Another WebRant

2005-03-08T21:56:00.000-08:00

I've always been pretty ambivalent about gun-control legislation. It's always struck me as a waste of time, and as a needless extension of the government into private lives. The idea of a massive government program that restricts individual rights and doesn't work is a pretty tough sell, after all.

Alphecca has a great post rounding up the various arguments against such a program, but as usual, none is as compelling as the simple fact that it doesn't work.

Take Canadian gun control laws. These laws are, to my knowledge, much stricter than American laws. But they're not any more effective. Alphecca's post leads with the story of James Roszko, a convicted felon who was barred from owning firearms, thanks to Canada's gun registry.

Last Thursday, Roszko shot dead four Royal Canadian Mounted Policemen (unrelated question: is "Mountie" offensive?) who were attempting to execute a search warrant on him. Canada's anti-gun program, which Alphecca says is costing the country's taxpayers $2 billion (Not that it matters, but: Canadian?), clearly failed here.

And Alphecca makes a great point:

The murder of the RCMP officers was a true tragedy but it points up the uselessness of registering firearms because the simple fact is that criminals don't obey laws and they're not going to register their guns.
Al Gore wanted to have national handgun registration here in the United States (which probably cost him five states in the 2000 election). Does anyone really think that if such legislation was passed that the Muhammads and Malvos, the Harrises and Klebolds would march down to the local police station to register their guns? That gang members would charter a bus to the local precinct to comply with the new law?

The answer to these rhetorical questions, of course, is "No." And as long as that remains the answer, it's impossible to see any reasonable justification for the kind of strict gun control that is so often the goal of our "progressive" politicians.

The entire post is a must-read, though. The Roszko case is just the start. Alphecca also has a dissection of an article from Reuters, that noted bastion of journalistic integrity, on the dangers of global arms proliferation. I disagree with his take on the issue, though: small-arms proliferation worldwide is a serious threat, and it's tough to compare it to the legal purchase of registered arms by citizens of democratic countries.

Still, read on, and form your own opinion.

2005-03-08T20:40:00.000-08:00

Attention, political junkies!

Ace has a very important news report: apparently, Al Gore won't be running for President in 2008!

All I can say is thank goodness Al decided to make this decision public so early. Certainly the "Draft Gore" groundswell had already built to epic levels...letting his supporters twist in the wind any longer would have been just cruel.

Riiiiiiiiiiiight.

In the same vein, I'm proud to report the following Another WebRant scoop: Charles Manson, Michael Jackson and Ice Cube will also not be making runs at the Oval Office in 2008. Please, restrain your disappointment.

Meanwhile, Gore's erstwhile replacement as the "electable" face of the Democratic party, John Kerry, is still waffling. Not that that's a surprise.

2005-03-07T16:14:00.000-08:00

I'm a proud subscriber to Foreign Policy magazine, one of the better publications to which I subscribe. I've always enjoyed the product, even if I frequently disagree with its slants. But the latest issue of FP contains one of the most preposterous articles I've ever read.

The piece, headlined "Inside the Committee that Runs the World," was written by David J. Rothkopf, who is the author of a forthcoming book about the inner workings of the National Security Council.

If the FP article is a preview of the book, I think I'll leave it off my Amazon.com wishlist.

Rothkopf portrays Cheney -- probably quite accurately -- as one of the most active and influential vice presidents in recent American history, with a large and powerful staff. To which I say: Great. So far, so good.

The real shocker, I suppose, is that Cheney, according to Rothkopf, oversees "a process of policy formation" that is -- wait for it! -- ideologically driven. If you're wondering how the Republic will survive such a terrifying blow to its very core, you're not alone.

But that's not all. Did you know that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 were an opportunity for the administration's neocons " to assert their case that diplomatic balancing acts in the Middle East had created danger for the United States and that the time had come for stronger measures, whatever the cost?"

Gosh...what a terribly ideological statement. Certainly it would take a nefarious conspiracy to make folks think that our Middle East policy had contributed to the attacks. And certainly the idea that "stronger measures" were needed would never have occurred to anyone if it wasn't for this Cheney-driven conspiracy.

But the most offensive remark of all is this one:

As for the president himself, one Bush family intimate, commenting on the commander in chief’s renewed sense of mission, muses, “I don’t know exactly what it means to be a born-again Christian, but, if it means that Jesus has entered your soul, then does it mean that you are infallible? I don’t know the answer to that. But it may impart a certitude to the president that affects the way he reacts to his team and everything else.” The lightning bolt had struck and the transformation of the transformationalists had begun.

Where to start with this piece of nonsense? Is this quote -- offered without comment by Rothkopf -- meant to provide insight into the way Bush operates? Is the assumption that there would be no war in Iraq, no invasion of Afghanistan, no Bush Doctrine at all, if it weren't for the fact that Bushitler believes in Jesus?

It's a rare day when words fail me. This is one of those days. I've got to move on.

Among the less objectionable -- but no less absurd -- revelations offered by Rothkopf is the news that the Department of Defense and the State Department are at odds over the path of U.S. foreign policy. Who'da thunk it, right?

But not to worry: "In the end, of course, the determining vote will come down to Cheney and, above all, as it always does, to President George W. Bush."

That's reassuring, I guess, if only because it's incredibly obvious. Certainly it was open-minded of Rothkopf to affirm the President's management of the doctrine that bears his name.

The story even comes with a handy chart, which purports to show "two degrees of Henry Kissinger." Terrifying stuff, really. It "reveals" that -- surprise! -- many members of the United States' foreign policy team have worked together in the past, and that -- gasp! -- some of them even worked with Kissinger.

The U.S. national security community is among the world’s most exclusive clubs—the preserve of the graduates of a tiny handful of schools and service academies. Within this small world, a number of individuals have become especially influential, and during their rise to the top they have groomed members of their staffs as future leaders and pulled strings to get them hired for key jobs.

Nobody better personifies this influence than Henry Kissinger, the dean of modern U.S. foreign-policy professionals. As the chart below illustrates, if you want to join the committee that runs the world, it helps if you’re already a member.

Of course, "worked with," for the purposes of the chart, is a pretty elastic term. I'm sure Colin Powell, for example, would be surprised to find himself within two degrees of Kissinger, as would Condoleeza Rice. And I'm guessing that Anthony Lake, an aide to Kissinger during the Nixon administration, and Sandy Berger, Lake's deputy, don't think of themselves as Kissinger disciples.

Considering that the Bush administration's foreign policy has been the opposite of Kissinger's paleolithic, Bismarck-inspired realism, it's safe to say that Kissinger's "influence" is a tiny bit overstated.

2005-03-02T21:39:00.000-08:00

Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned.

It's been 8 months since my last blog entry. And my shame knows few bounds. I'd offer excuses -- I moved to a new city, a new apartment, got a new job, lived without Internet access for a few months -- but really, there are no excuses. I just got lazy.

And let's face it: there's no guarantee it won't happen again. There's no guarantee it won't happen tomorrow, for that matter.

But for now, I'm back. It's been a busy eight months -- and an incredibly busy few weeks recently.

Since my last entry, on July 2, the forces of liberty and democracy have made some truly remarkable strides. The elections in Iraq, of course, are the highlight. Gallons upon gallons of ink have been spilled, and millions of pixels worth of blog posts have been penned, to celebrate this momentous achievement. I'm no going to add anything original -- after all, why start now? -- but I should point out the obvious, mostly because it's what I'm best at.

The elections, in the face of terrorist teeth-gnashing and Western leftist defeatism, proved -- beyond a shadow of a doubt -- the falsity of those tired tropes about Arabs' cultural unsuitability for democracy. With any luck at all, that racist meme has been consigned to the dustbin of history, where is belongs.

And in the shadow of those elections, as is belatedly becoming clear, we're seeing the first proof of the value of the Bush Doctrine. The swamp is starting to drain -- in fits and starts, to be sure, and certainly nothing is certain.

But the stirrings of popular protest in Lebanon, the reluctant acceptance of at least the semblance of democracy in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, pro-democracy statements across the region: these things add up. And even if the people making the speeches or the concessions or administering the elections don't really believe in democracy, they'll learn soon enough the lesson that Gorbachev and Deng Xiaoping learned to regret: there's no such thing as a little democracy. Offer it to the people, and they'll keep taking.

And if the United States has the courage to support the people of the Middle East in their struggles for freedom, then the coming decade could see a flurry of Kievs and Tblisis.

If we succumb to the isolationist shouts of the so-called "realists," then the next 10 years might see a succession of Tiananmens.

The choice is clear.

2004-07-02T17:48:00.000-07:00

The Christian Science Monitor's Daily Update on the War on Terror, dated July 1, is a helluva read.

It's a long, involved and very interesting article about the ongoing spat between the United Kingdom and Iran over the British sailors who were interned by Iran after allegedly violating Iranian waters.

Apparently the sailors, having been returned to Great Britain, are telling a very different story -- namely, that they were forced into Iranian waters by Iranian patrol boats, and then detained. The British government is naturally intrigued, and is demanding the return of the sailor's vessels, which have been interned by Iran. Apparently, the boats' GPS guidance systems might be able to settle the squabble.

All very interesting, of course -- particularly in that it's nice to see the U.K. taking a firm stand. (I'm guessing that if those were French sailors, Chirac's only action would have been to advise them to start learning Farsi.)

It's made even more interesting by the possibility that the incident might further stiffen Britain's spine against the recent series of exercises in excuse-making for the Iranian mullarchy's nuclear weapons program. The EU, which has been playing a major role in "mediating" between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency, has recently begun to resist Tehran's efforts to make a further mockery of the nuclear nonproliferation regime.

It's entirely possible that Iran's stunt -- which, if the sailors' story is true, amounts to kidnapping -- will prove to be the type of greedy overreach which will force the extremists to moderate their approach, strengthening the forces of nonproliferation.

In other words, a win for the good guys.

2004-07-02T16:44:00.000-07:00

Captain Ed, who runs the excellent blog Captain's Quarters (listed below and to the right, in my blogroll) linked to some very important news from both the AP and the BBC detailing yet another discovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

From the AP story, which is datelined Warsaw:

"Polish troops had been searching for munitions as part of their regular mission in south-central Iraq when they were told by an informant in May that terrorists had made a bid to buy the chemical weapons, which date back to Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s war with Iran in the 1980s, Gen. Marek Dukaczewski told reporters in Warsaw.

"'We were mortified by the information that terrorists were looking for these warheads and offered $5,000 apiece,'" Dukaczewski said. "'An attack with such weapons would be hard to imagine. All of our activity was accelerated at appropriating these warheads.'"

"Dukaczewski refused to give any further details about the terrorists or the sellers of the munitions, saying only that his troops thwarted terrorists by purchasing the 17 rockets for a Soviet-era launcher and two mortar rounds containing the nerve agent for an undisclosed sum June 23."

It has since turned out that the rounds are inert and posed no significant threat, at least according to a statement that the AP attributes to "multinational forces in Iraq."

Nonetheless, the fact remains that these rounds existed, that the U.N. inspectors were entirely ignorant of them, that they were successfully concealed for 12 years, and that others, more competently preserved, could still be hidden somewhere in Iraq. In other words, Iraq DID have WMDs, no matter what Hans Blix may say. Sanctions DID NOT succeed, no matter what George A. Lopez and David Cortwright have to say.

Of course, now that that's cleared up, I have no doubt that the New York Times, the Washington Post, the BBC, and indeed every other major media outlet in the world will be printing shamefaced corrections to their over-confident claims that there were no WMDs to be found it Iraq.

Wait...I must have slipped and hit my head, because that last paragraph was self-delusional nonsense. I must brace myself instead to be ready for limited coverage of this earth-shattering news in the world media, accompanied -- if we're lucky -- by a temporary muffling of the shrieks of "Bush lied!" from the left.

The only mystery remains how this news will be spun by the Michael Moores of the world. Will this latest news, like the discovery of another sarin shell in June, be treated as a relic from the 1980's, and used as an opportunity to spout more revisionist "Saddam was our ally" propaganda?

Ed also links to a Hugh Hewitt interview with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Richard Myers, in which Myers estimates that "16 or 17 warheads have been discovered" in Iraq and found to contain sarin or mustard gas.

Here's Ed's conclusion:

"It's now obvious that Saddam held onto his chemical weapons despite all claims that they had been destroyed after the first Gulf War, which demonstrates the folly of UNSCOM inspections. They had twelve years to find this stuff, since the Iraqis continually failed to prove that they destroyed them. Now we know why. Perhaps he manufactured nothing new since then, although I highly doubt that, but his standing inventory provided enough killing power to make Saddam a highly dangerous man.

"How much WMD do we need to prove the point? One of these shells would be enough to kill most of the people in my town, and 17 of them would be more than enough to wipe out any American urban center. The Poles worried about their use in Baghdad, but I suspect that had the terrorists made the buy first, they had plans for the weapons in Tel Aviv or Washington, DC."

The fact that the discovered weapons' killing power was blunted by time -- a fact Ed acknowledges in an update -- does not render his conclusions moot. Far from it.

I don't expect this to get through to the Fahrenheit 9/11 gang, who have demonstrated an extraordinary ability to ignore anything that doesn't fit the "Bush lied!" and "No blood for oil!" constraints of their worldview.

2004-07-02T15:20:00.000-07:00

McGehee at Blogosferics weighs in on the discussion on Kerry's presumptive vice-presidential candidate with an interesting theory: Kerry himself doesn't know, and may not know until Tuesday, which has been touted as The Day of The Announcement.

Money quote:

"As funny as it is to make fun of Kerry’s flipflopping, it’s really the only consistent thing about him. And I’m not so sure he does it consciously, as if trying to please others and get votes from as many different constituencies as possible. I think it’s simply that Kerry is a dilettante, a ditz. A male version of Reese Witherspoon’s character in Legally Blonde, without the depth of character that was revealed as the movie unfolded."

Hence, according to McGehee, all the discordant guessing-games about who the VP nominee will be. No one's able to make a credible prediction, because no one -- literally no one -- knows. It's the Occam's Razor solution: it doesn't make perfect sense, but it's as logical as any other explanation for the confusion surrounding the nomination.

So good luck, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Bill Richardson (who apparently wants no part of the job), Tom Harkin, Dick Gephardt, and anyone else I'm forgetting. It's anyone's race...maybe up until the minute Kerry strides to the podium to announce his choice.

2004-07-02T14:56:00.000-07:00

Election monitoring -- it's not just for Burkina Faso anymore. At least, that's what this story from Agence France-Presse says some U.S. lawmakers are saying.

Florida representative Eddie Bernice Johnson was one of nine lawmakers who sent a letter to Kofi Annan Thursday requesting U.N. election monitors to observe November's election.

From the AFP article:

"'As lawmakers, we must assure the people of America that our nation will not experience the nightmare of the 2000 presidential election,' she said in the letter.

"'This is the first step in making sure that history does not repeat itself,' she added after requesting that the UN 'deploy election observers across the United States' to monitor the November, 2004 election.

"The lawmakers said in the letter that in a report released in June 2001, the US Commission on Civil Rights "found that the electoral process in Florida resulted in the denial of the right to vote for countless persons.'"

This ongoing kerfuffle over the 2000 election is just another example of the tireless paternalism on the left. These representatives appear firmly to believe that "countless" numbers of their constituents were too ignorant to properly fill out a ballot which had been used for decades, entirely free of controversy.

But that arrogance and elitism is, surprisingly, not the most frightening thing about this story. The idea that American lawmakers would willingly invite such a barefaced violation of our nation's sovereignty, just to score partisan points over an already-decided election from four years ago, is just another indication of the immaturity and lunacy of the Moonbat elements on the left -- which are increasingly too numerous to be called a "fringe."

Blackfive thinks that U.N. monitors would ensure a Bush victory -- which is a pretty good point. But as funny as the idea is, the fact that these members of Congress intended it as a serious point of policy is profoundly disappointing.

2004-07-02T14:22:00.000-07:00

Searching for evidence of political correctness run amok, then gleefully ridiculing it on the Internet, has become a sort of national past-time in the right-wing blogosphere (to which I am proud to belong). I try to avoid that type of stuff, mostly because it has the same fish-in-a-barrel quality I find so unappealing about Fahrenheit 9/11, to name one example.

But I'll make an exception for this utterly absurd story out of Minnesota, which documents the difficulties encountered by the Minnesota Twins, who are giving away a free G.I. Joe doll to 5,000 kids in an effort to honor veterans. Unfortunately, the Twins have run afoul of Minnesota's thriving anti-war movement, which has brought enough pressue to bear that the team has asked Hasbro, the dolls' maker, to relieve their figure of his rifle.

Fortunately, the team has shown enough intestinal fortitude to continue with its plans for the giveaway -- despite the displeasure from the no-war crowd.

The St. Paul Pioneer Press' story on the controversy features what may be my all-time favorite subhed: "Peaceniks rip team's idea to honor military."

Key passages from the story:

"The Minnesota Twins will present Duke, "the calm and determined battlefield commander of the G.I. Joe team,'' to the first 5,000 children at Monday night's game against the Kansas City Royals as a way of honoring local military personnel.

...

"'I think the Twins are way off base with this idea,' said John Varone, a Vietnam veteran and president of the Twin Cities chapter of Veterans for Peace. "For gosh sakes, the last place we need to promote war is at our national pastime.'

"The Twins say Joe isn't glorifying war, but celebrating the efforts of servicemen and women. As part of that mission, the team asked Duke's maker, Hasbro Inc., to remove the customary gun from his side, bringing him in accordance with the Metrodome's no-gun policy. Hand grenades are still visible.

"'I know there are people who are adamant about opposition to the war, but this is not about politics,' Twins marketing vice president Patrick Klinger said. "And it's not just about this war. It's about what happened 60 years ago.'''

Hat tip to Baseball Crank, who, despite being a Mets fan, seems to be plenty bright and insightful. Will wonders never cease?

2004-07-01T09:53:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan thinks that regardless of the outcome of the election, the Republican Party will be engulfed in "outright civil war." Money quote:

"If Bush wins, it will cripple his ability to get anything done. If he loses, the recriminations will get vicious. The fiscal conservatives will be fighting the "deficits-don't-matter" crowd. The realists will be out to topple the neocons. The Santorum-Ashcroft axis will continue to wage war on any Republicans not interested in legislating either the Old Testament or the dictates of the Vatican. (The FMA battle now looks more and more like an attempt by Santorum to identify Republican social moderates so he can use primary hardliners to challenge them in the future.) The battle lines are deep and sharp - and the future of American conservatism is at stake."

Dramatically put, and well argued -- not that anyone should expect anything less from Sullivan, one of the four or five best bloggers out there. But his logic is flawed.

Although I agree with Sullivan on almost every issue of significance, particularly on gay marriage, his disdain for the "theocons" on the Christian Right makes him overrate their significance and their unity -- witness the downright paranoid line about the "Santorum-Ashcroft axis" and its plans.

If I can descend briefly into cliche, it's an accepted fact that the two main American political parties are "big tents." That's one thing that differentiates American politics from, say, Italian or Israeli politics. The opposing elements Sullivan highlights certainly do exist in the party. But those opposing groups exist under the umbrella of the Republican Party because of all the issues on which they are not opposed. Disagreement on one plank of the platform -- or even more than one -- should not be considered more significant than agreement on the majority of the platform.

With that said, Sullivan does make a good point amongs the drama -- the moderate Republican must be heard. The power of the Christian right lies in its ability to mobilize. But they remain a minority, both in America as a whole and in the party. Arguments about important issues facing the party and the nation should not be ceded to the right because of timidity in the center. Pat Robertson does not have to be the final arbiter of the party's policy on stem cell research, abortion, or gay rights, any more than Pat Buchanan was allowed to be the party's spokesman on immigration and trade policy. What's called for is not civil war, but civil discourse.

2004-07-01T08:50:00.000-07:00

David Bernstein over at The Volokh Conspiracy has a very interesting observation about this story in the New York Times about Democratic opposition to the Nader campaign.

The Times says that the Multnomah County Democratic Party coordinated an organized obstruction of a Nader campaign meeting in Portland, Ore. by crowding a meeting hall with Democratic voters. These crowds kept Nader's supporters out, preventing them from signing a petition which would put Nader on the ballot in Oregon.

The communications secretary of the MCDP, Moses Ross, actually owned up to this utterly ridiculous and undemocratic scheme.

"I felt it as my obligation due to the dirty tricks that the far right were doing to stack the seats at that convention," Ross said. "I felt obliged to encourage our Democrats to do something about that."

Bernstein has a great dissection of this argument:

"Republicans want Nader on the ballot to take votes from Kerry, so they go to a meeting to sign petitions for him. Sneaky, yes, but not interfering with anyone else's rights. The Democrats respond by flooding the meeting room to prevent both Republicans and anyone else from signing the petitions. This strikes me as beyond the ethical (and, depending on the details of "kept people out," perhaps legal) pale, as it prevented others from exercising their constitutional right to assemble, and was intended to do so."

Bernstein thinks, at the very least, that the Dems owe Nader and his campaign an apology. I think that's setting the bar too low.

2004-07-01T08:28:00.000-07:00

I'm full of thoughts on the Iraqi handover and what it means -- not to mention wrath at the defeatists who insist that the handover is meaningless or somehow an admission of defeat. Unfortunately, I haven't had time the last couple days to rant adequately about it in this space. While I set about clearing my schedule, please check out the excellent Iraqi blog Iraq the Model. He has a number of very interesting and very encouraging things to say about the handover -- and about the much-maligned Jerry Bremer.

Iraqi blogger Zeyad also gives his take on the handover.

Other blogs with can't-miss observations about the situation in Iraq include -- but certainly aren't limited to -- Belmont Club, Blackfive, Lt. Smash, and the gang at No Pasaran.

2004-07-01T08:17:00.000-07:00

James Lileks, one of the really outstanding writers in the blogosphere, has done it again. In noting the seeming lack of ecstatic reaction to the handover of custody of Saddam Hussein to the Iraqi government, Lileks says it's important to adopt "the correct cynical pose about this." Among your choices:

"Oh fine great that Saddam is gone, I never supported him, but what about Saudi Arabia? Shouldn’t we invade them? Not that we should, because that would totally be about oil."

"Would it have been better if the Iraqis themselves achieved this without outside help? Of course, yes. But we’ll never know if they could have, because this administration jumped the gun and rushed to war after only 12 years of cease-fire violations."

And my personal favorite..."Who frickin’ cares, I hate Bush. Kerry sux too."

UPDATE: Another great take on the Saddam handover, and what it means for Iraq, from the National Review's David Frum.

2004-06-29T16:07:00.000-07:00

The ongoing genocide in Darfur, Sudan, has gone overnight from under-reported travesty to front-and-center in the world media. And not a moment too soon.

If you haven't read about this humanitarian catastrophe, there are several good surveys of the disaster to date here, here, and here.

Colin Powell, who remained largely sessile during the buildup to the Iraq war -- although he did manage to make it to New York City to address the U.N., which I suppose was a blessing -- has even managed to stir himself into action.

Powell's visit to Sudan -- which hopefully will feature the Secretary's hitherto little-seen backbone -- is being covered exhaustively at this outstanding Sudan blog.

Sudan -- best known as Osama bin Laden's hideout prior to his taking up residence with the Taliban -- is run by a murderous, corrupt, venal junta whose main skill appears to be murdering their countrymen. The best example of that, previous to Darfur, was the long, bloody, exhaustive civil war, pitting the Christian and animist South against the Muslim north, which recently ground to a blood-soaked halt.

One of the more popular arguments against taking a firm line with the junta over Darfur is the fear that it might scuttle the recently-reached peace deal which ended the civil war. Opponents of humanitarian intervention also nervously cite the fact that Sudan is an oil-producing nation. (In fact, one of the major elements of the civil war was a squabble over division of oil profits.) Or they'll point with concern to the fact that the people of Sudan's northern regions, including the junta, are mostly Arab Muslims...much like the Iraqis we've been so criticized for liberating.

As you know, my optimism often knows no bounds. But I refuse to believe that such petty, public-relations-centric concerns will be used as excuses for inaction in Darfur. The shameful example of inaction in Rwanda, and the lackadaisical response to the civil wars in Yugoslavia should serve as a warning to those who would turn their backs on genocide in order to preserve their reputations or to keep gas prices low.

2004-06-29T15:49:00.000-07:00

Until now, I've been one of the legions of Republicans complaining that John Kerry's presidential campaign hasn't been clear enough about the policies and goals a Kerry administration would pursue.

If Kerry pal and campaign-trail helpmate Hillary Clinton is any indication, there's a damn good reason Kerry's been keeping mum: they're running a Walter Mondale Memorial campaign, complete with a pledge to raise your taxes, and a paternalistic rationale for doing so.

But don't take it from me. Here are Sen. Clinton's remarks during Tuesday's visit to San Francisco -- which, oddly enough, was supposed to be devoted to husband Bill's book tour:

"Many of you are well enough off that ... the tax cuts may have helped you," Sen. Clinton said. "We're saying that for America to get back on track, we're probably going to cut that short and not give it to you. We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."

Yep -- returning a fraction of tax dollars to ordinary people doesn't serve the common good. Taking it away and giving it to the always efficient, always trustworthy government to spend...that's a sure-fire recipe for success. Thanks for the tip, Senator. But if it's up to me, I'm going to "serve the common good," and "help America get back on track," by voting for Bush. Just a personal preference.

P.S. - Doesn't this comment by Hillary disrupt one of two precious leftist sacred cows? Clinton and her ilk have busied themselves with insisting that Bush's tax cuts only helped "the rich." Meanwhile, Democrats have for decades insisted that the Republican party is the party of wealth and privelege. But don't Clinton's remarks invalidate one or both of those points? Indeed they do -- not that they needed any further invalidation.

P.P.S - I can't think of a better time than this to link to this great story from James Lileks. Scroll down past the Marx Brothers and David Mamet reviews, all the way to the bottom.

UPDATE: Scrappleface, as usual, has a funny take on this: "Publisher Revokes Hillary's Advance for Common Good".

2004-06-29T14:47:00.000-07:00

I've vented my spleen to my heart's content on Michael Moore's hack opus, Fahrenheit 9/11, and have no desire to further rant here -- especially since I haven't seen the movie, and certainly will not.

That said, I do think that the most accurate comparison for F9/11 is the year's other popular, divisive, and influential movie -- Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. Yeah, I know -- brilliant insight. But that's not why you come here.

Anyway, both movies were controversial interpretations of well-known stories. Both have been ravenously received by their core audience and eagerly promoted by different segments of the media -- the cover of National Review for The Passion, the editorial page of the New York Times for F9/11.

Blogger Jeff Percifield, who's usually well to my right on any given issue, has a hilarious juxtaposition of the two movies' respective reviews, in cases where both was seen by the same reviewer. Among my favorites:

A.O. Scott, New York Times:

"Fahrenheit": "Mr. Moore's populist instincts have never been sharper. . . . He is a credit to the republic."

"Passion": "Gibson has exploited the popular appetite for terror and gore for what he and his allies see as a higher end."

Eric Harrison, Houston Chronicle:

"Fahrenheit": "[Moore] is an indispensable treasure, and his imperfections are part of the reason, because they mark him as real."

"Passion": "It's awful because everything he knows about storytelling has been swept aside by proselytizing zeal."

And the cream of the crop:

David Edelstein, Slate:

"Fahrenheit": After the screening, a friend railed that Moore was exploiting a mother's grief. I suggested that the scene made moral sense in the context of the director's universe, that the exploitation is justified if it saves the lives of other mothers' sons.

"Passion": "A two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie--The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre--that thinks it's an act of faith."

Thanks to Best of the Web for the link.

UPDATE: If you'd like to read a dispassionate series of arguments, competently and calmly laid out, about Moore and his movie, you can do so here, thanks to the National Review's Jonah Goldberg. Of course, if you wanted dispassionate and reasonable arguments, I can't for the life of me figure out why you'd come here.

SECOND UPDATE: Dave Kopel contributed an outstanding, exhaustively researched piece to National Review Online, titled "Fifty-Six Deceits in Fahrenheit 911." I highly recommend it.

2004-06-27T22:59:00.000-07:00

During my hiatus from blogging, I spent plenty of time exploring the blogosphere. One of the most interesting and entertaining blogs I came across was Benjamin, the Anti-Chomsky, whose blog is "dedicated to the permanent and total discrediting of the work of noam chomsky and his fellow travelers."

As you might imagine, it's some pretty heavy stuff. Devoting a part of your life to reading and rebutting Noam Chomsky seems sort of like being a professional pest exterminator -- a worthy social cause, but you come into contact with a lot of yucky stuff.

The blog is excellent. Benjamin, like me, loves long, involved sentence, replete with clauses and downright claustrophobic with unnecessarily long words. (See! There I go again!)

But, perhaps unlike me, he has a lot of excellent points to make. Check him out -- and if you ever respected Noam Chomsky, just pretend it never happened and hope nobody remembers.

2004-06-27T22:31:00.000-07:00

John Judis, a senior editor at the New Republic, has a very interesting point to make in the latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine. The piece -- heads-upped to me by a friend at FP, whose identity will be left secret to preserve her leftist credibility [/irony] -- manages to hide that very interesting point amidst a flurry of ass-backwards conclusions.

Judis opens his article with a quote from President Bush. In a 2003 visit to Manila, Bush drew a comparison between the establishment of democracy in the Phillipines and its coming establishment in Iraq.

“Democracy always has skeptics,” the president said. “Some say the culture of the Middle East will not sustain the institutions of democracy. The same doubts were once expressed about the culture of Asia. These doubts were proven wrong nearly six decades ago, when the Republic of the Philippines became the first democratic nation in Asia.”

Judis begs to differ, of course. For him, the American occupation of the Phillipines was a bloody disaster, unmitigated by any positive result. (This, of course, begs the question...did Judis bother to investigate Spain's handling of the colony prior to the U.S. occupation? If he did, there's no sign of it in the article). Judis' prize quote comes quite early in the story; to wit:

"...Instead of creating a Philippine democracy, the McKinley administration, its confidence inflated by victory in that “splendid little war,” annexed the country and installed a colonial administrator. The United States then waged a brutal war against the same Philippine independence movement it encouraged to fight against Spain. The war dragged on for 14 years. Before it ended, about 120,000 U.S. troops were deployed, more than 4,000 were killed, and more than 200,000 Filipino civilians and soldiers were killed. Resentment lingered a century later during Bush's visit."

Historical comparisons and analogies are always dangerous -- as anyone with a working knowledge of history is well aware. Santayana's oft-misquoted dictum (""Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it") makes a hell of a soundbite. Many historians love it, because it inflates the impact of their already-important discipline. But it's utter nonsense. Any patterns in history are entirely accidental, as is their supposed repetition. Remembering or not remembering, say, the Hundred Year's War will not stop bloody wars for territory. Remembering the Holocaust will not stop genocide.

But Judis' analogy is even more unrealistic than the norm. The American occupation of the Phillipines was undertaken in an age of straightforward imperialism, with a paternalistic attitude so clear that it actually inspired Rudyard Kipling's famous poem "The White Man's Burden." No such climate, or anything remotely akin to it, exists today. In fact, the paternalism is now mostly practiced on the antiwar left, by the commentators who insist that Arabs are somehow unsuited for democracy -- the same argument, as Bush pointed out in his speech, that was deployed decades ago against the fledgling Asian democracies.

Undaunted, Judis presses on. He insists that the various difficulties of democratizing the Phillipines are a cautionary road map for democratizing Iraq. This despite the external difficulties we faced in the Phillipines -- a native resistance movement that dwarfed anything Iraq has to offer; the assassination of President McKinley in the occupation's early days; the hamhanded torture techniques of American commanders, next to which the abuses at Abu Ghraib really [i]do[/i] look like fraternity pranks; and, of course, two world wars sandwiched around a worldwide economic collapse.

In fact, Judis' best point is the one he's so insistent upon avoiding: that nation-building is possible, and that it can even become a success. No matter how impoverished the Phillipines have been, no matter how endangered their democracy -- and it was utterly extinct under Marcos -- the Phillipines have endured, somewhat improbably, as a discrete political unit. It has taken a bumpy road from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century -- as have almost all the countries of the developing world.

Despite all of the problems and setbacks -- despite Filipino corruption and American incompetence and cruelty -- the Phillipines are today a representative democracy. Iraq will be one, too -- and history tells us that it can stay that way, given the right leaders and the right international support.

The first is up to the Iraqis. The second is up to the international community (France, Germany, I'm looking at you).

2004-06-27T22:23:00.000-07:00

Ugh. Almost a month since posting. If this blog ever had any readers -- a doubtful proposition at best -- they've long since been bored away.

First, it was writer's block. Then, I wanted to avoid my natural impulse toward over-the-top Reagan eulogizing, being done -- and done better -- everywhere else in the blogosphere. Then, it was just the mighty force of inertia.

Well, that's no more. I'm back, and back with a vengeance.

I've been recharging my batteries with an absolute cocktail of my pet peeves: I've been watching West Wing reruns (and yelling at the television), arguing about Michael Moore with people who are convinced George W. Bush is the real villain of Sept. 11, and reading a seemingly interminable book in French (by far the worst part). I was practically a parody of an unhappy Republican.

But the exposure to all these elements, like some sort of reverse Kryptonite, has strengthened my resolve. Welcome to the Golden Age of Another Web Rant. And while you're at it, help yourself to my new links list. It's a far from exhaustive list of blogs -- mostly on the right, of course -- that are far better than mine. Please remember to come back and visit, though.

2004-05-31T21:00:00.000-07:00

Jacob Sullum of Reason magazine has an interesting report from the nanny state's latest front-line: clove cigarettes!

That's right, kids. The government, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that endless taxpayer-supported anti-smoking ads aren't enough. Noooo, not by a long shot. In fact, the government's not just happy with yelling at you about smoking at every opportunity.

The latest project will see the feds ban clove cigarettes -- not on the eminently supportable grounds that they're pretentious and foul, but on the nebulous, scare-mongering basis that they're "appealing to kids."

As opposed to regular cigarettes, right? Because we all know our previous efforts to "educate" kids away from cigarettes have been a smashing success.

Jacob also does a great job of pointing out that Philip Morris, one of the bill's main supporters, just happens not to make flavored cigarettes...while Brown & Williamson and R.J. Reynolds do.

Hat tip to Arts & Literature Daily for the link.

2004-05-31T20:43:00.000-07:00

Attention: sniveling peaceniks, Kucinich voters, Frenchmen, and anti-American wusses of all descriptions, take heart!

P.J. O'Rourke is here to help. O'Rourke, one of America's most incisive thinkers -- and certainly one of its funniest -- has given your concerns a lot of thought. And -- perhaps to your surprise -- he's on your side. That's the gist of his brilliant suggestion in Sunday's Wall Street Journal. America should just recuse itself from the world's problems.

He's got a point -- we're just too involved in the situation(s) -- all of them -- to be objective. The world'd probably be a better place without that pesky American unilateralism. It could return to its natural state, which flourished before America started asserting itself. A state of blissful peace, harmony, and international cooperation.

More good sense:

"The benefits will be immediate. We can cut $300 billion from our defense budget. This will be almost enough to pay for the aging baby boomers' prescription drug benefits, which can now include Levitra, Botox and medicinal cannabis.

"One thing to whine about will be the fate of Israel. Without American safeguards that nation is certain to be militarily attacked. To judge by previous Israeli wars, in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982, the result will be serious headaches for Israelis as the Knesset furiously debates the status of Jewish settlements outside Damascus and on the west bank of the Euphrates.

"A NATO alliance that does not include the U.S. will acquire a new sense of mission and purpose, especially in Gdansk, Istanbul and maybe Hamburg, when Russia resumes its historic quest for warm-water ports."

I'm sold.

2004-05-30T19:22:00.000-07:00

This column by Zev Chafets of Jewish World Report is a must-read for anyone out there who's recently uttered the phrase, "I supported the war in Iraq in the beginning, but now..."

Chafets makes an outstanding point, which is not less outstanding because of its advanced age: war is hell. Terrible things happen in every war. Those terrible things should not distract us from why we went to war in the first place.

Money quote:

"No war is worth supporting if it can't be supported in cold blood. Revenge, honor, glory and other such hot-blooded impulses aren't good enough reasons to go to war, or to sustain one.

"Americans are learning that now. Many of the politicians and commentators who beat the drums for invading Iraq have begun beating their breasts instead. They didn't bargain for the pictures from Abu Ghraib or reports of the accidental slaughter of innocent villagers.

"They didn't think about how unpopular war would make them with the friends of their enemies or how unpleasant it would be to watch the evening news. They no longer want to be associated with war's terrible inevitabilities.

"Their sudden scrupulousness is not a badge of moral superiority. On the contrary, it is a mark of cowardice and a sign of bad character. Every grownup who supported sending troops to Iraq (and Afghanistan) knew that they would wind up unintentionally killing or injuring some civilians and abusing the rights of others. The question was, and remains: Is the war worthwhile despite what it entails?"

Chafet's answer -- and, of course, mine -- is "Of course!" The war has not lost its legitimacy because of the actions of a few depraved reservists. It has not lost its legitimacy because of an attack on some fictitious wedding party. And it will not lose its legitimacy thanks to the fearful departures of fair-weather supporters.

Regardless of the endless parade of tongue-clucking "experts" ranting about WMDs -- most of whom fall into paroxysms of denial over the sarin shell recently found in Iraq -- the vast majority of the reasons we went into Iraq were sound. We are in the process of establishing freedom and democracy to a country which has never known them. We have made the region more secure. We have drawn hundreds of Al Qaeda terrorists into the country, where we can destroy them far from American soil. (That last, though not a planned consequence of the invasion, is still a significant one.)

The Iraqi people seem more sanguine about the fate of Iraqi democracy than most of the doomsayers in the West. Even the part of the poll that -- unsurprisingly -- has been most discussed in the media is good news for those who hope for Iraqi democracy: the Iraqis want an end to the occupation.

Thank goodness, I say. If the Iraqis had no problem with their country being occupied, with their security and public services overseen by foreigners, I'd fear for the future of the country. The fact that they want the occupiers gone -- and want them replaced by a unifying democracy -- is very reassuring news about Iraqi democracy.

2004-05-28T14:22:00.000-07:00

Today's nominee for the "Needs Perspective" award goes to Denver Post "columnist" Reggie Rivers, who opined today that America's soldiers are the last bastion of slavery.

As you might imagine, the column's a laugh riot -- except that Reggie appears to be totally serious. Or maybe he's just playing us all for fools. How else to explain this ending?:

"So our kids get bombarded with formal and informal recruiting messages - and they sign up. One day, they find themselves sitting in a Humvee in Iraq, with their best friend lying dead on the floor next to them, and they suddenly realize the deception of their recruitment and the shackles of their slavery.

"They just want to go home, but they can't. And domestically, we continue to trot out the tired mantra that supporting the troops means supporting the war.

"If we truly care about our young slaves, we should do everything we can to get them out of harm's way."

How do you argue with that? Face it, America -- Reggie's right. What we need is a latter-day Abe Lincoln to...um...emancipate our soldiers? This column defies sarcasm, much less logic and reason.

Here's hoping that the good people of Denver recognize Reggie for the imbecile he is. And here's hoping that Reggie gets a mailbox full of letters from current and former military "slaves" who can set him straight on what it means to volunteer to defend your country at the risk of your own life.

UPDATE: Military reservist Brad Torgesen had a very illuminating e-mail exchange with Rivers, available on his blog.

2004-05-24T23:39:00.000-07:00

It's the middle of the night, and I'm exhausted after working a 16-hour day to put out a paper. Miserable -- but not the point. One thing that brightened my day was this essay by Bill Whittle, a very smart man.

Be forewarned -- it's long. And by "long," I don't mean a little longer than average, like most of my posts. We're talking epic. I'm guessing that there are multiple books of the Bible that check in with fewer words. It's like a deep well of words -- you could drop a 100-inch Gregg Easterbrook column in and never hear it hit bottom.

That said, it's outstanding. I literally couldn't stop reading it. But, of course, I have a high tolerance for wordiness, as anyone who's read anything I've ever written can tell you.

It puts into words, better than anything I've read in the last two and a half years, the gravity and magnitude of the struggle facing our country.

2004-05-22T21:48:00.000-07:00

After a long break from blogging thanks to a much-deserved beach vacation, I'm back in action -- and full of piss and vinegar about any number of absolutely ridiculous things that happened over my absence.

The most absurd was the letter written by 60 former U.S. diplomats, criticizing President Bush for his endorsement of Sharon's plans to follow his Gaza pullout by keeping some Jewish settlements in the West Bank. I have a number of problems with this. First, what ever happened to professionalism in the American diplomatic corps? One assumes that each of these men and women joined the Foreign Service to serve their country. Is their country served today by publicizing a letter -- and holding an accompanying press conference -- criticizing the Commander-In-Chief in wartime? The letter could have been submitted privately, if the aim of those diplomats was to provide constructive criticism. The fact that it was not makes me suspect that it's motivations were more political than patriotic. Disgraceful.

Then there was this great line in the letter: "By closing the door to negotiations with Palestinians and the possibility of a Palestinian state, you have proved that the U.S. is not an evenhanded peace partner."

We've hardly closed the door to negotiations with the Palestinians. However, the last decade -- since the affront to justice that was Yasser Arafat's Nobel Peace Prize -- has proven the uselessness of negotiating with the underhanded terrorists who make up the current Palestinian "leadership" -- especially since they don't even represent a majority of the Palestinian people. Sharon's move was unilateral, but it was also helpful. The move was a voluntary cession of land that was Israeli by right of conquest, and -- a historical first for Israel -- it was made without so much as a concrete offer of peace from the other side. A few relatively small settlements on the West Bank -- which will likely end up behind Israel's security wall anyway -- must not be allowed to become an excuse for Palestinian abandonment of the peace process.

The prospect of a Palestinian state -- which seems at turns frightening and laughable -- is still perfectly possible, despite this alarmist proclamation by these former public servants. And as for the utterly absurd notion that the U.S. is not "an evenhanded peace partner," I'd ask these former diplomats to take a look at the Palestinians. Until Arafat cracks down on the profusion of anti-Israeli terror originating from the territory he pretends to control, it is the PLO which cannot be a partner in the peace process. Democracies cannot negotiate with terror. That lesson, which was clear to most at the beginning of this abortive "process," should be abundantly clear now. It is impossible for the United States to expect its steadfast ally to negotiate with groups bent on its destruction, and on the murder of its citizens. The fact that 60 former U.S. diplomats apparently believe the opposite is enough to make me fear for the future of American foreign policy.

Even more disturbing is the fact that this action has given aid and comfort to the Palestinian leadership in its effort to end what currently passes for the peace "process": Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian Cabinet member, told the Associated Press that "President Bush [should] really look very carefully at this letter and change course."

America should not change course at the whim of a few retired diplomats, and it must not change course at the urging of a representative of an illegitimate government.

2004-05-15T09:38:00.000-07:00

The Financial Times has a very interesting article today about Bush's slipping approval numbers for his handling of the Iraq war. Forty-two percent of those surveyed approve of Bush's overall record as President, but "almost two-thirds" disapprove of his handling of the war.

First, a quick disclaimer. It's May 15. The election's not for a looooong time. My beloved Cincinnati Reds are three games back in the NL Central, and no rational person thinks that's going to last. The same applies to Bush's "war leader" rating: wait it out.

The most revealing quote from the article is this one: "Confronted with a rising US body count and images of torture in Abu Ghraib prison, Americans have begun to countenance failure in Iraq. The majority of people polled now do not think it was worth going to war." And who was it that was pushing those images of torture on the American people? The mass media -- most of whom have been convinced that it wasn't "worth going to war" since the invasion of Iraq began. This is a testament to the ability of the media -- with a few honorable exceptions -- to stay on message and influence public opinion. It's also a testament to the short-term sturdiness of public opinion: it's been more than a year since the invasion of Iraq, and this is the first time Bush's approval ratings have dipped so low.

The gleeful left-wing "Iraq is Vietnam! Iraq is Vietnam!" movement is also represented in the article, with political scientist John Mueller of Ohio State confidently comparing the decline in Bush's approval rating to the momentum shift against the Johnson administration in 1967-8.

The idea that Vietnam -- in which an under-trained and under-equipped army was supporting a corrupt and despised puppet regime -- is analogous to the current situation in Iraq is absurd. That army was fighting a guerilla war in unfamiliar territory against an enemy supported by three foreign countries. And to make the task even more difficult, the military was hamstrung by restrictions imposed by civilian leadership -- bombers forced to fly the same approach patterns week after week, soldiers prohibited from entering certain zones, etc.

In Iraq, we're fighting a war of liberation, supported by the mass of citizens, in clear, open terrain with which we are already familiar -- or at least more familiar than we ever were with the jungles of Southeast Asia. We're fighting a stateless enemy with limited access to heavy weaponry and a dwindling coterie of foreign supporters. And -- this is the most important part -- we're winning. Every day that goes by is a victory, inasmuch as it brings us closer to the establishment of Iraqi democracy, and that much closer to our ultimate goal -- a free, stable and democratic Middle East. In Vietnam, we weren't exactly fighting on the side of the angels. Here, we can be assured that we are -- and no rogue soldiers in the ranks, like those at Abu Ghraib, can detract from that.

2004-05-15T09:30:00.000-07:00

Interesting news today from across the pond, as the stubborn editor of the Daily Mirror, Piers Morgan, finally bows out. Morgan's being held responsible for publishing the faked photos of Iraqi prisoners being tortured by British soldiers. He even put on a very convincing display of believing they were true, but ultimately to no avail -- he's cleaned out his office and is now looking for work better suited to his talents in fiction. He even had the considerable gall to tell a reporter that "All I want to say is we published the truth. We have revealed a can of worms. If the government chooses to ignore that, it is entirely a matter for them."

Andrew Sullivan makes a great point: two of the most strident anti-war voices in the U.K. -- the Mirror and the BBC -- have been discredited by their eagerness to hurt the war effort with untruth. Tony Blair, meanwhile, who has been predicted to be an electoral casualty of the war in Iraq for months, is still chugging along. Reports of Blair's demise -- like the interminably long, bitter, and childish cover story in this month's Atlantic Monthly -- are greatly exaggerated.

2004-05-14T18:44:00.000-07:00

I created this blog to vent my otherwise unexpressed ferment of ideas, mostly relating to the ongoing war effort. I feel that the "pro-war" community suffers from many problems:

1. Skepticism or outright rejection in the mainstream media.

2. Tarnish by association with racist "kill 'em all and let Allah sort 'em out" ranters.

3. Insularity -- the tendency to confine discussion to a comfortable circle of people, all of whom agree with us.

Needless to say, this blog won't change any of that -- so on with the ranting!

The war in which we're engaged is a worldwide struggle with retrograde fascism. We're fighting a fanatical minority whose ideology is so disgusting as to boggle the mind. A minority who beheaded a man for the crime of being an American citizen just days before I write these words.

It's not a war against Islam. It's not a war against Saudi Arabia. It's not a war in support of Israeli ambition or American imperialism. We're fighting this war for two noble goals: to bring freedom and democracy to the oppressed millions who currently represent fertile recruiting grounds for terrorism, and to ensure the security of innocents across the globe. That may sound a lot like the "Bush Doctrine." It's no coincidence.

With goals so lofty and idealistic, it's safe to say that we've picked a difficult struggle. But we've fought -- and won -- those before. This is no different.

I've resisted the siren song of blogging for a long time -- content to read the many brilliant people who are already doing a better job than I could ever dream of doing. But finally, I lost patience with swallowing my rants. The last straw was an argument with an acquaintace, an intelligent, reasonable and educated guy, who is convinced that democracy is a "foreign" idea that we're "forcing" on the Iraqi people. Nonsense.

Who doesn't want to be free? Who are we to deny freedom to an entire region, and then to explain our failure away with pseudo-intellectual confidence: "Oh, they're Arabs and Muslims. Their culture just isn't compatible with democracy."

This terrifying argument has been made before, to keep several "culturally unsuited" elements from the ballot box...a list including African-Americans, Asian colonials, Latin Americans, South African blacks, and women. It was wrong then, and it's far more wrong now, because the people making the argument belong to an advanced liberal society built on the idea of freedom for all.

The anti-war left is incorporating into its arguments the most repulsive, discredited arguments of eugenics and imperialism, and putting them into the service of an ideology so blinded by moral relativism that it sees no difference between Al Qaeda terrorists and American soldiers.

It's a war of ideas, and this blog is just a tiny, insignificant bullet. Consider it fired.

Welcome!

2004-05-14T18:43:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Another WebRant. For now, this message is probably going to be viewed only by me...but that's OK. If you're not me, congratulations, and enjoy the banality!