in the year-long campaign to kill Mel Gibson’s film masterpiece, The Passion of the Christ—a campaign that was, in equal measure, hysterical, disingenuous, ignorant, and unsuccessful. As of this writing, The Passion has grossed over $360 million in the United States (making it the seventh top-grossing domestic film in history) and over $200 million overseas. The result is not the "violence" Fredriksen predicted but numerous stories of people being moved to return to Christ and, in a few instances, even to confess to unsolved crimes.
Just about everything the critics said about Gibson’s film was wrong. Starting with Fredriksen, the critics assumed the pose of objective historian, lecturing us ad nauseam that all scholars believe that the Romans alone were responsible for the Crucifixion; that Pilate was such a brutal tyrant that what the Gospels wrote about him was certainly false; that no one in first-century Jerusalem spoke Latin. But Raymond Brown, the late doyen of liberal biblical scholars, wrote in his Death of the Messiah that, "When the Jewish, Christian, and pagan evidence is assembled, the involvement of Jews in the death of Jesus approaches certainty"; that Pilate "was not a ferociously cruel governor" and the Gospels’ "descriptions of Pilate with their variations are not inherently implausible"; and that Pilate’s cohorts included the Secunda Italica Civium Romanorum—troops who spoke Latin, not Greek.
We were also repeatedly warned that Passion plays regularly lead to antisemitic violence, even though these warnings were invariably devoid of evidence that any particular Passion play had, in fact, led to violence. The reaction to Gibson’s film strongly suggests that these warnings were at least misplaced, if not baseless. A poll taken by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research showed, in fact, that Gibson’s film was more likely to lessen belief in Jewish culpability for Jesus’ death than the reverse. Such a result is surprising only if one believes, as do Gibson’s critics, that the Gospels themselves are antisemitic.
The critics also scorned Gibson for focusing on the Passion, not on Christ’s teachings or His Resurrection. Lawrence Frizzell, one of the first academics to attack Gibson, wrote that "Emphasis on the Passion . . . does not convey any insight into the means whereby the Gospels show that the work of forgiveness is accomplished." So much for J.S. Bach’s Passions, Joseph Haydn’s Seven Last Words, Michelangelo’s Pietà—not to mention the countless Crucifixions painted by nearly every master from Giotto up to the 18th century, including such diverse artists as Rubens and Rembrandt, Velazquez and El Greco, Tintoretto and Titian, Delacroix and Poussin, and even Gauguin and Dali. So much, too, for St. Francis of Assisi. As Jaroslav Pelikan notes in Jesus Through the Centuries, the great focus of Francis’ devotion was the Passion, and Bonaventure wrote in his biography of Francis that "Christ hung upon his Cross, poor and naked and in great pain, and Francis wanted to be like him in everything." It is a shame that such simpletons as Bach and Saint Francis did not have Lawrence Frizzell to show them the way.
Complaints about the violence of Gibson’s film suggest that the critics were simply ignorant both of the Western artistic tradition and of centuries of piety focused on the Passion, both of which have emphasized the physical nature of Christ’s sacrifice. As Jonathan Chaves has written, Gibson’s Christ was less battered than Matthias Grünewald’s in his renowned Isenheim Altarpiece, and nothing in Gibson’s film matched the bitter grief shown by Saint Mary and Saint John as they contemplate the crucified Jesus in Grüne-wald’s painting. Nothing in Gibson’s film, either, compares to the malevolence expressed by the faces surrounding Christ in Hieronymus Bosch’s Christ Carrying the Cross and Christ Crowned With Thorns.
Unlike his critics, Gibson was aware of the Western artistic tradition. He has spoken of his debt to such artists as Caravaggio, Mantegna, Masaccio, and Piero della Francesca. The result of Gibson’s study of other depictions of the Crucifixion was a film that was profoundly visual and evocative of Western art. As Chaves wrote,
"The stations of the cross proceeded across the screen like a series of engravings or woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer or Martin Schongauer; or paintings by Duccio di Buoninsegna, Fra Angelico, Francisco de Zurbaran or Guido Reni; or wall paintings or icons on the iconostasis of any of the monastery churches at Mt. Athos."
The New York Times’ Daniel Wakin, writing on April 18, described Gilbert Fuentes, a visitor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit on Byzantine art who was inspired both to return to his faith and to visit the exhibit because of Gibson’s film: "It really touched me, the way [H]e suffered. It makes me want to research more of it." Mr. Fuentes was particularly drawn to Venetian artist’s Michele Giambono’s The Man of Sorrows, painted around 1420-30, which he found, in a way, more powerful than the Gibson film: "You’re able to be one on one. You can stand here and meditate on it."
The tradition uniting Giambono and Gibson remains a fruitful one because it ultimately leads back to the Gospels. By contrast, the best that can be said for the tradition embraced by Gibson’s academic critics—the historical-critical approach to the Bible—is that not everyone who is exposed to it automatically loses his faith. It is a sterile tradition, inspiring no one, creating no art, leading nowhere.
Gibson’s film is also a vindication of orthodox Christianity. Though condemned by a handful of liberal churchmen, it was warmly embraced by believers of all denominations. Significantly, all of the criticism of Gibson’s film came from countries where Christianity is either on the defensive or actually dying. In the Third World, where the Faith is growing, no one condemned it. Instead, it was embraced by the entire episcopate of the Philippines and the leading churchmen of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and South Africa. Gibson’s depiction of Christ was thoroughly orthodox. As Kenneth Woodward wrote in the New York Times, Gibson’s Jesus
"doesn’t promote social causes. . . . He certainly doesn’t crusade against gender discrimination, as some feminists believe he did, nor does he teach that we all possess an inner divinity, as today’s nouveau Gnostics believe. One cannot imagine this Jesus joining a New Age sunrise Easter service overlooking the Pacific."
Those who prefer a New Age Jesus (or no Jesus at all) were shocked by Gibson’s film, which, for a moment, caused a welcome shift in our national discourse from endless chatter over such trivialities as Janet Jackson’s "wardrobe malfunction" to matters of real importance. It is hard to imagine a film about any other historical figure having such an impact. Whether one believes in Him or not, Jesus remains the central figure in history. And Gibson’s depiction of His last hours will continue to be watched long after all of Gibson’s critics are forgotten and their efforts to deconstruct the Gospels have come to naught.
Tom Piatak writes from Cleveland, Ohio.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Bush's Capital
A consequential presidency is always "polarizing."
Journalists like to complain, usually with cause, that politicians are slaves to the polls and rarely take a risk. So it is no small irony that the President who takes the stage tonight in New York City stands accused of taking too many risks.
Mr. Bush is assailed for pursuing tax cuts, amid recession and war, that have brought back the deficit. He is blamed for invading Iraq instead of concentrating on al Qaeda. He has also--pick your favorite sin of recklessness--upset our venerable global alliances, dumped the sainted ABM Treaty and Kyoto Protocol, opened Medicare to market competition, demanded too much from public schools, and loosened restraints on the Justice Department and FBI.
Merely to cite this list is to show how tumultuous the past four years have been. Mr. Bush has run neither the "in-box Presidency" of his father, nor pursued the mini-me agenda of Dick Morris and Bill Clinton. Whatever political capital he has won or been offered by events, he has turned around and spent it to pursue his goals. Agree with his priorities or not, no one can claim that he lacks what the Federalist Papers hailed as "energy in the executive."
Part of the political peril in this is that four years is often too short a time to see how these decisions turn out. That is especially true on national security, where in the wake of 9/11 Mr. Bush has set an entirely new strategy to combat terrorism and "transform" the Middle East. These are long-run bets, much as the "containment" strategy begun by Harry Truman took 40 years to prevail against Communism.
But already the ledger shows more assets than liabilities. Two regimes that were threats to America have been toppled. A third, Libya, turned state's evidence against its own nuclear program amid Saddam's fall. Some want us to believe that Moammar Ghadafi saw this light on his own, but his timing says otherwise. Pakistan, which once protected the Taliban, is now a key ally and its A.Q. Khan nuclear network has been rolled up.
Yes, Mr. Bush underestimated the Iraq insurgency, among other post-invasion mistakes. It's worth recalling, however, that those who opposed the war warned instead of disasters that did not happen--a refugee exodus, uprisings in the Arab street, environmental catastrophe, civil war. While civil war is still possible, the single most important change in Iraq is that all but the bitter-end Baathists now support free elections and representative government. If this nation-building succeeds, the U.S. will have an ally in the heart of the Mideast and the Arab Muslim world.
Surely the easier political choice for Mr. Bush was to stop after toppling the Taliban, delaying any Iraq decision until safely re-elected. But assessing the risks and concluding that they can't wait is what we pay Presidents to do. The far greater temptation--and in a world of WMD, the far greater risk--is to find some excuse never to act. This was the Clinton pattern, and John Kerry's record suggests it would also be his.
The other popular criticisms of Mr. Bush's foreign policy seem to us wildly overdrawn. Kyoto was fatally flawed and didn't include the developing world (China). The declining Franco-German half of Europe would be reluctant to help the U.S. no matter who was President. Far from being a "unilateral cowboy," Mr. Bush ended the archaic ABM Treaty with the full agreement of Russia. If anything, on Iran and North Korea he has deferred too much to allies and their diplomatic imperatives. A second term would require greater resolve.
On the domestic side, we wrote yesterday about the economic success of his tax cutting. But we'd add that this required him to take the additional political risk of shaking up his economic team and firing his disloyal and ineffective Treasury Secretary. This is something his father was never willing to do, but it was clearly the right call and has helped him avoid an even deeper post-9/11 recession.
If only Mr. Bush had been as forceful in settling disputes among his national security team. A blood feud--the CIA and State versus the Pentagon--meant that many vital decisions on Iraq were split down the middle or left to fester. Among other things, these fights hindered the prewar recruitment of Iraqi allies and lengthened the postwar occupation. We hope Mr. Bush has learned from the mistake of appointing a Secretary of State who can't be fired no matter how much his diplomats undermine White House policy.
In other areas, too, we wish Mr. Bush had been bolder. His failure to veto a single bill has only encouraged Congressional spendthrifts. On Medicare, he settled too easily for too little reform, saddling taxpayers with untold billions in future liabilities. Even here, however, Mr. Bush has planted the seeds of a revolution in consumer-driven health care by introducing health savings accounts. The rub is that he will need a second term to ensure their survival and growth, because Mr. Kerry would kill them in the cradle. He will also need a second term to fulfill his 2000 promise to reform Social Security, as we hear he will again pledge to do this evening.
One thing that hasn't surprised us is the charge that Mr. Bush is "polarizing." We doubt this has much to do with his Texas style. The truth is that every President who tries to do large things is controversial. And Mr. Bush represents a GOP vanguard that has displaced liberal Democrats who had dominated Washington for generations; no wonder his opponents are bitter. They understand that a second Bush term could well alter the country's political landscape for a generation.
Copyright © 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Bush's Capital
A consequential presidency is always "polarizing."
Journalists like to complain, usually with cause, that politicians are slaves to the polls and rarely take a risk. So it is no small irony that the President who takes the stage tonight in New York City stands accused of taking too many risks.
Mr. Bush is assailed for pursuing tax cuts, amid recession and war, that have brought back the deficit. He is blamed for invading Iraq instead of concentrating on al Qaeda. He has also--pick your favorite sin of recklessness--upset our venerable global alliances, dumped the sainted ABM Treaty and Kyoto Protocol, opened Medicare to market competition, demanded too much from public schools, and loosened restraints on the Justice Department and FBI.
Merely to cite this list is to show how tumultuous the past four years have been. Mr. Bush has run neither the "in-box Presidency" of his father, nor pursued the mini-me agenda of Dick Morris and Bill Clinton. Whatever political capital he has won or been offered by events, he has turned around and spent it to pursue his goals. Agree with his priorities or not, no one can claim that he lacks what the Federalist Papers hailed as "energy in the executive."
Part of the political peril in this is that four years is often too short a time to see how these decisions turn out. That is especially true on national security, where in the wake of 9/11 Mr. Bush has set an entirely new strategy to combat terrorism and "transform" the Middle East. These are long-run bets, much as the "containment" strategy begun by Harry Truman took 40 years to prevail against Communism.
But already the ledger shows more assets than liabilities. Two regimes that were threats to America have been toppled. A third, Libya, turned state's evidence against its own nuclear program amid Saddam's fall. Some want us to believe that Moammar Ghadafi saw this light on his own, but his timing says otherwise. Pakistan, which once protected the Taliban, is now a key ally and its A.Q. Khan nuclear network has been rolled up.
Yes, Mr. Bush underestimated the Iraq insurgency, among other post-invasion mistakes. It's worth recalling, however, that those who opposed the war warned instead of disasters that did not happen--a refugee exodus, uprisings in the Arab street, environmental catastrophe, civil war. While civil war is still possible, the single most important change in Iraq is that all but the bitter-end Baathists now support free elections and representative government. If this nation-building succeeds, the U.S. will have an ally in the heart of the Mideast and the Arab Muslim world.
Surely the easier political choice for Mr. Bush was to stop after toppling the Taliban, delaying any Iraq decision until safely re-elected. But assessing the risks and concluding that they can't wait is what we pay Presidents to do. The far greater temptation--and in a world of WMD, the far greater risk--is to find some excuse never to act. This was the Clinton pattern, and John Kerry's record suggests it would also be his.
The other popular criticisms of Mr. Bush's foreign policy seem to us wildly overdrawn. Kyoto was fatally flawed and didn't include the developing world (China). The declining Franco-German half of Europe would be reluctant to help the U.S. no matter who was President. Far from being a "unilateral cowboy," Mr. Bush ended the archaic ABM Treaty with the full agreement of Russia. If anything, on Iran and North Korea he has deferred too much to allies and their diplomatic imperatives. A second term would require greater resolve.
On the domestic side, we wrote yesterday about the economic success of his tax cutting. But we'd add that this required him to take the additional political risk of shaking up his economic team and firing his disloyal and ineffective Treasury Secretary. This is something his father was never willing to do, but it was clearly the right call and has helped him avoid an even deeper post-9/11 recession.
If only Mr. Bush had been as forceful in settling disputes among his national security team. A blood feud--the CIA and State versus the Pentagon--meant that many vital decisions on Iraq were split down the middle or left to fester. Among other things, these fights hindered the prewar recruitment of Iraqi allies and lengthened the postwar occupation. We hope Mr. Bush has learned from the mistake of appointing a Secretary of State who can't be fired no matter how much his diplomats undermine White House policy.
In other areas, too, we wish Mr. Bush had been bolder. His failure to veto a single bill has only encouraged Congressional spendthrifts. On Medicare, he settled too easily for too little reform, saddling taxpayers with untold billions in future liabilities. Even here, however, Mr. Bush has planted the seeds of a revolution in consumer-driven health care by introducing health savings accounts. The rub is that he will need a second term to ensure their survival and growth, because Mr. Kerry would kill them in the cradle. He will also need a second term to fulfill his 2000 promise to reform Social Security, as we hear he will again pledge to do this evening.
One thing that hasn't surprised us is the charge that Mr. Bush is "polarizing." We doubt this has much to do with his Texas style. The truth is that every President who tries to do large things is controversial. And Mr. Bush represents a GOP vanguard that has displaced liberal Democrats who had dominated Washington for generations; no wonder his opponents are bitter. They understand that a second Bush term could well alter the country's political landscape for a generation.
Copyright © 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Moderates to the forefront? Try true American heroes
by Collin Levey / Seattle Times editorial columnist
Since the Republican National Convention kicked off this week in New York, media gypsies have been dragging out their tape measures to examine the "big tent" of the GOP. The opening speakers' trifecta of John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger, many exclaimed, shows Republicans are on the defensive again, trying to recapture that frisson of inclusiveness that they had back in 2000 when Dubya was just a governor.
We certainly don't object to the giddy peering at what our newsmen consider rare and curious specimens of the "Republican moderate" (read, pro-choicer). But here, in their hurry to declare the "right wing" in retreat, they mistook the real reason the three men were chosen. It was not for their drawing-room opinions, but because all three are men of action — associated in the public mind with strength and power.
Were the intention to play to the left, by the way, there are quite a few GOP "moderates" out there who might have demonstrated effectively how much Republicans can sound like Democrats. Yet, somehow, Olympia Snowe and Arlen Specter were nowhere to be seen. (New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg will have his turn later.) Instead, Americans were introduced to a war hero, an action hero and a hero of Sept. 11, 2001.
All three men know that this, not their abortion stance, is the secret to their political cachet at this moment. The Governator never misses an opportunity to recall his former career fighting terrorists from the Third Dimension. And while John Kerry took the Democratic podium to declare himself a hero "reporting for duty," McCain stood to salute his commander in chief.
Giuliani's memories, both poignant and funny, recaptured the exact spirit of confidence that endeared him to Americans three years ago. And this has been the key difference between the conventions so far: In contrast to the self-congratulation at the Democratic National Convention in July, the message of the three men was understated strength.
It's a message that the Republicans would be well advised to carry over from the national-security front to the domestic agenda for the second term. The goal is not maximum splashiness, but forcefulness. Or, in Arnold's version, "Don't be economic girlie men."
That principle is critical to the Republicans in the next few days as they begin to create new enthusiasm in the base. With the exception of the early successful tax cuts, President Bush's first term had too many congressmen feeding at the trough. The administration signed on to a massive new drug entitlement and abdicated on Social Security reform, while other plans languished. Those "moderate" positions won little loyalty from either side of the aisle.
So, the "big tent" discussion is fine as far as it goes: Republican values should have broad appeal because national security should be the first priority. But the social issues that have traditionally defined the split between the parties in the headlines are nearly non-issues this year. (Remember all the furor over "strict constructionism" and Supreme Court nominees last time?) Instead, the tent seems bigger because the stakes are higher — the party cares most about the core issue of American safety and leadership in the world.
Hopefully, that same molten center will occupy the president when he gives his speech later tonight. There has been fair criticism in recent weeks that the Republicans seem to be playing both sides of the electoral equation simultaneously. No sooner had Bush proposed amending the Constitution to prevent gay marriage to woo the base than Vice President Dick Cheney hurried out to make clear — presumably for the benefit of swing voters — that not all Republicans were in that ship after all.
In a different sort of election, those suave maneuvers might slip through — but there is no room for them here. Republicans need to articulate a cohesive platform — they can't afford to look like Kerry, fleeing to the center in pursuit of the swing voters who don't seem to know what they want.
Collin Levey writes Thursdays for editorial pages of The Times. E-mail her at clevey@seattletimes.com
by Collin Levey / Seattle Times editorial columnist
Since the Republican National Convention kicked off this week in New York, media gypsies have been dragging out their tape measures to examine the "big tent" of the GOP. The opening speakers' trifecta of John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger, many exclaimed, shows Republicans are on the defensive again, trying to recapture that frisson of inclusiveness that they had back in 2000 when Dubya was just a governor.
We certainly don't object to the giddy peering at what our newsmen consider rare and curious specimens of the "Republican moderate" (read, pro-choicer). But here, in their hurry to declare the "right wing" in retreat, they mistook the real reason the three men were chosen. It was not for their drawing-room opinions, but because all three are men of action — associated in the public mind with strength and power.
Were the intention to play to the left, by the way, there are quite a few GOP "moderates" out there who might have demonstrated effectively how much Republicans can sound like Democrats. Yet, somehow, Olympia Snowe and Arlen Specter were nowhere to be seen. (New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg will have his turn later.) Instead, Americans were introduced to a war hero, an action hero and a hero of Sept. 11, 2001.
All three men know that this, not their abortion stance, is the secret to their political cachet at this moment. The Governator never misses an opportunity to recall his former career fighting terrorists from the Third Dimension. And while John Kerry took the Democratic podium to declare himself a hero "reporting for duty," McCain stood to salute his commander in chief.
Giuliani's memories, both poignant and funny, recaptured the exact spirit of confidence that endeared him to Americans three years ago. And this has been the key difference between the conventions so far: In contrast to the self-congratulation at the Democratic National Convention in July, the message of the three men was understated strength.
It's a message that the Republicans would be well advised to carry over from the national-security front to the domestic agenda for the second term. The goal is not maximum splashiness, but forcefulness. Or, in Arnold's version, "Don't be economic girlie men."
That principle is critical to the Republicans in the next few days as they begin to create new enthusiasm in the base. With the exception of the early successful tax cuts, President Bush's first term had too many congressmen feeding at the trough. The administration signed on to a massive new drug entitlement and abdicated on Social Security reform, while other plans languished. Those "moderate" positions won little loyalty from either side of the aisle.
So, the "big tent" discussion is fine as far as it goes: Republican values should have broad appeal because national security should be the first priority. But the social issues that have traditionally defined the split between the parties in the headlines are nearly non-issues this year. (Remember all the furor over "strict constructionism" and Supreme Court nominees last time?) Instead, the tent seems bigger because the stakes are higher — the party cares most about the core issue of American safety and leadership in the world.
Hopefully, that same molten center will occupy the president when he gives his speech later tonight. There has been fair criticism in recent weeks that the Republicans seem to be playing both sides of the electoral equation simultaneously. No sooner had Bush proposed amending the Constitution to prevent gay marriage to woo the base than Vice President Dick Cheney hurried out to make clear — presumably for the benefit of swing voters — that not all Republicans were in that ship after all.
In a different sort of election, those suave maneuvers might slip through — but there is no room for them here. Republicans need to articulate a cohesive platform — they can't afford to look like Kerry, fleeing to the center in pursuit of the swing voters who don't seem to know what they want.
Collin Levey writes Thursdays for editorial pages of The Times. E-mail her at clevey@seattletimes.com
from washingtonpost.com
A Goldwater Revival
By George F. Will
NEW YORK -- Barry is back.
Four decades after a Republican convention in San Francisco nominated Sen. Goldwater, sealing the ascendancy of conservatism in the party, his kind of conservatism made a comeback at the convention here. That conservatism -- muscular foreign policy backing unapologetic nationalism; economic policies of low taxation and light regulation; a libertarian inclination regarding cultural questions -- is not fully ascendant in the party. But the prominent display and rapturous reception of Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger demonstrated that such conservatism is not an insurmountable impediment to a person's reaching the party's highest echelons.
Conventions, long since transformed from deliberative or at least deciding bodies into ratifiers of decisions made elsewhere, are nevertheless intensely interesting. Just as the Soviet press merited close scrutiny because it was closely controlled to serve the regime's purposes, today's conventions give clarity to the parties' thinking. For the first time since 1940, the Republicans' ideological differences about some deeply felt convictions were cheerfully displayed rather than tensely ignored.
The nomination in 1940 of Wendell Willkie, a liberal businessman, rather than Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, the conservatives' favorite, was replicated in 1944, 1948 and 1952 by the nomination twice of New York Gov. Thomas Dewey and then Dwight Eisenhower, the choices of the party's dominant Eastern liberals. But from the podium of the 1960 convention, Goldwater exhorted conservatives to "take this party back." In 1964 they did.
Subsequent conventions heard the long, withdrawing sigh of liberal Republicanism -- and the rise of "social issues conservatism." The cultural fraying of the 1960s and, in 1973, the Supreme Court's ruinous removal of abortion from the control of representative institutions, gave social issues special saliency. They were more important than race in the rise of Republicanism in the South.
But the domination of the Republican Party by cultural conservatives did make some conservatives -- libertarians and religious skeptics, among others -- feel uneasy, even unwelcome. Being derided as RINOs -- Republicans in name only -- did not help. And the dominance of the cultural conservatives gave force to the Democrats' and the media's caricatures of the Republican Party as a brackish lagoon of intolerance, a caricature that, like all caricatures, contained a trace of truth.
The reemergence into Republican respectability of conservatism with a socially libertarian cast -- Goldwaterism -- is a development with a large potential to discomfort the Democratic Party. The reemergence can make the Republican Party more appealing to many young and suburban voters, two cohorts in which Democrats have recently made substantial gains.
The smooth surface of the Republican convention, unblemished by factional fighting, is partly produced by two kinds of heat. One is the heat of war, which has made all other issues seem distinctly marginal. The other is the heat of intense dislike of Democrats -- of some Democrats much more than of John Kerry. In a Wall Street Journal-NBC poll, Kerry is the Democrat disliked by only 5 percent of Republicans. He ranks sixth, behind Hillary Clinton (24 percent), Bill Clinton (19), Ted Kennedy (19), Jesse Jackson (11) and Al Gore (7).
The Republican Party's challenge is to keep its old fissures closed while relaxing the stringency of its social issues catechism. Republicans can derive encouragement from a long-lived coalition that was composed of elements far more discordant than a Republican Party that includes John Ashcroft as well as Giuliani and Schwarzenegger. FDR's "Roosevelt Coalition," which was born with the New Deal and did not crumble for four decades, balanced Northern liberals, intellectuals, organized labor and Southern segregationists.
And Republicans can learn a lesson that Democrats largely spurned 34 years ago. In 1970, as the Democratic Party was beginning to make the mistakes that created millions of Reagan Democrats, two Democrats, Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg, wrote a wise book, "The Real Majority." In it they advised their party that the enveloping sense of social dissolution had many voters saying:
"I do not expect a politician, any politician, can make these conditions disappear overnight. I even understand that some of the problems aren't strictly political problems. But I do expect that any politician I vote for will be on my side."
The Republican Party remains firmly on the side of the pro-life and religiously motivated social conservatives. But here this week the party began in earnest the task of making others not only more comfortable within the party but eligible to rank among its leaders.
Goldwater was, in a way, the first angry man of the angry '60s. But he actually smiled far more than he scowled. In his last years some conservatives excommunicated him because of his support for abortion rights and his relaxed views regarding homosexuality. However, this week his spirit is smiling broadly.
georgewill@washpost.com
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
A Goldwater Revival
By George F. Will
NEW YORK -- Barry is back.
Four decades after a Republican convention in San Francisco nominated Sen. Goldwater, sealing the ascendancy of conservatism in the party, his kind of conservatism made a comeback at the convention here. That conservatism -- muscular foreign policy backing unapologetic nationalism; economic policies of low taxation and light regulation; a libertarian inclination regarding cultural questions -- is not fully ascendant in the party. But the prominent display and rapturous reception of Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger demonstrated that such conservatism is not an insurmountable impediment to a person's reaching the party's highest echelons.
Conventions, long since transformed from deliberative or at least deciding bodies into ratifiers of decisions made elsewhere, are nevertheless intensely interesting. Just as the Soviet press merited close scrutiny because it was closely controlled to serve the regime's purposes, today's conventions give clarity to the parties' thinking. For the first time since 1940, the Republicans' ideological differences about some deeply felt convictions were cheerfully displayed rather than tensely ignored.
The nomination in 1940 of Wendell Willkie, a liberal businessman, rather than Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, the conservatives' favorite, was replicated in 1944, 1948 and 1952 by the nomination twice of New York Gov. Thomas Dewey and then Dwight Eisenhower, the choices of the party's dominant Eastern liberals. But from the podium of the 1960 convention, Goldwater exhorted conservatives to "take this party back." In 1964 they did.
Subsequent conventions heard the long, withdrawing sigh of liberal Republicanism -- and the rise of "social issues conservatism." The cultural fraying of the 1960s and, in 1973, the Supreme Court's ruinous removal of abortion from the control of representative institutions, gave social issues special saliency. They were more important than race in the rise of Republicanism in the South.
But the domination of the Republican Party by cultural conservatives did make some conservatives -- libertarians and religious skeptics, among others -- feel uneasy, even unwelcome. Being derided as RINOs -- Republicans in name only -- did not help. And the dominance of the cultural conservatives gave force to the Democrats' and the media's caricatures of the Republican Party as a brackish lagoon of intolerance, a caricature that, like all caricatures, contained a trace of truth.
The reemergence into Republican respectability of conservatism with a socially libertarian cast -- Goldwaterism -- is a development with a large potential to discomfort the Democratic Party. The reemergence can make the Republican Party more appealing to many young and suburban voters, two cohorts in which Democrats have recently made substantial gains.
The smooth surface of the Republican convention, unblemished by factional fighting, is partly produced by two kinds of heat. One is the heat of war, which has made all other issues seem distinctly marginal. The other is the heat of intense dislike of Democrats -- of some Democrats much more than of John Kerry. In a Wall Street Journal-NBC poll, Kerry is the Democrat disliked by only 5 percent of Republicans. He ranks sixth, behind Hillary Clinton (24 percent), Bill Clinton (19), Ted Kennedy (19), Jesse Jackson (11) and Al Gore (7).
The Republican Party's challenge is to keep its old fissures closed while relaxing the stringency of its social issues catechism. Republicans can derive encouragement from a long-lived coalition that was composed of elements far more discordant than a Republican Party that includes John Ashcroft as well as Giuliani and Schwarzenegger. FDR's "Roosevelt Coalition," which was born with the New Deal and did not crumble for four decades, balanced Northern liberals, intellectuals, organized labor and Southern segregationists.
And Republicans can learn a lesson that Democrats largely spurned 34 years ago. In 1970, as the Democratic Party was beginning to make the mistakes that created millions of Reagan Democrats, two Democrats, Richard Scammon and Ben Wattenberg, wrote a wise book, "The Real Majority." In it they advised their party that the enveloping sense of social dissolution had many voters saying:
"I do not expect a politician, any politician, can make these conditions disappear overnight. I even understand that some of the problems aren't strictly political problems. But I do expect that any politician I vote for will be on my side."
The Republican Party remains firmly on the side of the pro-life and religiously motivated social conservatives. But here this week the party began in earnest the task of making others not only more comfortable within the party but eligible to rank among its leaders.
Goldwater was, in a way, the first angry man of the angry '60s. But he actually smiled far more than he scowled. In his last years some conservatives excommunicated him because of his support for abortion rights and his relaxed views regarding homosexuality. However, this week his spirit is smiling broadly.
georgewill@washpost.com
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
from washingtonpost.com
Swift Boats and Double Standards
Why aren't the media scrutinizing lawyers and advisers to Kerry?
By Benjamin L. Ginsberg
Think you're getting unbiased, balanced coverage of politics? Or is there a double standard in the way the media treat Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives? My recent visit to the center of a media storm suggests there is. Consider this:
A $500,000 ad buy made by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth brings searing media scrutiny and "proof" of illegal coordination based on a lawyer (me) representing both the Bush-Cheney campaign and the Swift Boat Veterans; on an accountant working for Tom DeLay's political action committee; and on a $200,000 contributor to the group who is not a major donor to Bush-Cheney 2004 but who does know Karl Rove.
Meanwhile, the media give practically no scrutiny to a $63 million, five-month, negative-ad buy done by Democratic "527" groups (the Media Fund, MoveOn.org and others) with a revolving door of connections to the Kerry campaign. Consider:
• Kerry campaign lawyer Bob Bauer and Democratic National Committee counsel Joe Sandler also represent 527s -- not illegal, but doesn't it deserve a little scrutiny?
• Jim Jordan, John Kerry's campaign manager until last November, works for three of the 527s.
• Harold Ickes, an executive committee member of the Democratic National Committee, heads the Media Fund.
• Bill Richardson simultaneously chaired the Democrats' national convention and a 527.
• Michael Meehan became Kerry's spokesman after running NARAL Pro-Choice America's "soft money" programs.
• Zack Exley went from being a MoveOn.org executive to the Kerry campaign.
The coordination law prohibits individuals from "using or conveying" information on the private "plans, needs or projects" of a campaign to a 527 or vice versa. If the media can scrutinize my legal work, which doesn't even fall under the anti-coordination rules, why can't they scrutinize these Democrats with equal diligence?
Bob Perry has been criticized and scrutinized for giving $200,000 to the group questioning Kerry's claims about his Vietnam service and for knowing Rove. But does anyone in the media see a double standard in the lack of reporting on the far more direct connections among major Kerry-Edwards fundraisers who have contributed to their 527s? These include:
• Fred Baron, chairman of Kerry Victory 2004, who gave $50,000 to Richardson's 527.
• Stephen Bing, John Edwards's top donor, who contributed $8 million to 527s.
• Susie Buell, Kerry vice chairman, who raised more than $100,000 for the campaign and gave more than $1 million to 527s.
• Lewis Cullman, a major DNC donor who raised more than $100,000 for the Democratic Party and gave $1.65 million to 527s.
The point isn't that they -- any more than Bob Perry -- have done anything illegal or improper. But the connections of these Democratic donors are far more direct than Perry's -- and there's been no similar media scrutiny for ad buys 126 times greater than the one Perry helped fund. If the media clamor that President Bush renounce the $500,000 Swift boat ad is fair, how many reporters asked Kerry whether he would request his 527s to cease their $63 million in negative ads? Also, wouldn't an unbiased press corps have gotten John Edwards to release his list of major fundraisers, as the Bush-Cheney campaign voluntarily did?
When the Bush-Cheney campaign filed a detailed, 70-page complaint detailing illegal coordination by Democrats, the move produced 14 news articles, with no follow-up. When the Kerry campaign filed an unsupportable charge of coordination about the Swift boat ads, there were 74 articles, and the pack swarmed.
Perhaps the reason is that, politically and culturally, reporters are far from representative of the voters or politicians they claim to cover objectively and fairly, as shown in a study by the Pew Research Center. That study concluded that "journalists at national and local news organizations are notably different from the general public in their ideology and attitudes toward political and social issues. . . . [N]ews people, especially national journalists, are more liberal, and far less conservative, than the general public. . . . About a third of national journalists (34 percent) . . . describe themselves as liberals; that compares with 19 percent of the public. . . . Moreover, there is a relatively small number of conservatives at national and local news organizations. Just 7 percent of national news people . . . describe themselves as conservatives, compared with a third of all Americans."
In a 50-50 nation, how do the media square this imbalance with the claim of being objective, fair and nonpartisan? The double standard in reporting on 527s suggests that some of the withering scrutiny visited on the Swift boat veterans should be directed inward.
The writer, a partner in the law firm of Patton Boggs, resigned last week as chief outside counsel to President Bush's campaign. Before law school, he spent five years as a newspaper reporter.
Swift Boats and Double Standards
Why aren't the media scrutinizing lawyers and advisers to Kerry?
By Benjamin L. Ginsberg
Think you're getting unbiased, balanced coverage of politics? Or is there a double standard in the way the media treat Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives? My recent visit to the center of a media storm suggests there is. Consider this:
A $500,000 ad buy made by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth brings searing media scrutiny and "proof" of illegal coordination based on a lawyer (me) representing both the Bush-Cheney campaign and the Swift Boat Veterans; on an accountant working for Tom DeLay's political action committee; and on a $200,000 contributor to the group who is not a major donor to Bush-Cheney 2004 but who does know Karl Rove.
Meanwhile, the media give practically no scrutiny to a $63 million, five-month, negative-ad buy done by Democratic "527" groups (the Media Fund, MoveOn.org and others) with a revolving door of connections to the Kerry campaign. Consider:
• Kerry campaign lawyer Bob Bauer and Democratic National Committee counsel Joe Sandler also represent 527s -- not illegal, but doesn't it deserve a little scrutiny?
• Jim Jordan, John Kerry's campaign manager until last November, works for three of the 527s.
• Harold Ickes, an executive committee member of the Democratic National Committee, heads the Media Fund.
• Bill Richardson simultaneously chaired the Democrats' national convention and a 527.
• Michael Meehan became Kerry's spokesman after running NARAL Pro-Choice America's "soft money" programs.
• Zack Exley went from being a MoveOn.org executive to the Kerry campaign.
The coordination law prohibits individuals from "using or conveying" information on the private "plans, needs or projects" of a campaign to a 527 or vice versa. If the media can scrutinize my legal work, which doesn't even fall under the anti-coordination rules, why can't they scrutinize these Democrats with equal diligence?
Bob Perry has been criticized and scrutinized for giving $200,000 to the group questioning Kerry's claims about his Vietnam service and for knowing Rove. But does anyone in the media see a double standard in the lack of reporting on the far more direct connections among major Kerry-Edwards fundraisers who have contributed to their 527s? These include:
• Fred Baron, chairman of Kerry Victory 2004, who gave $50,000 to Richardson's 527.
• Stephen Bing, John Edwards's top donor, who contributed $8 million to 527s.
• Susie Buell, Kerry vice chairman, who raised more than $100,000 for the campaign and gave more than $1 million to 527s.
• Lewis Cullman, a major DNC donor who raised more than $100,000 for the Democratic Party and gave $1.65 million to 527s.
The point isn't that they -- any more than Bob Perry -- have done anything illegal or improper. But the connections of these Democratic donors are far more direct than Perry's -- and there's been no similar media scrutiny for ad buys 126 times greater than the one Perry helped fund. If the media clamor that President Bush renounce the $500,000 Swift boat ad is fair, how many reporters asked Kerry whether he would request his 527s to cease their $63 million in negative ads? Also, wouldn't an unbiased press corps have gotten John Edwards to release his list of major fundraisers, as the Bush-Cheney campaign voluntarily did?
When the Bush-Cheney campaign filed a detailed, 70-page complaint detailing illegal coordination by Democrats, the move produced 14 news articles, with no follow-up. When the Kerry campaign filed an unsupportable charge of coordination about the Swift boat ads, there were 74 articles, and the pack swarmed.
Perhaps the reason is that, politically and culturally, reporters are far from representative of the voters or politicians they claim to cover objectively and fairly, as shown in a study by the Pew Research Center. That study concluded that "journalists at national and local news organizations are notably different from the general public in their ideology and attitudes toward political and social issues. . . . [N]ews people, especially national journalists, are more liberal, and far less conservative, than the general public. . . . About a third of national journalists (34 percent) . . . describe themselves as liberals; that compares with 19 percent of the public. . . . Moreover, there is a relatively small number of conservatives at national and local news organizations. Just 7 percent of national news people . . . describe themselves as conservatives, compared with a third of all Americans."
In a 50-50 nation, how do the media square this imbalance with the claim of being objective, fair and nonpartisan? The double standard in reporting on 527s suggests that some of the withering scrutiny visited on the Swift boat veterans should be directed inward.
The writer, a partner in the law firm of Patton Boggs, resigned last week as chief outside counsel to President Bush's campaign. Before law school, he spent five years as a newspaper reporter.
Wednesday, September 01, 2004
Welcome to Maureenworld
Anything can happen.
by Catherine Seipp
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, probably the ditziest Pulitzer Prize winner ever, has just come out with her first book: Bushworld: Enter At Your Own Risk, a collection of her columns about the president. When I first heard about Bushworld, I remembered the time earlier this year when Dowd returned from several weeks' vacation with a column that swung from Bush to lesbians and back again and left many readers scratching their heads even more than usual.
Dowd hooked that return column — which had something to do with the paradox of George W. Bush's popularity even as lesbians are no longer considered outre — around the premiere of Showtime's new TV series The L Word. The connection was just too deliciously amusing for the wordplay-loving Dowd, because, you see, "L" is a letter, and "W" is a letter, and therefore, Dowd concluded: "It's hard to figure, but America seems ready to embrace W. and the L word at the same time."
Get it? Not everyone did, judging from the confused reaction I saw in online weblogs, where (I am sorry to say) she is regularly referred to as Moron Dud and Stupid Pan Dowdy. Apparently not everyone remembered, by the time Dowd had meandered down to her finish line, that the "L" in The L Word stands for lesbians. She'd explained it just a few graphs before, but there's something about a Dowd column that makes the mind wander. Attention, class!
But even those with a vested interest missed Dowd's point, if she did have one. As it happens, the day after Dowd's Bush/lesbians/whatever piece ran, Showtime presented its midseason programming to reporters in Hollywood. "You know something must be happening when Maureen Dowd mentions George W. Bush and 'The L Word' in the same sentence — both favorably, I might add," a Showtime exec announced.
Of course, Dowd hadn't mentioned Bush favorably — she never does — but The L Word people hadn't understood that, and obviously it didn't matter. As the Showtime exec chattered happily on, I realized that this was something of a watershed Maureen Dowd moment. Now it was (sort of) official: No one reads Maureen Dowd anymore for analysis, or insight, or even simple sense. They just read her because she's there, in the New York Times, like the weather report.
You hear a lot of talk in election years about the polarized American public, but few politicians are as polarizing as Maureen Dowd. Esquire included her in its "Women We Love" feature in the early '90s, and she's still something of a sacred cow in Washington and at the New York Times. But to many outside her Inside-the-Beltway/media-glamour circuit, Dowd has become the Woman You Love to Hate.
Critics have called her style catty, or at least kittenish. But this isn't really apt anymore. Cats scratch, and Dowd no longer draws blood. An effective criticism of Bush and his policies has to involve more than just chirping "Rummy" and "Boy Emperor" or dreaming up whimsical dialogues. Dowd is now more pixyish than kittenish, which is part of what makes her so annoying. Who wants to deal with Tinkerbell flitting around when you're trying to read the op-ed pages?
Here's a line from a column she wrote about Bush becoming "chummy" with Russian president Vladimir Putin: "The Russian president said he was looking forward to riding horses with the American president. Mr. Bush had to explain he doesn't ride. He prefers to saddle up his jeep or his golf cart, Gator, around the ranch."
And this meant...what, exactly? Nothing. But in a Maureen Dowd column, meaning has become unnecessary. It was just another school-girl spitball lobbed at Bush: Screw you and the horse you didn't ride in on.
Dowd's enemies aren't all on the right, by the way. When she began her Times column in 1995, Susan Faludi took Dowd to task in the Nation for not being a serious feminist like her predecessor, Anna Quindlen. Although I rarely agree with Quindlen (who now writes a column for Newsweek), at least she respects readers enough to bother laying out an argument, complete with examples to back up her points. Reading Quindlen is rarely a waste of time; reading Dowd usually is.
And yet Dowd still has enough true-believer fans for Bushworld to have spent the last three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. This struck me when I read, in the New York Observer's profile of the Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz a few months ago, a quote from one of Rabinowitz's Greenwich Village neighbors describing her disapprovingly as "the person who doesn't like Maureen Dowd."
What a cloying, insular world that conjures up — like the scent of an entire rose garden in one small bottle of attar. So for the benefit of people like that neighbor, perhaps an explanation is in order.
Dowd's relentless shallowness and silliness are her most obvious crimes against readers. And because she's the only woman with a plum twice-a-week spot on the New York Times op-page, the tacit and insulting message she gives off is that female political thinkers can't be expected to actually think. Sometimes when she's skittering around, like a water-beetle on a pond's surface, Dowd happens upon a notion she likes a lot. But rather than develop it into an actual argument, she just repeats it endlessly, like an eight-year-old with a knock-knock joke.
Take the column that inspired the title of Bushworld. After its opening line ("It's their reality. We just live and die in it.") the column consists entirely of 25, mostly one-sentence aphorisms. Examples: "In Bushworld, you brag about how well Afghanistan is going, even though soldiers like Pat Tillman are still dying..." "In Bushworld, we're making progress on the war on terror by fighting a war that creates terrorists." "In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq, even as they increasingly merge the two in America." And so on.
Set aside for a moment that these "Bushworld" statements are awfully easy to parody: "In Maureenworld, soldiers would never die in battle." "In Maureenworld, we can assume that before the war on terror, terrorists weren't a problem." "In Maureenworld, comparisons between a president who believes in God and people who think women should be stoned to death for religious reasons can be made with a straight face." And so on.
The main reason a person might not like Maureen Dowd is that beneath all the cutesiness lurks thinking that is ignorant, hysterical, and unoriginal. There's never anything in a Dowd column that you haven't heard a hundred times before at any upscale cocktail party.
A few months ago, Dowd began a column by continuing her cheerleading for the 9/11 commission but concluded it with what really seems to be bothering her: President Bush's religious ideas.
His statement that "freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world" led her to worry that, "Given the Saudi religious authority's fatwa against our troops...we really don't want to make Muslims think we're fighting a holy war."
Maybe not. But it makes you wonder how Dowd would have responded to Lincoln's Gettysberg Address hope "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom." Probably she would have pointed out that this might further offend the Confederate Army, who after all thought God was on their side too.
In Maureenworld, anything can happen. Except an idea.
— Catherine Seipp is a writer in California who publishes the weblog Cathy's World. She is an NRO contributor.
Anything can happen.
by Catherine Seipp
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, probably the ditziest Pulitzer Prize winner ever, has just come out with her first book: Bushworld: Enter At Your Own Risk, a collection of her columns about the president. When I first heard about Bushworld, I remembered the time earlier this year when Dowd returned from several weeks' vacation with a column that swung from Bush to lesbians and back again and left many readers scratching their heads even more than usual.
Dowd hooked that return column — which had something to do with the paradox of George W. Bush's popularity even as lesbians are no longer considered outre — around the premiere of Showtime's new TV series The L Word. The connection was just too deliciously amusing for the wordplay-loving Dowd, because, you see, "L" is a letter, and "W" is a letter, and therefore, Dowd concluded: "It's hard to figure, but America seems ready to embrace W. and the L word at the same time."
Get it? Not everyone did, judging from the confused reaction I saw in online weblogs, where (I am sorry to say) she is regularly referred to as Moron Dud and Stupid Pan Dowdy. Apparently not everyone remembered, by the time Dowd had meandered down to her finish line, that the "L" in The L Word stands for lesbians. She'd explained it just a few graphs before, but there's something about a Dowd column that makes the mind wander. Attention, class!
But even those with a vested interest missed Dowd's point, if she did have one. As it happens, the day after Dowd's Bush/lesbians/whatever piece ran, Showtime presented its midseason programming to reporters in Hollywood. "You know something must be happening when Maureen Dowd mentions George W. Bush and 'The L Word' in the same sentence — both favorably, I might add," a Showtime exec announced.
Of course, Dowd hadn't mentioned Bush favorably — she never does — but The L Word people hadn't understood that, and obviously it didn't matter. As the Showtime exec chattered happily on, I realized that this was something of a watershed Maureen Dowd moment. Now it was (sort of) official: No one reads Maureen Dowd anymore for analysis, or insight, or even simple sense. They just read her because she's there, in the New York Times, like the weather report.
You hear a lot of talk in election years about the polarized American public, but few politicians are as polarizing as Maureen Dowd. Esquire included her in its "Women We Love" feature in the early '90s, and she's still something of a sacred cow in Washington and at the New York Times. But to many outside her Inside-the-Beltway/media-glamour circuit, Dowd has become the Woman You Love to Hate.
Critics have called her style catty, or at least kittenish. But this isn't really apt anymore. Cats scratch, and Dowd no longer draws blood. An effective criticism of Bush and his policies has to involve more than just chirping "Rummy" and "Boy Emperor" or dreaming up whimsical dialogues. Dowd is now more pixyish than kittenish, which is part of what makes her so annoying. Who wants to deal with Tinkerbell flitting around when you're trying to read the op-ed pages?
Here's a line from a column she wrote about Bush becoming "chummy" with Russian president Vladimir Putin: "The Russian president said he was looking forward to riding horses with the American president. Mr. Bush had to explain he doesn't ride. He prefers to saddle up his jeep or his golf cart, Gator, around the ranch."
And this meant...what, exactly? Nothing. But in a Maureen Dowd column, meaning has become unnecessary. It was just another school-girl spitball lobbed at Bush: Screw you and the horse you didn't ride in on.
Dowd's enemies aren't all on the right, by the way. When she began her Times column in 1995, Susan Faludi took Dowd to task in the Nation for not being a serious feminist like her predecessor, Anna Quindlen. Although I rarely agree with Quindlen (who now writes a column for Newsweek), at least she respects readers enough to bother laying out an argument, complete with examples to back up her points. Reading Quindlen is rarely a waste of time; reading Dowd usually is.
And yet Dowd still has enough true-believer fans for Bushworld to have spent the last three weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. This struck me when I read, in the New York Observer's profile of the Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz a few months ago, a quote from one of Rabinowitz's Greenwich Village neighbors describing her disapprovingly as "the person who doesn't like Maureen Dowd."
What a cloying, insular world that conjures up — like the scent of an entire rose garden in one small bottle of attar. So for the benefit of people like that neighbor, perhaps an explanation is in order.
Dowd's relentless shallowness and silliness are her most obvious crimes against readers. And because she's the only woman with a plum twice-a-week spot on the New York Times op-page, the tacit and insulting message she gives off is that female political thinkers can't be expected to actually think. Sometimes when she's skittering around, like a water-beetle on a pond's surface, Dowd happens upon a notion she likes a lot. But rather than develop it into an actual argument, she just repeats it endlessly, like an eight-year-old with a knock-knock joke.
Take the column that inspired the title of Bushworld. After its opening line ("It's their reality. We just live and die in it.") the column consists entirely of 25, mostly one-sentence aphorisms. Examples: "In Bushworld, you brag about how well Afghanistan is going, even though soldiers like Pat Tillman are still dying..." "In Bushworld, we're making progress on the war on terror by fighting a war that creates terrorists." "In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq, even as they increasingly merge the two in America." And so on.
Set aside for a moment that these "Bushworld" statements are awfully easy to parody: "In Maureenworld, soldiers would never die in battle." "In Maureenworld, we can assume that before the war on terror, terrorists weren't a problem." "In Maureenworld, comparisons between a president who believes in God and people who think women should be stoned to death for religious reasons can be made with a straight face." And so on.
The main reason a person might not like Maureen Dowd is that beneath all the cutesiness lurks thinking that is ignorant, hysterical, and unoriginal. There's never anything in a Dowd column that you haven't heard a hundred times before at any upscale cocktail party.
A few months ago, Dowd began a column by continuing her cheerleading for the 9/11 commission but concluded it with what really seems to be bothering her: President Bush's religious ideas.
His statement that "freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world" led her to worry that, "Given the Saudi religious authority's fatwa against our troops...we really don't want to make Muslims think we're fighting a holy war."
Maybe not. But it makes you wonder how Dowd would have responded to Lincoln's Gettysberg Address hope "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom." Probably she would have pointed out that this might further offend the Confederate Army, who after all thought God was on their side too.
In Maureenworld, anything can happen. Except an idea.
— Catherine Seipp is a writer in California who publishes the weblog Cathy's World. She is an NRO contributor.
John Edwards: Hypocrite-In-Chief
By Jean Pearce
FrontPageMagazine.com
There’s a reason why North Carolina newspapers have started calling John Edwards "Senator Gone."
The real John Edwards, the one the media isn’t talking about, has missed 43 percent of Senate votes since suspending his presidential campaign, but claims he represents the powerless. And when the elected officials of the city of Charlotte needed federal money for light rail two years ago, they bypassed Edwards and relied on Congresswoman Sue Myrick, as did desperate North Carolina tobacco farmers seeking a buyout, who went to Senator Liddy Dole instead.
Edwards also failed to show up at the town hall meetings he had scheduled in North Carolina during the same period, sending his campaign manager in his place. Meanwhile, last summer, Edwards met with voters at a dozen town-hall meetings in New Hampshire. "He’s going to stay until every last question is answered," promised spokesman Colin Van Ostern.
And this is the same John Edwards who had the audacity, in his speech at the Democratic Convention, to paint a picture of a military wife struggling to pay the bills while her husband is stuck on extended duty in Iraq. Last year, Edwards personally put a “secret hold” on a bill called the HEROES Act that would waive student-loan payments for soldiers fighting overseas, so he could attach an amendment to it and take the credit. Edward’s staff initially denied, then admitted, that he had put a hold on the popular legislation, which passed the house 421-1.
It’s all part of a pattern in which Edwards does one thing, and then says another. In September, Edwards said Congress needed to send to the troops in Iraq “what they need” because “they’re in a shooting gallery, a very dangerous situation.” A month later, he voted against $87 billion in funding for those same troops, parts of which would have paid for body armor, increased imminent danger pay for soldiers and family separation allowances, things that would help that struggling military wife he now claims he’s looking out for.
Despite that vote, Edwards once again promised last week to “invest in the new equipment and technologies so that our military remains the best equipped and best trained in the world. This will make our military stronger so we're able to defeat every enemy in this new world.” Of course, it remains unclear how Edwards’ vote in 1999 to reduce defense spending by $3.1 billion furthered his goal of “defeating every enemy.”
The real story of Edwards’ short political career is one of hypocrisy, cheap rip-offs, flip-flops and boneheaded moves. But in the media’s version of the story, Edwards is the political prodigy who is going to get John Kerry elected president, forgetting that had Kerry not picked him as his running mate last month, the tattered thread by which Edwards’ political career had long been hanging would have snapped.
Given the media coverage surrounding Edwards, it’s easy to forget that the man has been elected to something exactly once in his life, barely sliding past incumbent Republican Senator Lauch Faircloth with just 51 percent of the vote in 1998 after Faircloth ran one of the lousiest campaigns in North Carolina electoral history. Of the18 candidates to run statewide in North Carolina in a general election in the last decade, Faircloth got the fewest votes. Edwards didn’t do much better. He was third from the bottom of the heap.
By last summer, a poll for the Raleigh News & Observer showed that North Carolinians had had it with Edwards’ endless campaigning for national office, first for the vice presidential slot on the Al Gore ticket in 2000, and then for president. Just 32 percent said they’d reelect him. (By comparison, 45 percent said they’d re-elect Faircloth when Edwards took him on in 1998.) As candidates in North Carolina lined up to run against him, Edwards jumped ship from the Senate seat that has been little more than a distraction to him in his campaign for the Oval Office.
For years, answers to simple questions about what has been going on around him in the Senate have eluded Edwards.
Edwards, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee since 2001, has long been screaming about the Bush Administration’s failure to detect and stop the terrorist plot that led to the 9/11 catastrophes. But when Edwards was asked by PBS’ Margaret Warner in May 2002 whether the intelligence committee had been briefed before September 11 on Osama bin Laden or the possibility of airline hijackings, Edwards couldn’t answer the question.
“We're just responsible for sort of broad oversight,” he told her.
“So you don’t really remember?” Warner pressed.
“I don’t remember the specifics of what we were told about this,” Edwards finally admitted.
A year after praising the Patriot Act and voting for it, Edwards claimed at a Democratic Presidential debate in Baltimore that he was seeking a dramatic revision to parts of the law dealing with civil liberties that, as it turns out, weren’t actually part of it.
When he appeared on Hardball in October, Edwards refused Chris Matthews’ invitation to play the “Foreign Leader quiz”, which would have required him to name the leaders of Chechnya, Taiwan, Pakistan and India. How Edwards could spend five years in the Senate and propose a presidential foreign policy platform of his own without knowing the answers to these questions is unfathomable.
Much of Edwards’ career has been based on bashing President George Bush for things that he himself voted for and advocated. Edwards voted for the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, and then spent the next three years bashing Bush for the law.
“This ‘No Child Left Behind’? This President is leaving millions of kids behind every single day,” Edwards said at the Baltimore debate in 2003.
Like Kerry, Edwards came out against the war in Iraq after he had voted for it. But Edwards took it a step further. In the fall of 2002, Edwards was one of the most vocal members of Congress on the need to remove Saddam Hussein. In the hours after Bush’s famous speech before the U.N., Edwards gave an impassioned oration on the Senate floor, demanding the president take unilateral military action to remove Hussein from power.
“Edwards almost outdid the administration in his fervor for toppling Saddam Hussein,” the Los Angeles Times opined.
Then, just three weeks later, after voting to authorize the war, Edwards trashed Bush for taking unilateral military action in Iraq, referring to Bush’s actions in a CBS interview as “gratuitous unilateralism, a determination to act alone for the sake of acting alone.”
When it comes to foreign policy, Edwards seems incapable of having an original thought without help from the Bush Administration. Edwards’ presidential foreign policy platform was little more than a cheap rip-off of Bush’s and reads like a campaign intern had cut and pasted it off the state department site, changing a few words. The Bush Administration had already accomplished about half of it, but since the national media doesn’t report Bush’s foreign policy accomplishments, the Edwards folks probably figured no one would notice.
Under close inspection, the ruse is almost laughable.
In February of 2004, Edwards promised that if elected, he’d lobby for a new United Nations Security Council resolution to tighten the diplomatic noose around nations that violate non-proliferation agreements. To enforce this principle, law-abiding nations would have the right to search ships, aircraft and land vehicles originating in these lawless countries, he said. One problem. The U.N. has already passed the resolution Edwards described. It was called Security Council Resolution 1540, and it was proposed by President George W. Bush five months earlier in a speech to the U.N. It passed unanimously.
Within six months of taking office, Edwards claimed he’d convene a summit of the world’s leading nations to establish clear international standards for the storage and transportation of dangerous nuclear materials and give the international community new tools to deter the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Edwards calls his nuclear non-proliferation plan the “New Global Nuclear Compact.”
The leaders of the member nations of the G8 have another name for this plan. It’s called the Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, and it was already underway over a year before Edwards first proposed it, thanks to the Bush Administration, which persuaded the member nations of the G8 to launch the program at a summit in 2002. Since then, six additional nations have signed on to the program and the US has pledged to pay half its $20 billion cost. The G8 member nations will pay the other half.
Then there’s Edwards’ proposed Middle East Partnership Program at NATO, a shameless rip-off of the Bush Administration’s Greater Middle East Initiative at NATO. The plan, which is based on the “Helsinki Process” that advanced free elections and political parties in post-World War II Europe, would help spread democracy in the Middle East.
The merits of Bush’s Middle East initiative were debated for months last fall by think tanks and the foreign press before Edwards proposed a nearly identical plan.
It’s all part of a similar pattern of ruses that Edwards has been using in the courtroom for years. According to CNSNews.com, Edwards, a trial lawyer who got wealthy suing physicians, won record jury verdicts and settlements in cases alleging that faulty deliveries caused infants to develop cerebral palsy.
The cases, as it turns out, were based on junk science. Recent studies have shown that the condition was likely caused by genetics, not delivery problems. Despite this, Edwards continues to claim he stood up for the little guy in court, even though he strenuously fought a bill in the North Carolina legislature that would have created a fund to care for every baby born with cerebral palsy – thus eliminating the future possibility of huge legal settlements.
Edwards voted in 2001 to kill an amendment that would ensure that patients receive the majority of benefits from any new lawsuit allowed in the McCain-Kennedy-Edwards “Patient’s Bill of Rights.” He also led the fight against a liability exemption for doctors providing pro-bono services and helped kill medical malpractice reform in 2002 and 2003 that would have saved the federal government at least $6 billion in healthcare costs.
Edwards’ campaign against the interests of the “little guy” didn’t stop there. He also voted to kill a bill in committee that ensured that class action members receive the majority of the benefits of settlements instead of personal injury lawyers. Moreover, in 1999, he voted against a bill to limit lawsuits and damages from potential Y2K computer failures.
Edwards was also the only Democrat missing from debates on asbestos litigation reform. Perhaps that’s because the co-finance chairman of Edwards’ campaign was Fred Baron, who pioneered the practice of suing companies on behalf of supposed asbestos victims that resulted in the bankruptcy of 67 companies, $57 billion in economic losses and the loss of 60,000 jobs.
Edwards’ record of loyalty to trial lawyers is about the only place his record is consistent. The rest, it seems, is part of slick ploy to fool his biggest jury yet, the American people.
By Jean Pearce
FrontPageMagazine.com
There’s a reason why North Carolina newspapers have started calling John Edwards "Senator Gone."
The real John Edwards, the one the media isn’t talking about, has missed 43 percent of Senate votes since suspending his presidential campaign, but claims he represents the powerless. And when the elected officials of the city of Charlotte needed federal money for light rail two years ago, they bypassed Edwards and relied on Congresswoman Sue Myrick, as did desperate North Carolina tobacco farmers seeking a buyout, who went to Senator Liddy Dole instead.
Edwards also failed to show up at the town hall meetings he had scheduled in North Carolina during the same period, sending his campaign manager in his place. Meanwhile, last summer, Edwards met with voters at a dozen town-hall meetings in New Hampshire. "He’s going to stay until every last question is answered," promised spokesman Colin Van Ostern.
And this is the same John Edwards who had the audacity, in his speech at the Democratic Convention, to paint a picture of a military wife struggling to pay the bills while her husband is stuck on extended duty in Iraq. Last year, Edwards personally put a “secret hold” on a bill called the HEROES Act that would waive student-loan payments for soldiers fighting overseas, so he could attach an amendment to it and take the credit. Edward’s staff initially denied, then admitted, that he had put a hold on the popular legislation, which passed the house 421-1.
It’s all part of a pattern in which Edwards does one thing, and then says another. In September, Edwards said Congress needed to send to the troops in Iraq “what they need” because “they’re in a shooting gallery, a very dangerous situation.” A month later, he voted against $87 billion in funding for those same troops, parts of which would have paid for body armor, increased imminent danger pay for soldiers and family separation allowances, things that would help that struggling military wife he now claims he’s looking out for.
Despite that vote, Edwards once again promised last week to “invest in the new equipment and technologies so that our military remains the best equipped and best trained in the world. This will make our military stronger so we're able to defeat every enemy in this new world.” Of course, it remains unclear how Edwards’ vote in 1999 to reduce defense spending by $3.1 billion furthered his goal of “defeating every enemy.”
The real story of Edwards’ short political career is one of hypocrisy, cheap rip-offs, flip-flops and boneheaded moves. But in the media’s version of the story, Edwards is the political prodigy who is going to get John Kerry elected president, forgetting that had Kerry not picked him as his running mate last month, the tattered thread by which Edwards’ political career had long been hanging would have snapped.
Given the media coverage surrounding Edwards, it’s easy to forget that the man has been elected to something exactly once in his life, barely sliding past incumbent Republican Senator Lauch Faircloth with just 51 percent of the vote in 1998 after Faircloth ran one of the lousiest campaigns in North Carolina electoral history. Of the18 candidates to run statewide in North Carolina in a general election in the last decade, Faircloth got the fewest votes. Edwards didn’t do much better. He was third from the bottom of the heap.
By last summer, a poll for the Raleigh News & Observer showed that North Carolinians had had it with Edwards’ endless campaigning for national office, first for the vice presidential slot on the Al Gore ticket in 2000, and then for president. Just 32 percent said they’d reelect him. (By comparison, 45 percent said they’d re-elect Faircloth when Edwards took him on in 1998.) As candidates in North Carolina lined up to run against him, Edwards jumped ship from the Senate seat that has been little more than a distraction to him in his campaign for the Oval Office.
For years, answers to simple questions about what has been going on around him in the Senate have eluded Edwards.
Edwards, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee since 2001, has long been screaming about the Bush Administration’s failure to detect and stop the terrorist plot that led to the 9/11 catastrophes. But when Edwards was asked by PBS’ Margaret Warner in May 2002 whether the intelligence committee had been briefed before September 11 on Osama bin Laden or the possibility of airline hijackings, Edwards couldn’t answer the question.
“We're just responsible for sort of broad oversight,” he told her.
“So you don’t really remember?” Warner pressed.
“I don’t remember the specifics of what we were told about this,” Edwards finally admitted.
A year after praising the Patriot Act and voting for it, Edwards claimed at a Democratic Presidential debate in Baltimore that he was seeking a dramatic revision to parts of the law dealing with civil liberties that, as it turns out, weren’t actually part of it.
When he appeared on Hardball in October, Edwards refused Chris Matthews’ invitation to play the “Foreign Leader quiz”, which would have required him to name the leaders of Chechnya, Taiwan, Pakistan and India. How Edwards could spend five years in the Senate and propose a presidential foreign policy platform of his own without knowing the answers to these questions is unfathomable.
Much of Edwards’ career has been based on bashing President George Bush for things that he himself voted for and advocated. Edwards voted for the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, and then spent the next three years bashing Bush for the law.
“This ‘No Child Left Behind’? This President is leaving millions of kids behind every single day,” Edwards said at the Baltimore debate in 2003.
Like Kerry, Edwards came out against the war in Iraq after he had voted for it. But Edwards took it a step further. In the fall of 2002, Edwards was one of the most vocal members of Congress on the need to remove Saddam Hussein. In the hours after Bush’s famous speech before the U.N., Edwards gave an impassioned oration on the Senate floor, demanding the president take unilateral military action to remove Hussein from power.
“Edwards almost outdid the administration in his fervor for toppling Saddam Hussein,” the Los Angeles Times opined.
Then, just three weeks later, after voting to authorize the war, Edwards trashed Bush for taking unilateral military action in Iraq, referring to Bush’s actions in a CBS interview as “gratuitous unilateralism, a determination to act alone for the sake of acting alone.”
When it comes to foreign policy, Edwards seems incapable of having an original thought without help from the Bush Administration. Edwards’ presidential foreign policy platform was little more than a cheap rip-off of Bush’s and reads like a campaign intern had cut and pasted it off the state department site, changing a few words. The Bush Administration had already accomplished about half of it, but since the national media doesn’t report Bush’s foreign policy accomplishments, the Edwards folks probably figured no one would notice.
Under close inspection, the ruse is almost laughable.
In February of 2004, Edwards promised that if elected, he’d lobby for a new United Nations Security Council resolution to tighten the diplomatic noose around nations that violate non-proliferation agreements. To enforce this principle, law-abiding nations would have the right to search ships, aircraft and land vehicles originating in these lawless countries, he said. One problem. The U.N. has already passed the resolution Edwards described. It was called Security Council Resolution 1540, and it was proposed by President George W. Bush five months earlier in a speech to the U.N. It passed unanimously.
Within six months of taking office, Edwards claimed he’d convene a summit of the world’s leading nations to establish clear international standards for the storage and transportation of dangerous nuclear materials and give the international community new tools to deter the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Edwards calls his nuclear non-proliferation plan the “New Global Nuclear Compact.”
The leaders of the member nations of the G8 have another name for this plan. It’s called the Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, and it was already underway over a year before Edwards first proposed it, thanks to the Bush Administration, which persuaded the member nations of the G8 to launch the program at a summit in 2002. Since then, six additional nations have signed on to the program and the US has pledged to pay half its $20 billion cost. The G8 member nations will pay the other half.
Then there’s Edwards’ proposed Middle East Partnership Program at NATO, a shameless rip-off of the Bush Administration’s Greater Middle East Initiative at NATO. The plan, which is based on the “Helsinki Process” that advanced free elections and political parties in post-World War II Europe, would help spread democracy in the Middle East.
The merits of Bush’s Middle East initiative were debated for months last fall by think tanks and the foreign press before Edwards proposed a nearly identical plan.
It’s all part of a similar pattern of ruses that Edwards has been using in the courtroom for years. According to CNSNews.com, Edwards, a trial lawyer who got wealthy suing physicians, won record jury verdicts and settlements in cases alleging that faulty deliveries caused infants to develop cerebral palsy.
The cases, as it turns out, were based on junk science. Recent studies have shown that the condition was likely caused by genetics, not delivery problems. Despite this, Edwards continues to claim he stood up for the little guy in court, even though he strenuously fought a bill in the North Carolina legislature that would have created a fund to care for every baby born with cerebral palsy – thus eliminating the future possibility of huge legal settlements.
Edwards voted in 2001 to kill an amendment that would ensure that patients receive the majority of benefits from any new lawsuit allowed in the McCain-Kennedy-Edwards “Patient’s Bill of Rights.” He also led the fight against a liability exemption for doctors providing pro-bono services and helped kill medical malpractice reform in 2002 and 2003 that would have saved the federal government at least $6 billion in healthcare costs.
Edwards’ campaign against the interests of the “little guy” didn’t stop there. He also voted to kill a bill in committee that ensured that class action members receive the majority of the benefits of settlements instead of personal injury lawyers. Moreover, in 1999, he voted against a bill to limit lawsuits and damages from potential Y2K computer failures.
Edwards was also the only Democrat missing from debates on asbestos litigation reform. Perhaps that’s because the co-finance chairman of Edwards’ campaign was Fred Baron, who pioneered the practice of suing companies on behalf of supposed asbestos victims that resulted in the bankruptcy of 67 companies, $57 billion in economic losses and the loss of 60,000 jobs.
Edwards’ record of loyalty to trial lawyers is about the only place his record is consistent. The rest, it seems, is part of slick ploy to fool his biggest jury yet, the American people.
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