November 30, 2003
ONE DOWN, TWO TO GO:
For the Iraqis, a Missile Deal That Went Sour (DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER, Nov. 30, 2003, NY Times)
It was Saddam Hussein's last weapons deal — and it did not go exactly as he and his generals had imagined.For two years before the American invasion of Iraq, Mr. Hussein's sons, generals and front companies were engaged in lengthy negotiations with North Korea, according to computer files discovered by international inspectors and the accounts of Bush administration officials.
The officials now say they believe that those negotiations — mostly conducted in neighboring Syria, apparently with the knowledge of the Syrian government — were not merely to buy a few North Korean missiles.
Instead, the goal was to obtain a full production line to manufacture, under an Iraqi flag, the North Korean missile system, which would be capable of hitting American allies and bases around the region, according to the Bush administration officials.
It's a trifecta: Iraq, Syria, and North Korea in one shot.
SO'S YOUR MOTHER:
The Chant Not Heard (THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, November 30, 2003, NY Times)
[T]he Bush team is such a partisan, ideological, nonhealing administration that many liberals just want to punch its lights out — which is what the Howard Dean phenomenon is all about.
"nonhealing"? Is that what passes for an epithet on the Left? And they wonder why we don't take them seriously.
FRANK RICH, CULTURE WARRIOR:
America Tunes In for the Money Shot (Frank Rich, 11/30/03, NY Times)
[W]holesale wallowing in pedophilia is no anomaly. Dozens of Web sites are devoted to counting down to the 18th birthday of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, twin kid stars of a 1990's sitcom who are now branding their emerging sexuality to move a merchandise line. We are only just recovering from the marathon bookselling tour enthusiastically taken by the parents of Elizabeth Smart, the abducted Utah 14-year-old. (The "money shot" everyone was looking for in that case was succinctly summed up when Oprah told the couple, "I think we all assume your daughter was sexually assaulted.") Still going strong is R. Kelly, the R & B singer due in court tomorrow on 21 counts of child pornography involving a 14-year-old girl. His new CD debuted at No. 1 in Billboard after he was charged. He also collaborated with Mr. Jackson on the one new song (titled "One More Chance," if you please) on the singer's compilation CD — just as he has with Britney Spears on her new CD.Ms. Spears, her ex-beau Justin Timberlake and her rival Christina Aguilera were all first spotted as pubescent sex symbols when converging as mouseketeers on the Disney Channel's "All New Mickey Mouse Club" in 1993, the year of the last Jackson sex scandal. The media assembly line moved her along from chaste child star to Lolitaesque jailbait in record speed; her trajectory is nothing if not an Internet-time version of Mr. Jackson's progress since his early days as a child star. By 16, Ms. Spears was wearing a Catholic school uniform in the video for her hit ". . . Baby One More Time." Her image, a fusion of sex and dewy ersatz innocence out of the Jackson family playbook, was bought not only by kids who might not know better but by the parents who shelled out for her merchandise.
It's hard to imagine many Americans complaining about Calvin Klein ads anymore. Perhaps pedophilic chic is growing because in a porn-saturated nation, it's the one taboo left (and barely at that). Perhaps it's because of our culture's ever-increasing panic about growing old, as manifested in our favorite new spectator sport, plastic surgery, for which Mr. Jackson is the unfortunate poster boy. Whatever the explanation, this phenomenon is worthy of far more debate than the jurisprudence surrounding the singer's legal fix. After all, that debate is over; he's already been declared guilty by the court of public opinion. Aside from Elizabeth Taylor, who would so much as entertain the notion that Michael Jackson might be the innocent victim of a hysterical "Capturing the Friedmans" scenario? Only those prudes who would pour cold water on the nation's most popular erotic pastime.
What exquisite irony to see Mr. Rich make precisely the kind of slippery slope argument--from the midpoint of the slope no less--that he would deny to others. Remind us again how the social acceptance of deviant sex isn't leading us to the point where paedophilia will be seen as just another lifestyle.
GIVE US BACK OUR MONEY:
As Stimulus, Tax Cuts May Soon Go Awry (LOUIS UCHITELLE, 11/30/03. NY Times)
LAUDING the Bush tax cuts isn't easy. They have turned a comfortable budget surplus into a constraining deficit, and they are enriching the wealthy far more than families with only five-figure incomes.The one mitigating factor is stimulus. The tax cuts are helping to revive the economy by putting more spending money into people's pockets. But even that will soon backfire. [...]
Hyped-up entrepreneurs are indeed a benefit, but when it comes to lifting the economy, 70 years of experience has demonstrated that rising demand is crucial, and must come first. Only then do suppliers really become active, to satisfy the customers knocking on their doors.
THE Bush tax cuts encourage this customer demand, though not efficiently. They work best if every dollar of forgiven taxes is spent. Unfortunately, only a third is being spent, according to Joel Slemrod and his colleagues at the Office of Tax Policy Research at the University of Michigan. The rest has been saved or used to pay down debt, the office found in recent surveys.
By this reckoning, the Bush tax cuts will not do much to lift the economy. The $117 billion in fiscal 2003 gives birth to only $40 billion in effective stimulus. Much more of the cuts, perhaps every nickel, would have been spent if the money had been channeled to the states instead, to pay the salaries of teachers who were fired to balance budgets. The economy surged in the third quarter, but as Mr. Slemrod notes, "the tax cuts were not a major part of that growth."
This is pretty much the definitive exhibit in the case for the Timesmen not getting it. The money is ours, not the government's. If letting us have it back produces some of the kind of stimulus he's talking about, that's great; such economic benefits are worthwhile. But the primary purpose of tax cutting is moral, to return what's rightfully ours.
SNEAKING UP AT A SNAIL'S PACE (via Mike Daley):
The Rise Of India: Growth is only just starting, but the country's brainpower is already reshaping Corporate America (Manjeet Kripalani and Pete Engardio With Steve Hamm, DECEMBER 8, 2003, Business Week)
Plenty of Americans know of India's inexpensive software writers and have figured out that the nice clerk who booked their air ticket is in Delhi. But these are just superficial signs of India's capabilities. Quietly but with breathtaking speed, India and its millions of world-class
engineering, business, and medical graduates are becoming enmeshed in America's New Economy in ways most of us barely imagine. "India has always had brilliant, educated people," says tech-trend forecaster Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif. "Now Indians are taking the lead in colonizing cyberspace."This techno take-off is wonderful for India -- but terrifying for many Americans. In fact, India's emergence is fast turning into the latest Rorschach test on globalization. Many see India's digital workers as bearers of new prosperity to a deserving nation and vital partners of Corporate
America. Others see them as shock troops in the final assault on good-paying jobs. Howard Rubin, executive vice-president of Meta Group Inc., a Stamford (Conn.) information-technology consultant, notes that big U.S. companies are shedding 500 to 2,000 IT staffers at a time. "These people won't get reabsorbed into the workforce until they get the right skills," he says. Even Indian execs see the problem. "What happened in manufacturing is happening in services," says Azim H. Premji, chairman of IT supplier Wipro Ltd. "That raises a lot of social issues for the U.S." [...]Tech luminary Andrew S. Grove, CEO of Intel Corp. (INTC ), warns that "it's a very valid question" to ask whether America could eventually lose its overwhelming dominance in IT, just as it did in electronics manufacturing. Plunging global telecom costs, lower engineering wages abroad, and new interactive-design software are driving revolutionary change, Grove said at a software conference in October. "From a technical and productivity standpoint, the engineer sitting 6,000 miles away might as well be in the next cubicle and on the local area network." To maintain America's edge, he said, Washington and U.S. industry must double software productivity through more R&D investment and science education.
But there's also a far more positive view -- that harnessing Indian brainpower will greatly boost American tech and services leadership by filling a big projected shortfall in skilled labor as baby boomers retire. That's especially possible with smarter U.S. policy. Companies from GE Medical Systems (GE ) to Cummins (CUM ) to Microsoft (MSFT ) to enterprise-software firm PeopleSoft (PSFT ) that are hiring in India say they aren't laying off any U.S. engineers. Instead, by augmenting their U.S. R&D teams with the 260,000 engineers pumped out by Indian schools each year, they can afford to throw many more brains at a task and speed up product launches, develop more prototypes, and upgrade quality. A top electrical or chemical engineering grad from Indian Institutes of Technology (IITS) earns about $10,000 a year -- roughly one-eighth of U.S. starting pay. Says Rajat Gupta, an IIT-Delhi grad and senior partner at consulting firm McKinsey & Co.: "Offshoring work will spur innovation, job creation, and dramatic increases in productivity that will be passed on to the consumer."
Whether you regard the trend as disruptive or benefical, one thing is clear. Corporate America no longer feels it can afford to ignore India. "There's just no place left to squeeze" costs in the U.S., says Chris Disher, a Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. outsourcing specialist. "That's why every CEO is looking at India, and every board is asking about it." neoIT, a consultant advising U.S. clients on how to set up shop in India, says it has been deluged by big companies that have been slow to move offshore. "It is getting to a state where companies are literally desperate," says Bangalore-based neoIT managing partner Avinash Vashistha. [...]Throughout U.S. history, workers have been pushed off farms, textile mills, and steel plants. In the end, the workforce has managed to move up to better-paying, higher-quality jobs. That could well happen again. There will still be a crying need for U.S. engineers, for example. But what's called for are engineers who can work closely with customers, manage research teams, and creatively improve business processes. Displaced technicians who lack such skills will need retraining; those entering school will need broader educations.
Adapting to the India effect will be traumatic, but there's no sign Corporate America is turning back. Yet the India challenge also presents an enormous opportunity for the U.S. If America can handle the transition right, the end result could be a brain gain that accelerates productivity
and innovation. India and the U.S., nations that barely interacted 15 years ago, could turn out to be the ideal economic partners for the new century.
Regardless of whether it's a good or a bad thing, the astonishing thing is that American political and intellectual elites continue to ignore India and to pretend that Europe matters. India is the single most important nation to our future--both economic and geopolitical--but when's the last time you heard a politician so much as mention it?
MORE:
-Wake-Up Call for the West: SPECIAL REPORT.Concern is growing at the exodus of British jobs to call centres in India ... but we have seen nothing yet. (Douglas Fraser, 30 November 2003, Sunday Herald)
-Call Centre Kings: In a world without borders a booming India is poised to clean up. And Kiran Karnik, a leading architect of the Bangalore boom, is determined to make the most of it (30 November 2003, Sunday Herald)
YOU'RE BETTER OFF BEING NIGERIAN?:
‘Add to the fact they voted for a PM who makes Bush look like a statesman with gravitas, no wonder Italians are giu (down)’ (Duncan MacLaren, 11/30/03, Sunday Herald)
[A]ccording to a recent scientific poll published in a reputable Italian magazine (they do exist), the happiest people on Earth are the Nigerians and the most miserable sods in Europe are the Italians. One in four people in the bel paese is unhappy with life – and that’s without being gutted in international football. Such unhappiness, say the pundits, is a sign of deep-seated psychological malaise. Italians were happier in the Sixties when the family was stronger, Fellini was making films of global renown and vast motorways were being thrust through mountains and over steep valleys as symbols of the new technocratic might of post-fascist Italy. It’s all been downhill since then.“After all, look at us now,” declaimed Graziana, also known as Grace, parfumière extraordinaire and chardonnay grappa imbiber, in a Trastevere wine bar. “We have the lowest birth rate in Europe because women prefer their own Smart car to children. I can count on only three (beringed and usually with cigarette poised) fingers of one hand the number of decent Italian film directors around, and our only good actors are dead or nearly so. And these days our engineering skills are such that houses often collapse without the excuse of an earthquake.
“Add to that the fact that we voted for a Prime Minister who makes Bush look like a statesman with gravitas, then no wonder we’re giù (down). Where is the Italy of high culture and engineering genius? Where are the great writers? Where is the dolce vita?” (I can almost hear her say) “Wherr’s wur anima?”
On discovering that the happiest people in Europe were the Swiss, Grace went ballistic and one of her rings flew off her hand hitting Arturo the barman in the teeth. All she could blurt out contemptuously was that their best-known dish was melted cheese, that they spoke the language of drowning cows and were responsible for what the Italians call ‘il blackout’ (stress on the ‘out’ and with the breathy hint of a vowel after the ‘t’), when the peninsula was plunged into darkness for up to 24 hours in September, forcing Romans to camp in the metro stations overnight and imprisoning some temporarily in lifts.
Not quite Wells:
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
but not bad, Grace. Unfortunately, all of Europe is becoming Swiss--more in love with secure peace and quiet than with the tumult of freedom.
AWAKENING:
God on the Quad: New England's liberal college campuses have become fertile ground for the evangelical movement, which is attracting students in record numbers. But after they graduate, will they keep the faith? (Neil Swidey, 11/30/2003, Boston Globe Magazine)
When he arrived on campus, Gomes recalls, the evangelicals were "rather beleaguered -- a small group of confessing Christians fighting godless Harvard." The university's push to diversify changed that. "People tend to think of affirmative action as only affecting racial minorities," he says, "but the change in Harvard demographics in the late '70s and early '80s meant that a lot of Midwestern white-bread Protestant Christian evangelicals at whom Harvard would never have looked in the past, and who would have never looked at Harvard, suddenly became members of the university."Over the last decade, the evangelical scene has itself become more diverse. This brand of Christianity is particularly well suited to campus life, since it is propelled by "parachurch" groups like InterVarsity and Campus Crusade that don't recognize denominational lines. In fact, there is no uniform definition of "evangelical." Some define it merely as a style of expressing beliefs, incorporating a wide range of Protestants and even some Catholics. Others emphasize central building blocks: a conversion experience leading to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, an acceptance of the Bible as the inerrant word of God, and a commitment to save souls by spreading the Word. This elasticity makes it impossible to determine a precise number of American evangelicals, though several surveys have estimated it to be at least a third of the US population.
Whatever the definition, the evangelical presence on campus is a big, rowdy tent. Many students buy into all the tenets of the national parachurches, no matter how incompatible they may be with the ethos of the Eastern liberal arts college. Other students function more like "cafeteria Catholics," picking and choosing the tenets they can get behind.
And somewhere along the way, evangelical Christianity -- which a generation earlier had been a mark of embarrassment, a sign that you had checked your brain at the gate -- became not just tolerated but cool.
You can see this in the throngs of students from around Boston who cram into Harvard's Science Center on Friday nights to sing, "We are hungry for more of You/We are thirsty, oh Jesus." The event is called RealLife Boston, which is Campus Crusade's name for its 500-student Boston-area ministry, and the SRO crowd is made up of well-built athletes, attractive faces, even artsy types with chin hair and trendy black glasses. The emcee is Aaron Byrd, an easygoing junior from Abilene, Texas, who plays safety on the Harvard football team.
How did evangelicals get this hip?
Part of it is marketing. The whole RealLife approach, for instance, came from a marketing firm that Campus Crusade hired in the 1990s to help it expand its footprint in Boston. There are catchy print ads (one features a pair of wedding rings and the message "For the best sex, slip on one of these") and flashy websites (everystudent.com, godsquad.com). The Boston University chapter of Chi Alpha holds regular "The Gospel According to The Simpsons" gatherings.
But a bigger reason for their new coolness involves Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus. When students from those religions began arriving on campus in larger numbers and continued to practice their traditions in public, others on campus were intrigued.
"It's very chic to be a believer now," says Gomes. "In a place which is so dispassionate, so rational, and in many ways so conformist intellectually, if you want to break out of the pack, you say your prayers in public. It is the example of religious practice elsewhere that has emboldened American evangelicals to exercise their own practice."
C-SPAN 2 this weekend features a talk by Tom Wolfe (repeat tonight at 6:30pm), which ends with him discussing the current age as one in which America is experiencing the Fifth Freedom: freedom from religion. That is to say that a country whose first freedom was the freedom of the individual to practice his own religion is going through a bout in which the very idea of moral limitations on the individual are viewed as anathema. The danger in this, as he notes, is that American freedom has only been made possible because of the ferocity of religious belief here and the manner in which Americans regulate themselves internally, which lessens the need for external restraints. Those who are attacking those internal restraints are in all likelihood creating the conditions under which greater external restraints are required--a process that's clearly visible in the simultaneous rise of secularism and of the regulatory State over the second half of the 20th Century. If the value of self-restraint can be inculcated in the coming generation of young people--as polling on issues like divorce and abortion suggests is taking place--then reductions in the authority exercised by the State will be possible. This is the conservative challenge and the promise of the current political transformation.
REFORM FIRST, RULE LATER:
The reformer: To his admirers, Tariq Ramadan is Europe's leading advocate of liberal Islam.To his detractors, he's a dangerous theocrat in disguise. (Laura Secor, 11/30/2003, Boston Globe)
WHEN TARIQ RAMADAN delivers a lecture, the room is invariably packed to capacity. Afterwards, dozens of young Muslim men are likely to throng the stage, seeking his definitive guidance on everything from veiling to animal rights to how to live with dignity in a secular society."What I am doing with them is at the same time important and dangerous," Ramadan says of his work with these young men. "It could be dangerous if you let them think you have the answers. I try to tell them, `I am not what I'm saying. I'm only trying to be."'
At age 41, Ramadan, an elegant, Swiss-born intellectual, imam, and activist, has become a magnet for young Muslims in France, Switzerland, and Belgium. He's done it partly by making himself personally accessible to the devotees who purchase audiotapes of his lectures and often travel for miles just to hear him speak. And he's also done it with his unstinting criticism of their community's inclination toward insularity.
Outside the Muslim community, Ramadan is the object of both admiration and suspicion. He's the Muslim Martin Luther, the American and French press have sometimes rhapsodized: He advocates that European Muslims use their unique experiences to lead a movement toward reform within Islam. He is "two-faced," critics reply: He sounds like a moderate, having adopted a vocabulary that he knows will be accepted by secular Westerners, but he is actually herding Francophone Muslims down the path of extremism.
Traveling with Ramadan on a whirlwind November lecture tour in France, I found no particular discrepancy between the sermons he delivered to Muslim audiences and his published work. (Ramadan has written some 10 books in French, and Oxford University Press has just brought out his "Western Muslims and the Future of Islam.") Nonetheless, Ramadan's message is itself fraught with the complexities and contradictions of Europe's Muslim community, which often seems to occupy two worlds -- one traditional and religious, the other fast-changing and secular. [...]
Secular France can't seem to decide if Ramadan is friend or foe. He is, after all, an Islamist, meaning that he believes Islam furnishes a political as well as a spiritual worldview. For majority Muslim societies like those of the Middle East, Ramadan envisions a reformed, moderate, but nonetheless Islam-based political and legal system. In the end, such a system would look a lot like Western secular democracy, he says, though its legitimacy would derive from Islamic sources.
Ramadan's vision may be a radical improvement on nearly every existing Islamic system of government; indeed, he is a harsh critic of virtually all the world's Muslim rulers, and Saudi clerics have issued fatwas condemning him. But is Ramadan trying to square the circle when he says a reformed Islamic system is compatible with secular values?
Take, for instance, the harshest Islamic corporal punishments, such as stoning adulterous wives or cutting off the hands of thieves. Ramadan personally finds such penalties unacceptable and un-Islamic. He believes a moratorium should be called on them while Islamic scholars ask themselves three questions: What is in the texts? How does the contemporary context affect how we read the texts? Is the policy implementable?
Ramadan seems confident that this reevaluation will lead to radical reform. What's more, he believes he is providing language and tools to dismantle abuses from the inside, rather than simply flatly condemning the Islamic system from without, as secular critics do.
But what if the best efforts of Muslim scholars still reveal a God who insists on cruel and discriminatory punishments? There can be no recourse to extrinsic principles, such as human rights or equality. The final word lies in the Koran and with those who interpret it.
So are reformists like Ramadan mitigating the worst excesses of a cruel political system, or are they simply sugarcoating it? If the former, moderate Islamism is perhaps the greatest hope for human rights in countries ruled by sharia (Islamic law). If the latter, moderate Islamism, whatever its advocates' intentions, looks more like a potentially deceptive sales pitch.
Perhaps, at a minimum, we could demand that the radical reform of Islam precede its use as a basis for the State.
MINUTEMEN VS. 60-MINUTE MEN:
Winter blunderland: It's no joy ride as UMass can't weather Colgate (Joe Burris, 11/30/2003, Boston Globe)
Complaints about the venue had long since subsided. By Friday, the fifth-ranked University of Massachusetts team had arrived in upstate New York primed for the first round of the Division 1-AA football playoffs. The Minutemen clung to a positive mind-set yesterday during the two hours it took to drive through a snowstorm from their hotel in downtown Syracuse to Colgate University -- a trip that usually takes 50 minutes.Their offense never arrived.
Save for James Ihedigbo's punt return for a touchdown with 6:43 left in the first quarter, the UMass team that entered the contest averaging 30.1 points per game couldn't score. Amid 29-degree temperatures, a 14-degree windchill, and snow that covered the field at Andy Kerr Stadium, the Minutemen sputtered, hampered by slips and dropped passes.
Sixth-ranked Colgate, meanwhile, played much better, scoring two touchdowns in the second quarter, then adding one in the fourth for a 19-7 triumph before 4,197 that ended the Atlantic 10 cochampion's season at 10-3.
Quarterback Chris Brown completed 17 of 37 passes for 209 yards and two touchdowns -- both to wide receiver J.B. Gerald -- as Colgate (13-0) became the first Patriot League team to win 13 games in a season and extended the longest winning streak in 1-A/1-AA to 19 games.
It also marked the third straight season that a Patriot League champion knocked out an Atlantic 10 champion in the first round. Last season, Fordham bounced Northeastern, and in 2001, Lehigh ousted Hofstra.
UMass's offense was held without a touchdown for the first time since a 31-6 loss to Hofstra Sept. 29, 2001. It was also the first time in coach Mark Whipple's six seasons that UMass held an opponent to fewer than 20 points and lost. And it marked only the third time UMass has scored fewer than 10 points against a 1-AA opponent under Whipple.
Credit Colgate, a team that came in 10th in the nation in rushing offense and averaging just 13.8 completions per game, for its effectiveness passing in adverse conditions.
Adverse? It's like that from October to April in Hamilton. What kind of momo's would even think to stay in Syracuse and drive down?
HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT:
Bush presses funding for faith groups (Mary Leonard, 11/30/2003. Boston Globe)
Through executive orders, an aggressive wooing of religious groups, and his unflagging commitment to use the bully pulpit, President Bush has bypassed a reluctant Congress and is fulfilling his inaugural promise to bridge the historic separation of church and state and make his administration the most faith-friendly in memory.The effort, carried out by Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and branches in seven federal agencies, is starting to bear fruit as it encourages religious groups to compete for public funds and directs millions of dollars in social-service grants to ministries and houses of worship, which can retain their religious identity and sidestep federal civil rights laws that bar discrimination in hiring. [...]
As he campaigns for reelection, Bush hopes to energize his important base of evangelical Christian voters by citing the faith-based initiative as a domestic-policy accomplishment and to convince African-Americans, who gave him only 8 percent of their vote in 2000, that his administration's outreach to inner-city churches proves he is a compassionate conservative, said a White House official who asked not to be named.Ron Sider, president of Evangelicals for Social Action, said the faith-based initiative holds out the promise that billions of dollars in federal contracts will reach religious charities that in the past were barred or discouraged from seeking public funds.
"What has happened is substantial and right, and maybe even historic, in terms of how the initiative has leveled the playing field for faith-based groups," Sider said. "Evangelicals are going to see this as an example of Bush articulating a vision and moving policy in their direction."
In how many stories assessing Mr. Bush's first term have you seen this clear success listed as a failure? It's no surprise that a commentariat that can barely figure out how the legislative process works is completely bamboozled when it comes to the functioning of the Executive, but it does do a disservice to readers.
CREEPAGE:
That Man in the White House: Reading the Bush bashers. (Andrew Ferguson, 12/08/2003, Weekly Standard)
Gasket Disease was closely linked to Bill Clinton. The man I call Billy Bob Gasket had been involved in Arkansas politics for thirty years or more. He was used to its homegrown scandals and the mostly harmless diversions enjoyed by members of its ruling class. In this spirit, back in the early 1970s, he became an energetic booster of the young Rhodes Scholar who'd come home from Oxford and Yale with the impressive hair and the glimmering eye and the semi-permanent catch in his voice.Then, along about Clinton's first term as governor, Gasket noticed something. Bill Clinton was different. He was not just another in the long line of amiable cads and genial roués who had grasped power in Arkansas since Reconstruction. The new governor was, Gasket came to believe, the least principled, sleaziest politician he had ever seen at work. That the lack of principle and sleaziness were lacquered over with twinkly charm and vaguely progressive politics made the situation, for Gasket, all the more maddening.
And maddening is the word. As Clinton was returned again and again to office, Gasket was at first disbelieving, then agog, and finally crazed. Why couldn't his fellow Arkansans see the truth? Why couldn't they penetrate the governor's sheath of bogus empathy and concern to see the creature of seething ambition and power hunger and raw cynicism that writhed so self-evidently beneath? Gasket became a hair-puller, a lapel-grabber, a mid-sentence interrupter, a nut. When, in the late 1980s, national reporters began trickling into the state to look over the promising young governor with national ambitions, their search for knowledgeable Clinton watchers led them inevitably to Gasket, and they found a madman. [...]
To explain today's politics it is tempting to cite the old and excellent joke about feuds among college professors: The fights are so furious because the stakes are so low. The slow and stable advance of the federal government is unlikely to be undone by a president of either party, and the frenetic activities of political enthusiasts will redirect it in only the most marginal ways. Yet the joke doesn't really explain Gasket Disease. Bush-haters hate Bush for the least articulable reasons, the visceral kind that never quite rises to the level of rationality. They're often at a loss even to explain who it is they hate--the Yalie plutocrat or the hill-country Bible-thumper? The failed businessman or the cunning Babbitt? The calculating liar or the master of malaprops, the wimp or the caveman, the evil genius or the boob?
THE BUSH-HATERS know they must scramble for more high-minded reasons to explain themselves, and this year's stack of new books is the unpersuasive product of their efforts. Taken together the books make plain, if only inadvertently, that the cause of our most recent outbreak of Gasket Disease is something much deeper than policy, much deeper even than politics, plunging down and down into the mysteries of cultural identity in fractured America. At the end of "Bushwhacked," Molly Ivins speaks for all Bush-haters when, with typical artlessness, she sums up our present state of affairs: "There is something creepy about what is happening here." But they can't quite put their finger on what it is.
Here's the kind of line that sets Andrew Ferguson head and shoulders above his peers: "AMONG THE MANY TIES that bind them, the authors are unanimous in claiming inspiration from Paul Krugman, a columnist for the New York Times, who, to borrow a term from epidemiology, seems to be Patient Zero in this most recent outbreak of Billy Bob Gasket Disease."
EVEN THE STUPID PARTY CAN COUNT TO TEN (via Linda Fish-Brown):
These five regimes must go: Mark Steyn lists the countries that must be dealt with if we are to win the war against terrorism (Mark Steyn, 11/29/03, The Spectator)
Profound changes in the above countries would not necessarily mean the end of the war on terror, but it would be pretty close. It would remove terrorism’s most brazen patron (Syria), its ideological inspiration (the prototype Islamic Republic of Iran), its principal paymaster (Saudi Arabia), a critical source of manpower (Sudan) and its most potentially dangerous weapons supplier (North Korea). They’re the fronts on which the battle has to be fought: it’s not just terror groups, it’s the state actors who provide them with infrastructure and extend their global reach. Right now, America — and Britain, Australia and Italy — are fighting defensively, reacting to this or that well-timed atrocity as it occurs. But the best way to judge whether we’re winning and how serious we are about winning is how fast the above regimes are gone. Blair speed won’t do.
What about Cuba, Libya, Vietnam, China, and Venezuela?
MOMENTUM?:
Bush and the liberal tradition (PETER BERKOWITZ, Nov. 13, 2003, Jerusalem Post)
What kind of conservatism is embodied in the new doctrine proclaimed by President George W. Bush in his November 6 speech in Washington to honor the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy?It insists that "freedom has a momentum," and it will "not be halted." It proclaims that we are in the midst of a "great democratic movement": since the early 1970s the number of democracies in the world has tripled, growing from about 40 to around 120.
It attributes this bracing progress to the "military and moral commitments" made to the countries of Europe and Asia over the last half century by the United States, itself a democracy and the world's most influential nation, as well as to the increasingly well-established proposition that "over time, free nations grow stronger, and dictatorships grow weaker." It recognizes that millions still live under oppression around the globe - in Cuba, in Burma, in North Korea, in Zimbabwe, in China - while taking special notice of the Arab Middle East, both because democracy there seems scarcely to have taken root and because of the region's "great strategic importance." It declares that the main obstacle to the happiness, peace, and prosperity of the region, as to all regions, is authoritarian government.
And it identifies the principles that should guide democratic reform: limited, representative government; the rule of law; multiple political parties and a free press; the protection of individual liberty; market-based economies that reward initiative; and government investment in the health and education of citizens. [...]
[W]hat the president has given voice to are convictions central to the liberal tradition. Freedom is not just good for Americans or for the British. It is good for all people everywhere, because it reflects a universal aspiration, a permanent inclination of the human heart. While forms of government for securing individual rights will vary, as will the choices individuals and peoples make about how to take advantage of the blessings of freedom, no individual wishes to be imprisoned, tortured, or enslaved. Individuals should not be forced to be free, but free nations may be compelled to use force to counter the threat posed by governments that subjugate their own people and threaten the liberties of other nations.
These convictions are nurtured by the tradition of John Locke, who maintained that all men and all women are by nature free and equal. And the tradition of the authors of The Federalist, who believed that the experiment under way in America was relevant to all mankind, because all mankind had interest in discovering whether government based on the consent of the governed and devoted to protecting the rights of individuals was possible. And the tradition of John Stuart Mill, who identified the "permanent interests of man as a progressive being" with the spread of liberty in a manner consistent with the principles of liberty.
The hard part, which may not be exportable, is that the principles have to precede the spread across the society or be accepted at pretty much the moment of spread. Since the first principle is a near universal moral order--to act as a self-imposed restraint on excessive personal freedom, so that one can predict and have trust in the likely behavior of one's fellow citizens--rather few societies start out ready for liberty, so order must be imposed first.
EVANGELISM OR SOCIALISM?:
Faith emerging as new fault line in U.S. politics (STEVEN THOMMA, 11/29/03, Knight Ridder Newspapers
Want to know how Americans will vote next Election Day? Watch what they do the weekend before.If they attend religious services regularly, they probably will vote Republican by a 2-1 margin. If they never go, they likely will vote Democratic by a 2-1 margin.
This relatively new fault line in American life is a major reason that the country is politically polarized. And the division over religion and politics is likely to continue or even grow in 2004.
A new poll by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center For The People & The Press this fall confirmed that the gap remains; voters who frequently attend religious services tilt 63-37 percent to Bush and those who never attend lean 62-38 percent toward Democrats.
"We now have the widest gap we have ever had between Republicans and Democrats," said Andy Kohut, the director of the Pew survey.
"It's THE most powerful predictor of party ID and partisan voting intention," said Thomas Mann, a political scholar at the Brookings Institution, a center-left Washington research center. "And in a society that values religion as much as (this one), when there are high levels of religious belief and commitment and practice, that's significant."
This is the ultimate choice we face: religion or statism.
START SPREADIN' THE NEWS:
A Spiritual Struggle for Democrats: Silence on Religion Could Hurt Candidates (Jim VandeHei, , November 27, 2003, Washington Post)
The nine Democratic presidential candidates all consider themselves religious, though most keep their faith and spiritual views to themselves when campaigning.Their silence stands in contrast to President Bush, among the most overtly religious presidents in generations, and could undermine the Democratic nominee, as polls consistently show that voters want to hear more about faith from their national leaders.
Democrats "have been very hesitant to talk about faith . . . and in doing so we have lost a connection with a lot of people," said Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), an Orthodox Jew and one of only two candidates who frequently talk about God. Long-shot candidate Al Sharpton, an ordained minister, is the other. "Democrats ought to pay attention to the fact that the two Democrats who have been elected president since [Lyndon] Johnson were Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton . . . and both talked a lot about their faith," Lieberman said.
In interviews, most of the candidates said they are uncomfortable discussing their faith as publicly as Bush does or Clinton did. Yet most agreed the party must do a better job of connecting with religious voters, or risk not winning the White House in 2004. [...]
An overwhelming majority of Americans consider themselves religious. A recent poll conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that nearly 70 percent of Democrats and 80 percent of Republicans expressed strong religious beliefs when asked questions designed to measure these attitudes.
A Pew study in June found that nearly twice as many respondents said "There has been too little reference to religious faith and prayer by politicians" (41 percent) than said "There has been too much" (21 percent). While Bush is sometimes criticized for his references to New Testament theology, only 14 percent said he mentions faith too often; nearly two-thirds said he is striking the right balance.
If you're evangelical you don't really have the option of not talking about it.
November 29, 2003
TESTY:
You calling me anti-American?: Matthew d’Ancona has prepared a quiz for those who are wondering whether they are Americo-sceptics, or just a bit wet (The Spectator, 11/29/03)
Let’s face it: these are tough times for us Atlanticists. People fall quiet at dinner when we say that we admire America. They shuffle their feet, splutter into their soufflés and tap their watches when we suggest that President Bush isn’t a moron. They shake their heads and catch each others’ eyes as if to say: he just doesn’t get it.And the sad thing is that they have fashion on their side. You see, Euroscepticism is so 1990s. The new and most virulent cultural contagion to grip the nation is Americo-scepticism. Taking a pot shot at Uncle Sam — kicking a Black Hawk when it’s down, as it were — has become as, Quentin Tarantino would say, too cool for school. It’s everywhere. Everybody’s doing it: Damon Albarn, Noam Chomsky, Max Hastings, Matthew Parris ...you know, anybody who’s anybody. No middle-class gathering is complete without a papier-mâché effigy of the President to pull down.
But are you an Americo-sceptic? To help you evaluate your position, The Spectator has devised the following psychometric test:
Here's the funniest, because most true:
7. The ‘spell-check facility’ on your computer will not accept that the noun ‘practice’ is spelt in Britain with a ‘c’, not an ‘s’. The red curly line that says ‘you are thick’ refuses to budge. Do you
(a) Write an angry letter to Bill Gates
(b) Ignore the provocation
(c) Accept that this is a small price to pay for the spread of freedom around the globe
ST. PATRICK:
2004 Is Now for Bush's Campaign: Early Advantage in Funds, Voters Sought (Dan Balz and Mike Allen, November 30, 2003, Washington Post)
President Bush's reelection team, anticipating another close election, has begun to assemble one of the largest grass-roots organizations of any modern presidential campaign, using enormous financial resources and lack of primary opposition to seize an early advantage over the Democrats in the battle to mobilize voters in 2004.Bush's campaign Web site already has signed up 6 million supporters, 10 times the number that Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean has, and the Bush operation is in the middle of an unprecedented drive to register 3 million new Republican voters. The campaign has set county vote targets in some states and has begun training thousands of volunteers who will recruit an army of door-to-door canvassers for the final days of the election next November.
The entire project, which includes complementary efforts by the Republican National Committee (RNC) and state Republican parties, is designed to tip the balance in a dozen-and-a-half states that both sides believe will determine the winner in 2004.
"I've never seen grass roots like this," said a veteran GOP operative in one of the battleground states.
Our old friend Patrick Ruffini has played a key role in the web operations of the campaign. Note that the Bush operation has four times the registered participants of the much ballyhooed Moveon.org.
ID POETRY:
Darwinian poetry tests whether art is a product of evolution or inspired genius (Michael Dinan, November 29, 2003, Stamford Advocate)
"Darwinian Poetry," the brainchild of David Rea, is an experiment in the interbreeding of selected words and phrases to form poems.Here's how it works:
Take 1,000 randomly generated groups of words, or "poems," and subject them to a form of natural selection, in which "bad" ones are killed off and "good" ones are bred with each other. Repeat until you have a good poem or two.
What distinguishes good poems from bad? Votes.
Since August, more than 115,000 votes have been cast at Rea's Web site, http://www.codeasart.com/poetry/darwin.html.
The popularity of his experiment surprised Rea, 36, who hopes it will convey the true meaning of evolution.
"One of my unstated goals is to share with people the power of evolution, so that people get a tactile feel for it," said Rea, a technical adviser at a Greenwich investment firm. "It's so abstract. I want to allow people to understand evolution, to feel its power and its beauty."
The beauty of the experiment is that this is how laymen understand Darwinism, even though what Mr. Rea is implementing is a form of intelligent design.
"BIG"OTRY? (via The Wife):
As Obesity Rises, Health Care Indignities Multiply (RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA and GRANT GLICKSON, 11/29/03, NY Times)
When Mark Rosenthal suffered a stroke, he was too heavy and wide for a stretcher, so he made the jarring, bouncing dash to the hospital lying on an ambulance floor. The ride injured his back, and he felt as if his own weight would suffocate him. At the hospital, doctors wanted to give him an M.R.I. scan, but he could not fit into the machine.But in that ordeal last June, Mr. Rosenthal's gravest humiliation came from something as simple as having to go to the bathroom. He was in no shape to walk to the cramped bathroom — he might not have been able to fit, anyway — and the hospital's portable commodes and bedpans could not hold his 450 pounds. So, he recalled, hospital workers told him to go in his bed, on himself, saying they would clean it up afterward.
"I just cried," said Mr. Rosenthal, 51, the treasurer of District Council 37, the New York City employees' union. "I refused to eat anything for six or seven days, hoping I wouldn't have to go again."
Obesity is the fastest-growing major health problem in the United States. In 2000, 31 percent of American adults were obese, up from 23 percent in 1990 and 13 percent in 1960, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
And those, like Mr. Rosenthal, who are classified as "morbidly obese" tripled in number in just a decade, to 2.2 percent of the population in 2000.
The perils of morbid obesity are not limited to life-threatening ailments like Type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure; merely getting the health care other people take for granted is beyond their reach.
Severely overweight people cannot fit into standard wheelchairs, waiting-room armchairs, blood pressure cuffs, hospital beds and gowns, or M.R.I. and CAT scan machines.
X-rays often cannot penetrate far enough into their bodies to produce useful images, and wall-mounted toilets snap off under their weight.
For the morbidly obese, trips to doctors or hospitals are more reminders that they literally do not fit, like paying for two seats on a plane, hunting for clothes, or enduring people's curiosity and derision. The indignities mean that obese people, who need medical treatment more than most, often refuse to seek it.
Lose some freakin' weight, huh?
THE AMERICAN'S BURDEN:
Is There an American Empire? (Michael Walzer, Fall 2003, Dissent)
When Rudyard Kipling called empire "the White Man's burden," he was stating, in the ideological idiom of his time, a simple fact: power brings responsibility with it. But the burdens of hegemony can't be borne alone; they have to be shared. A rationally governed hegemonic power doesn't act unilaterally to repel aggression or stop massacres or take on the (very difficult) work of nation building; it marshals coalitions. These will be coalitions of the willing, obviously, but the willingness has to be won by consultation, persuasion, and compromise. In recent years, our government has sought to avoid any serious version of these three necessary processes, as if its leaders want to manage the world all by themselves. That ambition is probably a better explanation of the Iraq War than any provided by the theory of imperialism. But America's leaders can't manage the world. In the aftermath of what has turned out to be a very incomplete victory in the war against Saddam, they obviously need help managing a single country. As I write, they are looking for help, but still without committing themselves to consultation, persuasion, and compromise. It is hard to gauge the learning curve of the Bush administration. But it will learn sooner or later that hegemony, unlike empire, rests on consent.What kind of left politics follows from this understanding of American power? We need a long response to this question, and right now I have only a short one. In Britain, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, leftists were "little Englanders," that is, they advocated independence for the colonies. The United States is already committed to independence-even Bush & Co. are against "microadministration"!-and also, rhetorically, at least, to democracy. One thing the left can do is to insist that this commitment be honored not only in words but also in performance, even when the performance compromises hegemonic power. Is the United States prepared, for example, to help create a government in Iraq capable of saying no to its American patron, the way the Turks did? (I don't mean that we have to work for a Shiite theocracy.) How many "interests and tendencies" contrary to its own is our government ready to acknowledge and accommodate for the sake of global stability? What sort of "equilibrium," with what other groups, is it willing to accept? V. I. Lenin once wrote that "the task of the intelligentsia is to make special leaders from among the intelligentsia unnecessary." He didn't mean it, but the idea is useful. The task of a democratic hegemon is to make its own role less central, the exercise of power more and more consensual.
This will never be the chosen task of the people currently in power in Washington. Even the minimal goal of a better equilibrium, a more compromised hegemony, a more effective defense of democratic government, can only be achieved through oppositionist politics. Opposition will have to come first from inside the United States: American liberals and leftists should be advocates of self-limitation, which would be the real meaning of signing on to (and then upholding) instruments such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, or the Kyoto accords, or the International Criminal Court-and also of accepting greater mutuality in world trade and opening our doors to third world imports. All these involve qualifications of hegemony, the acceptance of universal rules, equally applied, and hence they constitute "sacrifices of a corporate nature." As Gramsci suggests, however, these sacrifices don't eliminate hegemonic power; they modify it in ways useful to humanity, but at the same time they represent a form of intelligent maintenance. The Democratic Party should certainly be capable of that much (though its leaders seem, right now, barely capable of anything). But those of us who want more than this, who are worried about and opposed to the rule of a single hegemon, need external allies-first in the society of states and then in international civil society.
It's almost necessary to feel sorry for Mr. Walzer, a decent seeming man left floundering by the reluctant realization that it is the Right enacting his ideals globally, not the Left.
MORE: (via Mike Daley):
The Selective Solidarity of the Left (Danny Postel, 11.24.03, In These Times)
Why are American progressives by and large silent about the situation in Iran today?How many American progressives knew who Shirin Ebadi was before she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last month? Almost no one. By the same token, how many of us knew who Rigoberta Menchú was before she won the prize in 1992? Many, if not most of us: We’d seen her speak, read her autobiography, or simply had come to know her story by osmosis in activist circles.
Consider the number of Guatemalan solidarity groups that have come onto the scene over the years. How many American progressives, at some point between the early ’80s and the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996, were involved, at one level or another, in solidarity work around Guatemala? Tons of us. Why the difference?
What is going on in Iran doesn’t lend itself to the kind of analytical prism through which progressives made sense of Central America during the high tide of our solidarity activism, the Reagan years. In Central America, military juntas and death squads, in concert with feudal elites and corporate oligarchs, were running the show with the active support of the United States. In a nutshell, a bloodbath of imperial domination, rapacious exploitation, scorched earth terror, and mass murder—in which the United States was complicit from top to bottom.
But what happens when people are struggling against tyranny and repression that is not being perpetrated by the United States or its proxies and when—to take the case of Iran today—the regime in question is a sworn enemy of the United States.
Let’s face it: It’s just plain uncomfortable for progressives to say anything that sounds like it could also come out of the mouth of George Bush or Paul Wolfowitz.
Jeremy Brecher argues in Foreign Policy in Focus, however, that “failure to defend human rights in such circumstances only plays into the hands of the Bush juggernaut.” Progressives must, he contends, be known as “people whose fundamental solidarity is not with one or another government but with all people who are struggling for liberation from oppression.”
The solidarity, of course, is against America, not in favor of the freedom of other peoples.
THAT'S ALL:
Hugh Kenner, Commentator on Literary Modernism, Dies at 80 (CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT, 11/25/03, NY Times)
Hugh Kenner, the critic, author and professor of literature regarded as America's foremost commentator on literary modernism, especially the work of Ezra Pound and James Joyce, died yesterday at his home in Athens, Ga. He was 80.He had been suffering from heart problems, his wife, Mary Anne Kenner, said.
The variety of Mr. Kenner's interests was contained in 25 books of his own (he contributed to 200 more) and nearly 1,000 articles, as well as broadcasts and recordings. He wrote commandingly on everything from Irish poetry to geodesic math and Li'l Abner's pappy (Lucifer Ornamental Yokum), to the Heath/Zenith Z-100 computer (one of which he built for himself and then wrote the user's guide) and the animated cartoons of Chuck Jones.
But it was for his pioneering guide to English-language literary modernism and for his books "Dublin's Joyce" (1956), "The Pound Era" (1971) and "Joyce's Voices" (1978) that Mr. Kenner was best known. In these works and others he employed the techniques proposed by the writers themselves to define new standards by which to judge their work.
In "The Pound Era," perhaps his masterwork, he tried to show how the American expatriate poet absorbed the altered sense of time created by Einstein's revolution and helped to pass it on to artists like Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Eliot, William Carlos Williams and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.
While some faulted Mr. Kenner for attributing to Pound too much prominence in the scheme of modern art, no one failed to be impressed by the vigor and importance of Mr. Kenner's analysis.
Interesting that just recognizing the greatness and influence of Pound and Eliot made him a "conservative" within academia.
MORE:
-ESSAY: Vladimir Nabokov, Tyrants destroyed (Hugh Kenner)
-That's Not All, Folks!: "Of course you know this means war." Who said it? (TERRY TEACHOUT, November 25, 2003, Wall Street Journal)
-A Critic Whose Scholarship Gleamed With His Writing (BENJAMIN IVRY, November 29, 2003, NY Times)
-Hugh Kenner, Modernist Literary Scholar, Dies (Adam Bernstein, November 26, 2003, Washington Post)
-Hugh Kenner: Literary critic with a passion for Ezra Pound (Jon Elek, November 28, 2003, The Guardian )
-INTERVIEW: HUGH KENNER: THE GRAND TOUR (Interview by Harvey Blume, March 2001, BookWire)
-ARCHIVES: Hugh Kenner (NY Review of Books)
-A Special Double Issue : Essays in Honor of Mary Ellen Solt and Hugh Kenner (William Carlos Williams Review)
OKAY, MAKE IT 49-1:
Democratic arrogance keeps Bush off ballot (THOMAS ROESER, November 29, 2003, Chicago Sun-Times)
How can Bush lose Illinois a year before election? Because the Republicans will hold their national convention in early September and the Illinois Election Code requires certification of ballots in August, a minor change needs to be made in state law. Madigan, who is also the state chairman, and Jones are holding up certification -- for a price.Madigan and Jones say Bush will be put on the ballot if the GOP caves on two points. One would be to agree that the Illinois Board of Elections could, at any time, dismiss without prejudice any matters currently pending before the board -- especially applying to violations that were levied after the original state gift ban act. That means that Democrats fined for dozens of campaign disclosure violations would not have to pay fines -- fines running as high as $797,600 for Secretary of State Jesse White and 14 Senate members, all Democrats. A second condition, requested by the Cook County clerk, Democrat David Orr, would be to remove the requirement that voters who register to vote by mail must vote in person the first time they vote.
Republicans in the House reluctantly went along, but Senate Republicans, under Frank Watson, said no. Watson's refusal to buckle under led Republicans to stand opposed, and so the bill lost. As of now, George W. Bush will not be on the Illinois ballot. Was Watson wrong not to cave? Nope: Let the heat go to those who seek to deprive Illinoisans of their right to vote for president. Normally, lawmakers with a conflict of interest abstain from voting on legislation affecting them. On this issue, Democratic senators facing fines did not abstain from voting.
This could well be an issue worth losing on--the President doesn't need the state but the state GOP would be extremely motivated for the open Senate seat race and nationally the story would be horrible for Democrats.
PREACHING TO THE VIRTUIAL CHOIR:
New giant on Dems' stage (Martin Sieff, 11/29/2003, UPI)
Suddenly MoveOn.org is everywhere. And as Gore's choice of its venue to delivering his blistering Nov. 9 attack on Bush shows -- in a development that may come to signal his eventual availability as a "stop Howard Dean" candidate for the Democratic right -- the upstart Web-based Internet organization has suddenly become the market place for aspiring Democratic national leaders to hawk their wares and reach out to the party grass roots.It is quite a leap for a group that was founded half a decade ago. But MoveOn.org, started in 1998 by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, has come a long way fast by flouting conventional wisdom and making visionary leaps that so far have paid off amazingly often.
The group seeks to revive liberal fortunes by marrying middle-class, baby-boom yuppie frustration, and even horror, at the repeated political triumphs of President George W. Bush and the conservative Republicans with the wonders of Internet technology and it has swept the high-tech, suburban middle-class Web-surfers like a tidal wave.
Once you've got the liberal "high-tech, suburban middle-class Web-surfers" on your side, it only takes another 45% of America to get to 50.
THIRD DEGREE BURNS:
AUDIO INTERVIEW: 'New York Times' Iraq Correspondent John Burns (Fresh Air: NPR, November 25, 2003)
We catch up with him about the latest news from Iraq. He's in the United States for just one day, and then he goes back to Baghdad. Burns has won several Pulitzer Prizes for his overseas war reports.
You'll recall that Mr. Burns said the following about the despicable behavior of his peers in pre-war Iraq:
Terror, totalitarian states, and their ways are nothing new to me, but I felt from the start that this was in a category by itself, with the possible exception in the present world of North Korea. I felt that that was the central truth that has to be told about this place. It was also the essential truth that was untold by the vast majority of correspondents here. Why? Because they judged that the only way they could keep themselves in play here was to pretend that it was okay.
WHAT THE TIMESMEN REMEMBER:
'In an Uncertain World': The Man Behind the Surplus (Remember?) (DAVID WARSH, 11/30/03, NY Times)
One is prepared, on reading this headline from the Book Review, for yet another biography of Ronald Reagan--it was after all the ending of the Cold War and the cutting of military spending in half that created the surplus. Then again, it's the Times...
THEY GAVE US ENIGMA, WE GAVE THEM KATYN:
Those pesky Poles: In which old members offer new ones some lessons in negotiation (Charlemagne, Nov 27th 2003, The Economist)
[A]ll the huffing by current members of the EU about the need to think of the “European interest” would be more convincing if they were to apply the same principle to themselves. Where is the European interest in the Franco-German decision to trash the stability pact, simply because the French and Germans cannot control their budget deficits? Where is the European interest in France's dogged defence of the wasteful and protectionist common agricultural policy, which just happens to shovel huge wads of cash to French farmers? Where is the European interest in Britain's insistence on keeping its budget rebate, no matter what? Or in Spain's relentless determination to cling on to a disproportionate share of EU regional aid?The Poles, however, are newcomers, and relatively poor at that. As a result, they seem to be expected to mind their manners and just be grateful for all the EU money that will soon head their way. Even when current members try to sound sympathetic, their attitude is deeply condescending. Viscount Etienne Davignon, a Belgian former vice-president of the European Commission, and the epitome of the EU's great and good, says: “We have to remember that the Poles have only recently regained their national sovereignty and are new to the European Union. It takes many years of membership before people really understand how Europe works.” The notion that the Poles and the other seven central European countries that are joining next year (along with Malta and Cyprus) might just possibly have ideas that are as valid as those of the six “founder members” is apparently too fanciful to contemplate.
The fact is that the entry of Poland into the EU is profoundly unsettling to traditionalists. European integration began with Franco-German reconciliation after the second world war. The EU's main institutions are still strung out along the Franco-German borderlands, in Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg. For French and German politicians, it is axiomatic that their relationship should remain the fulcrum around which the EU revolves. But enlargement will shift the centre of gravity. The decision of the Poles (and most other central Europeans) to take a pro-American line over Iraq went down particularly badly in France, prompting Jacques Chirac's now infamous remark that the newcomers had “missed a good opportunity to shut up”. Now that the constitutional negotiations are reaching a crunch, the Poles are again being invited to “shut up”. So far, they have declined the invitation. How very shocking.
Given the historic ties between Poland and America, and the debt we owe them, why not offer them trade and mititarly alliance with us instead?
IN THE GAME:
His season in the sun: Dow Mossman wrote 'The Stones of Summer' 31 years ago, but his book tour has just begun (David Mehegan, Globe Staff, 11/29/2003, Boston Globe)
He grew up in Cedar Rapids, went first to Coe College, then finished his bachelor's degree at the University of Iowa. While still in his teens, he wanted to be a novelist. By the time he went to the prestigious Writers' Workshop, he says, "I was totally driven. . . . My idea of writing a novel is, you get the biggest pile of clay you can and start carving. It's like sculpture." Some readers have found the result to be a challenging read. The book is long -- 586 pages -- poetical, and relatively plotless.Like many writers "totally driven" to write a first novel, he couldn't write another. He was married and living in New York, and in 1978 he and his wife (they were divorced eight years ago) moved back to Cedar Rapids to start a family. Mossman got a job as a shop welder. He kept that job for 20 years, shaping, forging, and fabricating heavy equipment. "I loved welding," he says, until the work became more of a mindless assembly line. Before that happened, he was truly building things: "stainless-steel scale systems, bucket elevators, all kinds of conveyers."
He dabbled at writing but published nothing, and turned increasingly to reading. After 1975 he began to read more nonfiction, especially social history, though he was steeped in such classic authors as Shakespeare, Balzac, and Conrad.
"He was extremely literary," says mystery novelist Ed Gorman of Cedar Rapids, one of Mossman's close friends for 40 years. "If somebody said to him, `Do you watch this TV show?' No. `Ever read any popular novels?' No. He only wanted to read first-rate art. Over the years, I introduced him to such writers as Charles Bukowski, John Fante, and Graham Greene. In turn, he introduced me to writers such as Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Giacomo Casanova, and Emile Zola. He's the brightest guy I've ever known and certainly the most talented." [...]
"I don't want anyone to feel sorry for me," Mossman says. "It's a happy tale. I was frustrated for a lot of years, but I was reading. Writer's block doesn't mean you're trading your brain in. I was in the game, in my own way."
The story here about how Barnes and Noble revived the book itself is quite neat.
"I MAY NOT GET THERE WITH YOU":
The Promised Land (DAVID BROOKS, 11/29/03, NY Times)
The history of American conservatism is an exodus tale. It begins in the wilderness, in the early 1950's, with Russell Kirk, Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley Jr. writing tracts for small bands of true believers.Conservatives crashed into the walls of power during the Goldwater debacle of 1964, and then breached those walls with Reagan's triumph 16 years later. But even with Reagan in the Oval Office, Republicans were not the majority party. Democrats controlled the House, and few Reaganites actually knew how to run a government.
In 1994, with the Gingrich revolution, the conservatives strode closer to the center of power. But even then, they were not quite there. For the rule of exodus tales is that the chiefs who lead in the wilderness and storm the citadels do not get to govern once their troops have occupied the city. Renegades are too combative to govern well.
It was only this week that we can truly say the exodus story is over, with the success of the Medicare reform bill. This week the G.O.P. behaved as a majority party in full. The Republicans used the powers of government to entrench their own dominance. They used their control of the federal budget to create a new entitlement, to woo new allies and service a key constituency group, the elderly.
From now on, as Tony Blankley observed in The Washington Times, if you work at an interest group and you want to know what's going on with your legislation, you have to go to the Republicans. The Democrats don't even know the state of play.
One does wish that Ronald Reagan were in possession of his senses so that he could see his people arrive in the Promised Land.
SCRAPPY SCRAPPLEMEN:
Hamming It Down in Japan (SETH STEVENSON, 11/30/03, NY Times Magazine)
The Nippon-Ham Fighters are the ''Fighters,'' not the ''Ham Fighters.'' That is, Nippon-Ham is the owner of the team, which plays in the Nippon Professional Baseball league in Japan. It's simply a bit of misfortune that the organization's full name suggests lunch-meat gladiators.As it happens, the Fighters are no strangers to misfortune. They are perennial doormats in Japan's major league. They have been awful for decades on end, with exceedingly rare exceptions, and -- as if to highlight their ineptitude -- they play in the same city and stadium as the legendary Yomiuri Giants. While the Giants draw 50,000 passionate fans to the Tokyo Dome for each game, the Fighters are lucky to get 10,000. One Japanese sports executive says the team's image is so dismal that the team ''could actually devalue the ham brand.''
Is it any wonder Fighters management ached for a change? So this off-season the team is moving far, far away from Tokyo and the Giants in order to establish a brand-new identity on the northern island of Hokkaido. There the Fighters will play in the Sapporo Dome -- a gorgeous modern stadium named for Hokkaido's largest city -- and they won't even have to share it with another baseball team.
New city, new stadium, with luck some new fans -- perfect time for a total image overhaul. And that includes the most important element of all, the key to any brand and, above all, to any sports franchise: the logo.
To not feature a seething pig in their logo is to waste one of the truly great sports names.
WHERE THE PRICES ARE LOW...LOW...LOW...:
Apartment Glut Forces Owners to Cut Rents in Much of U.S. (DAVID LEONHARDT, 11/29/03, NY Times)
Renting an apartment in much of the country these days can feel a little like waking up on your birthday.Waiting for the tenants in some building lobbies around Memphis every morning are free cups of Starbucks coffee. In the Atlanta suburbs, people who move into one garden-style apartment building receive $500 gift certificates to Best Buy, the electronics chain. In Cleveland, Denver and many other cities, landlords have been giving new tenants gifts worth $1,000 or more: one, two or even three months of rent-free living.
While rents have continued to rise in many big cities on the coasts, including New York and Los Angeles, they are falling in more than 80 percent of metropolitan areas across the country. Low interest rates in recent years have persuaded many families to move out of rented apartments and buy their first homes at the same time that developers have been putting up thousands of new rental buildings, leaving many landlords desperate to fill apartments.
The portion of apartments sitting vacant this summer rose to 9.9 percent, the highest level since the Census Bureau began keeping statistics in 1956.
"I've been doing this for 30 years, and this is the worst rental climate I've ever seen," said Leonard Richman, president of the Sunshine Corporation, which manages almost 4,000 apartments in Memphis. "Rents have gone down to where they were about three or four years ago."
Remind us again where inflationary pressures are going to come from?
60-40 FILES:
CHALLENGING DASCHLE? (Robert Novak, November 29, 2003, Townhall)
National Republican strategists have grown more optimistic that former Rep. John Thune will run against Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle in South Dakota next year.Thune was thought inclined not to run for the Senate again after being narrowly defeated last year by Sen. Tim Johnson. However, he has been convinced that the South Dakota Republican turnout will be much better in 2004, with George W. Bush heading the ticket, than in 2002.
SELF-REFERENCE ALERT:
Hell's 25-Year Echo: The Jonestown Mass Suicide: A reporter who was in the vortex of the cult catastrophe finds survivors still coping. (Tim Reiterman, November 19, 2003, LA Times)
On a grassy slope in Oakland, more than 400 take their final rest, mostly children who were unclaimed or unidentified.And across San Francisco Bay, a U.S. congressman is buried in a national cemetery not far from a park that bears his name.
Their lives converged 25 years ago Tuesday in a South American jungle clearing that has come to symbolize the worst that organized religion, cults and madness can reap.
"The people of Jonestown were a precious people, family people," the Rev. Jynona Norwood, who lost 27 relatives in Jonestown, told mourners in Oakland. "It is an injustice when people say they were unintelligent.... They had a natural desire for a better life for themselves and their children."
Jungle reclaimed Jonestown years ago. But even now I can see them together in the open-air pavilion there — Rep. Leo Ryan (D-San Mateo) on stage, microphone in hand, addressing a rainbow of Peoples Temple members from the heartland, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Taking their cues from the Rev. Jim Jones, they applauded Ryan on the opening night of his mission to find whether the settlement was the brutal work camp described by escapees or the utopia extolled by supporters.
Within 24 hours, virtually all would be dead. Ryan was shot to death on a nearby airstrip, along with a church defector and three of my fellow newsmen. Then the temple members were killed at the pavilion in a ritual of mass suicide and murder. The final toll: 913.
"We need to remember to remember," Norwood said. "If you can say 1,000 people died and it can easily fall from your lips, you are remembering to forget."
I had the standardized Achievement tests the day the story hit the papers, including English with Essay. The essay question was:
"We have met the enemy and he is us" Discuss.
The Reverend Jones, tragically, gave me all the material needed to answer.
November 28, 2003
BETTER DEAD THAN CLEFT:
Curate's court action over abortion (Colin Blackstock, November 19, 2003, The Guardian)
A curate is taking legal action to force police to investigate a late abortion on a woman who did not want to have a baby with a cleft palate.Joanna Jepson is taking Paul West, chief constable of West Mercia police, to court because she says he sanctioned an illegal abortion by failing to investigate a pregnancy termination after the six month legal limit.
An unnamed woman chose to abort the foetus after finding out it would be born with a cleft lip and palate - although the pregnancy was past 24 weeks. After this time an abortion can only be carried out if there is a risk of serious handicap.
eugenics
\Eu*gen"ics\, n. The science of improving stock, whether human or animal. --F. Galton.
Improving?
ONE MORE REASON TO BE THANKFUL:
Schilling will waive no-trade clause (Jayson Stark, November 28, 2003, ESPN.com)
After three days of negotiations, the Red Sox and Curt Schilling have agreed to a deal on a two-year contract extension. Sources with knowledge of the negotiations say the deal will be announced later Friday night.
It's hard to overstate the magnitude of what last Summer & Fall did to an already Red Sox crazy region. At dinner yesterday, all anyone could talk about was Game 7--folks elsewhere may know where they were when Kennedy was shot; here we know where we were when Pedro came out for the 8th--and the possibility of getting Schilling and A-Rod.
EVEN ELEANOR:
Bush in Baghdad (Eleanor Clift, 11/28/03, Newsweek)
George W. Bush's daring secret trip into the heart of Baghdad was such a triumph of political choreography that it left Democratic strategists gasping for mercy. Senator John Kerry had just begun airing a television spot in Iowa mocking Bush's swaggering "Mission Accomplished" photo op of May 1. Bush's genuinely emotional thanking of the troops on Thanksgiving Day wipes away that earlier image, and makes it harder to belittle the president's commitment to Iraq.BUSH'S TRIP TO the front had all the trappings of a James Bond movie as Air Force One, its windows shuttered and the press corps outfitted in bullet-proof vests, landed at the Baghdad airport under cover of darkness. Americans getting ready for a day of feasting and football were let in on the news only after the president was safely back in the air en route to Texas. The element of surprise gave the trip an added boost, and coming as it did on the heels of Congress passing prescription drug coverage for seniors, the outlines of Bush's election strategy are coming into focus.
After weeks of bad news from Iraq, culminating in the humiliation of rocket launchers fired at U.S. targets from a donkey cart, Bush reasserted himself as commander-in-chief. For good or ill, this is his war, and he seems to have concluded that he can't run away from it. Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's "Hardball" and a former Capitol Hill staffer, advises politicians that, rather than duck controversy, they should "hang a lantern" on their problems. Bush has taken heat in recent weeks for not attending military funerals and for seeming to distance himself from Iraq as the security situation worsened. With this visit, Bush wrapped himself in the war, which may prove smart politically.
REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL PART 3:
GOP has many reasons to give thanks: Party stole Democrats' thunder (Marc Sandalow, November 28, 2003, San Francisco Chronicle)
The Democrats' straightforward attack on Republicans as more conservative than compassionate suddenly got a lot more complicated.Developments on a range of complex policy matters -- from Medicare to marriage -- have confused rather than clarified distinctions between the two parties, and by most accounts made the Democrats' uphill fight to unseat President Bush and reclaim a majority in Congress an even steeper challenge.
This past week, Republicans were joined by more than a handful of Democrats in passing a $400 billion drug plan for seniors that marked the largest expansion in the liberal Medicare program in its 38-year history. The week before, Democrats running for president had a hard time distinguishing themselves from Republicans when reacting to a Massachusetts court's ruling on gay marriage. As Congress finally adjourned for Thanksgiving, Democrats stood up to Republicans on a pork-laden energy bill, but only after the GOP spent the final hours branding them as obstructionists.
And the week was capped when Bush made a top-secret Thanksgiving Day visit to the troops in Iraq, giving him another chance to appear as commander in chief.
While partisans are able to construct scenarios where each of the events might eventually help Democrats, most neutral observers -- and even many party strategists -- acknowledge that the new terrain favors Republicans.
How can such a straightforward man as George W. Bush manage to confuse his opponents so much?
SUICIDE BOMBING:
AFL-CIO Facing Major Financial Woes (LEIGH STROPE, 11/28/03, AP)
The AFL-CIO is enduring a budget shortfall so severe that its own workers are taking two days of unpaid leave to avoid layoffs, even as the labor federation attempts to mobilize its largest-ever political campaign. [...]Other belt-tightening measures are being taken in response to a dismal economy that slammed many unions with layoffs, and to launch a "do-or-die" election effort next year to defeat a cash-flush President Bush. [...]
"It's safe to say we will put as much as we possibly can of all of our resources into the political campaign," said AFL-CIO President John Sweeney.
Some union presidents have asked Sweeney to trim fat from the AFL-CIO's overall budget and to apply any savings to the federation's political program. [...]
About $5 million was diverted from the labor federation's organizing efforts to help fund what Sweeney said is "the biggest, earliest, most aggressive grass-roots political program in our history."
The federation has about $35 million budgeted for member mobilization and politics in the election cycle, Sweeney said. That's less than the $42 million spent in 2000.
Is President Bush really worth a futile kamikaze mission?
ONLY IN AMERICA (OR BAGHDAD) [via Best of the Web]:
Can You Keep a Secret? Hop On (Edwin Chen and Maura Reynolds, November 28, 2003, LA Times)
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the president was sneaking past his own Secret Service detail, wearing a baseball cap and riding in an unmarked van with darkened windows. He was without his customary motorcade and, during the 45-minute drive, experienced rush hour and red lights for the first time since he became president."The president encountered and witnessed traffic for the first time in three years on the way to the airport," Bartlett said. "That was a little amusing to those who were riding with him."
National security advisor Condoleezza Rice rode with him in the van, also with a baseball cap pulled low over her face.
"We looked like a normal couple," Bush recounted later. [...]
As the plane sped toward Andrews at 665 mph, an incredulous Bloomberg reporter, Richard Keil, leaned out of his seat and declared to the rest of the press cabin: "The president of the United States is AWOL, and we're with him. The ultimate road trip."
Reporters felt the plane land two hours and 40 minutes later but were not allowed to look outside until the plane rolled to a stop inside a top-secret hangar at Andrews. Under the hangar's bright lights, they descended from one presidential 747 and boarded another — both are designated Air Force One whenever the president is aboard.
The pool reporters got their first glimpse of the president during the switch. Bush, wearing jeans, a work shirt and a baseball cap, appeared in a good mood as he caught sight of the entourage. Over the noise of the aircraft engines, he raised his hand to his ear in a gesture mimicking the use of a cellphone, then waved his arms and drew his finger across his throat and mouthed the words, "No calls, got it?"
"The president's manner was that of a stern father reprimanding his children, but in good humor," Allen said.
The wisecrack about him and Condi Rice speaks volumes about the man.
THE ODD COUPLE:
Raised to be a King, Shah's Son Preaches Democracy: Pahlavi appeals to young Iranians who hate clerical rule and don't remember his father's regime (Borzou Daragahai, Nov 28, 2003, Star-Ledger)
With his plastic watch and blue suit, Reza Pahlavi blends easily into the strip malls and bedroom communities that sprawl beyond the Capital Beltway.But the son of Iran's deposed king has far greater aspirations than the white-collar professionals and stay-at-home moms who populate suburban Washington: He wishes to lead the Iran of his youth -- the nation that sent him into a quarter-century of exile -- from dictatorship to democracy. [...]
In a historic meeting, Pahlavi recently sat down for an afternoon tea with dissident Iranian cleric Hossein Khomeini, grandson of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the fiery cleric who led the overthrow of the monarchy in 1979.
The young Khomeini was in Washington to give a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. "We talked about issues such as civil disobedience, such as secularization, such as separation of religion from state, such as self-determination, such as a referendum," Pahlavi said.
"Basically we had a common vision on all these points." [...]
Just as Khomeini used cassette tapes recorded in exile to distribute his revolutionary messages inside Iran, Pahlavi has been using satellite television and radio broadcasts.
He has shored up his presence inside Iran, calling for the end of a theocratic rule and a referendum on the country's future government.
"When I see him on television, I feel comforted," said Mina, a woman in her 50s who says she avidly watches Iranian satellite television broadcasts from abroad, which are illegal but generally tolerated.
"The people sense that they can't make any change through any of the internal forces in Iran, so they look abroad," said an Iranian dissident intellectual, recently released from jail and afraid of being sent back, who asked to remain anonymous.
"They've also forgotten the bad things about the previous government, and Pahlavi's satellite broadcasts have a great impact on the young generation." [...]
Unlike his father, who in 1953 returned to his throne in a CIA-backed coup d'etat, the younger Pahlavi says he would return to lead Iran's monarchy only if Iranians opted for its restoration.
"As an Iranian I would shudder under the fact that my country would have to come under foreign attack of any sort," he said.
"It is in fact insulting for me to hear that people are not willing to believe that Iranians are capable of managing their own affairs and would require a foreign force doing it for them."
In Iran, however, at least a sizable number of the youth -- frustrated by social controls and the lack of economic opportunities -- have succumbed to the fantasy that Pahlavi will rescue the country from abroad.
"There's a perception that he's going to come and save us," said the dissident intellectual, who himself opposes restoration of the monarchy as a step backward for Iran.
"If the situation doesn't change, he has a good chance of coming back."
Now there's an alliance that would have to scare the Iranian clerics, the sons of the Shah and the Ayatollah, working together for democracy.
ASTONISHING?:
Why Bush is still the man to beat: Much of the world hates him, but many Americans think their President is the man for the age (Graham Barrett, November 29, 2003 , The Age)
Get used to the thought of another five years of George Bush as the most powerful person on earth. Astonishing as it may seem, he is moving into re-election mode with just about everything going for him.This appears counter-intuitive. Just look at the laundry list that will be making the papers between now and next November. The Middle East is an expensive shambles, the case for invading Iraq is still shifting from one confection to another, the rise of terrorism has exposed the most dramatic intelligence failure since Pearl Harbour, the US deficit is the biggest in history, several million American jobs have been lost, environmental pollution is worsening, American diplomacy is in tatters and American global popularity is to be found in a compost bin.
Bush would seem to possess no chance of staying on at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue until early 2009. Why, then, are the US Democrats so worried?
They know that American presidents are not elected by sophisticated European or Australian critics or by Arab adolescents throwing stones in the streets of the Gaza Strip, but by a small number of swinging voters in places called Sarasota or Louisville, who are starting to resent the antipathy of the outside world. They vote for the individual, not the party or policy platform. [...]
A hint of steel has entered the heart of many American voters in what remains one of the most patriotic countries in the world, persuading them - for now - that those body bags from Baghdad are a tragic but necessary price to pay for preserving their nation and its values.
There is a countervailing resentment among the American people, who are learning what a former British foreign secretary, Lord Carrington, said about another great power in history: "When we ran the world in the 19th century, which I think we did rather well, we were cordially disliked. Jealousy and hostility, not gratitude, was our experience."
As a former US national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, puts it: "American power worldwide is at its zenith. American global political standing is at its nadir." It is a combination that compels many American voters to rally behind an incumbent who, however flawed he may appear, possesses one big advantage.
Unlike his predecessor, Bush appears strong, decisive, focused, moral and relentless. These are characteristics to which Americans, or indeed most people, warm in a time of national stress.
Pollution? Do foreigners know anything about this country that they don't read in DNC handouts?
MORE:
Multilateral Mantras: The fantasies of the old world meet the realities of the new. (Victor Davis Hanson, November 26, 2003, National Review)
American and European intellectuals think they can explain the current furor directed at the United States. In fact, they have fashioned a standard exegesis that goes back to the last decade or so of American foreign-policy efforts. Our supposed post-9/11 unilateralism is summed up by something like this: chances lost; sympathy wasted; opportunities let slip; dialogue spurned; etc.That is, after eight careful years of Clintonian multilateralism — characterized by deference to the U.N., consultation with the EU, and various apologies to aggrieved countries from Greece to South Africa — the United States was once again (say, by 2000?), ever so slowly, beginning to be liked in the world. Indeed, we were on the collective bus, so to speak, and supported the foundations for a new global framework that would give us racial bliss at Durban, environmental salvation at Kyoto, and international justice at The Hague.
We all wished it was true. Those who had doubts kept quiet for the most part — lest they appear as the dour and glum Reaganites who had once caricatured Jimmy Carter's human-rights policies as naïve and conducive to subsequent hostage-taking, SS-10s, and Afghanistan.
Indeed, we are now supposed to be quite nostalgic about the old aura of multilateral harmony. Everyone from Madeline Albright to Al Gore lectures us about how we were once beloved of the Europeans and admired by the Arabs. But then the story darkens, as Bush administration boorishness, ineptness, and chauvinism forfeit all their predecessors' hard-earned capital, the fruit of careful past diplomacy. Perhaps the hysterical slurs about "Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld" reflect the deep hurt that former officials presently feel when they travel abroad and are no longer treated with the deference of old. Their apologia "We tried to tell them" is met by their sympathetic hosts' "Don't worry, we know it's them, not you."
But how accurate — or important — is the charge of unilateralism?
NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED:
Report: Hesitancy to be called 'occupiers' hurts US in Iraq (Tom Regan, 11/28/03, csmonitor.com)
A leaked postwar self-evaluation by the Army's 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized) showed several serious problems during the invasion of Iraq, and after Baghdad fell. The report shows that American military commanders did not impose curfews, halt looting or order Iraqis back to work after Saddam Hussein's regime fell because US policymakers were reluctant to declare American troops an occupying force.
Political correctness and Great Power politics makes for an uncomfortable fit, eh?
THE SELF-HATRED DIET:
Food for Holiday Thought: Eat Less, Live to 140? (DAVID HOCHMAN, 11/23/03, NY Times)
"I'm definitely not one of these guys who says, `Ooo, 18 more years and I can retire,' " said Mr. Sherman, 46, who runs a biotech company in California near his Silicon Valley home. Now that he's acclimated to the diet and is somewhat bulked up from weight lifting, he looks more like a cyclist than a "Survivor" finalist. "I feel very much like I did at 20," he said. "Nothing but blue sky ahead of me." Mr. Sherman is part of a curious subculture of scientists, philosophers, futurists and assorted high-minded anorectics who believe that saying no to dessert (and sometimes to breakfast, lunch and dinner, too) will be the ticket to superlongevity.Advocates of the strategy, known as calorie restriction, or C.R., insist they're not dieting to get skinny but rather to have the last laugh. Eat smart enough, they say, and you can live to see great-great-grandchildren, not to mention postpone the onset of cancer, diabetes, heart disease and kidney failure.
"Aging is a horror and it's got to stop right now," said Michael Rae, a vitamin researcher from Calgary, Alberta, and a board member of the Calorie Restriction Society, which has about 900 ultralean members worldwide.
This kind of fear of and attempt to deny death is rooted in the secularization of the culture and an almost pathological hatred of that which makes us human.
MUTABILITY (via Mike Daley):
Blacks Balk at Gay Marriage-Civil Rights Links (JAY LINDSAY, 11/28/03, Associated Press)
A new controversey has erupted around the issue of gay marriage, as some black leaders have been outraged by comparisons being drawn between the civil rights movement and the right of homosexuals to marry.Observers have been drawing similarities between the two movements since the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled last week that the state's constitution guarantees gay couples the right to marry. The court cited landmark laws that struck down bans on interracial marriage, but conservative black leaders object to the comparisons, arguing that sexual orientation is a choice.
The Rev. Talbert Swan II said the two struggles are not similar because blacks were lynched, denied property rights and declared inhuman.
"Homosexuality is a chosen lifestyle," he said. "I could not choose the color of my skin. ... For me to ride down the street and get profiled just because of my skin color is something a homosexual will never go through."
A poll released by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press on Nov. 18, the day of the ruling, indicated 60 percent of blacks opposed gay marriage.
As the Reverend Sawn suggests, the issue is quite simply one of morality and choice--one is or is not a certain race or ethnicity; one chooses one's sexual partners.
Undermining Society's MoralsAlan Charles Raul, November 28, 2003, Washington Post)
The promotion of gay marriage is not the most devastating aspect of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's recent decision. The more destructive impact of the decision for society is the court's insidious denial of morality itself as a rational basis for legislation. This observation is not hyperbole or a mere rhetorical characterization of the Goodridge v. Department of Public Health decision. The Massachusetts justices actually quoted two opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court (the recent anti-anti-sodomy ruling in Lawrence v. Texas and an older anti-antiabortion ruling, Planned Parenthood v. Casey) to support the proposition that the legislature may not "mandate [a] moral code" for society at large. The courts, it would seem, have read a fundamental political choice into the Constitution that is not apparent from the face of the document itself -- that is, that individual desires must necessarily trump community interests whenever important issues are at stake.These judicial pronouncements, therefore, constitute an appalling abnegation of popular sovereignty. In a republican form of government, which the Constitution guarantees for the United States, elected officials are meant to set social policy for the country. They do so by embodying their view of America's moral choices in law. (This is a particularly crucial manner for propagating morality in our republic because the Constitution rightly forbids the establishment of religion, the other major social vehicle for advancing morality across society.) In reality, legislatures discharge their moral mandates all the time, and not just in controversial areas such as abortion, gay rights, pornography and the like.
Animal rights, protection of endangered species, many zoning laws and a great deal of environmental protection -- especially wilderness conservation -- are based on moral imperatives (as well as related aesthetic preferences). Though utilitarian arguments can be offered to salvage these kinds of laws, those arguments in truth amount to mere rationalizations. The fact is that a majority of society wants its elected representatives to preserve, protect and promote these values independent of traditional cost-benefit, "what have you done for me lately" kind of analysis. Indeed, some of these choices can and do infringe individual liberty considerably: for example, protecting spotted owl habitat over jobs puts a lot of loggers out of work and their families in extremis. Likewise, zoning restrictions can deprive individuals of their ability to use their property and live their lives as they might otherwise prefer. Frequently, the socially constrained individuals will sue the state claiming that such legal restrictions "take" property or deprive them of "liberty" in violation of the Fifth Amendment, or constitute arbitrary and capricious governmental action. And while such plaintiffs sometimes do and should prevail in advancing their individual interests over those of the broader community, no one contends that the government does not have the legitimate power to promote the general welfare as popularly defined (subject, of course, to the specific constitutional rights of individuals and due regard for the protection of discrete and insular minorities bereft of meaningful political influence).
IMMANENTIZE THE REFORMATION:
Telling the Truth, Facing the Whip (MANSOUR AL-NOGAIDAN, 11/28/03, NY Times)
The most recent government crackdown on terrorism suspects, in response to this month's car-bombing of a compound housing foreigners and Arabs in Riyadh, is missing the real target. The real problem is that Saudi Arabia is bogged down by deep-rooted Islamic extremism in most schools and mosques, which have become breeding grounds for terrorists. We cannot solve the terrorism problem as long as it is endemic to our educational and religious institutions.Yet the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Islamic Affairs have now established a committee to hunt down teachers who are suspected of being liberal-minded. This committee, which has the right to expel and punish any teacher who does not espouse hard-core Wahhabism, last week interrogated a teacher, found him "guilty" of an interest in philosophy and put on probation.
During the holy fasting month of Ramadan, imams around the country stepped up their hate speech against liberals, advocates of women's rights, secularists, Christians and Jews — and many encouraged their congregations to do the same. I heard no sermons criticizing the people responsible for the attacks in Riyadh, in which innocent civilians and children were killed. The reason, I believe, is that these religious leaders sympathize with the criminals rather than the victims.
I cannot but wonder at our officials and pundits who continue to claim that Saudi society loves other nations and wishes them peace, when state-sponsored preachers in some of our largest mosques continue to curse and call for the destruction of all non-Muslims. As the recent attacks show, now more than ever we are in need of support and help from other countries to help us stand up against our extremist religious culture, which discriminates against its own religious minorities, including Shiites and Sufis.
But we must be aware that this religious extremism, which has been indoctrinated in several Saudi generations, will be very difficult to defeat. I know because I once espoused it. For 11 years, from the age of 16, I was a Wahhabi extremist.
The frequency with which such voices are being heard post 9-11 gives one some hope for the necessary Islamic Reformation.
APPLES AND ORANGES (NOT THE ONLY FRUIT) (via Michael Herdegen):
Untying the Knot: For Better or Worse: Marriage's Stormy Future (TAMAR LEWIN, November 23, 2003, NY Times)
Political and religious conservatives maintain that the word "marriage" must be reserved for the union of men and women. Since 1996, 37 states have passed laws declaring that marriage must join male and female, and a push is under way for a constitutional amendment along those lines.
But some conservatives recognize a need for new social forms like civil unions. "I'm not opposed to civil unions," said James Q. Wilson, the social scientist and author of "The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened
Families." "I understand that people who wish to live together may want to manage their affairs."The most radical structural change being discussed these days is taking the state out of the marriage business.
"People who wanted religious ceremonies could still have them," Ms. Sanger said. "People could also write their own contracts formalizing individual agreements. To some extent, it's already happening, with prenuptial agreements, and homosexual couples' ceremonies that have nothing to do
with the state. We're not used to thinking of commitment outside marriage, so the social status of other arrangements is unclear: Do you have to give presents if someone has a civil union, or registers a domestic partnership?"Most conservatives say that the state must keep its central role in marital arrangements - both because marriage is such a central institution and, as a practical matter, because when a private union dissolves, the state may have to decide what becomes of the children and the property.
"The state has to be involved in marriage," Mr. Wilson said. "Marriage is the foundation of organized society, our way of coping with intractable problems like getting men to take responsibility for children, managing the allocation
of property, settling questions of custody. The argument that we could do it all by contract comes mainly from law professors, who have a much stronger belief in the power of contracts than other people."Undoubtedly, marriage maintains unique symbolic value. For many homosexuals as well as heterosexuals, a civil union, a commitment ceremony or a registered partnership simply lacks the emotional, psychological and spiritual weight that centuries of tradition added to marriage.
"Marriage is more than a bundle of rights and privileges," said Nancy Cott, a history professor at Harvard and author of "Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation." "It's a word that's sacred to many people, and because of its symbolic value, its customs and history, it has superior status."
Separation of State and Marriage seems the ideal solution. Let only religious institutions perform marriages. Let states grant civil union status to anyone they choose. Let couples who are Married receive automatic recognition as being entered into a civil union. The only folks who would be unhappy at that point are those who insist on "marriage" as a way of forcing society to not merely allow but to accept homosexuality.
MORE:
One Man, One Woman: The case for preserving the definition of marriage. (ROBERT P. GEORGE, November 28, 2003, Wall Street Journal)
GIVE THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT:
Meeting of Iraqi Leaders Gives Lift to U.S. Plan on Power Shift (JOEL BRINKLEY, 11/28/03, NY Times)
The American plan to transfer power to Iraq regained some momentum on Thursday, after a meeting between two leading Iraqi political figures.Jalal Talabani, the president of the Iraqi Governing Council, traveled to Najaf to confer with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the senior Iraqi cleric who had raised objections to the American plan for indirect elections for a new provisional government. Afterward, both sides appeared to be moving toward a possible compromise.
Ayatollah Sistani exercises strong influence over Iraq's majority Shiites, and on Wednesday his spokesmen said he was insisting that the election planned for next June must be a direct, popular ballot and not the indirect caucus election called for in the American plan.
That threw the future of the plan for speeding up self-rule into doubt. The American authorities have maintained that popular elections are impossible in the absence of a census, which cannot be completed by next summer. But at a news conference on Thursday night, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a Shiite cleric and member of the Governing Council who is close to Ayatollah Sistani, said there was room for negotiation.
"There are different proposals for getting the opinion of the Iraqi people," he said. "The best way would be to have a census and election law, and elections. But in these circumstances, there are other ways you can reach the views of the Iraqi people."
"The most important thing," he added, "is to end the occupation."
Our interests converge--they don't want us there and we don't want to be there.
IT WORKED SO WELL LAST TIME...:
Official: Al-Qaeda plans something big (Kevin Johnson, 11/27, USA TODAY)
A top counterterrorism official says al-Qaeda operatives dropped plans this year for several small attacks in the USA to focus on plotting a "more spectacular" assault comparable to the Sept. 11 attacks.The U.S. counterterrorism official, who has access to all intelligence on the terrorist group, told USA TODAY this week that officials have no specific evidence to indicate how or when al-Qaeda might try to launch a massive strike on U.S. soil.
But, the official said, interviews with al-Qaeda detainees, intercepts of communications from suspected operatives and other sources have yielded evidence that Osama bin Laden's network still has a command structure and a determination to launch an attack that might rival the suicide hijackings.
We should announce in advance what steps we'll take if they strike again, for instance: arrest and try Arafat; depose Syria's Ba'athists; bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities; remove Qaddafi; etc.. Make it clear to the Islamic world what the cost of such terror is.
THAT ONE WON'T PLAY (via Mike Daley):
Some Understand Covert Journey; Others Fear Bad Precedent (Howard Kurtz, November 28, 2003
Washington Post)
Former White House spokesman Joe Lockhart, who worked for President Bill Clinton, said: "There's no way to do this kind of trip if it's broadcast in advance, for security reasons. My problem with this is not that he misled the press. This is a president who has been unwilling to provide his presence to the families who have suffered but thinks nothing of flying to Baghdad to use the troops there as a prop."
Last week, Democrats complained that he didn't care about the military, because he wasn't going to every funeral. Now he visits them in a war zone and they're just "props"? They need some work on their talking points.
UPDATE: Oops, may have spoken to soon--apparently the Europeans and Arabs agree with Mr. Lockhart, Bush's Iraq Visit a Pre-Election PR Stunt (November 28, 2003, Agence France-Presse)
"Electoral raid on Baghdad" read the caustic headline in the left-wing Paris daily Liberation which summed up European newspaper editorial reaction to President George W Bush's Thanksgiving Day visit to US troops in Iraq. [...]"Bush 'infiltrated' Baghdad for two hours," scoffed the front-page headline of the London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat.
In Beirut, Al-Mustaqbal newspaper, owned by Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, announced that "Bush's secret visit to Baghdad opens presidential election season."
A front-page editorial in Lebanon's leading An-Nahar newspaper compared Bush to Roman emperor Julius Caesar, but said the US president could not repeat the phrase: "I came, I saw, I conquered."
November 27, 2003
WRONG VICTIM:
Schwarzenegger Paroles Woman Who Killed Her Husband's Mistress (The Associated Press, 11/27/03)
Arnold Schwarzenegger has agreed to parole a woman who killed her husband's mistress in 1987, the second time in a week the newly elected governor has granted the release of a convicted murderer.Schwarzenegger's decision Wednesday marks a departure from former Gov. Gray Davis, who during his five years repeatedly refused to grant paroles approved by the state's Board of Prison Terms. [...]
Schwarzenegger did not comment on his decision to parole Munoz, a 51-year-old mother of three who was convicted in 1989 of killing her husband's lover in Los Angeles.
The board's approval of Munoz's parole was based on her apparent remorse for the killing, psychological evaluations that showed a slim chance of her offending again and her efforts to raise money for the victim's daughter by selling portraits, said board spokesman Bill Sessa.
It's her husband she should have whacked.
JUST A DASH, PLEASE:
The Key to Genius: Autistic savants are born with miswired neurons - and extraordinary gifts. The breakthrough science behind our new understanding of the brain. (Steve Silberman, December 2003, Wired)
There is no single unified memory function in the brain. Just as there are many types of remembering - retaining a phone number long enough to dial it, recollecting Proustian panoramas after a bite of madeleine - there is a diverse set of subsystems for imprinting experience in the mind.The memories of savants run deep but narrow. They can recite, forward or backward, the contents of a book they've read and tell you the number of steps they took to the store. Their memories are high-fidelity - concrete, precise, and comprehensive - but there is little emotion in them. Musical savants are frequently described as human tape recorders.
This oddly adhesive memory is what binds together every domain of savant skill. In the brains of savants, Treffert believes, associative memory systems located in the higher regions of the cortex fail, and older parts of the brain - the ancient pathways in the basal ganglia known as habit memory - take over.
Habit memory is Pavlovian, an archive of involuntary stimulus/response loops - the memory that never forgets how to ride a bike. To reproduce a Bach sonata with slavish accuracy requires an inner tape recorder and a book of rules. But to play Bach with fire and originality requires Proustian memory, with its nuanced webs of association and metaphor. This higher-order memory, like a living text, is constantly under revision. It's not just that savants remember everything, says Treffert, it's that they are unable to forget anything, like the protagonist in Jorge Luis Borges' short story, "Funes the Memorious."
Treffert is convinced that some savants don't have to learn the algorithms involved in tasks like calendar calculating. The software comes preinstalled. "You have to go beyond talking about traits," he says, "and start talking about the genetic transmission of knowledge."
The drawing abilities of most savant artists, for example, burst forth with no preparation, no training, and no practice - as if their skills were already there, fully fledged, needing only access to a pencil or a brush.
Children who seem to come into the world with profound artistic gifts have been objects of fascination for centuries, but recent discoveries suggest we may all carry a savant inside us waiting to be born.
Why couldn't mine have been born when I was failing College Math?
THAT'S TASTEFUL:
"Sharon eating babies" cartoon wins British prize (Ellis Shuman, November 27, 2003, Israel Insider)
The United Kingdom's Political Cartoon Society selected a cartoon published by The Independent in January depicting a naked Ariel Sharon biting off the bloodied head of a Palestinian child as helicopter warships hovered overhead blasting out "Vote Sharon" from loudspeakers as its "Cartoon of the Year." In his acceptance speech, cartoonist Dave Brown thanked the Israeli Embassy in London for its angry reaction to the cartoon, which he said had contributed greatly to its publicity.
"CONSERVATIVE" WILL DO NICELY:
"Conservatism" (David Warren, 11/16/03, Sunday Spectator)
Consider, if you will, what might be meant today by the term, "social conservative". It is applied to people who have strangely backward views about society; who are against things like killing unborn children, or publicly celebrating homosexuality. And they are categorized with persons in other cultures who advocate, e.g., stoning rape victims for adultery.
This can only mean, that a person who does not agree to the revolutionary overthrow of the social order is a "social conservative", beyond the pale. The term has, in other words, been twisted so far around, that it has come out right-way-up again, but on a wheel off its axle. For what was previously "normal" is now labelled "abnormal", and vice versa.
This fills me with hope. It suggests the possibility that with further twisting, other ideas may come out right again, albeit in a crazy, off-the-spindle sort of way.
In the meantime, I'm looking for another word to communicate the idea of "conservative", other than the word "conservative" which must inevitably communicate something else. I am playing with the word "traditionalist", which might, at the minimum, have the advantage of not being understood at all.
The idea itself is that all sound action within a society will come out of a development of that society's own traditions, rather than from a negation or inversion of them. For it is a secret of society and nature, that few things are improved by turning them upside-down. It is one of those things that just works, like gravity; always worth another try.
Or, as Michael Oakeshott put it:
The general characteristics of this [conservative] disposition are not difficult to discern, although they have often been mistaken. They centre upon a propensity to use and to enjoy what is available rather than to wish for or to look for something else; to delight in what is present rather than what was or what may be . . . an appropriate gratefulness for what is available, and consequently the acknowledgment of a gift or an inheritance from the past.
FILLING THE VACUUM
Georgian interlude (David Warren, November 26, 2003)
The future need not be grim. The economic prospects for a country that offers the only possible transit to the high seas for oil from the Caspian basin, which does not pass through Iran or Russia, are potentially very good. (It is largely from fear of this potential competition, that the Russians have fished so assiduously in Georgia's troubled waters.)It is an experiment that, alas, cannot be repeated easily in any Muslim country of the Middle East (Georgia was an ancient Christian kingdom, one of the few Christian polities to survive the Islamic conquests). And yet it is a very significant event for the region, especially for Iran, where a huge student movement continues to lead opposition to the tyranny of the ayatollahs, and where the young are also increasingly inspired by "the American way" of doing things.
For Georgia has just created a shining example of what the fall of the Berlin Wall might look like, transposed and translated into the Middle Eastern vernacular. Mr. Shevardnadze's highly personal way of ruling was in the regional mould, and even his Communist background was suggestive of the ideological formations that underlie many of the region's most powerful statesmen.
The tinder has been struck. While the situation in Georgia is necessarily desperate (freedom invariably begins in chaos), and the Russians may well do everything they can to undermine the new Georgian government that emerges, the flame is lit. Christian Georgia has given the Muslim Middle East an example of "how it is done", even without the help of the U.S. Army. It is close enough to home to be noticed.
And the power of example in a moral vacuum should never be underestimated.
Georgia as Shining City?
MORE:
-Where Europe Vanishes: Civilizations have collided in the Caucasus Mountains since the dawn of history, and the region's dozens of ethnic groups have been noted for "obstinacy and ferocity" since ancient times. Stalin was born in these mountains, and it was also here that the Soviet empire began to crumble. The story of the Republic of Georgia illustrates that the peoples of the Caucasus may prove as incapable of self-rule as they were resistant to rule by outsiders (Robert D. Kaplan, December 2000, The Atlantic)
-Many Roles, Many Acts (Jim Hoagland, November 27, 2003, Washington Post)
WHY SHOULD IRAQIS HAVE ALL THE FUN?:
Free Damascus (NIR BOMS & ERICK STAKELBECK, Nov. 27, 2003, Jerusalem Post)
[T]he Reform Party of Syria (RPS), a fledgling US-based political movement comprised of resident Syrians and Syrians living abroad... was formed shortly after 9/11 to express a voice that has been virtually nonexistent in Syria under 40 years of oppressive Ba'ath Party rule: a voice of freedom.For members of RPS, the president's castigation of "dictators in Iraq and Syria" who "promised the restoration of national honor [and] left instead a legacy of torture, oppression, misery, and ruin," represented an anchor of hope for a new Syria, one free from extremism, terror and iron-fisted rule.
While talk of Middle East reform usually centers on Iraqi de-Ba'athification or the student protesters of Iran, RPS has become increasingly visible during the last few months, spearheading a pro-democracy message framed in the context of a new Syrian constitution.
For members of RPS, the post-9/11 reality presented both a challenge and an opportunity. The time had come to speak out against the perpetual police state their homeland had become under decades of Ba'ath Party rule.
Next year in Damascus...
IS HE STILL AROUND?:
For the moment, the dean of his class: Dean becomes a heavyweight while maintaining the look of a political outcast. (Liz Marlantes, 11/28/03, CS Monitor)
A former dark horse who's catapulted to the front of the Democratic pack, Howard Dean is a rare hybrid candidate - an increasingly established heavyweight who maintains the look of a political outcast. As his profile rises, the former Vermont governor's network of support is rapidly expanding to traditional constituencies, with congressional and union endorsements drawing blue-collar workers and minorities. But at its core, the Dean phenomenon still seems shaped by a legion of fervent young people like these, drawn to his antiestablishment rhetoric and bold political stances.The campaign's energy is fueled by a devoted base that's helped Dean weather gaffes and attacks. He's parlayed that support into stunning financial success, raising enough cash to opt out of the public financing system, with one-quarter of his money coming from people under 30.
Yet this youthful base, combined with Dean's opposition to the Iraq war, has evoked unflattering comparisons to George McGovern, and causes some to question the ultimate breadth of Dean's appeal. While students cram into auditoriums to hear him, it's unclear how much of that enthusiasm will translate into votes. In Iowa - where polls show him in a dead heat with Rep. Richard Gephardt - the caucuses tend to weed out all but the most committed voters, making them a key early test of Dean's strength.
The problem for Mr. Dean is that he can hardly portray himself as a fresh new outsider next Fall, when he'll have been his party's frontrunner or nominee for almost two years. He'll have grown terribly stale by then.
AMERICAN:
Johnny Cash's Legacy of Emotions, on CD's (NEIL STRAUSS, 11/27/03, NY Times)
I'll play you one song," the record producer Rick Rubin said over the telephone. Two clicking sounds could be heard in the background. Then a voice, singing, came through the earpiece: "I never thought I needed help before/Thought that I could get by by myself."The voice was that of Johnny Cash, accompanied only by a softly strummed guitar, the song by Larry Gatlin. Cash's voice cracked and wavered with each word, at times falling out of tempo and tune as if fighting against extinguishment. Yet it continued, slow, determined, choking back emotion: "But now I know I just can't take it anymore/And with a humble heart on bended knee/I'm begging you please for help."
The song, Mr. Rubin said, was recorded two months after the death of Cash's wife, June, and two months before Cash's own death on Sept. 12 at 71.
It is one of 40 to 50 songs that Cash had recorded for "American V," the fifth CD in a 10-year collaboration between Cash and Mr. Rubin, who started his career producing the Beastie Boys and Run-D.M.C. The disc is expected to be released next year. In the meantime a five-CD box set that includes 64 previously unreleased Cash recordings was released this week under the title Cash Unearthed, a name that Cash helped select.
The CD includes collaborations with Joe Strummer, Carl Perkins, Willie Nelson, Tom Petty, Nick Cave and, in a moving version of the Cat Stevens song "Father and Son," Fiona Apple. The solo material ranges from bittersweet new tracks like "Singer of Songs" to stripped-down classic gospel and country, like an organ-enhanced "Big Iron" that rivals the Marty Robbins hit.
"Isn't it amazing that my father would pass away and such a body of work would come out?" said Cash's son, John Carter Cash. "It looks like a 30-year section of music, but it was all recorded in the last few years. And what's amazing is how much more there is."
Ammo for your Amazon Wish List.
MORE:
Johnny of the Cross (Peter M. Candler, Jr, December 2003, First Things)
In the world of popular music, one generally becomes a “legend” only in death—as if death accomplishes for a musician all that he was unable to do for himself in life. Legends are often made in the manner of their death—in a helicopter crash, say, or collapsed on the bathroom floor. But Johnny Cash’s death at seventy-one on September 12 was decidedly un-legend-like: silent, slow, and unspectacular. Yet “legend” seems, if anything, not big enough a word to describe Johnny Cash.We all knew the end was coming, particularly after June Carter, to everyone’s shock, beat him to it. But the impact of the news was not thereby diminished. On that Friday we lost possibly America’s most singular individual. I don’t think that it’s too much of a stretch to say that in Johnny’s death a little bit of what is best about America died, too.
The only word that seems to suffice here is magnanimity. The OED defines it poetically: “In Aristotle’s sense of megalopsuchia . . . loftiness of thought or purpose, grandeur of designs, nobly ambitious spirit. Now rare.” That was Johnny Cash: great-souled, rare. Everything about him was as big and black and broad as the Arkansas delta, from his physical stature and persona to “that” voice.
Yet his life cannot be reduced to a metaphor. It was more than just one of noble ambition or grandeur of design; Johnny’s virtues were just as hard-fought as his vices. In life Johnny Cash struggled for and against the God whose grip on him was so frustratingly and thankfully relentless that it was able to absorb all that fierce rage and all those addictions. Johnny could sing about murder and God in the same song and with the same voice because to do otherwise would have been dishonest. At the same time, he let that despair, agony, and rejection stand on their own—he lent them integrity. There was no serious salvation unless there was first some serious sin. Cash echoed St. Paul: “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.” But there is at least one thing that Cash never was, and that is a moralist. He did not chalk doubt up to a misunderstanding. Rather, Cash showed that doubt is itself proper to faith. A God who could not stomach the darkest moments of His creation was not worth our worship, much less a song.
.406+ :
Revised lawsuit-reform bill wins Democratic converts (Charles Hurt, 11/26/03, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)
Three Democratic senators changed their stances after language was inserted they say better protects consumers while still reining in many frivolous lawsuits and preventing lawyers from "venue shopping" in search of sympathetic judges and juries that award the biggest settlements.Those supporters now include Democratic Sens. Charles E. Schumer of New York, Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana, all of whom opposed the bill last month. The bill was defeated by a single vote in a filibuster lodged by mainly Democrats. [...]
The bill is designed to usher more class-action lawsuits into the federal courts and prevent lawyers from guiding their cases to states where judges and juries are viewed as generous to plaintiffs. It will also prevent plaintiffs from getting coupons of little or no value while attorneys make millions of dollars.
"Businesses and consumers victimized by the current system can give thanks tomorrow that the days of class-action abuse are numbered," U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue said yesterday, on the eve of Thanksgiving Day. "We urge the Senate to pass the Class Action Fairness Act at the earliest opportunity." [...]
The Bush administration has listed tort reform as one of its top domestic priorities and the president's signature would be widely expected.
Ted Williams wasn't this hot in '41.
IF FRANCE IS THE DISEASE, IS HE THE CURE?:
Fast-rising young challenger eyes Chirac's crown: Hugely popular French interior minister makes his ambitions plain (Jon Henley, November 27, 2003, The Guardian)
France's young, hard-hitting and hugely popular interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, has made his intentions clear: he will be running for president in 2007 - against Jacques Chirac if necessary. [...]A recent poll showed that Mr Sarkozy, diminutive, pugnacious, plain-speaking but somehow always human, is regarded as "the man most capable of changing things in France" by 42% of the population, against 9% for Mr Chirac. Fifty per cent said the 48-year-old would be an "excellent" or "good" rightwing presidential candidate.
Since his appointment 18 months ago, the man the French press often refers to as Goldfinger (because all he touches succeeds) has resolved the long-running dispute with Britain over the Sangatte refugee camp; sent thousands of asylum seekers home; cracked down on juvenile delinquency, crime and prostitution; hired the first of 15,000 new police officers; dramatically reduced traffic offences and road deaths and overseen the capture of France's most wanted terrorist in Corsica.
His extraordinary rise (he has won praise from such political opposites as the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen and the communist mayor of Calais) is due not just to his energy but to his determination, highly unusual in French politics, to call a spade a spade and, if it is a problem, to do something about it. In Sarko-speak, drunken drivers are "murderers", teenage gang-rapists "barbarians" and misbehaving youths on run-down council estates "yobs" and "thugs". He sees part of his job, he has said, as curing "a French disease: the notion that because we cannot tackle everything, we end up tackling nothing".
The Chiracs' personal dislike for him is a good sign.
IT'S LIKE WWII ALL OVER AGAIN:
Spain, Poland lead EU opposition (Roland Flamini, 11/26/2003, UPI)
Standing shoulder to shoulder, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and Polish counterpart Leszek Miller led the attack Tuesday against a European Union decision designed to let Germany and France off the hook.The occasion was a meeting of European economic and finance ministers in Brussels at which the EU system of imposing fines on member states that exceeded budget deficit limits was suspended to avoid punishing Berlin and Paris.
"This decision deals a hard blow to the common (European) effort to maintain economic stability," Aznar declared. He went on to warn that the move "will obviously have consequences in the forthcoming Intergovernmental Conference."
Spanish sources said Aznar's argument was that no agreement could be reached on the constitution if budget discipline has collapsed. But this was taken as a bold threat to carry on the battle against France and Germany when talks on a new EU constitution come to a head next month. [...]
Both Poland and Spain want NATO to remain the stalwart of European defense, free from the competitive challenge of an EU rapid reaction force, as proposed by Berlin and Paris.
Similarly, both countries are against any change in the EU "vote weighting," the distribution of votes to each country in relation to population size. At the moment both Spain and Poland have 27 votes each in the Council of Ministers, while Germany, with a far bigger population, has 28 votes. The constitution would switch to a new voting system that, smaller nations say, will give France and Germany more power.
Pretty much the only countries to resist both the USSR and Hitler now stand together to fight the latest threat to European freedom.
RUNNING ON EMPTY:
Why the Democrats Are All Boxed In: Why Democrats are losing the political game and Republicans are betraying their convictions (JOE KLEIN, Nov. 23, 2003, TIME)
The Democrats' opposition to the Medicare bill was both tortured and intemperate. Some of the gripes are legitimate—the proposed drug benefit is complicated and in many cases insufficient. But Ted Kennedy voted for that benefit last summer. The sticking points now involve matters of Democratic Party theology, and they require a brief explanation. Medicare currently is a fee-for-service program, which means it works the way old-fashioned medicine did—essentially, you get whatever services you request. This is fabulously expensive and bound to grow more so as the baby boomers retire. Most Republicans and many moderate Democrats want to restrain costs by moving toward a system of managed care—which is what most nonelderly Americans now receive through HMOs and preferred-physician networks. The Medicare bill contains a six-city test of managed care, which would begin in 2010. This tiny experiment is what sent the Democrats up a wall. "We're not going to let seniors be herded into HMOs," Dick Gephardt harrumphed. Their alternative? Well, they don't have one. "Medicare should be left alone," said Howard Dean, who used to be more creative—and honest—about such things.The vehemence of the Democratic assault was astonishing. The AARP, formerly a linchpin of the liberal coalition, was trashed by various liberals as a den of insurance-peddling moneygrubbers. House Democrats told me that minority leader Pelosi was twisting arms with unprecedented avidity—anyone who voted in favor was "no longer a Democrat," and plum committee assignments would go only to loyalists. I suspect this reflects desperation as much as principle. The Bush Administration is outsmarting the Democrats at every turn. The economy seems to be recovering. If Iraq is stabilized—a huge if—what will the Democrats run on? Their intellectual cupboard is bare, and the election may be slipping away.
Campaign Finance Reform? Gone. Prescription Drugs? Gone. Education? Gone. Abortion? It works in favor of the GOP now. Taxes? Democrats want to raise them. The Economy? It's booming. The war on terror? Democrats seem to oppose it. Iraq? Maybe, but by next Summer it's likely to have calmed down and Iraqis are likely to be at center stage, not us.
So what are the big new ideas for the Democrats? Ideas comparable to privatizing social services, voucherizing the social welfare net and education, reforming the tax code, and democratizing Islam?
WE'VE ONLY JUST BEGUN:
Power in Washington is shifting (Tony Blankley, 11/26/03, Washington Times)
So complete was the FDR Democrats' acquisition of power in this city, that it has until now withstood the erosive assaults of Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and Gingrich. Their total possession of the federal government from 1932-1946 engendered and brought to maturity the Democratic Party's sense of a birthright to power.The first cornerstone of their actual power was, of course, the presidencies of FDR and Truman from 1932-1952. Their second cornerstone was control of the House of Representatives (the purse strings of government) for 40 straight years (and 58 of the 62 years) prior to the Republican take over in 1994. (They also controlled the Senate for almost as many of those years.) The third cornerstone was their domination, both physical and spiritual, of the unofficial power sources of Washington: the great law firms, lobbyists, trade associations, publicists, news organs, federal bureaucracies and think tanks. The fourth cornerstone was, in fact, their sense of a birthright to power. Republican presidents, when they came to Washington, couldn't deny that birthright, and felt like self-conscious interlopers — playing a perpetual away game against the hometown team.
Even when the first and second cornerstones (the White House and Congress) were taken away, the Democratic power edifice stood firmly on the real, but less visible, remaining ones. But slowly, the remaining cornerstones have begun to crumble, as the Democrats have become more attenuated in time from the House of Representatives — for 40 years their bulwark — and are frozen out of the remaining government. The Republicans — first, Newt Gingrich and now Tom DeLay and Speaker Denny Hastert — have been persistently prying the cold, almost dead, Democratic fingers off the law firms, lobbyists and trade associations. (They also have given and received succor from the new media of cable news, talk radio, the Internet and the now legions of conservative commentators.)
The Republicans have also begun doing to Democrats what Democrats did to Republicans for half a century — cutting them out of both the information and influence loop on legislation. The Medicare legislative process is a prime example. Over the last few months, when ranking Democratic congressmen and senators have spoken before vital trade associations, they have been unable to tell their audiences the status of Medicare legislation, for the simple reason that they have been cut out of the negotiations. On the other hand, key Republicans have been able to provide up-to-the-minute insights into the decision-making that can make or break whole industries.
It seems fair to measure the next cycle in American politics from the starting point of the GOP being able to reform an entitlement program on its own.
WHO DO YOU WANT ME TO BE TO MAKE YOU SLEEP WITH ME:
Europe's Anti-American Obsession (Jean-Francois Revel, The American Enterprise)
For skeptics of democratic capitalism, the United States is, quite simply, the enemy. For many years, and still today, a principal function of anti-Americanism has been to discredit the nation that stands as the supreme alternative to socialism. More recently, Islamists, anti-modern Greens, and others have taken to pillorying the U.S. for the same reason. To travesty the United States as a repressive, unjust, racist society is a way of proclaiming: Look what happens when modern democratic capitalism is implemented!
This is the message of critics not only in Europe, but also in the United States itself, where anti-Americanism continues to prosper among university, journalistic, and literary elites. But in Europe, these ideological reasons for blaming America first are multiplied by simple jealousy of American power. The current American "hyperpower" is the direct consequence of European powerlessness, both past and present. The United States fills a void caused by our inadequacies in capability, thinking, and will to act.
Americans might ask themselves what interest the United States could have in plunging into the bloody quagmire of the Balkans, that centuries-old masterpiece of Europe's matchless ingenuity. But Europe found herself incapable of bringing order by herself to this murderous chaos of her own making. So it devolved upon the United States to take charge of operations in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia. The Europeans thanked the Americans afterwards by calling them imperialists--although they quake with fright and accuse the Americans of being cowardly isolationists the moment they make the slightest mention of bringing their soldiers home.
Certainly America, like all societies, has many defects and deserves criticism. But the intentional ignoring of facts begins with sociological preconceptions of the U.S.--the alleged absence of social protection, the notorious "poverty line," the supposed unemployment level. The fact that unemployment in the U.S. fell to below 5 percent in the 1990s, whereas in France it shot up to 12 percent, implied nothing good about America according to our commentators, who reassured us with the myth of America's omnipresent minimum-wage jobs!
At the advent of America's 2001 economic slowdown, French newspapers ran gleeful headlines announcing "The End of Full Employment in the USA." At the same time, the French government was frenetically heaping praise on itself for reducing unemployment levels to 8.7 percent--almost twice the American level (not counting the tens of thousands of the effectively unemployed who in France are artificially excluded from the statistics). By September 2001, unemployment in France had already climbed back to over 9 percent.
"The End of the American Economic Dream" was Le Monde's headline when there was a pause of the practically uninterrupted 17-year period of U.S. economic growth from 1983 to 2000. In truth, the U.S. has led a technological revolution without precedent, creating tens of millions of jobs while absorbing a tremendous population increase (from 248 million in 1990 to 281 million in 2000). All this was but a "dream"? Americans are regularly reproached for wanting to "impose their economic and social model" on others. But whenever there is an economic slowdown, other countries anxiously await an American-led "recovery."
While the U.S. is vilified and blamed, its financial and military aid is universally desired. America is the sole power at once capable of saving Mexico from economic collapse (in 1995), dissuading communist China from attacking Taiwan (repeatedly), mediating between India and Pakistan in the matter of Kashmir, and working with some chance of success toward the reunification of the two Koreas under a democratic regime. When the European Union sent a delegation, headed by the Swedish prime minister, to Pyongyang in May 2001, the delegation could find nothing better to do than grovel before Kim Jong Il, the criminal chief of one of the last totalitarian jails on the planet.
The fundamental role of anti-Americanism in Europe in general, and particularly among those on the Left, is to absolve themselves of their own moral failings and intellectual errors by heaping them onto the monster scapegoat, the United States of America.
Just glad we can help.
November 26, 2003
LOOKING FOR MR. "I'M ONLY KIND OF PRO-TAX HIKE"?:
Who Can Beat George W. Bush?: The pundits are whispering that either Dean or Gephardt is likely to be the Democratic nominee. Which one of them can win? (Jack Beatty, 11/26/03, Atlantic Monthly)
Another candidate could emerge, but let's assume this primary sprint will come down to Dean vs. Gephardt. Which man would be the stronger candidate against the President?They share a liability that makes them weaker candidates than the other Democratic prospects: they would repeal all of the Bush tax cuts. Senators Kerry, Edwards, and Lieberman, as well as General Wesley Clark, would repeal only the cuts for the wealthiest Americans, leaving in place the child tax credit and other elements of the cuts for the middle class. In the first presidential debate, if either Dean or Gephardt is the nominee, George W. Bush will point to his opponent and say, "If your family income is $40,000 a year, this man will raise your taxes by over $1,200"—and for once, he'd be telling the truth about the distribution of his tax cuts. Gephardt or Dean would counter, "Yes, Mr. President, but with that $1,200 we will fund health insurance and education programs worth much more than that to middle-income families." But the programs are promises; the $1,200 savings is cash in hand.
That debate moment is the best argument for nominating someone other than Gephardt or Dean.
The answer to Mr. Beatty's question, as even he seems to realize, is: no one.
THE LIBERAL OPTION:
Reviving Mideastern Democracy: We Arabs need the West's help to usher in a new Liberal Age. (SAAD EDDIN IBRAHIM, November 26, 2003, Wall Street Journal)
For about a century...from around 1850 until about the time of the Free Officers' coup that toppled the monarchy and brought Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser to power in 1952, there flourished in Egypt a Liberal Age that is all too often unjustly forgotten in discussions of Arab politics today. Leading thinkers and writers such as Taha Hussein and the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naghib Mahfouz characterize that period, but there were literally hundreds of others. This was also a time of relative sectarian peace and tolerance. The great Oxford historian Albert Hourani's "History of the Arab Peoples" is a good primer on this and other aspects of political development in that period.The Liberal Age came to an end after the Arab defeat at the hands of Israel in the 1948 war and the subsequent rise of military regimes across the Arab world. With ideological roots in populist nationalism, these governments soon became entrenched autocracies. Civil society groups, political parties, trade unions and the independent judiciary were among their early victims.
When we founded the Ibn Khaldun Center and as we guided its work throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, we had the Liberal Age very much in mind. We saw ourselves not as builders from scratch, but as revivers of a great (but not perfect) tradition that had existed not only in our country but also in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Morocco and elsewhere. We were and we remain determined that this liberal tradition--and the Egyptian Court of Cassation, as witnessed in our legal case, is part of this legacy--will not be forgotten. We believe that if these ideas receive the exposure they deserve, the memory of this tradition and, more importantly, the still-living relevance of its core teachings on rights, freedom, transparency, and justice, can play a large role in showing that democracy does indeed have a reasonable chance of putting down roots and growing in the Middle East.
Instead of the "paralysis by analysis" that comes from cataloguing all the familiar reasons why our peoples will "never" be ready for democracy, we choose to remind ourselves of the liberal options that were once open and can be open again.
Perhaps the appropriate posture to take is dubious, but hopeful?
HELLFIRE ON MY TRAIL:
Yemen Pursuing Second Top al-Qaida (The Associated Press, 11/26/03)
Yemeni security forces are pursuing a second top al-Qaida figure after capturing the alleged mastermind of the terror network's most dramatic attacks in Yemen, the bombings of the destroyer USS Cole and a French oil tanker, government officials said Wednesday.Abu Ali al-Kandahari is one of two top al-Qaida leaders in Yemen, according to security reports published in the Yemeni press.
The other, Mohammed Hamdi al-Ahdal, was arrested by security forces that surrounded his hide-out west of the capital, San'a, the Interior Ministry said Tuesday. Four men, believed to be al-Ahdal's guards, were also arrested.
Al-Kandahari is believed to be hiding in the northern provinces of Marib and Jawf, and security forces are closing in on him, said officials, speaking on customary condition of anonymity.
He is reported to have replaced Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi after he was killed by a missile fired from a U.S. drone last year. Al-Harethi was thought to have been Osama bin Laden's top deputy in Yemen.
Lemme hear you say, Yemen.
BLUE OR GREEN?:
For Democrats, A Wake-Up Call (David Von Drehle, November 26, 2003, Washington Post)
The wily and experienced Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) had his pocket picked. It was humiliating."It's an odd dynamic," said Eric Hauser, a strategist on the party's liberal wing. "When I came to Washington in the mid-'80s, the idea that Democrats ran things was just like the sun coming up in the east. Now, with each passing year, Democrats are less relevant."
Kennedy's experience with the Medicare bill was repeatedly cited as both pivotal and highly instructive. Earlier this year, he joined with Republican sponsors to get a prescription drug benefit moving, hopeful that the details would become more to his liking during the conference to iron out differences between the House and Senate versions.
"What Kennedy didn't realize is that the tide has changed," said James A. Thurber, an expert on congressional politics at American University. Instead, GOP leaders shut Kennedy out of the conference, stiffened the spines of their own party and enticed Breaux, Baucus and a few others with a few targeted tweaks to the bill.
Is this a sign of resignation to a long stretch in the minority? "Maybe," Thurber said. "These interest groups and some lawmakers may already be thinking there will be more Republicans in the Senate and the House next Congress and Bush will be reelected. And they think this is the best they're going to get."
Medicare Monstrosity (E. J. Dionne Jr, November 18, 2003, Washington Post)
The problem is that many conservatives, especially in the House, don't like Medicare as it is. They would prefer a system in which the government guaranteed everyone a certain amount of money that could be used to buy private health insurance. Ending Medicare as we know it is their long-term goal. They call this "expanding choice." [...]Now, what does any of this have to do with a prescription drug benefit? Good question. If this were only about providing a limited prescription drug benefit, Congress could have debated the best ways to cut up the $400 billion it has allocated for this purpose. The amount covers a little more than a fifth of seniors' drug costs. Logically, this limited sum would have been best used to help the poorest seniors who are not now covered by Medicaid, and the sickest -- those whose drug costs are especially high.
Instead, Republican negotiators, joined by Democratic Sens. John Breaux and Max Baucus, went behind closed doors and decided to use the public's demand for drug coverage as an opening wedge to change Medicare. The shame of it is that Republicans and Democrats in the Senate had already reached a real compromise. The bipartisan proposal, crafted in cooperation with Sen. Ted Kennedy, was inadequate. Yet it was better than this bill. It passed the Senate overwhelmingly because it left the larger Medicare issues open for real debate later.
But House conservatives weren't willing to go that far. They want medical savings accounts, a tax cut for the wealthy in disguise, and they insisted on experiments with privatization.
At some point the question may well become not whether the Democrats are going to be a minority party, but whether they're going to be the minority party. If you're going to be in the minority, why not return to your principles, as Ronald Reagan forced the GOP to do. Yes, Republicans came to accept the New Deal to some degree, but they didn't return to power until they moved far to the Right. No one in the Democratic Party seems really interested in doing something similar and becoming forthrightly the party of big government again. This would seem to set the stage for the rise of a third party, perhaps growing out of the Greens, which would appeal to the faithful by moving Left and, as it became the more serious alternative to the Republicans, eventually force moderate Democrats into the GOP. The Democrats would go the way of the Whigs.
OSCARS ALL AROUND:
AARP Support for Medicare Bill Came as Group Grew 'Younger' (SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and MILT FREUDENHEIM, 11/26/03, NY Times)
Critics question just who AARP represents, and whether the interests of the elderly — in particular those 65 and older, who are eligible for Medicare — are really being served. They do not understand how AARP, a group whose mission has long included protecting the Medicare program, could support a bill that includes experiments with private competition and a means test that will require wealthy people to pay a bigger share of their premium."We've always felt Medicare was very important and should not be means-tested and should not be privatized," Lovola Burgess, AARP's national president from 1992 to 1994, said. [...]
But with the aging of the boomers, AARP officials said, they decided they needed to pitch to younger members. They also brought younger people onto the board; at 64, Mr. Parkel said he is the youngest president AARP has ever had.
The membership age was lowered to 50 from 55 and, to shed the word "retired," the group shortened its name to AARP. This year, for the first time, Mr. Novelli said, a majority of AARP members still work.
Marilyn Moon, a former director of public policy for AARP, said it had also become politically bolder. "They want to be players in the political arena," she said. "They want to be considered partners with people in Congress," which, she said, means "working with Republicans."
That is bad news for Democrats, who have long counted on the elderly as a reliable voting constituency. Among those most angered by the endorsement was Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who has long worked with AARP on health care issues, but broke with it over the bill. "I think they didn't speak for their constituency on this one," Mr. Kennedy said.
If "fiscal conservatives" are right and this bill has no reform potential in it, the Left has done a brilliant acting job.
WORK TO DO FOR THE AXIS OF GOOD:
India and Russia have much to lose (Ramtanu Maitra, 11/25/03, Asia Times)
Both Moscow and New Delhi are worried that the Taliban are gaining ground and that, despite the firepower Washington possesses, they could be back in the saddle in Kabul. What then?According to a report by Agence France Presse, during the November summit discussions between Russian President Vladimir Putin and visiting Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the latter voiced concern over the Taliban threat in Afghanistan. "Events in Afghanistan cause anxiety; there exists a threat of the Taliban's return in one form or another," Vajpayee told Putin. The Russian president's reply, if there was one, was not reported.
But in a joint declaration following the summit, a paragraph was dedicated to Afghanistan, and the last sentence in that paragraph showed the concern: "India and the Russian Federation strongly believe that Afghanistan should emerge as a peaceful, strong prosperous, united and independent nation that would be free from external interference and living in peace and harmony with its neighbors." It is now on the record that neither India nor Russia really believes that Afghanistan, as it stands today, is emerging as a peaceful nation free from external interference. What they will do about it remains to be seen, but a review of the reasons for their mutual concern suggests some likely steps.
Perceive a threat? Get involved. Stop trying to ride our coat tails.
DISMANTLING GERGES:
Dismantling al-Qaida (Fawaz A. Gerges, November 23, 2003, Baltimore Sun)
Since Sept. 11, U.S. officials and outside analysts agree, nearly 65 percent of al-Qaida's leaders have been killed or captured. About 3,400 al-Qaida suspects have been arrested in the United States and overseas, from Tunisia to Indonesia. Important logistical networks in Spain, Italy and Germany have been dismantled.According to U.S. intelligence, most of the operatives who helped plan Sept. 11 have been accounted for, and those who have been captured have described their roles in the attacks. Al-Qaida's financial infrastructure is being steadily dismantled worldwide.
Much of the strength and growth of the organization during the 1990s resulted from its ability to operate from a geographical base with impunity, first in Sudan and then in Afghanistan. The training camps, safe houses and caves were the critical infrastructure for al-Qaida. That base is now gone. The leadership has splintered and gone underground.
Bin Laden appears to be in hiding in the remote mountains of Pakistan and no longer in regular communication with his foot soldiers or his most senior deputy, Mr. Zawahiri. The London-based Control Risks Group said last week that al-Qaida's network has been largely dismantled and is leaderless.
So, that seems fairly comforting, eh? However, Who Is Fawaz Gerges?: Another problem Mideast scholar. (Jonathan Calt Harris, July 21, 2003, National Review)
Fawaz Gerges, professor of Middle East studies at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, has emerged as a foremost media interpreter of the Middle East. He is a frequent guest of Paula Zahn on CNN, has appeared recently on The Charlie Rose Show and The Oprah Winfrey Show, and is now a regular Middle East analyst for ABC News.Gerges is typical of his field: He's yet another Middle East specialist who minimizes the threat of militant Islam while presenting the United States as a sinister force. Let's look at his thinking on four key issues. [...]
Militant Islam. Gerges consistently downplays the threat of militant Islam in general and Osama bin Laden in particular. One year before 9/11, he found that Osama bin Laden was "exceptionally isolated," and "preoccupied mainly with survival, not attacking American targets." He also ridiculed "exaggerated rhetoric" in Washington about the Bin Laden threat. Al Qaeda was no longer more than a "shadow of its former self," Gerges had the misfortune of writing, as bin Laden was "confined to Afghanistan, constantly on the run," and, "hemmed in by the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt." Not just that, but his "resources are depleting rapidly." Gerges drew the bizarre conclusion that the U.S. government must have its reasons for "inflating his importance." Six months before 9/11, Gerges publicly ridiculed what he called "the terror industry" — his term for specialists voicing concerns about militant Islam — for fomenting an "irrational fear of terrorism by focusing too much on far-fetched horrible scenarios."
Plenty of other folks agree with the analysis of Mr. Gerges, but one takes his opinion with some caution.
ENFLESHED (via Mike Daley):
Tolkien and the Gift of Mortality (Anna Mathie, November 2003, First Things)
Clearly, mortality is at the heart of this story. The subject has become a hot topic today, with Leon Kass and other "mortalists" arguing against a research culture that sees death and aging merely as foes to be overcome. If medicine succeeds in making man immortal, or even much longer-lived, the mortalists argue, much that makes human life worthwhile will be lost. Kass has used the wisdom of such ancient authors as Homer to illustrate his vision of mortality's benefits. In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien makes a Christian case for the same claim. In Tolkien's world, immortality and long life lead even the noblest creatures to a spiritual dead end, or to outright corruption.The virtues of mortality are most obvious in the great paradox of the book: that the very mortal Hobbits are the only ones who can resist the Ring's seduction and destroy it. Seemingly the most insignificant and lowliest race of all, they spend their (relatively) short lives in small pursuits. They have little use for lofty "elvish" ideas. As most characters in The Lord of the Rings remark, they are unlikely saviors of the world. In fact, their lowly mortality may be their greatest asset.
The Hobbits are firmly enfleshed. They love gardening, visiting, eating and drinking-"six meals a day (when they could get them)"-and parties and presents. Also, unlike the other lands we see, the Shire is full of children, for Tolkien tells us that Hobbits have very large families, Frodo and Bilbo being "as bachelors very exceptional." This is true of no other people in Middle Earth. The immortal Elves, of course, need few children. Arwen seems to be spoken of as one of the youngest of her people; they call her their "Evenstar." Legolas has apparently been his father's heir for aeons. The Dwarves, though mortal, are very long-lived, and they have
children so seldom that many believe they are not born, but grow from stones. They have few women, and even fewer children, as many women choose not to marry; likewise with the men, "very many also do not desire marriage, being engrossed in their crafts." The Ents seem to live more or less forever, but even they are dying out. "There have been no Entings-no children, you would say, not for a terrible long count of years," Treebeard tells the Hobbits. "The Ents gave their love to the things they met in the world, and the Entwives gave their thoughts to other things." Finally the Entwives disappeared altogether.It is not only the older and the lesser races that have ceased to bear children. Barrenness also characterizes Gondor. Once great, the city has declined. Pippin sees there many houses that have fallen empty, so that "it lacked half the men that could have dwelt at ease there." Beregond the guard tells him, "There were always too few children in the city." When Faramir, younger son of the Steward of Gondor, meets Frodo, he explains his country's decay more fully:
Death was ever present, because the Numenoreans still, as they had in their own kingdom and so lost it, hungered after endless life unchanging. Kings made tombs more splendid than houses of the living, and counted old names in the rolls of their descent dearer than the names of sons. Childless lords
sat in aged halls musing on heraldry; in secret chambers withered old men compounded strong elixirs, or in high cold towers asked questions of the stars. And the last king of the line of Anorien had no heir.Personal immortality, or the lure of it, seems to turn members of all these races in on themselves. The Elves dwell more in their memories than in the present; the long-lived mortal races turn to glorious deeds in an attempt at personal immortality. For the Elves and the Ents, the result is a kind of lethargy. For men it can be far more sinister: in Boromir and especially in Denethor, Tolkien shows the pride and despair that come from the pursuit of personal immortality through individual glory.
The Hobbits have no illusions that they can in any sense live forever. As a result, they concentrate on immediate and animal concerns. They pursue immortality only by a far humbler and more mortal path, the ordinary, impersonal, animal immortality of parenthood. It's no accident that everyone who meets the Hobbits mistakes them for children at first. Even after long acquaintance, they are to Legolas "those merry young folk" and to Treebeard "the Hobbit children." Something about the Hobbits is so lively and natural that they invariably turn the minds of others toward childhood and children.
This fertility, this willingness to pass life on to a new generation rather than grasping for "endless life unchanging," is the Hobbits' great strength, as it should likewise be mankind's proper strength. It makes them at once humbler than immortals, since they place less confidence in their own individual abilities, and more hopeful, since their own individual defeats are not the end of everything. The life that lives for its offspring may never achieve perfection, but neither is it ever utterly defeated or utterly corrupted. Some hope always remains. The Elf Legolas and the Dwarf Gimli discuss this tenacity of mortals when they first see Gondor. Gimli observes in the older stonework of the city a promise unfulfilled by the newer:
"It is ever so with the things that men begin: there is a frost in Spring or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise."
"Yet seldom do they fail of their seed," said Legolas. "And that will lie in times and places unlooked for. The deeds of Men will outlast us, Gimli."
Here and throughout the book, seed is Tolkien's symbol for the hope peculiar to mortals.
Perhaps the saddest admission we can make about Western society is that we've shifted our hope for the future from our heirs to ourselves and to the futile dream of living forever, unencumbered by dependents. What makes it such a melancholy spectacle to behold is not just the selfishness it entails but that it is a denial of our nature--indeed, a denial of Nature itself.
THE CLUMSY GIANT:
Georgia's partner in democracy: US: A decade of US aid helped bring democracy to Georgia. (Scott Peterson, 11/26/03, CS Monitor)
From Paris to Pakistan, Americans have grown used to television footage of American flags going up in flames or being trampled under foot by angry crowds.But in Georgia, a handful of American flags have been held high among the sea of opposition banners that protesters used to usher in their revolution - waved in gratitude for Washington's role in facilitating democratic change here.
"We are so grateful to the US and European Union, our friends that have supported us," says Giorgi Baramidze, a chief strategist of interim President Nino Burjanadze. "We can now teach our children how to defend democracy, using Georgia's 'Rose Revolution' as the example."
Senior US officials pushed diplomatic buttons before and throughout the crisis - in concert with Russia and others - making clear to all sides the dangers of a forceful crackdown or street violence. But untidy as the opposition's seizure of power has been, analysts say that billions in Western aid - and steady prodemocracy brow-beating - proved a key to regime change, one achieved without a shot being fired.
Iraqis' impatience, guarded hope: A week's travel through the streets of Baghdad, Fallujah, and Sulaymaniyah yields a collage of intensely held views on new freedoms and the US occupation. (David Clark Scott, 11/26/03, The Christian Science Monitor)
Muayab Jajo hasn't written a poem about the fall of Saddam Hussein. But he speaks as if he's started one."Saddam's exit is like the lid has been lifted off our coffin; the light is pouring in," says the assistant professor of English literature, standing in a packed hallway at Baghdad University. He rhapsodizes about going on the Internet without restrictions and the end of a proscribed curriculum.
"Before, in my Introduction to English Lit class, I had to teach Blake's "The Sick Rose," and "Death of a Salesman," and "Wuthering Heights." All gloomy. All about death," he says. "Now, we read Steinbeck," he beams. "I received my BA, MA, and PhD here in English literature and never once was [John] Steinbeck even mentioned."
The before and after of the Hussein era is still crystallizing for most Iraqis. This is a nation caught in the eddies of a monumental transition. Ask an Iraqi if he's better off almost eight months after the arrival of US troops, and the answers are often contradictory - and based purely on personal experience. The attacks on US soldiers, say some, reflect a simmering anger over how Iraqi civilians are abused in the hunt for what the coalition calls "noncompliant" forces. But the same Iraqis say they would shoot Hussein if they found him.
Ahmed, who didn't give his last name, embodies the collective impression of impatient yet guarded hope that this reporter took away after a week of conversations with Iraqis and homesick US soldiers.
"This will be the last war," he declares firmly. This well-educated, middle-aged Iraqi left his family's computer-controls business last month to work with a Spanish NGO. He's making less money bringing medical care to children here. "The Americans are making a lot of mistakes. They don't understand the Iraqi culture. But I want to be a part rebuilding my country at the grassroots," he says. "This is the time to make a difference."
We may not be too deft, but it's hard to see how anyone can argue we aren't trying to do the democratic thing.
WHO LET TED DRIVE?:
Another mugging on Capitol Hill (Albert Eisele, 11/26/03, The Hill)
The Democratic Party, one of the twin pillars of the American political system and a major force in Congress for much of the 20th century, died last weekend while working on Capitol Hill. It was 175 years old. The cause of death was injuries suffered from an apparent mugging while trying to rescue the New Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society.Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer said the victim’s body was found Monday in the excavation for the Capitol Visitor Center, shortly after Congress cleared the way for overhauling Medicare, the Great Society program created in 1965 that was considered the party’s most important legacy.
The time of death was uncertain, but it probably occurred between early Saturday morning and Monday afternoon, Gainer said.
Even though the body bore signs of a violent struggle, Gainer did not rule out the possibility of suicide, citing reports that the victim had been severely depressed since November 2000. [...]
Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) said he was sorry to see his party expire. But he expressed confidence that it would reconstitute itself in a few years, “as soon as Ted Kennedy and Zell Miller figure out what we stand for.”
Has our recent political history offered any more inexplicable sight than the Democrats handing credit to the GOP for a prescription drug plan that has been the centerpiece of Democratic campaigns for years now and, in the process, letting them begin the reformation of the entire Medicare program?
November 25, 2003
THE PARTY OF GOVERNANCE:
Highlights of first year of 108th U.S. Congress (Reuters, 11.25.03)
Highlights of the first year of the 108th Congress, which neared completion of its work on Tuesday: [...]MEDICARE: Congress approved the biggest overhaul of Medicare since the federal health program for the elderly and disabled was conceived in 1965 as a part of Democratic President Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society." The Republican-led House and Senate added a prescription drug benefit to the program along with free-market reforms.
TAXES: Congress passed a $350 billion, 10-year tax cut that accelerated planned income tax cuts and lowered taxes on dividends and capital gains to 15 percent. The tax cut was sought by Bush as a way to boost the economy. Lawmakers put off until early next year further action on legislation that would repeal tax subsidies for U.S. exporters that the World Trade Organization said violate international trade rules.
ABORTION: Congress passed a ban on a procedure critics call "partial birth" abortion after years of debate. If upheld by the courts, it would be the first federal restriction on an abortion procedure since the 1973 "Roe versus Wade" decision upholding abortion rights. [...]
JUDICIAL NOMINATIONS: Democrats blocked six of Bush's most conservative judicial nominees, two after an around-the-clock Senate debate during which Republicans accused them of unprecedented obstructionism. Democrats denied the charge, noting that they helped confirm 168 of Bush's other judicial candidates the past three years.
OVERTIME REGULATIONS: The administration has said that despite objections by most members of Congress it plans to implement changes in work rules that foes say would cost millions of Americans their overtime pay. Foes vow to keep battling the regulations in Congress, and labor promises to challenge them in court.
A SINGLE STANDARD:
Duking Bobby Jindal (John Tabin, 11/18/2003, American Spectator)
"If there was a racist backlash against Jindal anywhere, it would be in north Louisiana, in Duke country," Louisiana political analyst John Maginnis told Rod Dreher of National Review Online after the race. To some extent, Blanco laid the groundwork for a such a backlash herself. She dusted off her maiden name and campaigned as Kathleen Babineaux Blanco. Voters encountered the full name on the ballot, where her opponent was listed as "Bobby" Jindal, complete with quotation marks (Jindal's given name is Piyush). Appealing to tribal instincts in the only state where Frenchness is still considered a virtue, Blanco's packaging of herself was designed to make it clear who had the deeper roots in Cajun country.Such tapping of identity politics for ethnic whites is nothing particularly unusual or scandalous. The shamrock incorporated into Irish-American candidates' names is a staple of local politics across much of the Midwest and Northeast. It would be unfair to suggest that Blanco ran a racist campaign. At the same time, isn't it worth noting that the usual suspects, to whom unfairness rarely gives pause, haven't so much as raised an eyebrow?
It might be useful to file this case away as a yardstick for the future. There was a small amount of coverage of northern Louisiana's racial politics during the race -- Adam Nossiter's AP dispatch from last Friday, a set of quotes culled to make the town of Amite, Louisiana, sound as awful as possible (sample: "Really, you got a foreigner and a woman. So it's a hard choice to make"), was typical -- but the "Babineaux Blanco" appeal to "Duke country" has gone mostly unnoticed. The next time Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson or Kweisi Mfume or any similar rabble-rouser announces a whiff of racism (or "racial insensitivity"), measure the grievance cited against this non-event. The comparison might be illuminating.
Nothing wrong with playing racial politics so long as you don't try to maintain you're virginal.
WHO WOULD WISH THE EU ON A FRIEND?:
Giving Thanks for Turkey (Ariel Cohen, 11/25/2003, Tech Central Station)
The 'Muslim democrats' of the ruling AK Party will inevitably be forced to fight Islamist terror. There are two major wings of the AKP: the liberals -- who seem to dominate the party's decision-making mechanism -- and the conservatives. The latter are led by Bülent Arınç, whose group has until now supported more radical positions when it came to divisive religious issues like wearing head scarves, and relaxed guidelines for religious education. AK religious radicals do not practice violence but are sympathetic to it. As Professor Ahmet K. Han of Istanbul Bilgi University said, "these radicals are creating intolerable legitimacy for terrorism."In the aftermath of the terrorist bombings, the Turkish military, along with its traditional decision making elites, the "deep state" -- security services and state bureaucracy, the anti-EU groups, the hard-line support of Prime Minister Rauf Denktash of Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus -- are all likely to place increased political pressure on the AKP to change its reformist policies. The level of pressure on the ruling party is also likely to be exacerbated by the economic ripple effect of terrorist attacks.
The recent terror attacks will have negative economic consequences on the brittle Turkish economy, which was barely recovering after a painful recession. Phillip Rosenblatt, a U.S. attorney practicing in Istanbul says that the attacks of the past weeks came at a time when the economic stresses had just begun easing up. "With little fanfare, the current Government had put wide ranging reforms in place to align Turkey's economic, social and political legislation with those in the European Community. Turkey hopes to receive a date from the EU at the end of next year to commence negotiations on full membership. Tourism to Turkey, which is $15 billion out of a total GDP of $200 billion, is almost certainly going to be hurt, especially if there are follow-up attacks on tourist targets along the Mediterranean coast."The Bush Administration should welcome Turkey's firm commitment to fight terrorism and oppose its state sponsors. It should expand security and intelligence cooperation with the Turkish military and security services, initiating joint operations to penetrate Al Qaeda and other radical Islamist terrorist organizations.
Turkish and U.S. security agencies should jointly conduct an audit of potential terror targets, especially on and around the Bosphorus Straits and Incirlik US air base.
Finally, the U.S. should support Turkish economic, legal, and democratic reforms aimed at joining the EU, including declaring a date certain for Turkish accession to the EU by the end of 2004.
Why would we do that to an ally? Offer them their own bilateral free trade agreement and multilateral military pact (including Israel, Russia, India, etc.) instead.
MORE:
After the bombs: Maureen Freely grew up in Istanbul. After Friday's terrorist attacks she caught the first plane back - and found the city bloodied but defiant (Maureen Freely, November 25, 2003, The Guardian)
This was Istanbul's September 11. They thought they were safe from the war on terror because they thought all Muslims were brothers. Now they know otherwise, and are unified in their condemnation of the terrorists, who cannot be "true Muslims". The fact that the terrorists staged this attack in the last days of Ramadan has added to their outrage. But no one is in any doubt why the city has become a terrorist target. How its residents respond to their new status depends very much on how much support they get (or fail to get) from the allies who dragged them into this. As one shopkeeper put it, "Surely, now that we have suffered this, the EU must open its arms to us." If it doesn't, or if the US gives the impression, as it has sometimes done in the past, that it is taking Turkey's "sacrifice" for granted, the sense of betrayal could be huge.But right now, everyone's mind is on the present, on trying to survive. By that I do not mean that people are avoiding danger, but that they are quite adamantly refusing to let danger change the way they live. And God only knows they have had practice. In the past three years, they have been playing this game so much they have hardly had time to breathe. Begin with the earthquake, in which the official death toll was 18,000 but may well have been twice that. Continue with the crippling recession, which has yet to ease, and the crimewave that has followed in its wake. Even so, this has remained an exemplary city. To visit Istanbul over the past few years has been to see friends look after each other in ways that we in the privatised west have long forgotten. According to the local code of conduct, the most dangerous thing is solitude, the next worst thing is to sit at home behind closed doors. The worse things get, the more important it is to go out with your friends and do whatever you have to do to laugh adversity away.
"THROW A FINGER IN THE AIR":
Yemen Arrests Mastermind of Attacks on USS Cole (Fox News, November 25, 2003)
One of the top Al Qaeda members in Yemen was captured by security forces Tuesday, the Interior Ministry said, calling him a suspected mastermind of the homicide bombings of the USS Cole and a French oil tanker off the country's coast.Mohammed Hamdi al-Ahdal was arrested after Yemeni forces surrounded his hide-out west of the capital, San'a, the Interior Ministry said in a statement carried on the official SABA news agency. [...]
A U.S. counterterrorism official in Washington confirmed al-Ahdal's capture. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he had been among the top 20 Al Qaeda figures at large.
Al-Ahdal played a role in the terror group's finances, weapons smuggling and operational planning and was well-connected to other extremists in Persian Gulf countries, the official said.
In neighboring Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, security forces foiled a planned terror attack in the capital Tuesday, killing two militants and seizing a car bomb ready to detonate on the first day of festivities marking the end of Ramadan, the Saudi government said.
If only Howard Dean, or someone else who was concentrating on al Qaeda, were president, we'd be capturing guys like this...oops, never mind.
EVOLUTION OF THE REVOLUTION:
Iran's hard-liners mourn ascendancy of secular influence: Even if they win the next election, many see change cannot be undone (Robert Collier, November 24, 2003, San Francisco Chronicle)
Throughout the country, the religious hard-liners that have ruled since the 1979 revolution are no longer as wolfishly aggressive as they used to be, and that saddens people like Montazer Shubbar.The 22-year-old medical student at Tehran University is a local leader of the Basij, the religious paramilitary organization that for years has acted as shock troops to intimidate democracy activists, crack heads and break up street demonstrations.
But these days, Shubbar laments, things have become too lax, and even the religious establishment doesn't have the backbone to crack down.
"Women wear their hijab way back, showing most of their heads," he said, referring to the Muslim shawl that should cover the hairline. "Young people play rock music. They insult the velayat-e faqih (Iran's concept of absolute power for top religious authorities) and the worst thing is that we can no longer act like we could before to stop them."
Surrounded by dusty piles of religious leaflets in the six-room cluster of offices at the medical school where the Basij monitors students' comings and goings, Shubbar sighs: "Even if we come back to power, we won't be able to change anything."
Conservatives are widely predicted to win a major victory in February's parliamentary elections, retaking control from reformers loyal to President Mohammad Khatami whose public support has evaporated because of political deadlock. It is expected that millions of disillusioned pro-reform voters will stay home, driving abstention to near-record highs, while the highly organized conservative machine brings its voters to the polls.
But the pace of social change -- mainly driven by the people themselves, not the government -- has gone so far that some say the reform process will continue even if the rightists regain power. Developments such as the Internet and the proliferation of illegal satellite TV dishes have irrevocably changed people's views on lifestyle issues such as the hijab, dating, music and freedom of speech.
If only they had the vision to do so, the clerisy could manage reform so that the necessary liberalization of government and economics doesn't necessarily destroy the good aspects of the faith.
CRUSADE IN EUROPE:
Fervor and optimism: Scholars are detecting a growing interest in spiritual matters in France and throughout Europe (Uwe Siemon-Netto, 11/29/03, World)
Many Americans think of France as hopelessly godless, yet many young Catholics and Protestants have the fervor and optimism of Rev. LeBlanc. Among
Protestants, the French Reformed Church is no longer a hotbed of extreme left-wing agitation. The new crop of pastors is once again proclaiming the
gospel without political frills. Evangelical congregations are starting up at the rate of one every nine days.France still appears outwardly post-Christian, but a new groundswell is making itself felt. New Bible translations and commentaries are hot-ticket items. Theological issues are creeping into more and more dinner discussions. Catechism classes for grownups have become so popular that some churches now have waiting lists. The influential publication Le Figaro recently ran an eight-part series about the reemergence of Christian intellectuals, who for the last half century had been hiding in cerebral catacombs. The Roman Catholic Church lacks priests--only 25,000 are left in a country of 60 million--yet committed lay leaders have taken over many tasks once performed by clergymen.
The French surge has its counterpart in other European countries.
We've mentioned before that the thought of African evangelicals re-Christianizing France is simply too delicious.
66 MORE YEARS:
Consumer confidence rises in November to highest level in more than a year (Adam Geller, 11/25/2003, Associated Press)
Steady improvements in the job market helped push consumer confidence in November to its highest level in more than a year, a private research group reported Tuesday.After rebounding last month, the Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index rose again to 91.7 in November, up from a revised 81.7 in October. The reading, the highest since September 2002, was well ahead of the 85.0 projection by analysts. [...]
Perceptions of the current economy improved, Franco said, a sign that ''consumers believe a slow but sure labor market turnaround is underway. The rise in expectations is a signal that consumers will end this year much more upbeat than when the year began.''
The strong one-month rise in the confidence reading shows that consumers are taking notice of recent reports on the nation's improving employment situation, economists said.
And if you want to see why Democrats are acting so hysterical, check out the subhead on this one: Economy grows at 8.2 percent pace in third quarter: Strongest showing since 1984 (Jeannine Aversa, 11/25/2003, Associated Press)
RARE COMMON SENSE ON NCLBA:
No Child Left Behind Act: Facts and Fiction (Jay Mathews, November 11, 2003,
Washington Post)
The No Child Left Behind Act, in its second year, is the most ambitious federal effort to raise achievement in public schools in 38 years. It is also one of the most complicated education laws passed by Congress, leading to a host of myths and misinterpretations. Here are 10 statements about the law that experts say are heard often but are not firmly anchored in reality.
Reality? The critics couldn't find it with a map.
MORE MYTH BUSTING:
The Big Lie in Hollywood: The Hollywood Ten Were Not Victims But Villains (Michael Berliner, November 24, 2003, Capitalism)
Lie Number One: By requiring them to testify and then jailing them for refusing, the House Un-American Activities Committee violated the First Amendment, free speech rights of the Hollywood Ten. The truth: No one interfered with their freedom of speech. In fact, freedom of speech was not even an issue. HUAC was investigating a question of fact, the fact being membership in the Communist Party. The Committee did not ask anyone whether he believed in communism, but asked only whether he had joined the Communist Party. By joining the Party (an undisputed fact), the filmmakers were not merely making an ideological statement but were agreeing to take orders to commit actions -- criminal and treasonable actions, since the Party, and the Soviet government it served, was openly dedicated to the overthrow of the U.S. government. Therefore, there was a national security reason for the Committee to determine membership in the Party. In notes to herself prior to testifying as a "Friendly Witness" in 1947, Ayn Rand wrote that "Under American law, there is no such thing as a political crime; a man's ideas do not constitute a crime, no matter what they are. And precisely by the same principle, a man's ideas -- no matter what they are -- cannot serve as a justification for a criminal action and do not give him freedom to commit such actions on the ground that they represent his personal belief." Legal issues aside, there is an obscene irony in the Communist writers complaining that their right to freedom of speech was violated, since that right was precisely what the Communist Party was out to destroy.Lie Number Two: The Hollywood Ten were persecuted by being refused jobs. The truth: They were denied employment by executives who were exercising the right to hire whom they wished -- a fundamental right in a free society. It was within the employers' right (and self-interest) not to hire writers who wanted to use their positions to eliminate all private property and private business. What the writers wanted -- in refusing to testify -- was the "right" to hide their ideology on the grounds that, were it known, they'd be fired. In other words, they wanted the "right" to defraud their employers. In a free society, there is a private right to boycott (which the Hollywood leftists used against hundreds of anti-Communists). The right to freedom of speech prohibits the government from interfering with the expression of ideas, and that means that an employer cannot be forced to propagate ideas he's opposed to.
Lie Number Three (the biggest lie): The blacklisted writers were humanitarian idealists. The truth: Their "ideal" was the sacrifice of the individual to the collective, a moral viewpoint endorsed by Marxism and put into practice by the Soviet government. It was an "ideal" that destroyed millions of human lives. The Communist Party championed by the Hollywood Ten was the same Party that -- under the leadership of Joseph Stalin -- exterminated millions of peasants in the Ukraine. The "persecuted" writers dutifully paid their dues to the Party whose reign of terror included murdering or banishing to Siberia anyone who remotely threatened its power. The Hollywood Ten littered their movie scripts with Soviet propaganda, the same Soviets who signed a non-aggression pact with Adolph Hitler. While the Hollywood Communists and apologists talked of peace, brotherhood, and workers' rights, their spiritual masters were perpetrating what is arguably the most murderous tyranny in world history, its victims estimated at 20-40 million people -- not including the tens of millions relegated to a sub-human existence. Far from being pitiable victims, the Hollywood Ten and their followers have the blood of millions on their hands.
A.K.A., DEATH TO FLYING THINGS:
Psychophysics: How fielders arrive in time to catch the ball (Peter McLeod, NICK REED & ZOLTAN DIENES , 11/20/03, Nature)
Tracking an object moving in three dimensions, whether as an insect pursuing a mate on the wing or as a batsman aiming to hit an approaching ball, provides the spatial and temporal information needed to intercept it. Here we show how fielders use such tracking signals to arrive at the right place in time to catch a ball — they run so that their angle of gaze elevation to the ball increases at a decreasing rate while their horizontal gaze angle to the ball increases at a constant rate (unless the distance to be run is small). Allowing the horizontal angle to increase minimizes the acceleration that the fielder must achieve to reach the interception point at the same time as the ball.
Spooky--that's exactly how Mickey Rivers describes catching a fly ball.
NOT QUITE:
Best of the Web Today - November 21, 2003
The crybabies at the Council on American Islamic Relations say they're being persecuted in the funny papers. At issue is the Nov. 10 B.C. strip, drawn by Johnny Hart. The first panel features a man walking uphill, approaching an outhouse. Then the word SLAM appears, and the second panel shows the outhouse sitting atop the hill. The third panel has a cartoon bubble, as the man inside the outhouse says, "Is it just me, or does it stink in here?"That's kind of stupid, but why would it be anti-Islamic? The Washington Post explains:
The first public questioning of this cartoon arose in a washingtonpost.com chat Tuesday, when a reader noted that the cartoon seemed to make no sense, except metaphorically. The reader noted that the cartoon contained six crescent moons--three in the sky, and three on the outhouse door--and wondered if this might have been a veiled slur on the world's 1 billion practicing Muslims.
The CAIR e-mail mentioned the moons, and also noted that Hart had drawn a prominent sound effect--"SLAM"--between two frames to accompany the closing of the outhouse door. The SLAM was stacked vertically, in the shape of an I, and could be seen to signify "Islam." The cartoon appeared on the 15th day of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month.
First they came for B.C., then they came for the Wizard of Id . . .
Like everyone, we're big fans of Best of the Web, but that's just disingenuous. Based on Mr. Hart's own beliefs (see below) it is entirely reasonable to read the strip as a criticism of Islam. The question is whether it's unfair, not whether that's its intent.
MORE:
Johnny Hart: Not Caving In: The cartoon characters of "B.C." reflect their imaginative creator, Johnny Hart. Especially his unapologetic faith in God. (Joe Maxwell, Christian Reader, March/April 1997)
Today, the gray-haired "gag man" (his own description) draws a caveman with ever-growing convictions. Hart believes the Lord put him into the cartooning world for a reason. Every prudent chance he gets, he takes advantage of it.On Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter—and many days between—Hart's characters offer messages reflecting the cartoonist's own firm belief in the gospel message. "I find myself trying to put the gospel into practically every strip I create without being obvious about it," he says.
Hart says he wants to create a "spasm" in his reader, putting a new twist on an old truth. [...]
In many ways, Hart is a preacher, only his congregation absorbs his message via America's mainstream newspapers as he brings light into the often dark daily news. People who don't read the Bible or attend church services often do read Johnny's comics.
He was gratified when a woman wrote to say that a "Wizard of Id" strip kept her from committing suicide. "The strip had no real mind-jarring message," says Hart, "so I just knew that [it was] God [who] had used it to reach that precious soul."
MORE: (via ef brown):
An open-and-shut case of hypocrisy (Mark Steyn, 25/11/2003, Daily Telegraph)
[W]hile Islamic lobby groups and the most distinguished semiotics professors in America are analysing Johnny Hart's outhouse joke, the European Union's Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia has decided to shelve its report on the rise of anti-Semitism on the Continent. The problem, as reported in The Telegraph, is that the survey had found that "many anti-Semitic incidents were carried out by Muslim and pro-Palestinian groups", and so a "political decision" was taken not to publish it because of "fears that it would increase hostility towards Muslims".Let's go back over that slowly and try not to get a headache: the EU's main concern about an actual epidemic of hate crimes against Jews is that it could provoke a hypothetical epidemic of hate crimes against Muslims. You couldn't ask for a better illustration of the uselessness of these thought-police bodies: they're fine for chastising insufficiently guilt-ridden whites in an ongoing reverse-minstrel show of cultural self-abasement, but they don't have the stomach for confronting real racism. A tolerant society is so reluctant to appear intolerant, it would rather tolerate intolerance.
FROM THE ARCHIVES--THE RAINBOW SIGN:
Psychiatric Association Debates Lifting Pedophilia Taboo (Lawrence Morahan, June 11, 2003, CNSNews.com)In a step critics charge could result in decriminalizing sexual contact between adults and children, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) recently sponsored a symposium in which participants discussed the removal of pedophilia from an upcoming edition of the psychiatric manual of mental disorders.
Psychiatrists attending an annual APA convention May 19 in San Francisco proposed removing several long-recognized categories of mental illness - including pedophilia, exhibitionism, fetishism, transvestism, voyeurism and sadomasochism - from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
Most of the mental illnesses being considered for removal are known as "paraphilias."
Psychiatrist Charles Moser of San Francisco's Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality and co-author Peggy Kleinplatz of the University of Ottawa presented conferees with a paper entitled "DSM-IV-TR and the Paraphilias: An Argument for Removal."
People whose sexual interests are atypical, culturally forbidden or religiously proscribed should not necessarily be labeled mentally ill, they argued.Different societies stigmatize different sexual behaviors, and since the existing research could not distinguish people with paraphilias from so-called "normophilics," there is no reason to diagnose paraphilics as either a distinct group or psychologically unhealthy, Moser and Kleinplatz stated.
The combination of moral relativism and increased life expectancy has created a unique problem for modern man: we now live long enough that the things we find most reprehensible come to be socially acceptable in our own lifetimes. In a few years people will spit the term "paedophobe" at us with the same venom as they now use the term "homophobe" and we''ll be considered aberrant for thinking that sex between adults and children is evil.
THE LEFT'S FAVORITE CULTURE WARRIOR:
Powell defends US policy on Aids: American Secretary of State Colin Powell has said the US is making a greater contribution to fighting HIV/Aids than any other country. (BBC, 11/17/03)
The US secretary of state also rejected suggestions that it was unrealistic to allocate one-third of the money to programmes that promoted abstinence from sex.He said: "Abstinence works, we know it works. If you're not actually transmitting the disease through sexual conduct, the disease will not be transmitted."
However, Mr Powell stressed that sexual abstinence was being promoted as part of a comprehensive approach to HIV and Aids that also included education, promotion of safe sex and condoms, treatment programmes and research into a cure.
"Abstinence is a good thing to teach young people before they're ready for the responsibilities of sexual activity," he said.
Colin, they hardly knew ye...
PRESSURE COOKER:
Hall of Fame Pitcher Warren Spahn Dies (Bart Barnes, , November 25, 2003, Washington Post)
His first major league season was in 1942, when he broke in with the Braves in Boston and made four uninspired starts. He was sent down to the minor leagues by manager Casey Stengel, reportedly for refusing to brush back Pee Wee Reese of the Brooklyn Dodgers.He spent the next three years in an Army uniform, fighting in World War II in Europe. More than a half century later, Mr. Spahn was asked at a news conference in his native Buffalo if he'd ever felt more pressure than pitching in the World Series.
"Well, there was the Battle of the Bulge," Mr. Spahn answered, according to the Buffalo News. His Army service included duty with an engineering unit that worked on the bridge at Remagen, the last bridge left standing over the Rhine River, and he was awarded a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.
After the war, pitching major league baseball seemed easy, he said. "After what I went through overseas, I never thought of anything I was told to do in baseball as hard work. You get over feeling like that when you spend days on end sleeping in frozen tank tracks in enemy-threatened territory. The Army taught me something about challenges and about what's important and what isn't," Mr. Spahn was quoted as saying in Gary Bedingfield's "Baseball in World War II."
That seems a compelling reason for the draft--to teach an ever more juvenile citizenry what really matters in life.
FIGHTING FOR THE CRUMBS:
FLORIDA (3/9 primary): Lieberman Leads Dem Primary Matchup; Bush Leads WH '04 Dems By At Least 20 (Hotline, 11/25/03)
General Election Matchups
Bush 56% Bush 59% Bush 56% Bush 58% Bush 57%
Lieberman 36 Dean 36 Clark 33 Gephardt 36 Kerry 34[Pollster Brad] Coker said Bush's 54% "approval on conduct of the war" and 52% "confidence on the economy" mean "it will be very difficult for the Democrats to win in Florida" in '04 (Tallahassee Democrat, 11/25).
President Bush basically can contest the Pacific Coast states and then from Iowa to the East without having to worry about any state to in between or to the South.
RAISE THE PIE HIGHER:
Q3 economic growth revised up to 8.2% rate (Reuters, 11/25/03)
Robust business and consumer spending powered the U.S. economy ahead even more than first thought in the third quarter, the government said Tuesday in a report that showed corporate profits growing at the fastest rate in more than a decade.Gross domestic product, or GDP, shot up at an 8.2% annual rate, more than double second quarter's 3.3% gain and the strongest quarterly advance in 19-1/2 years.
A month ago, the Commerce Department said GDP advanced at a 7.2% rate. Its revision surpassed Wall Street economists' forecasts for a 7.8% gain.
Well, those who were skeptical about the economic were right that they were wrong. They were just spectacularly wrong themselves about which direction the error lay in.
HAND THEM A WOODEN STAKE:
Fury as France and Germany Escape Rule Breach Punishment (Geoff Meade, 11/25/03, PA News)
A decision not to punish France and Germany for consistently breaking single currency rules triggered a political backlash today. [...]Conservative MEP and finance spokesman in the European Parliament Theresa Villiers said:
“Surely this must be the end of the Stability Pact.
“Why should any country comply with it, when the two biggest Euroland economies are flouting it and getting off scot-free?
“This is also another blow to the credibility of the euro. The Pact was billed as an essential way to make the euro work – now it is coming apart at the seams.”
European Liberal Democrat leader Graham Watson MEP said:
“This shabby deal will endanger the ratification of Europe’s new constitution. Citizens may well ask what is the point of agreeing new rules to run the European Union if the big countries will ride roughshod over them when the going gets tough.”
“The European Parliament will want to conduct a thorough post-mortem on this sorry affair. The Commission has attempted to apply (the Pact) but has been overridden by self-interested member states. The onus now will be on the governments which have killed off the Stability Pact to create a workable framework to ensure the future stability of Europe’s currency.”
Those transnational institutions seem so wonderful when they're all in your mind, but give them substance and no powerful nation will ever bind itself by them.
IVIED WALLS DO NOT A PRISON MAKE, NOR BOOKSHELVES A CAGE:
Feeling Stuck? (Chronicle of Higher Education, Career Talk, 11/21/2003)
Question: I've been at my campus for many years and I'm tenured. But I'm not happy. The job isn't what it was when I took it. Everything is different now -- standards have risen, and if my job was advertised today, I wouldn't be competitive for it. I can't see myself languishing here for years in what I've come to find a toxic environment, but I don't think I could find a job with equivalent salary and benefits, which are barely enough to sustain us as things are. [...]Mary: If you're an older faculty member in a tenured position that makes you unhappy, you may have more reason to hold back before abandoning academe.... Sometimes you are truly "stuck" and it may be the best decision to stay in your tenured job, do your best, and leave your work at the office at the end of the day. Don't take a bad work situation home and brood. Find something that will provide some joy in your life!...
Julie: If you can't move (at least for the time being), you have several options: You can start to distance yourself emotionally from your job ...
We know people in academe who are unhappy with their work but unable to leave their jobs, for a variety of reasons. We would like to end by listing some of the things those people have done to keep themselves going:
Worked to preserve a local watershed.
Raised show dogs.
Taken up aikido.
Taught aerobics and Pilates fitness programs.
Joined a rock band.
Participated in all kinds of writing.
Researched and written family histories.
They've developed other interests and taken steps on their own to enhance their lives. You can, too.
Of course, the taxpayers, the ultimate source of the salaries of tenured professors, will not object if professors devote themselves to aikido, raising show dogs, and local political activism; nor will young would-be professors, or students, mind. So just follow this career advice and everyone will be happy!
EXCEPTIONALER:
Refuting the Cynics (DAVID BROOKS, 11/25/03, NY Times)
[A]round the middle of the 1980's, the U.S. and Europe started to diverge. The American work ethic shifted, so that the average American now works 350 hours a year — 9 or 10 weeks — longer than the average European.American fertility rates bottomed out around 1985, and began rising. Native-born American women now have almost two children on average, while the European rate is 1.4 children per woman and falling.
Economically, the comparisons are trickier, but here too there is divergence. The gap between American and European G.D.P. per capita has widened over the past two decades, and at the moment American productivity rates are surging roughly 5 percent a year.
The biggest difference is that over the past two decades the United States has absorbed roughly 20 million immigrants. This influx of people has led, in the short term, to widening inequality and higher welfare costs as the immigrants are absorbed, but it also means that the U.S. will be, through our lifetimes, young, ambitious and energetic.
Working off U.N. and U.S. census data, Bill Frey, the indispensable University of Michigan demographer, projects that in the year 2050 the median age in the United States will be 35. The median age in Europe will be 52. The implications of that are enormous.
Well, the divergence began with the differences between the American and the French Revolutions, but the rest is valid.
SINCE COPERNICUS:
How Nietzsche Found Jesus: Was the antichrist really religious? (Stephen N. Williams, November/December 2003, Books & Culture)
What if we need to correct our account of Nietzsche? What if the literature has avoided or missed important and positive things he has to say about religion, even about Christianity? What if Nietzsche found a friend in Jesus? Alistair Kee, of the University of Edinburgh, strikes out in the direction of answering these questions in his provocative book, Nietzsche Against the Crucified.Seven chapters conduct us quickly through some of the major Nietzschean themes. God is dead and, with God, Truth. Morality is gone and aesthetics is applied physiology. Christianity offers the ultimate in decadent resistance to a proper will-to-power. Then comes a hinge chapter, dealing with Nietzsche's thought on eternal recurrence. Here, Kee's thesis that Nietzsche is a fundamentally religious thinker, comes into its own, as he interprets this notoriously controverted teaching as a sign that the numinous mantle of mystical religious experience had settled on his subject.
The way is opened for some reassessments. Nietzsche was a man of faith, a philosophical faith akin to religious faith. He even passes the christological test. For Nietzsche not only called Jesus the noblest human being‚ he meant it. He not only said that, from the earliest times, Jesus'
followers had corrupted his message‚ he meant that, too, but, more significant still, he thought it important actually to say it. Why bother to do so unless you want to make a point of rehabilitating Jesus?Nor does Nietzsche embrace a free and independent human Jesus in the context of sheer godlessness. There is a concept of deity worth entertaining, the holy storm-God Jehovah, wreathed not in the holiness of moral goodness or of aesthetic beauty, but in a dreadful uncanniness. Believe in him or not, at least he would be a worthwhile character, president of an order that is neither benign nor moral, an order adequately represented in religion only by the God beyond good and evil that Nietzsche discerns in parts of the Old Testament. Cut it as you will, you will therefore find a religious thinker, if you take Nietzsche at his word. Indeed, Nietzsche is re-opening the question of religion for us‚ and on terms that are counter to the postmodernism foisted on him by familiar contemporary description. The bottom line is that Nietzsche experienced some kind of revelation that led him to perceive the natural order as religiously colored at its very roots. His is a knowing form of natural, pagan religion.
My account is cryptic, but it just summarizes where the author more or less leaves his readers, with swirling waters surrounding Nietzsche's own position. Kee bequeaths to us the task of ordering our religious life and constructing our religious thought with the aid of Nietzsche's insights. This book is an example of those projects that seek both to separate the inspiration of Jesus from what later Christianity has made of him and to requisition the thoughts of a putative opponent of religious faith for the service of religion.
It's all too easy to take "God is dead" as a shout of triumph, rather than to hear the undertone of lament that Nietzsche may have intended, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemical Tract: Third Essay: What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals? (Friedrich Nietzsche, 1887, Translated by Ian Johnston):
Isn't it the case that since Copernicus the self-diminution of human beings and their will to self-diminution have made inexorable progress? Alas, the faith in their dignity, their uniqueness, their irreplaceable position in the chain of being has gone. The human being has become an animal, not a metaphorical animal, but absolutely and unconditionally—the one who in his earlier faith was almost God ("child of God," "God-man" [Gottmensch]) . . . Since Copernicus human beings seem to have reached an inclined plane. They're now rolling at an accelerating rate past the mid-point. But where to? Into nothingness? Into the "penetrating sense of their own nothingness"? . . .Well, then, wouldn't this be precisely the way into the old ideal? . . .All scientific knowledge (and not just astronomy, whose humbling and destructive effects Kant understood remarkably well, "it destroys my importance". . . )—all scientific knowledge, natural as well as unnatural (the name I give to the self-criticism of knowledge) is nowadays keen to talk human beings out of the respect they used to have for themselves, as if that was nothing more than a bizarre arrogance about themselves. In this matter we could even say scientific knowledge has its own pride, its characteristically acrid form of stoical ataraxia [indifference], this laboriously attained self-contempt for human beings as its ultimate, most serious demand for respect, for the right to hold itself erect on its own (and, in fact, that's justified, for the one who despises is always still one more person who "has not forgotten respect" . . .). Does that really work against the ascetic ideal? Do people really think in all seriousness (as theologians imagined for quite a while) that somehow Kant's victory over dogmatic theological concepts ("God," "Soul," "Freedom," "Immortality") succeeded in breaking up that ideal?
In asking that question, it's not our concern at the moment whether Kant himself had anything like that in mind. What is certain is that all sorts of transcendentalists since Kant have once more won the game. They've become emancipated from the theologians. What a stroke of luck! Kant showed them a secret path by which they could now, on their own initiative and with the most sincere scientific decency, follow their "hearts' desires". And similarly who could now hold anything against the agnostics, if they, as admirers of what is inherently unknown and secret, worship the question mark itself as their God? (Xaver Doudan once spoke of the ravages brought on by "l'habitude d'admirer l'inintelligible au lieu de rester tout simplement dans l'inconnu" [the habit of admiring the unintelligible instead of simply staying in the unknown]; he claimed that the ancients had not done this). If everything human beings "know" does not satisfy their wishes and, beyond that, contradicts them and makes human beings shudder, what a divine excuse to be allowed to seek the blame for this not in "wishes" but in "knowledge"! . . . "There is no knowledge. Consequently, there is a God"—what a new elegantia syllogismi [syllogistic excellence]! What a triumph of the ascetic ideal!
Indeed, who that cares about the dignity of Man, as Nietzsche unquestionably did, could celebrate such self-dimunition?
KURDISTAN, SHI'ASTAN & ?:
The Three-State Solution (LESLIE H. GELB, 11/25/03, NY Times)
President Bush's new strategy of transferring power quickly to Iraqis, and his critics' alternatives, share a fundamental flaw: all commit the United States to a unified Iraq, artificially and fatefully made whole from three distinct ethnic and sectarian communities. That has been possible in the past only by the application of overwhelming and brutal force. [...]The only viable strategy...may be to correct the historical defect and move in stages toward a three-state solution: Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south.
Almost immediately, this would allow America to put most of its money and troops where they would do the most good quickly — with the Kurds and Shiites. The United States could extricate most of its forces from the so-called Sunni Triangle, north and west of Baghdad, largely freeing American forces from fighting a costly war they might not win. American officials could then wait for the troublesome and domineering Sunnis, without oil or oil revenues, to moderate their ambitions or suffer the consequences.
This is okay as far as it goes, but raises the question of why the Kurds and Shi'ites should tolerate a Sunni state in their midst, rather than driving them south into Saudi Arabia and/or West to Syria.
I AIN'T NO FORTUYNATE ONE:
Judging Michael Jackson and ourselves (Cal Thomas, November 25, 2003, Townhall)
If Michael Jackson did, in fact, as it is alleged, have sex with a minor boy, what's wrong with that? The question is not meant to be cute; I am serious. If a male child was fondled or sodomized by Michael Jackson, why shouldn't he and the boy be allowed the orientation of their choice? If you disagree, who are you to impose your morality on them?Are you outraged by this? Do you think we have gone too far? Not far enough, some say. Yesterday's unacceptable (divorce, premarital sex, abortion, homosexuality, group sex, domestic partnerships and, soon, same-sex marriage) are today's acceptable. It's just a matter of conditioning. Groups exist that promote adult-child sex. Expect an alliance - composed of academics, theologians and cultural commentators - to ram this home through the media, crushing whatever resistance remains.
Nothing shames us. In pursuit of freedom we have embraced license and now licentiousness, throwing off all restraint.
Folk on the libertarian Right will be quick to protest, but it's worth recalling that one of their icons, Pim Fortuyn, favored exactly this sort of thing.
MORE:
Jacko's the sick king of industry that preys on kids (Stanley Crouch, Nov. 25, 2003, Jewish World Review)
[P]edophilia is the essence of the pop music industry, where children are exploited in every possible way by products arriving in the form of lyrics or images or dehumanizing perspectives.Our children are made hungry for things they cannot digest. Their narcissism is used against them, which is the exact technique of the pedophile who says to the child that he or she - unlike all those other kids! - is mature enough to be treated like an adult and to do things that other kids either don't understand or are too lame to appreciate.
Our children are told that hostility, vulgarity, shock and sex are the weapons that best express their freedom from the adults who - hidden inside the industry like the Wizard of Oz - are setting them up to consume even more demeaning products.
From any angle, Michael Jackson is no longer the man in the mirror. He is now the mirror itself.
THE GOVERNOR:
The politics of Medicare: GOP sees victory; Dems await backlash (David S. Broder and Ceci Connolly, 11/25/03, The Washington Post
With the Senate moving toward final congressional approval of his Medicare prescription-drug bill, President Bush has made a bid to break the historic political alliance between Democrats and senior citizens — a feat that could change the dynamics of next year's election and perhaps long-term partisan patterns in this country.But some Democrats, reeling from defeat on an issue they long saw as their own, said a voter backlash against a measure they consider deeply flawed could still work to their benefit. [...]
During the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush introduced a plan to subsidize drug purchases for low-income seniors and promised to "make prescription drugs available and affordable for every senior who needs them." Republican ads, backed by extensive independent spending by pharmaceutical companies and business associations, were credited with reducing Democratic opponent Al Gore's advantage on the Medicare issue.
"This is another core Democratic issue that will be in the Bush column come Election Day, alongside education," said Republican strategist Scott Reed.
"It is a big short-term victory for Bush," said Democratic consultant Anita Dunn. "He can say he has actually done something on domestic policy and health care."
Regardless of what one thinks of any of the many things he's done, Mr. Bush has certainly demonstrated that it is possible to govern America, even when it's as narrowly divided and bitterly partisan as it has been for the last 20+ years. Think back to December 2000 and the numerous predictions that he'd find it impossible to do anything significant because of bad blood over the election, losing the popular vote and only having a one vote margin in the Senate and then look at the list of things he's achieved--partial birth abortion ban, multiple tax cuts, Education reform, Free Trade authority, etc., not to mention two wars. If he does, as he seems intent on doing, run on a significant agenda for the second term (entitlement, tort, and tax reform) and works to increase the GOP margin in the Senate, he's well on his way to being the most important president since FDR, which was what his supporters dreamed he could be and why they stuck with him over John MCCain, who would have won easily in 2000, but was such a mainstream politician that he'd have made not a dent on the nation.
PECK VS. THE PACK (via Mike Daley):
Reading his reviews, there is a sense that Peck's writing is motored by a rage that has little to do with literature. There are clues in his biography. He grew up on Long Island, the son of an alcoholic plumber. His mother died in mysterious circumstances when he was three and he has put it on record that 'violence' may have had something to do with it. When his father discovered his son was gay, he beat him up. Peck's father is important here, if only because his latest book is a 'memoir' about his father's childhood (What We Lost, published in February by Granta). Dale Peck emerges as a fighter with the evangelical zeal of a Jehovah's
Witness for whom the End of the Novel is Nigh. He was educated at Drew University in New Jersey and took a creative writing course at Columbia. He was talent-spotted as a critic by James Wood, who commissioned him to write in the back pages of the New Republic, back pages that were to make front-page news.
Peck's admirers value him because of the scale of his ambitions as a critic. There is an almost suicidal valour about seeing off so many writers with such assurance. And Peck is as scathing about the fiction of the past as he is of the present. The modernist tradition, he writes, 'began with the diarrhoeic flow of words that is Ulysses, continued on through the incomprehensible ramblings of late Faulkner and the sterile inventions of Nabokov, and then burst into full, foul life in the ridiculous dithering of Barth, Hawkes and Gaddis, and the reductive cardboard constructions of
Barthelme, and the word-by-word wasting of a talent as formidable as Pynchon's; and finally broke apart like a cracked sidewalk beneath the weight of the stupid - just plain stupid - tomes of DeLillo'. In a single sentence: class dismissed.
There's a far simpler, and more coherent, explanation than his being the gay son of a plumber: he's right.
MORE:
Critics on Reviews (Mary Gannon, March 2003, Poets & Writers)
It wouldn’t be a stretch to call book reviewing a labor of love, except for the fact that it is so often a vilified profession. Reviewers are accused of having agendas and of cronyism, are called show-offs and career-killers. It’s a lot of heat to take for some free books, a few bucks, and a byline.So what’s the draw?
“I think a lot of people have this itch to be in something that might be called the cultural conversation. [Reviewing] is one of the most direct paths in,” says Sven Birkerts, whose reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Esquire, and the Boston Globe, among other publications. “You really are interacting with authors and readers. You’re playing the culture sport, and there’s a lot of satisfaction in doing that.”
For Laura Miller, Salon senior writer and biweekly columnist for the New York Times Book Review, the appeal of writing reviews is the appeal of writing in general—“getting a chance to work out what you think and to put your point of view out there as part of the big conversation. And it’s great to be able to read all these books that I might not have the time to read otherwise if it weren’t my profession.”
Of course, not all books provide a singular reading experience, but there’s the thrill of finding those that do. “When you come across that sense of amazing discovery you think, ‘Boy, all those mediocre books—it was worth slogging through them to get to this,’” says Jonathan Yardley, Dirda’s colleague at the Washington Post Book World and also a Pulitzer Prize winner in criticism.
Dirda says that the happiest hours of his life are those six hours in the evenings when he writes his weekly piece for Book World. The act of writing and the idea that his work serves “to keep reading going, to keep the excitement of books alive for another generation or two,” compels him.
“Reading of any kind is a leisure activity,” says Miller, “and if we make people feel like they’ve wasted their time, they’re bored, they could have been watching Sex and the City, then all we do is discourage them from reading again the next time they have a choice. Our job is to be interesting and to make people feel like they’ve added something to their lives by reading what you’ve provided, even if all they’ve done is laugh.”
But not everyone is laughing. Book reviewers and the state of book reviewing itself are often under assault, especially by authors. In the inaugural (March 2003) issue of the Believer, a monthly literary magazine, novelist and coeditor Heidi Julavits wrote in her introductory essay, “I fear that book reviews are just an opportunity for a critic to strive for humor, and to appear funny and smart and a little bit bitchy, without attempting to espouse any higher ideals—or even to try to understand, on a very localized level, what a certain book is trying to do, even if it does it badly. This is wit for wit’s sake—or, hostility for hostility’s sake.… I call it Snark, and it has crept with alarming speed into the reviewing community, infiltrating the pages of many publications.”
November 24, 2003
BETTER PRAY FOR MORE RAIN:
Hall of Famer, 82, won 363 games (Associated Press, , November 24, 2003)
Warren Spahn, the Hall of Fame pitcher who won more games than any other left-hander in history, died Monday. He was 82. [...]Spahn was the mainstay of the Braves' pitching staff for two decades, first in Boston and then in Milwaukee. He pitched for 21 seasons, winning 363 games and posting 20 or more victories 13 times.
The remarkable part was that he was 25 before he got his first major league win. [...]
In 1943, Spahn went into the Army. He served in Europe, where he was wounded, decorated for bravery with a Bronze Star and Purple Heart and was awarded a battlefield commission. He fought at the Battle of the Bulge and in the battle for the bridge at Remagen, Germany, where many men in his company were lost.
Spahn returned to baseball in 1946, and had an 8-5 record for the Braves.
The next season, he emerged as one of baseball's best pitchers with a 21-10 record. He led the NL with a 2.33 ERA and became part of a pitching partnership with Johnny Sain that took Boston to the NL pennant the next year. Because of the Braves' thin staff, Boston's pitching was described as "Spahn and Sain and pray for rain."
Starting in 1947, Spahn won 20 or more games in 13 of the next 17 seasons. Only Christy Mathewson had as many 20-win seasons in the NL. Strangely, one of the years he missed that plateau was 1948, when he was 15-12 as the Braves won their first pennant since 1914.
Equipped with a high-kicking delivery that baffled batters, Spahn became a dominant pitcher after that season, a consistent 20-game winner. Only once between 1953 and 1961 did he fail to win 20 games.
Spahn led the NL in victories eight times, including five in a row from 1957-61, and led the league in strikeouts from 1949-52.
He once said, "When I'm pitching, I feel I'm down to the essentials -- two men with one challenge between them."
WE'RE SO PROUD OF WE:
Balls of Glass: The New Republic has no shame. (Mugger, 11/24/03, NY Press)
A few thoughts struck me while watching Shattered Glass. One, as an artistic achievement, it’s the Yanks’ Enrique Wilson, as compared to Gentleman’s Agreement or All the President’s Men taking on a Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays role. Second, the self-aggrandizement of the New Republic itself continues to be fairly repulsive; not only has the magazine advertised Shattered Glass constantly on its website, but the film’s conclusion, in which Lane is portrayed as a ticker-tape-parade-worthy hero for firing Glass, is just silly. It’s not as if the Glass saga at the weekly–Lane found out that nearly 30 of his articles were made up–was something to brag about. And the magazine’s Nov. 10 cover has a picture of Glass to accompany Jonathan Chait’s story "What the Media Can Learn from Stephen Glass: And What It Can’t."Talk about making lemonade out of rotten lemons.
In addition, there were two galling factual inaccuracies in the film. When then-proprietor Marty Peretz (he now owns a third of TNR) fires Lane’s predecessor, the late Michael Kelly, it’s not mentioned even in passing that the bombastic Peretz canned one of the most influential journalists of the past generation because Kelly was unrelenting in his criticism, within TNR’s pages, of the magazine’s pet Al Gore. Also, gladiator Lane (who was a paid consultant for the film) is identified at the end as simply now working for the Washington Post, when in fact he, too, was let go by Peretz in 1999, in favor of Peter Beinart.
(Beinart, actually, after a rocky start, has emerged as a talented editor, producing a mostly liberal magazine that nonetheless is eclectic enough to attract readers who can’t abide doctrinaire Bush-is-a-moron competitors such as the American Prospect, the Nation and the Washington Monthly.)
Most obviously, that Shattered Glass could even be made–and that book publisher Simon & Schuster would pay real money to Stephen Glass to write a silly novel called The Fabulist, released last May–is an enormous statement about pop culture (of which the media’s an integral cog) today. Can anyone imagine that in 1981, after Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke had a Pulitzer Prize rescinded after it was revealed her winning series of stories was based on a composite character, that a movie would be made celebrating the Post’s soul-searching over the deception?
Are there really enough journalists in America to make such a film profitable? Because, who else would want to see it?
ALL ABOUT AGRICULTURE AGAIN:
Free trade negotiations continue (ABC, 11/24/03)
Trade Minister Mark Vaile is in Washington this week to push along free trade negotiations between Australia and the United States.Mr Vaile will meet his US counterpart Bob Zoellick to identify any sticking points that must be resolved, if the two countries are to complete talks by the end of the year.
The final round of negotiations start next week.
Mr Vaile has confirmed access for Australian agricultural products to the US market is still being debated.
WHERE DO THEY FIND THEIR VACLAV'S?
Czech warning (Arnaud de Borchgrave, 11/24/2003, UPI)
Czech President Vaclav Klaus said Europeans are living "in the dream world of welfare, long vacations, guaranteed high pensions, and cradle-to-grave social security" and are yet to realize "they are not moving toward some sort of nirvana."The Czech republic is a candidate for European Union membership, but in an interview with UPI, Klaus, who was elected president last February, made clear his distaste for the European Union. But he conceded "the political unification of Europe" is now in "an accelerated process...in all aspects and in all respects."
Klaus said the forward motion to a single political entity of 25 European nations "will not change until people start thinking and realizing they are not moving toward some sort of nirvana." The Czech president remains "convinced you cannot have democratic accountability in anything bigger than a nation state."
Asked whether he could see the nation-state disappearing "with untoward consequences," Klaus replied, "That could well be the case. Remains to be seen whether it will be the nominal disappearance or the real disappearance. We could see the scaffolding of a nation-state that would retain a president and similar institutions, but with virtually zero influence. That's my forecast. And it's not a reassuring vision of the future." [...]
The Czech republic is one of 33 nations in the coalition of the willing with boots on the ground in Iraq, but Klaus has been critical of the post-war transition to an Iraqi civilian government. "My concern was always what to do after the end of the war because I know something about the transition from a totalitarian regime to a free society," the Czech president told UPI. "This cannot be done by soldiers, or by foreigners. After we won back our freedom at the end of the cold war, there was a proposal to bring back Czechs who had escaped to Western countries and make up a new government of those people who had been living in free countries. Those who had lived the tragic communist experience said no the idea of foreigners organizing our transition back to freedom. We said we had to do this ourselves without outside influence dictating what we should do."
Mr. Klaus seems wise on both counts--the danger of the EU and the importance of rapid Iraqification--though the latter is of more immediate concern.
MORE:
UPI interview with Czech president (Arnaud de Borchgrave, 11/24/2003, UPI)
THE OPTIMISM OF THE PESSIMISTS:
-REVIEW: of Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy by Richard A. Posner (Richard Rorty, Dissent)
Richard A. Posner, a federal appellate judge who is one of the most admired figures in the American legal system, thinks we...should put aside the illusion that the American public will gradually become better informed and wiser. He asks us to recognize that modern democratic
governments, including our own, are better described as what Alan Ryan has called "elective aristocracies" than as examples of popular rule. We should take note of the tautologous but depressing fact that half the population has an IQ below 100. We should admit that "ordinary people have as little interest in complex policy issues as they have aptitude for them."Posner concludes that "deliberative democracy, at least as conceived by Dewey, is as purely aspirational and unrealistic as rule by Platonic guardians." What we have, and what we should be satisfied with, is an understanding of democracy that "accepts people as they are, does not think it feasible or desirable to try to change them . . . and regards representative democracy as a pragmatic method of controlling, and providing for an orderly succession of, the officials who (not the people) are the real rulers of the nation."
To see the American political system in this way is to substitute what Posner calls "Concept 2" democracy for Deweyan "Concept 1" democracy. For
Concept 2 democrats, democracy is "not self-rule" but is "rule by officials who are, however, chosen by the people and who if they don't perform to
expectations are fired by the people." Concept 2 democrats "don't think that jawing in the agora is the most productive way for people to spend their time. They don't believe that politics has intrinsic value or that political activity is ennobling." Concept 2 democracy is a matter of balancing competing interests, not of debating the worth of ideas, and so is no more ennobling than commerce.Posner, a philosophy buff who cheerfully calls himself a "moral relativist," is happy to endorse Dewey's anti-foundationalist and contextualist views
about knowledge, rationality, and morality. But he thinks, rightly, that "pragmatism has no political valence" and that Dewey's social hopes have
nothing in particular to do with these views. "The connection between the liberal-visionary and the pragmatic" is indeed, as he says, "purely historical and contingent." Nor does he think that philosophical pragmatism has much to contribute to legal thought. Judges will not learn how to do their job better by reading Dewey and William James. Still, he says, "the pragmatic mood, the pragmatic culture that Tocqueville described, has given rise to a different pragmatism-what I call 'everyday pragmatism'-which has much to contribute to law." This latter sort of pragmatism is embodied in Posner's own distinctive "law and economics" brand of judicial decision-making. This approach relies on cost-benefit analyses of the socio-economic consequences of deciding a case in one way rather than another."Everyday pragmatism," Posner continues, "is the mindset denoted by the popular usage of the word 'pragmatic,' meaning practical and businesslike,
'no-nonsense,' disdainful of abstract theory and intellectual pretension, contemptuous of moralizers and utopian dreamers." Posner contrasts the
application of this kind of pragmatism to law with the originalism of a Robert Bork and the moralizing of a Ronald Dworkin. In rejecting both, he
sees himself as carrying through on Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes's criticisms of legal formalism. He is quite willing to drop the pretense that
the federal judiciary is above the battle and to admit that it is as political an institution as are the other two branches of the federal government. [...]Still, there is something missing in Posner's account of American democracy. Maybe politics is not ennobling, and perhaps Hannah Arendt was wrong, as Posner argues she was, to try to invest the United States with the glamour of the Greek polis. Perhaps Dewey was overly nostalgic for the Burlington, Vermont, of his own youth-a period when the United States could still revel in its Tocquevillian newness. But just as Pericles was right when he said there was something ennobling about being a free citizen of Athens, there is still something wonderful about being an American-something that Posner has trouble taking account of.
It is not for nothing that our democracy has been seen, by millions of people throughout the last two centuries, as more than just another arena of
competition between interest groups. The United States has not been a beacon of hope for the world merely because American voters have been able to fire politicians who fouled up. Our country's self-image is still shaped, and its history is still being molded, by a Lincolnesque narrative of moral
progress-progress made by appeals to the better angels of our nature.
What both Mr. Posner and Mr. Rorty would appear not to have recognized is that there's something almost madly idealistic in the conservative faith that, though Man is Fallen and most men are dolts, a free nation can be made of them and you can on occasion get them to listen to the angels of their better nature.
HIGH AND DRY:
Womb with a View: Why the feminists can't admit that most women favor the partial-birth abortion ban. (Noemie Emery, 11/24/2003, Weelkly Standard)
If the sisters could tear their eyes away from the picture and read words instead, they might discover some interesting things.ONE is that over the past decade support for abortion has been dropping steadily among old and young people; women and men. A second is that sex does not effect people's views on abortion, except that women are slightly more likely to be pro-life than men. And a third is that, as Will Saletan's "Bearing Right" tells us, the arguments made by Quindlen and Goodman have always been losers outside of selected newsroom and neighborhoods, and that abortion-rights advocates have only been able to prevail among broad swathes of voters when they use the "conservative"/libertarian "hands-off-my-[anything]" language favored by the NRA.
Polls taken over the preceding decade have not brought the sisters good news. Polls taken in 2003 showed those who described themselves as "pro-life" and "pro-choice" for the first time at parity and showed that support for abortion among college students had fallen 10 points in 10 years. Worse, a poll commissioned by a former head of Planned Parenthood showed that 5l percent of all women questioned (a great number of them with wombs, presumably), were opposed to abortion in all circumstances, except those of incest and rape.
As CNN's Bill Schneider explained on the AEI website, "Only 30 percent of women endorsed the view that 'abortion should be generally available to those who want it,' down from 34 percent two years earlier." Thirty-four percent thought it should be "against the law except in cases of rape, incest, and to save the life of the mother," while 17 percent thought it "should not be permitted at all." Worse still, Republicans are shrinking the gender gap among women, who do not share this aversion to Bush and his programs. All of this is not exactly a secret, which makes the sisters' hysterics a matter of truly willed ignorance. They are not fighting the fringe--they are the fringe, camped out in the exurbs of public opinion in a state better known as denial. As Bush said in the bill-signing ceremony, the public isn't ready yet for a ban on abortion, and perhaps never will be. But it is moving, somewhat, in that direction, and away from les girls, and their theories. And everyone sees it but them.
There's a lesson for the GOP here that's applicable with regard to gay marriage: if your message is righteous, just keep hammering it home and you can prevail in the long run, even when the social tide seems to be running against you.
WHAT THE HECK, BABIES ARE ALREADY COMMODIFIED (via Harry Eagar):
Hawaii hosts Marshallese baby market (Kristen Sawada, 11/24/03,
Pacific Business News)
Hawaii has emerged as a staging ground for Marshallese women who come here to give birth and relinquish their newborns to American adoptive parents.It has become a free enterprise marketplace for Marshallese babies -- a lucrative industry that has skyrocketed since the late 1990s.
So far this year, the state has had 47 adoption referrals for Marshallese children born in Hawaii, according to Child Welfare Services, which says adoptions have increased over the last few years though statistics weren't readily available. The cost to adopt a child is estimated at between $25,000 and $35,000.
"It's really human trafficking and no one is really accountable," said Julie Kroeker, an anthropologist and program director for Small Island Networks, a federally funded nonprofit agency that works with Marshallese and Micronesians living in Hawaii. "It's not illegal but it's certainly unethical in my mind."
The trade in babies stands to be big business as the developed world becomes desperate for youngsters, though the resurgence of nativism will probably mitigate against bringing in Marshallese babies.
CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTIONARY:
Shevardnadze toppled by his political offspring (Straits Times, NOV 25, 2003)
Like Shakespeare's tragic hero King Lear, 75-year-old Eduard Shevardnadze was ruined by those he loved the most.The young opposition leaders who toppled him from Georgia's presidency last weekend were people he had befriended, nurtured and launched on their political careers before they turned against him.
At the climax of the drama, these opposition leaders who had been spearheading the protests invited themselves to his official residence just outside the capital to demand that he step down.
Sitting across the table from the Georgian leader at that meeting were three politicians whom Mr Shevardnadze had done more than anyone to create.
This story really does seem a tragedy. To the extent that any Soviet leader deserves credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union it would seem to be Mr. Shevvadnadze, who harbored few of Gorbachev's delusions that the system could be reformed and saved and who had the courage to resign when Gorbachev moved towards reimposing strict dictatorship. Alas, he stayed to long at the ball and retires in disgrace. In the final irony, he was shown the door by Russia and America working in concert.
MORE:
In Georgia, high hopes, hurdles: Acting president Nino Burjanadze pledged Monday to hold new elections within 45 days. (Scott Peterson, 11/25/03, CS Monitor)
Led by interim president Nino Burjanadze, today's leaders - who were yesterday's opposition - will have to move immediately, analysts say, to balance Georgian dreams with the harsh realities of the dysfunctional kleptocracy Mr. Shevardnadze left behind. [...]The new leadership is focused on efforts to "move forward" with the economy, says a Western diplomat, though corruption remains a "very difficult issue." Graft permeates the Caucasus nation from the top, on down to the cops on the street, who, paid just $25 to $30 per month, take fines from motorists, send a portion "up the ranks," and then use the cash to "put bread on the table for their children," the diplomat says. Customs officials, he adds, are "presented with enormous temptations."
It's issues like these that most rankle Georgians, despite weightier strategic questions about Georgia's possible suitability for EU membership or its role in a long-standing regional tug-of-war for influence between the US and Russia. "All Shevardnadze did was the deeds of a dictator, who uses his power for his own profit," says David Kikilashvili, a former factory worker, who was among those tending dying fires outside the parliament building Monday at dawn, as street cleaners began sweeping up the garbage left after Georgia's wild victory party just hours earlier. "Salaries, pensions, jobs. Nothing is working now."
BLAME MOBIL (via Buttercup):
Silence on sex selection This is the first in a series of editorials on the challenges raised by the October report of the President's Council on Bioethics. (Washinghton Times, 11/24/03)
Some technologies seem to sneak up on the public. Their application becomes the norm before any thought has been given to their implications. That seems to be the case with sex selection, according to the recently released report from the President's Council on Bioethics, Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness.Sex selection is simply choosing a child based upon its sex. It can be done through several different techniques: amniocentesis or sonogram screening followed by abortion; preimplantation genetic diagnosis followed by transfer of embroys of the selected sex; and pre-fertilization separation of sperm of the desired sex followed by fertilization and implantation. While some of those techniques were originally developed to screen for diseases, they are now being put to non-therapeutic purposes.
While the oldest of those techniques have only been available since the 1970s, their application is already having a significant societal impact. On average, Mother Nature provides for 105 boys to be born for every 100 girls. However, with those human interventions, that ratio has become skewed in some societies, particularly those in the developing world. The ratio is 108.7 to 100 in Egypt, it is 110.9 in Pakistan and it is 117 to 100 in China. Some nations in the Caucasus region have seen ratios as high as 120 to 100. Such effects have not yet been seen in the United States, but they have appeared in other Western nations.
Based on speculation about greenhouse gases, folks are prepared to dramatically scale back industrial growth. But where there's a measurable effect our own actions are having on the biosphere, no one wants to so much as acknowledge the problem. Perhaps we should start a rumor that the oil companies are paying for gender selection abortions.
OUR LONG MARCH:
The Origins of the Modern American Conservative Movement (Lee Edwards, Ph.D., November 21, 2003, Heritage Lecture #811)
The central idea of The Conservative Mind, upon which American conservatism is essentially based, is ordered liberty. It is a blending of the sometimes contending requirements of the community and the individual, of individual freedom and individual responsibility, of limited government and unlimited markets.Kirk described six basic "canons" or principles of conservatism:
A divine intent, as well as personal conscience, rules society;
Traditional life is filled with variety and mystery while most radical systems are characterized by a narrowing uniformity;
Civilized society requires orders and classes;
Property and freedom are inseparably connected;
Man must control his will and his appetite, knowing that he is governed more by emotion than by reason; and
Society must alter slowly.
The Conservative Mind was an impressive feat of scholarship--a synthesis of the ideas of the leading conservative Anglo-American thinkers and political leaders of the late 18th century through the early 20th century. The work established convincingly that there was a tradition of American conservatism that had existed since the Founding of the Republic. With one book, Russell Kirk made conservatism intellectually acceptable in America. Indeed, he gave the conservative movement its name.
However, the intellectual pedigree of American conservatism goes much farther back in time than the 18th century. In a subsequent book, Russell Kirk wrote that the roots of American order were first planted nearly three thousand years earlier.
Kirk used the device of five cities--Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia--to trace their development. The roots first appeared in Jerusalem, with the Hebrew perception of a purposeful moral existence under God. They were strengthened in Athens, with the philosophical and political self-awareness of the Greeks. They were nurtured in Rome, by the Roman experience of law and social awareness. They were intertwined with the Christian understanding of human duties and human hopes, of man redeemed. They were joined by medieval custom, learning, and valor.
The roots of American order were then enriched by two great political experiments that occurred in London, the birthplace of parliaments and the guardian of common law, and in Philadelphia, where both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were written. The miracle of Philadelphia was that the delegates were able to resolve, for the most part, the conflicting demands of freedom and order. They created a true national government but not an absolute government. They designed something new under the political sun--a federalism which carefully enumerated, separated, and restrained the powers of the national government.
1953--the year of The Conservative Mind--was a critical year in American politics and conservatism. Dwight Eisenhower was inaugurated as President, signaling an end to the New Deal era. Conservatives such as Russell Kirk, Robert Nisbet, Richard Weaver, Clinton Rossiter, and Leo Strauss published works that could not be ignored. It was the year that conservatives began to coalesce, arguing and disputing all the while, into a political movement.
Over the next 50 years, a succession of conservative philosophers, popularizers, philanthropists, and politicians marched across the American political stage. First came the philosophers, who presented their ideas usually in an academic forum. Next came the popularizers, journalists and the like, who translated the often obscure language of the philosophers into a common idiom. Finally came the politicians, whose attention was caught and whose imaginations were fired by the popularizers and who introduced public policies and campaign platforms based on conservative ideas. Throughout this period, prescient philanthropists underwrote the thinking of the philosophers, the journals of the popularizers, and the campaigns of the politicians.
The history of American politics suggests that a political movement must experience these successive waves of ideas, interpretation, and action along with sufficient financial resources to be successful. [...]
The liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in 1947 that "there seems no inherent obstacle to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States through a series of New Deals." Five-and-a-half de-cades later, the conservative columnist George Will wrote that we had experienced "the intellectual collapse of socialism" in America and around the world.
The one political constant throughout those 50 years has been the rise of the Right, whose Long March to national power and prominence was often interrupted by the death of its leaders, calamitous defeats at the polls, frequent feuding within its ranks over means and ends, and the perennial hostility of the prevailing liberal establishment. But through the power of its ideas--ever linked by the priceless principle of ordered liberty--and the unceasing dissemination and application of those ideas, the conservative movement has become a major, and often the dominant, player in the political and economic realms of America.
It's fascinating to watch the American Left try to revive itself by skipping to step three--setting up radio and television networks without bothering to reckon with their complete lack of ideas. Give the GOP an hour of free airtime on the networks to present a vision of the next four years and you'd get democratization and free trade abroad and an "ownership society", faith-based social programs, and radical tax reform at home. These are ideas about transforming America and the world. Give the Democrats an hour and you'd get...what?
FROM RISQUE TO RISIBLE IN ONE LUDICROUS LIFETIME:
Hugh Hefner's Hollow Victory: How the Playboy magnate won the culture war, lost his soul, and left us with a mess to clean up. (Read Mercer Schuchardt, December 2003, Christianity Today)
One of the occupational hazards of Christian cultural analysis is the tendency to see Satan behind every sociological phenomenon with which you've personally struggled. One of the secret pleasures of this habit, however, is that occasionally you really do find him. [...]Hiding in plain sight in the June 2001 issue of Philadelphia magazine is Ben Wallace's essay "The Prodigy and the Playmate." In it Sandy Bentley, the Playboy cover girl and former Hefner girlfriend (along with her twin sister Mandy), describes Hefner's current sexual practices in just enough detail to give you a good long pause:
"The heterosexual icon [Hugh Hefner] … had trouble finding satisfaction through intercourse; instead, he liked the girls to pleasure each other while he masturbated and watched gay porn."
This statement may seem either shocking or trivial. But it points to that which Hefner's detractors have been saying for years: Pornography stifles the development of genuine human relationships. Pornography is a manifestation of arrested development. Pornography reduces spiritual desire to Newtonian mechanics. Pornography, indulged long enough, hollows out sex to the point where even the horniest old goat is unable to physically enjoy the bodies of nubile young females.
Ultimately, Hugh Hefner is an old joke: a solitary master baiter. Armed with two-thirds of the truth and a well-lubricated marketing machine, he has played a large role in manipulating society into accepting his adolescent fantasy of false desire and technological gratification—a legacy that amounts to our generation's toxic dump.
And, now in his late 70s, it's unlikely that Hefner will ever grow out of his self-serving, adolescent phase. You and I will have to wipe up his mess.
Hard to decide which of the perma-Peter Pans in the news is the more the embarrassing case study, him or Michael Jackson.
CRICKETS:
Master and Conundrum: Can a Russell Crowe movie help the Democrats in 2004? (Knute Berger, 11/19/03, Seattle Weekly)
The film's central figure is Aubrey alone, and best pal Maturin is demoted to the role of a nag who pricks the captain's conscience at inconvenient moments. In this, he's a bit like the Democrats. But though Aubrey is a Tory superhero fighting the French, let's also be clear about another thing. I've read Patrick O'Brian. I knew Patrick O'Brian. And George W. Bush is no Jack Aubrey. You never would have found Aubrey strutting around on deck crowing, "Mission accomplished!"In some ways, Aubrey has more in common with Bill Clinton. [...]
He is an optimist. Aubrey is unafraid of long odds and is always confident of victory. He runs a positive campaign and offers his crew a clear vision of how things will turn out.
He's a man of action. In battle, Aubrey's motto, from Lord Nelson, is "Go right at 'em." If need be, he'll run to live and fight another day. But Aubrey also believes you won't win by being on the defensive.
He's cunning. And smart. In the film, Aubrey and his men overcome overwhelming odds by tricking the enemy. Stealth, trickery, inventiveness are all part of the arsenal. If you're outgunned, change the terms of battle and turn the tables on the enemy.
He makes tough decisions. In the movie, Aubrey must literally cut loose a man to save his ship. Aubrey doesn't need a sign on his desk to tell you where the buck stops.
He's compassionate. Aubrey doles out the occasional flogging, but he understands his people and is deeply loyal. He knows their needs, their desires, their ways--and he attends to them, without pandering.
He's charismatic. Democrats tend to think rightness is more important than popularity--a fatal flaw. Natural confidence, smarts, sex appeal, and luck are essential parts of power (another Jack, Kennedy, had these). The Democratic candidate will need at least three of these four qualities to win.
Some assertions defy comprehension.
PRIVATE REASONS, PUBLIC DAMAGE:
-Culture of Vice (Robert R. Reilly, Orthodoxy Today)
In The Ethics Aristotle wrote, “men start revolutionary changes for reasons connected with their private lives.” This is also true when revolutionary changes are cultural. What might these “private” reasons be, and why do they become public in the form of revolutionary changes? The answer to these questions lies in the intimate psychology of moral failure.For any individual, moral failure is hard to live with because of the rebuke of conscience. Habitual moral failure, what used to be called vice, can be lived with only by obliterating conscience through rationalization. When we rationalize, we convince ourselves that heretofore forbidden desires are permissible. We advance the reality of the desires over the reality of the moral order to which the desires should be subordinated. In our minds we replace the reality of moral order with something more congenial to the activity we are excusing. In short, we assert that bad is good.
It is often difficult to detect rationalizations when one is living directly under their influence, and so historical examples are useful. One of the clearest was offered at the Nuremberg trials by Dr. Karl Brandt, who had been in charge of the Nazi regime's Aktion T-4 euthanasia program. He said in his defense: “...when I said `yes' to euthanasia I did so with the deepest conviction, just as it is my conviction today, that it was right. Death can mean deliverance. Death is life.”
Unlike Dr. Brandt, most people recover from their rationalizations when remorse and reality set back in. But when morally disordered acts become the defining centerpiece of one's life, vice can permanently pervert reason. Entrenched moral aberrations then impel people to rationalize vice not only to themselves but to others as well. Thus rationalizations become an engine for revolutionary change that will affect society as a whole.
The power of rationalization drives the culture war, gives it its particular revolutionary character, and makes its advocates indefatigable. It may draw its energy from desperation, but it is all the more powerful for that. Since failed rationalization means self-recrimination, it must be avoided at all cost. For this reason, the differences over which the culture war is being fought are not subject to reasoned discourse. Persons protecting themselves by rationalizing are interested not in finding the truth, but in maintaining the illusion that allows them to continue their behavior. For them to succeed in this, everyone must accede to their rationalization. This is why revolutionary change is required. The necessity for self-justification requires the complicity of the whole culture. Holdouts cannot be tolerated because they are potential rebukes. The self-hatred, anger, and guilt that a person possessed of a functioning conscience would normally feel from doing wrong are redirected by the rationalization and projected upon society as a whole (if the society is healthy), or upon those in society who do not accept the rationalization. [...]
Controversies about life, generation, and death are decisive for the fate of any civilization. A society can withstand any number of persons who try to advance their own moral disorders as public policy. But it cannot survive once it adopts the justification for those moral disorders as its own. This is what is at stake in the culture war.
One can observe this process at work today as folks argue that gay marriage represents no significant change to the institution.
REMEMBER THE DEAD:
It's worth a few minutes to review photos from Iraqi mass graves. (Via Healing Iraq.) May Saddam's victims rest in peace. May tyranny be banished from the earth.
THE OTHER DEATH THAT DAY:
A Mind That Grasped Both Heaven and Hell (JOSEPH LOCONTE, 11/23/03, NY Times)
Forty years ago today, as the world mourned the assassination of an American president, the passing of the 20th century's most influential Christian writer was hardly noticed: Clive Staples Lewis, professor of English literature at Oxford and Cambridge, died on Nov. 22, 1963. In his ability to nurture the faithful, as well as seduce the skeptic, C. S. Lewis had no peer.Lewis was an atheist for much of his adult life, an experience that may have helped immunize him from the religious cliché, the reluctance to ask hard questions, the self-righteousness of the zealot. "Mr. Lewis possesses the rare gift," according to an early reviewer, "of being able to make righteousness readable." Lewis was not a theologian, but he expressed even the most difficult religious concepts with bracing clarity. He was not a preacher, yet his essays and novels pierce the heart with their nobility and tenderness.
The lessons found within his writings continue to resonate today. In fact, it's hard to imagine a time when the need for sane thinking about religion was more momentous. Cite an act of terror, from the sniper shootings in Washington to the bombings in Baghdad and Istanbul, and faith is close at hand. Many are now tempted to equate piety with venality — or worse — and it's here that Lewis may have the most to teach us. [...]
Many modern liberals dismiss Lewis's concept of the diabolical as a "medieval" superstition. Yet many religious conservatives seem to make evil the brainchild of God himself. For them, all individual and social sin — including the terror of Sept. 11 — is the perfect will of a Divine Judge (as the Rev. Jerry Falwell claimed at the time). Lewis disagreed: Evil is always man's doing, yet it is never his destiny. The power of choice makes evil possible, but it's also "the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having."
The modern mantra of tolerance is evil disguised, precisely because it denies that one's choices matter.
THE LIPS OF THE RIGHTEOUS TEACH MANY:
Crash Course in Jewish History #67 - The Miracle of Jewish History (Rabbi Ken Spiro, Aish.com)
Over 300 years ago King Louis XIV of France asked Blaise Pascal, the great French philosopher, to give him proof of the supernatural. Pascal answered: "Why, the Jews, your Majesty -- the Jews."An astonishing answer. The best proof of the supernatural that Pascal could think of was: "The Jews."
We don't have to speculate what Pascal meant when he gave this answer, because he took the trouble to spell it out. (See Pensees, para. 620, p. 285.) Pascal said that the fact that the Jewish people survived until the 17th century -- to the time period when he was living -- was nothing short of a supernatural phenomenon.
There simply was no logical explanation for it.
As we have seen from this series, Jewish history simply doesn't comply with the rest of history; it does not make sense. [...]
Today there are approximately 12-14 million Jews in the world, where there should be 500 million. The reasons why: 1) persecution, and 2) assimilation.
The greatest strength of the Jewish people is also their greatest weakness.
Jews are a "stiff-necked" people. They have stubbornly clung to their beliefs and as a result outlasted all of the ancient empires of history while changing the way the entire world looks at morality and the concept of God. Jewish ideas -- of one God, of a loving God, of a universal vision for humanity -- have been at odds with the philosophies of all these empires, and to hold up that vision has required an unbelievable strength of character.
And yet, what is the greatest weakness of the Jewish people? Their stubborn individuality makes them unbendable. Every Jew thinks he/she is right. The hardest job on earth must be to unify and lead the Jewish people.
Of course, when unified, the Jewish people are an unbeatable force in human history.
Folks like Bill Clinton, Howard Dean, and the Europeans say that we need to be impartial brokers between Israel and Palestine.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T:
Raiders get home playoff game: Colgate hosts Massachusetts Saturday (CRAIG MUDER, Nov 24, 2003, Observer-Dispatch)
The Raiders learned Sunday that they will host Massachusetts Saturday in first-round playoff game at Andy Kerr Stadium. Colgate got into the playoffs via the Patriot League's automatic berth - and was awarded the No. 4 seed in the 16-team field.Saturday's game, which starts at 12:30 p.m., will mark the first playoff game in Hamilton since the Raiders hosted Boston University in 1982 -- and just Colgate's sixth playoff berth ever. [...]
The Minutemen (10-2, 8-1 in the Atlantic 10) are ranked No. 7 in the country. UMass's only two losses this year came against Delaware, another member of the I-AA playoff field, and Division I-A Kansas State. [...]
If Colgate wins, the Raiders would host the winner of Saturday's Montana/Western Illinois game Dec. 6.
The Raiders will enter Saturday's game with the longest active winning streak in Division I: 18 games. Tailback Jamaal Branch, a leading candidate for the Walter Payton Award -- I-AA football's version of the Heisman Trophy -- rushed for a school-record 280 yards and three touchdowns against the Crusaders, leaving him with a school-record 2,026 yards and 25 touchdowns on the season.
"I'm biased, but for what Jamaal has done for us, he's deserving of consideration for the Payton Award," Biddle said. "Regardless of what league he's playing in, he's won games for us.
The BU game in 1982 was played in the kind of ice and freezing cold that makes football nearly tolerable.
LETTING THE GOP CALL THE TUNE:
Candidates Plan Responses to G.O.P. Commercial on Terrorism (JIM RUTENBERG, 11/24/03, NY Times)
The campaigns of Senator John Kerry and Howard Dean said on Sunday that they would begin showing television commercials in Iowa heavily criticizing a new Republican Party advertisement that portrays the Democratic presidential candidates as undermining President Bush while he fights terrorism.The plans for the two Democratic spots were evidence that the Republican advertisement served at least one of its intended purposes. It drew the Democrats into a debate on national security, which Republican Party officials believe to be the president's strong suit.
Even the Democrats can't be this foolish. "I oppose the war" is a principled position, even if wrong. "We all support the war, but..." is just politics.
THINK PERSONALLY, ACT PERSONALLY:
In disarray, U.S. anti-war movement struggles to make an impact (John Jurgensen 11/23/03, THE HARTFORD COURANT)
What's an anti-war activist to do after war breaks out?Judging from the peace movement in the eight months since the invasion of Iraq, there seem to be three options: Admit defeat, find a new cause or keep up the fight. [...]
Despite the unflagging efforts of core activists to keep the fires of public protest burning, there's no avoiding the fact that the anti-war movement failed. War happened in Iraq. It was, by definition, a crippling blow to the peace movement.
"I think it's moribund. It's on life support," said Todd Gitlin, a professor of sociology and journalism at Columbia University and author of "Letters to a Young Activist." After the war began, he said, "The movement shrunk back to its core of go-for-broke activists. Some of the sentiments are alive, but the movement demonstrated a few weeks ago in Washington that it's not capable of turning out the numbers that it did last winter."
Gitlin was referring to the Oct. 25 march in the nation's capital, the first major street demonstration there since Baghdad fell in April. Although tens of thousands gathered to show their disapproval of White House policies, attendance was sparse compared with the coordinated protests that drew millions of people in February. [...]
Besides the stamina required to protest an open-ended occupation of Iraq, the groups opposing White House policies are, as in the past, dogged by their many competing agendas: environmental degradation, globalization, human rights, the Patriot Act.
"We have so many important issues. Where do we put our energy?" said Jim Galvic of Hartford, a regular at the Monday gatherings at the meeting house. "It's like we're getting sucker-punched from all sides. If we had one laser-like issue to rally around, it would make it easier. But what do you choose?"
The point being that they weren't protesting the war, as such, in the first place, but hopping on a convenient vehicle to push their own petty personal causes.
COMIC, NOT TRAGIC:
George W Bush, tragic character (Spengler, 11/24/03, Asia Times)
It is hard to label "tragic" anyone as cheerful and optimistic as President George W Bush. Perhaps more than any leader in history, Bush is a Christian. Religious conversion is the defining experience of his life, and it is in his nature to convert others. Because he is a 21st-century American and not a 12th-century Crusader, he preaches the ballot box rather than the cross; as I have argued elsewhere (Mahathir is right: Jews do rule the world, October 28) that amounts to the same thing. Telling in this regard was the president's London oration last week. No less than five references to "ideals" and "idealism" showed where his heart lies; recall his campaign declaration that Jesus Christ was his favorite political philosopher.Mephistopheles introduced himself to Faust as "ein Teil von jener Kraft, die stets das Boese will und stets das Gute schafft. (a part of that power, which always wants to do evil, but always does good)." Reverse this, and you have the tragedy of Bush: he wants universal good, but he will end up doing some terrible things. [...]
"American tragedy" (despite Theodore Dreiser's dreadful novel) is something of an oxymoron, for America is the land of new beginnings. Tragedy invariably takes the form of a shadow from the past darkening the present and future. But something like the River Lethe girds the American continent, through which immigrants forget their past and with it their past tragedies. One might say that the American tragedy is the incapacity of Americans to understand the tragedy of other peoples. America can cherry-pick out of the nations those individuals who wish to be Americans, but it cannot force back on the nations its own character. Its efforts to do so have perpetually destabilizing consequences for other peoples. Not idly does Osama bin Laden denounce Americans as "crusaders".
Spengler is right in so far as he goes, which is nowhere near far enough. America is unquestionably the most lethal and successful military power the world has ever known. But it has framed every one of its wars in messianic terms and has failed to achieve its stated goals in each. The Civil War saved the Union and freed the slaves, but left the South a much despised region and blacks an oppressed minority. In WWI we beat Germany, but left the Bolsheviks in power and the French and the British carving up the Third World. We'd destroyed enough of Germany and Japan in WWII that we felt compelled to help rebuild them, but left the Soviet Union in control of all of Eastern Europe. We more or less managed to contain the Soviets in the Cold War, but never asked ourselves why we weren't forcing them to contract if we really cared about the freedom of other peoples--meanwhile, the Korea and Vietnam wars and the confrontation with Cuba all left communist powers in place. And in the first Iraq War we easily expelled Saddam from Kuwait, but left his brutal regime in place at home. It's a pretty abysmal record.
Now we confront Islam generally and insist that democratic forces be brought to bear on the entire region--via military power and/or political pressure--but there's no reason to believe that we'll stay committed for as long as it takes. Already--just two years after 9-11 and after improbably minimal military losses--the elites and the Democrats have pretty much abandoned ship and as the media, academics, etc. pound away at the war public support always fades too. If you were a betting man, you'd side with Spengler here and say that the clash of civilizations will be called off long before we reach its conclusion and that will indeed be tragic for the folks we leave behind.
However, there are a few caveats that should be mentioned. First, just as in those prior wars, there have already been extensive successes, which are nothing to sneeze at--in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine people have the opportunity to choose more popular governments than they had before this all started. Likewise, from Morocco to Saudi Arabia to Iran and beyond, there's a recognition that if the Islamic world is to provide its people the standard of living and the basic human freedoms they desire, massive reform will have to occur. This is obviously not to say that Iraq will emerge as a full-fledged liberal democracy. It might even slip back into chaos or totalitarian oppression. But its people have an opportunity, unique in their history, to determine their own fate. That's a worthwhile thing.
Meanwhile, it seems Spengler somewhat misses his own point: the necessity of the American tragedy. George W. Bush is more willful, clear-sighted and articulate in his advocacy of democracy than someone like Al Gore would have been, but the fact is that a President Gore would have cast this war in precisely the same light. America is so powerful and so isolated from the world (and has been for so long) that its own self-interest is never really implicated in global wars. In order to rouse the nation to war two things are necessary: a precipitating attack on us, no matter how dubious; and that the war conform to our vision of ourselves, as Spengler says, as crusaders for democracy (though he's quite wrong that we're 21st century crusaders--rather, we are the last 18th century nation). The President, whoever he be, has no choice in his war aims and his rhetoric if he hopes to lead America to world war. We actually believe all that stuff in the Declaration of Independence and think it applies to all men everywhere. We aren't unintentionally destabilizing; it's our national purpose whenever we go abroad (which we only do, John Quincy Adams not withstanding, seeking monsters).
Last week we quoted the Battle Hymn of the Republic--it's worth citing one verse again:
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
That's the kind of vision that does indeed lead to tragedy--precisely because it is so grandiose--but it is also the vision that has made us history's singular nation. That other peoples do not measure up to our vision is a mild tragedy for us, but a great tragedy for them. If the Islamic world is impervious to globalization and remains backwards, corrupt, and totalitarian, it will put a dent in our view of humankind, but it will ruin a billion non-American lives. The American tragedy is minor from that perspective, isn't it?
Last, Spengler (and everyone else) would do well to remember that, for America, these wars can never have a truly tragic ending. We will win the war on Islamicism, one way or another. If the Islamic world chooses not to reform and if attacks recur on our soil then this war will just be waged more brutally. Sure, we're in the midst of the warm fuzzy phase of the war, when we think we can bring democracy to people who must want it, but we've never been terribly bashful about destroying entire nations when they prove resistant to our initial offer. From Sherman's march to the sea to the firebombing, and eventual nuclear bombing, of WWII, we've shown the will to beat people until they have no choice but to change their ways.
The Islamicists could avert this fate by turning their violence totally inwards and waging their war only upon Arab regimes. At that point we'd be quite likely to withdraw altogether and leave Islam to destroy itself, while we enjoyed the kind of free and affluent lives we'd offered to help them realize. That would be tragic to some degree. But it wouldn't be an American tragedy. We might even say that this is the American comedy: people go to war with us, with catadtrophic results for them, when all we really want is to be left alone, or, at worst, to help them be more like us. Who's the loser if they refuse?
MORE:
-ARCHIVES: The Complete Spengler (Asia Times)
-The Break-Fast Club: Kuwaitis think America should be more assertive in the Arab world.
(MATTHEW KAMINSKI, November 21, 2003, Wall Street Journal)
The first stop tonight is the diwaniya run by Mr. Bishara's cousin. As I shake the hands of the dozen men there, I let slip that I'm heading up to Iraq the next day. Braced for a taste of Yankee-bashing, I get an earful of Americanophilia instead. It's soon clear this Ramadan is uniquely joyous: the first without Saddam Hussein, who overran Kuwait in 1990 before Uncle Sam kicked him out half a year later.Revenge is sweet, and profitable. Hotels are full and business is booming, a USC graduate who runs a catering business tells me. Kuwait's former finance minister, Youssef Ibrahim, whispers in my ear that "being next to Iraq is a golden opportunity." What about all the violence and political trouble? "I have no doubt the Americans will make it work," he says. At least someone's confident.
Between the various stops, Mr. Bishara explains that of all the non-Iraqi Arab states, Kuwait alone can claim first-hand experience of the U.S. and Saddam's Iraq. For that reason, Kuwaitis believe in the U.S. project for remaking Iraq, and the Middle East.
Mr. Bishara does have a gripe, however. "The U.S. made a mistake here," he says, thinking back to the 1991 liberation. "They had a free hand to liberalize this country and instead they packed up their troops and moved out. We had to fight even to restore Parliament."
Today Mr. Bishara heads a pro-democracy group--no easy job in a state ruled by infirm septuagenarian emirs and permeated with a Saudi-style strain of religious and social conservatism. But educated Arabs have no trouble discussing democracy on "our" terms. Along with every Kuwaiti I meet this evening, Mr. Bishara studied in the U.S., getting his undergraduate degree at Columbia during the turbulent 1960s. "Those SDS guys were friends of mine," he says, before insisting that their protest tactics--taking over buildings, holding people hostage--wouldn't translate well to Kuwait.
I ask how a Western-educated liberal can keep his wife from the diwaniyas or let his daughter live in a country as a second-class citizen. He responds with an understanding smile. "My wife wouldn't want to come here," he says, pointing to his roomful of friends at our final destination, a diwaniya organized by the deputy speaker of Kuwait's Parliament. "What's more, she would think it strange if I didn't come here."
In this room, America and democracy come to dominate conversation.
HAPPILY OCCUPPIED:
No battles, no bombs … just the silent war: A sedate way of life in the Golan Heights masks the dispute over Israeli occupation. (Robert Tait, 11/23/03, Sunday Herald)
Unlike the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the atmosphere here is sedate. But true peace it is not. For the Golan Heights is the site of Israel’s silent occupation, the one the world rarely hears about.No suicide bombers leave from here. There is no violent resistance from the indigenous Arab population. Israeli F16s do not carry out assassination strikes. Road blocks and checkpoints are not a feature. [...]
Unlike their Palestinian counterparts, the mainly Druze Arabs of the Golan Heights are quiescent. In contrast to the residents of the West Bank and Gaza, the Golan Heights Arabs have benefited from higher living standards. Yet many express a yearning to be a part of Syria once again.
In Majdal Shams, a town whose main square features a memorial to local leaders of a popular uprising against the French colonial rulers of Syria in 1925, Abu Jabil, 60, said he would never accept Israeli rule.
“We still feel like we are living in Syria,” said Jabil, a ring-leader of a local rebellion in 1981 against a government attempt to impose Israeli identity cards on local people.
But why does this national yearning not explode into the open? “The Palestinians are fighting to build a country,” Jabil said. “We have a nation, Syria, already. We are just waiting for this part to be given back.”
The desire of local Druze to be reunited with their kinsmen in Syria is expressed at the “screaming hill”. Here, twice a year, people on either side of the border gather, microphones in hand, to shout their family news to relatives across the international frontier.
But in nearby Massade a different view was expressed.
Israeli soldiers relax at the Restaurant Nidal, a scene unthinkable in the West Bank. “It’s good for us here,” said the restaurant owner, Khaled Hassan, 30. “ People are scared that, one day, they will be returned to the Syrians.
Would you want to be ruled by the Assads?
JUST ANOTHER COUNTRY:
THOSE DIVIDED DEMOCRATS (Michael Barone, 12/1/03, US news)
If the un-Dean wins, Dean's enthusiastic supporters will be bitterly disappointed. Some will not want to vote for a Democrat who voted for military action in Iraq. The Green Party nominee, whether Ralph Nader runs or not, could easily exceed the 3 percent Nader won in 2000. That would hurt with the electorate this closely divided. Just ask Al Gore.The Democrats' problem will be different if Dean is nominated. Their problem will be with American exceptionalism. That is the idea, shared by most Americans, that this country is unique and special, with unique virtues and special responsibilities--a city on a hill, as John Winthrop and Ronald Reagan put it, with the responsibility to spread freedom and democracy around the world. Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan were all American exceptionalists. So, as we have seen with ever increasing clarity, is Bush. Dean doesn't seem to be, and neither do most of his followers. When they say they want to take their country back, they mean they want the United States to take its place as just one of many nations, with no claim to moral superiority, heeding the cautions of France, Germany, and Russia; deferring to the United Nations or NATO; seeking the respect of the protesters in the streets of London or the opinion writers in Le Monde.
Bad enough to project as much anger as Mr. Dean does, but conveying dislike for your own country is a truly dubious strategy.
November 23, 2003
DALLAS DUPERY (via Mike Daley):
How Moscow Undermined the Warren Commission (Max Holland, November 22, 2003, Washington Post)
How is it that Americans have come to embrace a conspiracy theory that reads like a script written by the KGB, the CIA's mortal Cold War adversary? Well, it turns out that Moscow's relentless propagation of that virulent theory and its prevalence here are no mere coincidence. One of the more amazing stories to seep out of the former Soviet empire is the role Moscow played in exploiting Americans' psychological vulnerability after the assassination, and in preying on their devotion to due process. We can piece together this concerted effort only now with the release of documents from Soviet archives -- some disclosures authorized, some not. Taken together, they prove that the KGB played a central, pernicious role in fomenting the belief that the CIA was involved in Kennedy's assassination.The first inkling of an aggressive KGB posture is revealed in a document gratuitously cited by Boris Yeltsin in his 1994 memoir. In a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union dated Nov. 23, 1963 -- when Oswald was still alive -- KGB Chairman Vladimir Semichastny recommends publishing in a "progressive paper in one of the Western countries," an article "exposing the attempt by reactionary circles in the USA to remove the responsibility for the murder of Kennedy from the real criminals, [i.e.,] the racists and ultraright elements guilty of the spread and growth of violence and terror in the United States."
Two months later, R. Palme Dutt, the Stalinist editor of a Communist-controlled British journal called Labour Monthly, published an article that raised the specter of CIA involvement without offering a scintilla of evidence. "[M]ost commentators," he wrote, "have surmised a coup of the Ultra-Right or racialists of Dallas. That may be; but the trail, if followed up seriously, seems to reach wider . . . on the face of it this highly organized coup (even to the provision of a 'fall guy' . . . and rapid killing of the fall guy while manacled in custody, as soon as there appeared a danger of his talking), with the manifest complicity necessary of a very wide range of authorities, bears all the hallmarks of a CIA job."
Five months later, in June 1964, a freelance journalist named Joachim Joesten posited a strikingly similar analysis in his book "Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy?" Following a chapter on "Oswald and the CIA," Joesten asserted that the agency was beyond presidential control and bitterly opposed to Kennedy's policy of "easing the Cold War." It has long been a matter of record that Joesten's book was the first published in the United States on the subject of the assassination. Until the notes of a former KGB archivist named Vasili Mitrokhin were published in 1999, however, it was not known that Joesten's publisher, the small New York firm of Marzani & Munsell, received subsidies totaling $672,000 from the Central Committee of the Communist Party in the early 1960s.
These early efforts to implicate the CIA met with little apparent success. But the KGB kept on trying and finally hit the jackpot once a relatively unknown New Orleans district attorney named Jim Garrison took a sudden interest in the assassination in late 1966. The word "dupe" has long been out of favor, but that's precisely what Garrison turned out to be after he arrested Clay Shaw in March 1967 and charged him with conspiring to assassinate Kennedy.
That's the kind of intelligence work that we should be better at. Instead, it's up to the Weekly World News to report on Saddam and Osama's marriage and recent adoption of a baby.
A VERY NECESSARY SAINT (via Michael Herdegen):
From Village Boy to Soldier, Martyr and, Many Say, Saint (SETH MYDANS, 11/21/03, NY Times)
Portraits of this young man, Yevgeny Rodionov, are spreading around Russia — sometimes in uniform, sometimes in a robe, sometimes armed, sometimes holding a cross, but always with his halo.He is Russia's new unofficial saint, a casualty of the war in Chechnya who has been canonized not by the Russian Orthodox Church but by a groundswell of popular adoration. [...]
In pamphlets, songs and poems, in sermons and on Web sites, Private Rodionov's story has become a parable of religious devotion and Russian nationalism. The young soldier, it is said, was killed by Muslim rebels seven years ago because he refused to renounce his religion or remove the small silver cross he kept around his neck.
It is the story his mother says she was told by the rebels who killed him and who later led her, for a ransom of $4,000, to the place they had buried him. When she exhumed his body late one night, she said, the cross was there among his bones, glinting in the light of flashlights, stained with small drops of blood.
"Nineteen-year-old Yevgeny Rodionov went through unthinkable suffering," reads an encomium on one nationalist Web site, "but he did not renounce the Orthodox faith but confirmed it with his martyr's death.
"He proved that now, after so many decades of raging atheism, after so many years of unrestrained nihilism, Russia is capable, as in earlier times, of giving birth to a martyr for Christ, which means it is unconquerable."
As his story has spread, pilgrims have begun appearing in this small village just west of Moscow, where his mother, Lyubov, 51, tends his grave on an icy hillside beside an old whitewashed church.
Some military veterans have laid their medals by his graveside in a gesture of homage. People in distress have left handwritten notes asking for his intercession.
In a church near St. Petersburg, his full-length image stands at the altar beside icons of the Virgin Mary, the Archangel Michael, Jesus and Nicholas II, the last of the czars, who was canonized three years ago.
No Church needs more to be reformed from the ground up, nor any society to be reformed by religious faith, nor any war revitalized with a sense of crusade.
DEEPLY SADDENED DASCHLE:
Democrats Insist Republicans Pull Bush Ad (JENNIFER C. KERR, 11/23.03, Associated Press)
Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle is demanding that Republicans stop showing their first television ad of the 2004 presidential race, which he called "repulsive and outrageous."The 30-second ad, featuring clips of Bush during his State of the Union address last January, portrays the president as a fighter of terrorism as Democrats retreat from the fight.
"It's wrong. It's erroneous, and I think that they ought to pull the ad," Daschle told NBC's "Meet the Press" program on Sunday.
"We all want to defeat terrorism," the South Dakota senator said. But "to chastise and to question the patriotism of those who are in opposition to some of the president's plans I think is wrong." [...]
Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy called it an "attempt to stifle dissent." On ABC's "This Week," Kennedy said "dissent is a basic part of what our whole society is about."
Senator Kennedy has it just about right--Democrats do have a right to dissent from the war on terror and advocate retreat.
DAWKINS VS. DARWIN (via Mike Daley):
Oxford Scientist Launches Sharp Critique of Religion (ASYA TROYCHANSKY, The Crimson)
Despite the massive costs religion has imposed on human society, it persists because children do not question their parents' beliefs, renowned Oxfordscientist Richard Dawkins argued in a fiery lecture last night at Lowell Lecture Hall.
Before a packed house of 450 community members, faculty and students, Dawkins argued that the widespread presence of religion -despite its lack of obvious benefits-suggests that it was not an evolutionary adaptation.Rather, he argued, religion is a societal norm that stems from children's psychological tendencies.
"It is their unique obedience that makes them vulnerable to viruses and worms," Dawkins said.
Society provides a breeding ground for the "virus" of religion by labeling children with the religion of their parents. Children, in turn, absorb these beliefs because they are conditioned to do so.
Though it is universal, Dawkin said, religion is not widely beneficial.
Rejecting the theory of many of his contemporaries, Dawkins argued that religion has not helped people to adapt or to survive.
As a skeptic about evolution, I agree with Mr. Dawkins, but it's hard to see how anyone who does believe in it could.
WHERE'D HE READ THAT, THE NATION?:
Blair plans new laws to curb civil liberties: UK wants similar powers to controversial US Patriot Act (James Cusick, 11/23/03, Sunday Herald)
SWEEPING new emergency legal powers to deal with the aftermath of a large terrorist attack in Britain are being considered by the government.The measures could potentially outlaw participation in a protest march, such as last week's demonstrations during President Bush's state visit, making it, in effect, a criminal offence to criticise government policy.
In an attempt to give the UK government similar powers to those rushed through in the US after the 9/11 attack on New York in 2001, it is understood that a beefed-up version of current civil contingencies law is being considered. It will allow the government to bypass or suspend key parts of the UK's human rights laws without the authority of parliament.
In the US, the Patriot Act has been widely condemned by civil rights groups throughout the US. Many lawyers have blamed the Patriot Act as an excuse for eroding civil rights that dated back to the founding principles of the US constitution.
That the UK government is considering seeking similar power in a crisis situation indicates the heightened level of concern following the terrorist bombings in Istanbul.
Somebody wanna hand Mr. Cusick a copy of the Constitution and the Patriot Act--such a law would be unconstitutional here.
THEY SHOOT DANCING HORSES, DON'T THEY?:
Echo Sounder: Still going strong after 25 years: how do the Bunnymen do it? It’s all down to my je ne sais quoi Ian McCulloch tells Leona Gillan (Sunday Herald, 11/23/03)
IAN McCulloch has been “belting towards” Echo And The Bunnymen’s 25th anniversary tour since early summer. “We wouldn’t be touring if it wasn’t for the fact that Warners were remastering five albums,” he cackles, “and I thought, ‘Bloody hell, it’s our 25th anniversary!’ Even though we had nine years off for bad behaviour.” [...]Without getting misty-eyed, the tour has forced Mac to appraise the Bunnymen’s place in rock history, darkly persuasive and hugely influential. Recently, it’s helped to have such high- profile fans as Chris Martin of Coldplay, but even at the height of their fame, the Bunnymen seemed to be born outsiders.
“It’s just what I’ve always wanted to do. We were never tucked into a kind of age, it was never about rock’n’roll rebellion, it was always about thought and feeling and those kind of things. Timeless. That’s why the music has stayed timeless. I suppose the fact that I’ve still ‘got it’ helps. If I thought I didn’t have the je ne sais quoi I think I’d jack it. But it seems to be getting better.”
As ever, he is completely earnest in his self-aggrandisement and forces you to ride along with his cast-iron belief that the Bunnymen are the best band in the world.
They were a great band, but who knew they were even still together?
GOP TAILWIND (via Kevin Whited):
Istook changes vote, backs bill (Chris Casteel, 2003-11-23, The Oklahoman)
His approval made the Oklahoma congressional delegation unanimously in favor of the sweeping Medicare bill. Reps. Brad Carson, D- Claremore; Tom Cole, R-Moore; Frank Lucas, R-Cheyenne; and John Sullivan, R-Tulsa, also voted for it. [...][C]arson, who is running for the U.S. Senate, broke with most members of his party to support the bill.
"Adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare is a major step forward," Carson said in a prepared statement after the vote."This package is not perfect, but at least it gives us a basis to improve upon at a later date. AARP believes, as do I, that it is better to have a working piece of legislation on the table providing a prescription drug benefit than no assurance at all."
As Brother Whited points out, Mr. Carson's vote is a pretty good indicator of where the political winds are blowing on this one.
ALL THINGS COME TO HE WHO WAITS:
Sharon floats plan that might include eventual dismantling of small settlements (RAMIT PLUSHNICK-MASTI, November 23, 2003, Associated Press)
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is floating a plan to draw a border with the Palestinians and dismantle small Israeli settlements if there is no progress on a U.S.-led peace plan, newspapers reported Sunday.The plan was leaked at a time when Sharon faces growing criticism at home. Several former security chiefs have said he is stalling on renewing peace talks because he wants to avoid making concessions and his support is slipping.
Sharon told the Yediot Ahronot daily that he would present his new plan soon. "I just wanted the Israeli public to know that its prime minister has not stopped thinking about how to get out of the impasse with the Palestinians," he told the newspaper.
The plan, as published in the major Israeli dailies, would kick in if efforts to resume implementation of the "road map" peace plan fails.
In that case, Israel would draw its own border -- along the West Bank security barrier currently under construction to keep out Palestinian militants -- and uproot a few small settlements, the newspapers said. Some of the settlers would be moved to the Negev Desert and others to larger settlement blocs in the West Bank. Israel would also withdraw from Palestinian towns and release some Palestinian prisoners.
This has been the inevitable--because best for Israel--outcome all along; it's just a shame they've wasted so many years getting to it.
PARADOX? (Via ESR: Musings):
Where is the Middle East’s Sakharov (ASLA AYDINTASBAS, Jerusalem Post: Upfront)
Historian Bernard Lewis explains this as the great paradox of the modern Middle East: the so-called moderate regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt have populations irate with anti-American and anti-Western sentiments, while among the people in rogue regimes like Iran, Iraq and Syria, there is sympathy for the West and support for the new American mantra for regime change.Skeptical? Go take a cab in Teheran — where the drivers feel free to curse at the government in front of a total stranger and move on to discuss ways Iranians could achieve freedoms.
In fact President George W. Bush’s speech earlier this month about promoting democracy in the Middle East could not have arrived at a better time for the Middle East. Predictably, the Arab (and European) media dismissed Bush’s idealism; scoffed at his mea culpa; banished the call for freedoms as a smoke screen to cover up the US occupation of Iraq. No surprises here.
Instead of self-criticism, the official Middle East and its intelligentsia would rather revel in discussions of America’s past support for Saddam, the looting at the Baghdad archeological museum, the failures to find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, how the US companies are milking Iraqi oil, and so forth.
BUT WHAT cannot be ignored by anyone is the quiet beginnings of an uprising against autocratic, repressive, and corrupt governments in the various corners of the Middle East and the Muslim world. The fact that practically all Muslim nations — with the exception of Turkey and perhaps Bangladesh — are run by regimes that are characterized as anti-democratic is an abomination first and foremost to Muslims. And we know it.
"Any regime that represses is bad. But a dictatorship that combines state and religion is especially unacceptable. There is nothing Islamic about this," Hussein Khomeini, a Shiite cleric and the grandson terrible of Iran’s revolutionary radical Ayatollah Khomeini, told me a few months ago in New York. He looked exactly like his grandfather, but could he possibly be any further from the man who gave us the Islamic revolution?
Mr. Khomeini is certainly right where Shi'a Islam is concerned, but it seems an open question whether Sunni Islam, as currently understood in most of the Middle East is inherently totalitarian.
REOPEN THE CLOSED CASE?:
Full Disclosure: The X Files: Forty years later, the CIA is still stonewalling. Time for the agency to come clean (Gerald Posner, 11/24/03, NEWSWEEK)
“I am afraid ... they’ll kill me. Let me in,” the young man pleaded in halting Russian, sobbing in front of several KGB agents in the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. He desperately needed a visa to travel to Cuba, to help the Castro government protect itself against future attacks by the CIA.BUT THE CUBAN and Soviet governments had already turned him down. The KGB agents were his last hope. Growing increasingly hysterical, the man reached for his .38-caliber revolver, and swung it about in the air. “See?” he cried. “This is what I must now carry to protect my life.”
The man: Lee Harvey Oswald. The date: Sept. 28, 1963—less than two months before he would be arrested in Dallas for assassinating John F. Kennedy.
The accounts of Oswald’s desperate visit to those communist embassies in the weeks before his rifle shots would change the course of history have long been one of the case’s most troubling issues. Was Oswald alone or with someone when he went to the embassies? Did he threaten to kill the president? Did either Cubans or Soviets encourage him to undertake the assassination? While Cuban and Soviet officials—decades after the event—provided accounts of what transpired, there might be definitive answers closer to home, inside CIA files, in documents never released by the agency.
From 1992 to 1998, an independent federal body, the Assassination Records Review Board, released thousands of records previously deemed too sensitive for the public. But more is needed. While the massive document release of the past decade reinforces the growing consensus that Oswald alone killed the president, there is a continuing failure by key government agencies—particularly the CIA—to disclose everything of relevance. Over the past 40 years the agency has too often served its own interests in this case, at the expense of truth and history.
The CIA covering its bureaucratic butt instead of seeking the truth? Hush yo' mouf.
THE REGIME IS IN ITS YOUTH:
Regime change (Christopher Shea, 11/23/2003, Boston Globe)
MOVE OVER POLLSTERS, pundits, and other political psychics. Over the last few years, a "little-discussed theory of the American presidency" has had "startling, if unnoticed, success as a crystal ball," Swarthmore political scientist Rick Valelly argued last month in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The theory, he said, has predicted Clinton's impeachment, the Bush tax cut, and even the war on Iraq.Valelly was talking about a theory laid out by Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek in his 1993 book The Politics Presidents Make. [...]
Skowronek's theory rejects the pendulum metaphor in favor of a sequence of political creation, decline, and reconstruction. Only a few presidents, he argues, get to set an agenda that lasts for decades, and they are those who come into office when the nation has hit some kind of dead end: Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, FDR, Reagan. They "repudiate" the old order and set up a new "regime."
Successive presidents from the same party will try to build on their predecessor's vision (as Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson built on Roosevelt's and the two Bushes built on Reagan's). But it gets harder and harder to do this with each new chief executive. Success breeds factionalization. Late-arriving presidents are apt to start "muscle-flexing" foreign wars, like Vietnam, to prove the continued potency of their political vision and consolidate their party's support.
Finally, every regime dies. The last president it coughs up gets treated by history as a loser (unjustly, Skowronek thinks): James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter (who arrived long after the New Deal). They muddle through until the way is cleared for a new Great Repudiator.
Of course, there are wild cards: presidents like Nixon (a Republican in a basically Democratic era) or Clinton (vice versa). As these chief executives follow their pragmatic paths, they get vilified, even by their own party, as slippery, calculating, and mongrel -- and suffer brutal personal attacks.
How well does this theory account for George W. Bush? For all his talk of bipartisanship, he's a Republican trying to build on the Reagan legacy, which explains his aggressive tax cuts. And Iraq is a "classic muscle-flexing war," Skowronek says.
One surprise is the absence of internal division within today's Republican party, which ought to be splintering by now. "There are two explanations," Skowronek offers. "One is that this Republican Party really is a new animal in American history, that is, a nationally organized, ideologically homogeneous party.... No regional differences or Main Street/Wall Street rifts." In that case, Reagan's regime might be proving even more robust than FDR's. The other is that 9/11 delayed the inevitable intra-party fits -- over fiscal discipline or gay marriage, say -- which may yet emerge in a Bush second term.
If the theory has some validity--and it would seem to--we wouldn't expect to see fissures in the Reaganesque regime for several more decades. As other scholars have noted, the typical American regime tends to last about 70 years.
WHAT THE CLASS WARRIORS WROUGHT:
Primary colors: How a little-known task force helped create Red State/Blue State America (Mark Stricherz, 11/23/2003, Boston Globe)
There have been a number of attempts to explain this growing divide. In their 1991 book "Chain Reaction," Thomas and Mary Edsall argued that the Democratic Party's embrace of the civil rights movement, followed by Nixon's Southern Strategy, caused many working-class whites to desert their ancestral party in favor of the GOP. In 1991, E.J. Dionne Jr. extended the argument in his book "Why Americans Hate Politics," contending that Republicans "were able to destroy the dominant New Deal coalition by using cultural and social issues -- race, the family, 'permissiveness,' crime -- to split New Deal constituencies."But both explanations are overly broad and incomplete. If region and culture divide the parties, it is not simply the legacy of the upheavals of the 1960s. It is also the legacy of a forgotten 28-member body called the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection (1969 -- 72), better known as the McGovern or McGovern-Fraser commission.
The McGovern commission, chaired first by Senator George McGovern and then Congressman Don Fraser of Minnesota, ended the old boss system of choosing presidential nominees and helped create the modern presidential primary system. This led to a class shift in each party, as affluent liberals gained more power in the Democratic Party while working-class conservatives won more say in the GOP.
Perhaps most importantly, the commission changed the rationale for choosing presidential nominees: Picking a candidate who was likely to win became less important than choosing one who represented the views of primary voters and special-interest groups. Today the legacy lives on in the insurgent candidacy of quintessential "blue-state" candidate Howard Dean. [...]
The McGovern commission brought the old system to an end. No longer would party bosses have control over two-thirds to four-fifths of the delegates. Not only could they no longer appoint ex-officio delegates, but just as importantly -- and against the desires of many on the commission -- a number of state legislatures decided to institute new elections in order to comply with the jumble of new rules. Thus the modern presidential primary was born. In 1968, 16 states held primaries. By 1972, 28 did -- and George McGovern himself became the Democratic nominee. In 2004, primaries are scheduled in 33 states.
The McGovern commission also changed the makeup of the party's followers. No longer would nonunionized working-class whites have the same influence in party affairs. As polls have consistently shown, they don't tend to vote in primary races, while college-educated professionals do. The latter are not only more civically engaged in general than their working-class counterparts, they are more knowledgeable about party affairs. As a result, more upper-middle-class voters joined the party and had more say within it. [...]
Some conservative pundits have lately been chortling over the prospect of a McGovern-style debacle in 2004. But the point of the McGovern commission wasn't to win elections, but to transform the party. As McGovern himself says today of his commission's work, "I'm not saying we'd get a better presidential nominee. It just means that whoever we nominate would go through a democratic process. Democracy has always been a gamble, and if we make mistakes, at least they are our mistakes."
Who but a man of the Left could say with a straight face that a system rigged in order to transfer power from the working and middle classes to the upper-middle represents a triumph of democracy?
KICKIN' BACK IN THE BRIAR PATCH:
For White House, 2 Bills Offer Route to Political High Ground (ELISABETH BUMILLER, November 23, 2003, NY Times)
As President Bush flew over the North Atlantic on Friday, heading home from three days as the houseguest of Queen Elizabeth, he switched his attention from the glamour of royal Britain to the grit of American politics.From Air Force One, with his politically critical Medicare bill in precarious straits on Capitol Hill, Mr. Bush placed calls to pressure wavering House Republicans. Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's chief political aide, had already made calls from Buckingham Palace, House Republicans said.
So when the presidential helicopter landed at 6:20 p.m. on the White House South Lawn, it was no surprise that Mr. Bush strode over to the waiting television crews, quickly dispensed with pleasantries about his trip - ``Her Majesty the Queen was a great host'' - and made a pitch for the Medicare and energy bills, his top two legislative priorities, which were at that moment embroiled in frantic negotiations on Capitol Hill.
The normally early-to-bed president made calls to the Hill into the small hours of Saturday morning, White House officials said, and kept up the pressure on Congress to pass the Medicare bill in his weekly radio address. ``I urge all members of Congress to remember what is at stake,'' Mr. Bush said.
What was at stake for the White House was command of the high ground in the 2004 re-election campaign. [...]
The goal of the White House, administration officials and Republicans said, was to get the two bills off the table and to leave national security and the economy as the chief focus of the president's 2004 campaign.
One would merely note that the Democrats have spent 2003 trying to focus voter attention on national security and the economy in the mistaken belief those issues would help them. In the words of the sage: Duh?
GRAB YOUR PITCHFORKS!:
Time for a new Boston Tea Party (Pat Buchanan, November 23, 2003, Townhall)
"John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it," thundered Andrew Jackson of the legendary chief justice.From the sublime to the ridiculous, we have one Margaret Marshall, chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, ordering the state legislature to enact, in 180 days, a law giving homosexuals the right to marry. What is to be done with this Justice Marshall?
The legislature and Gov. Mitt Romney should ignore the court, defy the order and submit to Massachusetts voters a constitutional amendment declaring that marriage is between a man and woman, as God and nature intended.
Massachusetts has been given an opportunity to lead the nation as it did in the 1770s, in breaking the power of a tyrrany. If Bay State legislators will refuse to pass the law demanded by the court, and Romney will refuse to sign such a law and orders the bureaucracy to ignore the court, what could the court do? Order his arrest? Declare him in contempt. So what? Reasonable people already hold the Massachusetts court in contempt.
It's long past time to stop letting courts have the final say on constitutions.
November 22, 2003
SOMEWHERE ANDY KERR SMILES:
Colgate Extends Its Winning Streak to 18 (The Associated Press, 11/23/03, NY Times)
Jamaal Branch scored three times yesterday, including an 87-yard game-winning touchdown run, as visiting Colgate outlasted Holy Cross, 45-38, for its 18th straight victory.Branch's performance, in which he rushed for 280 yards, was needed for Colgate (12-0, 7-0 Patriot League) to win.
Colgate led, 31-17, at halftime, but Holy Cross (1-11, 1-6) scored three touchdowns in the third quarter and held Colgate scoreless in that period to take a 38-31 lead into the fourth.
Branch then rescued Colgate with two touchdowns, scoring on a 24-yard run to tie the score at 38-38 with 13 minutes 47 seconds left. Ryan McManaway of Holy Cross then punted to the Colgate 13, setting the stage for Branch to run 87 yards for the winning touchdown with 11:24 left.
The Red Raiders of the Chenango Valley are the only football team that can call an undefeated season something of a disappointment, since they are measured against the immortal 1932 team that went: "undefeated, untied, unscored-upon, and uninvited."
THE LOSING CARD IS LAID:
U.S. takes first step away from S. Korea (RICHARD HALLORAN, 11/12/03, The Japan Times)
U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's visit to South Korea this past week should be seen for what it really was, an early step in a long, gradual disengagement of U.S. land forces from South Korea and a greater reliance on sea power to maintain an American security posture in Asia.
As he flew through Northeast Asia, Rumsfeld sprinkled clues about the future of U.S. military dispositions there even as he reaffirmed the American treaty commitments to South Korea and Japan. Other U.S. officials explained what the hints meant.A primary reason for pulling back from South Korea is that the U.S. needs the 17,000 soldiers of the Second Infantry Division elsewhere. As Rumsfeld and military leaders have said repeatedly, U.S. forces are stretched thin. The U.S. Army has only 10 divisions and cannot afford to have one tied down in South Korea.
Related to that need has been the refusal of South Korea to send a division of 12,000 soldiers to secure a sector in Iraq, as requested by the U.S. Instead, Seoul will post only 3,000, and that will include the 700 already there.
Moreover, anti-Americanism is so widespread that moving American troops out of Seoul and positions north of the capital will ease tensions only slightly. In a discussion of South Korea and North Korea, an American officer said, only half joking, "Sometimes I wonder which one is really our adversary."
The cream of their crop is already here.
LAST KID PICKED:
It's Time to Tear Down the 'Arab Wall' (Shafeeq N. Ghabra, November 23, 2003, Washington Post)
[T]he Arab status quo has been challenged -- by President Bush's Nov. 6 speech urging the Arab world to adopt liberal democracy, by the war in Iraq and, above all, by internal forces such as the growing population of young and discontented subjects. Arab regimes that before Sept. 11, 2001, seemed stable and enduring now seem vulnerable to a militant brand of Islam such as al Qaeda's.As a result, there is now a faint possibility of a third way that navigates between the two dismal poles in an Arab world. This new form of politics could begin by opening up debate in the press, schools, streets, civic organizations and even in the mosques and husayniyyas (the annexes to Shiite mosques where political discussion often takes place). It could adopt laws that protect expression and political rights. And it could nurture forces that mediate differences between state and society, between religious and secular authorities, and between government and the radical opposition. These new forces in Arab society should then defend certain elements of the status quo as if the extremists were on the verge of taking power while seeking reform and democracy as if the radicals were not there threatening to fill the vacuum.
The evolution of this third way in Arab politics will require years of expanding freedoms and reforms. And it will, inevitably, be something of an experiment. Yet the Middle East has experimented -- unsuccessfully -- with most of the last century's political faiths: socialism (in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen since the 1950s), communism (South Yemen in the 1960s), and state capitalism fused with monarchy (the Gulf states, Jordan and Morocco). The Middle East has even experimented with homegrown ideologies, including Nasserism, Baathism and Khomeiniism. Just about the only ideology the region hasn't tried is liberal capitalist democracy of one form or another.
If that admission weren't so poignant it would be funny--the only system they haven't tried is the only one that works.
THE 13TH STEP:
Recovery. It Can Be So Addicting (Mark Gauvreau Judge, November 23, 2003, Washington Post)
Now that he's out of rehab and back on the job, there's no shortage of people offering Rush Limbaugh advice on his new life as a recovering drug addict. But I think I can offer the pugnacious radio talk show host some advice he's probably not getting: Listen, Rush. Whatever people tell you, recovery is not endless -- and it should not remain the center of your life.In 12-step circles, this is heresy. Once you get bounced into what alcoholics call "the rooms" of Alcoholics Anonymous and other groups -- those church basements where the recovering meet -- it's hammered into you that recovery must be the center of your life, every day, for the rest of your life. This is a self-defeating proposition. Admitting powerlessness and asking for help are signs of honesty and maturity. But making a fetish out of a long-ago disorder and engaging in groupthink are not.
As someone once addicted to alcohol, I've logged many hours in the rooms. I've heard lots of self-aggrandizing stories of debauchery, which are common in the recovery culture. In most of these stories, individuals battle addiction to arrive at the truth that the world doesn't revolve around them -- yet often they still manage to make themselves the center of the universe. They spend years of their lives in a stupor of addiction; then, once sober, they spend years of their lives talking about it.
AA and similar programs do remarkable, life-saving work, but Mr. Judge has it precisely right when he says that they've a tendency to leave the addict totally focused on self. The last step really needs to be the recognition that the Universe has a Center, and you aren't it.
AXIS OF GOOD FILES:
The Quiet Revolution: All eyes are on Iraq, but the most breathtaking democratic reforms in the Muslim world are happening in Turkey—with Islamists leading the way. (Stephen Kinzer, 12/01/03, American Prospect)
The Turks, hoping more fervently than ever to join the European Union, are sliding out of the American orbit and steadily closer to Europe. Their new government has embarked on one of the most sweeping reform campaigns in the country's history. If this effort succeeds, Turkey will become important in a new way: It will be the counter-model to Muslim fundamentalism and a living example of how an Islamic country can progress by embracing what Kemal Ataturk called "universal values." That would make Turkey an even greater asset to the West than it was at the height of the Cold War. In the past, Turkey was strategically vital because of where it is; in the future, it may be vital because of what it is.The political earthquake now shaking Turkey was set off by two events. The first and more dramatic was the election of November 2002, which brought to power the first stable, single-party government the country has had in more than a decade. It was an amazing triumph for the Justice and Development Party, which had existed for less than two years, and also an expression of disgust with the encrusted political establishment.
Then, just after that stunning election, European Union leaders promised that in December 2004 they would vote on whether to begin talks with Turkey about joining their elite club. These two events sent Turkey onto a frenzied course of reform that is breathtaking in its ambition—but also full of dangers.
The new government has used its large parliamentary majority to pass a series of profound reforms aimed at expanding civil and political freedoms. One package was designed to reduce the military's power in politics. Another legalized broadcasting and education in Kurdish languages, a major breakthrough in a country where promoting Kurdish culture has long been considered seditious. Parliament also voted to expand the rights of religious minorities, impose heavy penalties on abusive police officers, and make it harder to punish citizens for what they say or write.
Such reforms would be extraordinary in any Muslim nation. But what makes this scenario especially fascinating is the fact that the party leading this peaceful revolution has its roots in Islamic politics. Its leaders, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, shun the Islamist label and prefer to be called "conservative democrats." Both, however, pray regularly, avoid alcohol and are married to women who wear headscarves. Such people are often assumed to be intolerant. In Turkey today, however, their party is turning out to be more committed to democracy than any of the corrupt "secular" parties that bled the country for decades.
A lot of folks got their panties in a twist when Turkey refused to co-operate during the Iraq war, but their interests in Kurdistan conflicted with ours and it's hard to see why they should have acted against self-interest. Our relations may well be difficult, but we'd be foolish to ignore things like Mr. Erdogan's recent visit to the bombed synagogues, which Turks themselves recognized as an extraordinary gesture.
MORE:
'Such Events Will Only Strengthen Our Resolve' (Engin Ansay [consul general of Turkey in Los Angeles], November 21, 2003, LA Times)
The terrorism that took place Saturday in my country and again Thursday morning should not be classified as actions against a certain group, a particular people or religion, or political decisions and choices that Turkey has made. Rather, these are acts against all humanity, bearing the apparent signature, once again, of Al Qaeda. [...]The cowardly acts of recent days will also receive the appropriate response and the hand of justice. The perpetrators' only achievement is an evil, criminal notoriety and worldwide condemnation of their actions.
Turkey, like Israel, is a democracy in an otherwise extremely volatile and unstable region. Last month, we celebrated the 80th anniversary of the foundation of the Republic by Kemal Ataturk. We take pride in our democracy and in our secular way of life. The Turkish Republic is a living testimony to the idea that a country with a majority Muslim population can be a strong democracy.
We regard the bombings of the synagogues, and Thursday's double bombing in Istanbul, as horrific attacks aimed at undermining our country. Who would be poisoned and naive enough to think that such an act of inhumanity would make a country do or not do something?
How unlucky we are to witness the horror of ignorance that culminates in an act of despair such as this one. But we will not give up. Such events will only strengthen our resolve.
ANOTHER DEMOCRAT VICTORY TURNS TO DUST:
Congress Drops Fight for Overtime: Acceptance of New Labor Dept. Rule Ends Spending Bill Stalemate (Eric Pianin, November 22, 2003, Washington Post)
Congressional leaders last night handed President Bush a major victory by dropping objections to his plan to revamp the nation's overtime pay policies, even though many lawmakers say it will cost millions of workers overtime benefits.A stalemate between the White House and lawmakers over the issue has held up passage of a $284 billion multi-agency spending bill needed to let Congress adjourn for the year. House leaders may seek passage of the spending measure as early as today.
Bush's proposed new Labor Department rules would redefine eligibility for overtime pay, typically time-and-a-half after 40 hours of work in one week. Workers earning more than $65,000 a year could be denied overtime pay if their employers categorized them as administrators, professionals or other exempt employees.
The administration says the changes would better reflect modern workplace realities, and make many low-income workers newly eligible for overtime pay.
The House last month had joined the Senate Appropriations Committee in opposing the administration's plan. It marked a significant victory for Democrats and labor leaders, and Bush threatened to veto the spending package unless the overtime language was removed.
No wonder Terry McAuliffe when asked if he feared being replaced in his job as DNC Chairman asked: Who would want it?
LOSING THEIR RELIGION:
Euro strong but endangered (Martin Hutchinson, 11/21/2003, UPI)
The Cato Institute's 21st annual monetary conference Thursday, on the future of the euro, achieved more or less unanimous consensus: the euro can be expected to be very strong against the dollar in the next two years, soaring to $1.50 or more, but is in severe danger of disintegration in the long term.As Kenneth Rogoff, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund said, the euro was "a religion" and many of the reasons for inventing it in 1998 were non-economic. Nevertheless, it has had a fairly successful first 5 years, and now looks likely to be very strong against the U.S. dollar, because of the U.S. trade deficit, now 5 percent of gross domestic product, and the likely increase in the share of central bank reserves denominated in euros. [...]
In the longer term, however, the euro has serious structural weaknesses, because of the unfounded pension liabilities in a number of eurozone countries. This would not be such a big problem if all countries of the euro zone had the same problem; the currency would simply enter a period of serious structural weakness and substantial inflation, as the problem was overcome.
Jose Pinera, Chilean health minister 1978-1980, and instigator of the world's first privatized pension system pointed out that in the eurozone this was not the case. Some eurozone countries, Finland, Ireland and Luxembourg, have sound public finances, and others, such as the Netherlands (and, outside the eurozone, Britain) have substantial well funded private pension systems. However, there are a number of core eurozone countries, in particular Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Austria that have pay-as-you-go public sector pension systems, which appear attractive in their early years but the bills for which are now coming due as baby boomers retire and birth rates have fallen substantially below replacement levels. Immigration may mitigate the problem somewhat but is unlikely to solve it, since a solution would require that in 2030-50 young immigrants would be paying very high taxes to fund the social costs of aged locals -- a prospect unlikely to be politically feasible.
The long term solution to this, according to Pinera, is for these countries to move to a privatized, fully funded pension system, similar to that now found in 23 countries, and abandon the pay-as you go system, originally invented by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who now "threatens to damage Europe in the 21st Century by this invention as much as he damaged it in the 20th by his other invention of a militarized German super-state."
Not every country is lucky enough to have a Pinochet.
PLAIN WHITE TOAST:
Spoiling (Carefully) for a Fight (MATT BAI, 11/23/03, NY Times Magazine)
The general consensus this fall is that there are too many candidates and too many debates, and that they sound about as spontaneous as a George Foreman infomercial.''They're not debates,'' Paul Begala, one of the party's leading debate strategists, said. ''You have a collection of people with their canned lines, some of them good and some of them not good, and they just recite them in random order. In fact, maybe we should just do that. 'Senator Kerry, could you please give us your line on Medicare?'''
Begala said the best way to fix this mess would be to somehow winnow the field, giving a smaller number of candidates more time to answer each question. When I repeated this suggestion to Sharpton, who has clearly been the most agile debater thus far, he scoffed. ''What are we really talking about?'' he asked. ''A minute or two? It's not like some of them were on the verge of brilliance and then somebody cut them off!''
I asked Sharpton to rate the debating skills of his rivals. Gephardt and Kucinich show the most passion, Sharpton said, while Lieberman is the most sure of his convictions. ''He don't care if they heckle or boo, that's who he is. I respect it.'' Dean, he said, ''can come off as arrogant or even mean-spirited.'' Sharpton likened Kerry to a prizefighter who scores well in every round but never lands the knockout punch.
I asked him about Edwards. ''He suffers from his handlers maybe building something up that he couldn't live up to,'' Sharpton said, sympathetically. ''I don't blame him for that. I think sometimes you can be overpromoted, and it can hurt you in the end.''
Some Democratic insiders, including at least one friend of the senator's, suggested to me that Edwards might have something to gain by remaining tepid. The 50-year-old candidate, who has already said that he will give up his Senate seat, would be a natural pick for vice president should he lose the nomination, and his chances will be better if he doesn't savage the eventual nominee.
Nothing fires up the faithful like positioning yourself as the most tepid option in the race.
HOW'D "STUPID" GET SO SMART?:
Real Bush 'At Odds with Media Caricature' (Chris Moncrieff, 11/21/03, The Scotsman)
US President George Bush is “totally at odds” with his media image, Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Menzies Campbell said today. [...]“He is personally extremely engaging. He has a well-developed sense of humour, is self-deprecating and when he engages in a discussion with you he is warm and concentrates directly on you.
“He looks you straight in the eye and tells you exactly what he thinks.”
Mr Campbell, stressing that the President was “totally at odds” with his media image, went on: “I was not persuaded by what he said, but I was most certainly surprised at the extent to which the caricature of him was inaccurate.”
As opposed to those accurate caricatures.
I KISSED A GIRL:
Conservatives leave 'closet' during rally (Bridget Smith, 11/21/03, [Penn State] Collegian)
More than 100 students gathered on the steps of Old Main yesterday to announce their decision to come out of the "conservative closet."A little after noon, Penn State College Republicans chair Brian Battaglia began "Conservative Coming Out Day" by encouraging the audience to register to vote as Republicans and to research each candidate.
Collegiate conservatives sure seem to have more fun than their opposition.
AGAINST VALETUDINARIANISM:
Is the deficit too small? (Richard W. Rahn, 11/20/03, Washington Times)
The conventional wisdom is our federal government deficit is too large. However, the empirical evidence suggests the deficit might be too small. [...]The total federal government debt held by the public (which is the relevant number to be concerned about) dropped from 42 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 1962 to a low of 25 percent in 1975, then rose to a high of 50 percent in 1993, and then dropped back to 33 percent in 2001. Currently, debt as a percent of GDP stands at about 35 percent.
Since 1963, we have had 14 years when debt has been below 33 percent of GDP and 26 years when it has been higher. Conventional wisdom is that economic performance should have been better in the years when we had less relative debt, but the facts are the opposite. Real economic growth averaged 3.47 percent in the high debt years, which was almost 1 percent higher than the 2.59 percent average growth of the low debt years.
Unemployment was also lower in the high debt years averaging 5.65 percent as opposed to 6.43 percent in the low debt years. Inflation averaged a whopping 7.6 percent in the low debt years, almost 3 times as high as the average 2.95 percent of the high debt years.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates federal debt could grow to as much as 40 percent of GDP by 2005 and then begin declining again. From 1986 to 1999, it was above 40 percent, and we did quite well during most of those years. Recent data showing both much higher economic growth and higher inflation (meaning much higher nominal GDP) than the CBO forecasted means the debt GDP ratio in fact is likely to remain almost constant. [...]
Finally, the analysis of the historical data clearly indicates that if we had properly structured tax cuts (like the first Reagan and the most recent Bush tax cuts) in 1969, 1973, 1979, 1989 and 2000 we may have avoided the recessions, with all their human misery and unemployment, that occurred the year following each of the above dates. Unfortunately, policymakers in all of those years were more preoccupied with reducing the deficits rather than keeping the economy growing.
The lesson is clear, economic prosperity can continue, even if the federal government never balances its budget, provided it keeps government spending from growing as a percentage of GDP, and has an ongoing program of removing tax and regulatory impediments to growth.
This has only been obvious for two hundred years now.
OUR ARAB:
ABIZAID OF ARABIA: General John Abizaid has driven big changes in the American
military. Now, as he commands U.S. forces in the Middle East, his ideas are being put to the test. (Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., 12/03, Atlantic Monthly)
This past July, a week after taking charge-as the chief of what the military calls Central Command-of all U.S. forces in the Middle East, the four-star Army general John Abizaid stepped over the line. He deliberately used the loaded word "guerrilla" to describe the escalating Iraqi resistance to U.S. occupation-something his civilian superiors had gone out of their way to avoid. Reporters pounced, even as soldiers quietly applauded Abizaid's candor. The Administration let it go-testimony to Abizaid's standing in the Pentagon, where he is said to be one of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's favorite officers.And not only Rumsfeld's. To a remarkable degree Abizaid is admired by his fellow officers, many of whom have said outright that he is uniquely suited to oversee the increasingly complex and bloody occupation of Iraq. Indeed, Abizaid's entire life seems to have prepared him to be the military proconsul of an Arab country in chaos. But now the question is whether he can step up from a career of triumphs in smaller arenas to take on the nation-building challenge of the decade.
Lieutenant Colonel Hank Keirsey (now retired) got a firsthand look at Abizaid's approach when the general commanded an airborne brigade in a war-games exercise at Fort Polk, Louisiana, back in 1995. "He was probably at his best in the chaos of the 'low-intensity' fight," Keirsey recalls, "the one that most usually confuses the modern American commander." In the phase of the exercise simulating a "high-intensity" war, against a conventional, tank-heavy force, Abizaid's performance was unspectacular, marred by gaps in the performance of his staff. But in the phase simulating a "low-intensity" war, against Third World insurgents, Abizaid's unit killed more guerrillas than any other Keirsey had ever seen. Discarding standard procedure ("He operated that brigade almost by ignoring his staff," Keirsey recalls), Abizaid improvised quick counterstrikes and repeatedly turned the tables on his would-be ambushers. This unconventional approach to warfare was not how the Army had taught Abizaid to fight. It was something he had largely taught himself.
It's helpful to find your Creighton Abrams six months into the war instead of six years.
JUST KEEP ROLLING THE DICE:
Bid to Change Social Security Is Back: Bush Aides Resurrect Plan for Personal Retirement Accounts (Mike Allen, November 21, 2003, Washington Post)
Bush aides said he will make the longtime conservative goal more palatable by discussing changes to Social Security as part of a set of plans encouraging what he calls an "ownership society" in which minorities receive help buying homes, seniors have a choice of health care, and employees control part of their retirement savings."We are going to do everything we can to encourage a healthy public dialogue about Social Security reform," a senior administration official said. "The politics works on this because it is accepted in the general public that Social Security has a long-term solvency problem."
A Republican official said the White House has signaled Capitol Hill that Bush's campaign "wants to spend a lot of money" on advertising promoting the issue.
A presidential adviser said Bush is intent on being able to say that reworking Social Security "is part of my mandate" if he wins. Bush made modernization of the retirement system one of the six core issues of his campaign in 2000, but he has said little about it since a commission he had appointed issued an inconclusive report at the end of 2001.
Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who worked for Vice President Al Gore in 2000, said Bush was able to wage this debate somewhat theoretically last time because he was a challenger. "This time the debate will be very different and much more concrete," he said. "It's a high-risk strategy. I hope they do it."
Despite a belief by some that Reaganauts are blind to his faults, you'll find that most regret his failure to push a big agenda when he ran for re-election and his focus on boosting his landslide instead of trying to win seats in Congress. Actually, the two are inextricably linked. Reagan won in '80 running on a, for the time, extremely conservative platform and carried the Senate against all expectations. Similarly, in 1994, the GOP ran on the Contract and won huge. George W. Bush and Karl Rove seem to recognize that it is by nationalizing elections that Republicans can win down-ticket. Running on a vision this immense is certainly risky, but win and the payoff is a paradigm shift. That seems a worthwhile gambit.
TURN TO PAGE 1776 IN YOUR HYMNAL:
Nothing to lose but their chains: Michael Ledeen says that our most potent weapon in the war against terrorism is democracy: people everywhere want to be free (Michael Ledeen, 11/22/03, The Spectator)
The most controversial part of George W. Bush's vision of the war against terrorism is his insistence that this is a war against tyranny, and that we will not be able to win the war until we have helped democratic revolutions succeed in the key countries, those that provide the terrorists with much of their vital wherewithal. It's controversial for varying reasons, depending on the critic. Some say that countries are marginal in the terror universe; it's transnational organisations like al-Qa'eda which we must defeat. Others are upset because they think the President is declaring war on any country, anywhere, that helps the terrorists, and they ask where the money and the troops will come from. Still others are critical of Bush's belief that the Middle East can be successfully democratised at all, and wish that the United States would either give up this crazy dream, or get serious about building an empire and find proper viceroys, etc. [...]I think we are on the verge of the same kind of revolutionary transformation in the Middle East today. The real question is not whether it can be done, but whether we have the will to do it. We haven't been very good in Afghanistan, where American negotiators unaccountably agreed to the creation of an 'Islamic Republic' when we should have vetoed the very idea. We haven't been nearly as active as we should have been in embracing the Iraqis, who have proved many of the pessimists totally wrong: there hasn't been a religious or ethnic civil war, the Iraqi Shiites have not been manipulated by the Iranians, and there are plenty of talented and educated Iraqis who, given the chance, could do a thoroughly presentable job of managing their country. We're getting better, but the people of the region are running ahead of us whenever they can. There was a brief 'Prague Spring' in Damascus after the death of the old tyrant, but it was crushed soon after. I don't think it will be that difficult to find suitably democratic forces in Syria in the future, especially if we deal effectively with Iran.
The main thing is to see the situation plainly: we are at war with a group of tyrants who sponsor a network of terrorists. Our most potent weapon against them is their own people, who hate them and wish to be free. We don't need to invade Iran or Syria or Saudi Arabia, but we certainly need to support the calls for freedom coming from within those tyrannical countries.
And that's the Dubya Doctrine.
The kids were marching around the house today to the tunes of a Walt Disney cd of patriotic songs and the Battle Hymn of the Republic came on--long version:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on."He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.
The thought occurred: George W. Bush's democratic messianism is of rather ancient vintage, isn't it.
REMEMBER JOHN EAST:
He's Spoiling for a Chance to Take On Schumer (RAYMOND HERNANDEZ, 11/10/03, NY Times)
In New York Republican circles, Michael Benjamin has become a bit like the kid on the basketball court begging the other players to pass him the ball.Even as the party has all but given up any hope of finding a candidate who can beat New York's well-funded senior senator, Charles E. Schumer, next year, Mr. Benjamin has been trying to convince the party's leaders that he is the man for the job.
Mr. Benjamin, 33, has put more than 40,000 miles on his Ford Explorer in the last nine months, visiting every one of the state's 62 counties in an effort to round up support from local party leaders and rank-and-file Republicans.
He has also managed to arrange meetings with some leading Republicans in the state, including Joseph L. Bruno, the Senate majority leader, and Alexander F. Treadwell, the state party chairman.
He even cornered Gov. George E. Pataki at a recent fund-raiser in Westchester County to press his case, though the governor's response was something on the order of "Don't call us, we'll call you," according to people familiar with the encounter. [...]
Politically, Mr. Benjamin has sprung up from virtually nowhere. The son of immigrants — his father is Iranian, his mother Honduran — he lived in Central and South America because of his father's job with the Bank of America, the biography on his Web site says. Fluent in Spanish, Mr. Benjamin points out that he would be the first United States Senator of Hispanic origin from New York if he defeats Mr. Schumer.
Thus are Republicans known as the Stupid Party. In 1994, another Republican landslide held Daniel Moynihan, a far more popular Senator, to 55%, against a relatively unknown Republican, Bernadette Castro, who received almost no help from the National Party because her cause was considered hopeless.
Similarly, in 1994 the GOP failed to invest any resources in VT on the assumption that Bernie Sanders was unbeatable, but he barely escaped anyway, with under 50% of the vote. The Party seems unable to process the fact that when elections get nationalized they can carry seemingly unwinnable seats. If they'd recruit top drawer candidates and fund them, they'd not only stand to pull off upsets but would inevitably help other races down-ticket.
With that in mind, here are a few races to watch--states where the GOP is currently given no prayer to beat veteran incumbents (unlike SD, NV, WA & CA, LA--which are at least recognized as possibilities) but which will at some point in the process be recognized as lon--okay, very long--shot possibilities: Patrick Leahy, VT; Daniel Inouye, HI (assuming he decides not to run); Russ Feingold, WI; and Byron Dorgan, ND.
JUST ANOTHER "-ISM":
THE MYTH OF AN ISLAMIC GOLDEN AGE (Srdja Trifkovic, Speech to the Highland Park-Highwood Lions Club, November 6, 2003)
The task facing a narrow segment of urban intelligentsia in the Muslim world that seeks to reform Islam into a matter of personal choice separated from the State and distinct from the society is frankly impossible. This has always remained a minority view in the world of Islam, and even its apparent triumph in Turkey under Mustafa Kemal remains tentative at best. If and when Turkey becomes a true democracy, that instant it will become Islamic and anti-Western.The predominant response of the Muslim world to the crisis caused by western superiority has been the clamoring for “Islamic solutions.” Both traditionalists and fundamentalists postulate the superiority of their faith and its divinely ordained world leadership, and both regard the early success of Islam as a natural result of the strict and uncompromising observance of all tenets of that faith. The subsequent decline and the temporary superiority of the unbelievers is both resented—creating the culture of anti-Western otherness—and feared. The failure of the umma was understood as a consequence of the failure of the Muslim world to be “truly Islamic.” The revival of the model of early Islam in a modern form absolutely mandates the reaffirmation of uncompromising animosity to non-believers and the return to violence as a means of attaining political ends. Islamic terrorism, far from being an aberration, became inseparable from modern-day jihad. It is legitimized by it, and it is its defining feature.
While it would be simplistic to claim that Islamists routinely cheat in representing their history to the rest of us, it is closer to the mark to say that they are prone to construct an invented reality for themselves. To understand the reality of Islam’s record with its non-adherents, one should not compare it to Judaism or Christianity but match it against modern totalitarian ideologies, notably Bolshevism and National Socialism. Each explicitly denied the legitimacy of any form of social, political, or cultural organization other than itself. In the name of Allah and Islam, more people were killed in one year of Khomeini than during the preceding quarter-century of the Shah. It is easy to eliminate enemies who have been dehumanized, like when Khomeini announced, “In Persia no people have been killed so far, only beasts.” Hitler’s or Stalin’s forma mentis was different from that of Khomeini only in quantity, not in quality. The latter’s statement that the Muslims have no choice but to wage “holy war against profane governments” until the conquest of the world has been accomplished—an eminently orthodox and “mainstream” statement of Islamic world outlook, different only in its frankness from the pitch of Muslim apologists in the West—had a familiar ring to it. It was Nikita Khrushchev’s “We shall bury you” wrapped in green instead of red. The Kremlin ruse called “peaceful coexistence” was but jihad under another name.
Always reliant on the plunder of its neighbors and robbery of its non-Muslim subjects, Islam was unable to create new wealth once the conquerors had run out of steam and reduced the vanquished to utter penury. Pre-Islamic Egypt was the granary of Europe, just like the pre-Bolshevik Ukraine; now both have to import food. Pre-Islamic Syria and Asia Minor suffered a similar fate under Caliph Umar to the highly developed and prosperous East Germany and Czechoslovakia after 1945. Both Islam and Communism oppose the preconditions for successful economic development in principle as well as in practice. In both cases, attempts to copy Western methods of production failed because they were not accompanied by the essential changes of social, political, and legal structure; the problem of Ottoman experiments with modernization were remarkably similar to the tinkering with various “models of socialism” a hundred years later.
This analysis recurs too often, from Karen Armstrong (unintentionally) to Bernard Lewis to Paul Berman--of Islamicism as a rather standard variant of totalitarianism--to be dismissed.
MORE:
-ESSAY: The Golden Age of Islam is a Myth (Srdja Trifkovic, November 15, 2002, Front Page)
THE PACIFIC CENTURY:
US reorganizes its military might (Alan Boyd, 11/20/03, Asia Times)
Thailand, the Philippines and Australia have been targeted as possible US defense staging posts just days after the United States announced that it would restructure its forces in Asia, and as the Pentagon is considering a partial pullout from its remaining Asian bases in Okinawa and South Korea. [...]"Some allies are obviously going to be more important than others. Japan, Korea and Australia will remain the linchpins because they operate the same basic defensive platforms as the US and are more in tune politically," said a diplomat. "Staging points are a logistics rather than a strategic concept. Singapore is the model, as it has performed the role through Changi [naval base] for a number of years, to the extent that it is now servicing Nimitz-class carrier groups."
The US, Japan and Australia formed a liaison group last year to study how East Asia's security and defense capabilities could be enhanced, and it is currently meeting in Canberra. Frontline countries will be offered more training and equipment, but will also be expected to assume increased responsibility for their own defense once the US streamlines its presence in the region.
Despite the obsessive focus of Atlanticists on our relations with yesterday's nations--like France and Germany--Australia, the Philippines, India, and the like are far more important to our future.
November 21, 2003
WHIPLASH WILLY AND REVERSIBLE ROBERT:
An Administration of One: Bush has made it clear that the only exit strategy from Iraq is a victory strategy, with victory defined as "democracy." (Robert Kagan and William Kristol, 12/01/2003, Weekly Standard)
WHEN GEORGE W. BUSH first entered the White House, the conventional wisdom was that his inexperience and lack of vision in foreign policy would be compensated for by his wise and experienced cabinet. This may or may not have been a reasonable view at the time. Right now, however, it is clear that the most visionary and, yes, the wisest and most capable foreign policy-maker in the Bush administration is the president himself. [...][B]ush has broken from the mainstream of his party and become a neoconservative in the true meaning of the term. For if there is a single principle that today divides neoconservatism from traditional American conservatism, it is the conviction that the promotion of liberal democracy abroad is both a moral imperative and a profound national interest. This is a view of America's role in the world that has found little favor in the Republican party since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. Reagan was a modern exception--the product, no doubt, of his own roots as a Truman Democrat--but this aspect of Reaganism was largely abandoned by Republicans after 1989. And so we are not surprised to see traditional Republican conservatives, of whom there is no more esteemed intellectual spokesman than George Will, now denouncing the supposed folly of such ambitious ventures. Nor are we surprised that in Bush's own cabinet, neither his secretary of state nor his secretary of defense shares the president's commitment to liberal democracy, either in Iraq or in the Middle East more generally. Indeed, the only thing that surprises us, a little, is the failure of American liberals--and European liberals--to embrace a cause that ought to be close to their hearts.
Liberals and conservatives alike these days seem willing to consign the Arab peoples to more decades of tyranny. "The West," argues Fareed Zakaria, "must recognize that it does not seek democracy in the Middle East--at least not yet." President Bush rejects this counsel. "In the West," Bush noted in London, "there's been a certain skepticism about the capacity or even the desire of Middle Eastern peoples for self-government. . . . It is not realism to suppose that one-fifth of humanity is unsuited to liberty. It is pessimism and condescension, and we should have none of it."
What has also become clear this past week is that Bush is determined to promote democracy in Iraq--and right now.
These two change their minds about W so often, even they must have to pick up that week's magazine to see whether they think he's wobbling or ascending Mount Rushmore at any given moment.
OUR OWN CARGO CULT:
Wannabe Yanks: Theodore Dalrymple regrets that we import many of America’s vices but none of her virtues (The Spectator, 11/23/03)
American virtues are much harder to convey, let alone imitate, than American vices. These virtues are, in a loose sense, spiritual, or at least philosophical. As Marx wrote in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, ‘Theory becomes a spiritual force when it is gripped by the masses.’ And Americans, en masse, believe that their lives are what they themselves make of them. It is from this belief that their wealth arises; and it is from their wealth that their high culture arises. What Virtual America does not convey is that the world’s best universities, best libraries, best scientific research laboratories, best cultural institutions are American. America is simultaneously demotic and elitist, but only the demotic is communicated to consumers of Virtual America. But it is the products of the elitism that are admirable, and so essential to American affluence.The consumers of Virtual America see the affluence and are embittered that it is not theirs, but they do not understand the culture or effort that created it. They are like Africans who see the wealth of Europe but have no idea where it came from, or of the depth of the intellectual tradition that created it. Like Africans, they become cargo-cultists, expecting wealth to drop from the skies by supernatural delivery. When this fails to happen, they grow bitter and enraged.
In fact, a combination of American demotic culture and expectations inculcated by the welfare state is a disastrous one. When the demotic culture is not combined with or ameliorated by a belief in personal striving for material improvement, but rather with the idea that affluence is delivered by the government through confiscation and redistribution — that is to say by the promotion of ‘social justice’ — a uniquely horrible, new culture is forged, the culture of embittered slovenliness. The British are increasingly a nation of angry slobs.
Well, that crack about baseball caps was unnecessary.
MISSING YOUR OWN POINT:
Setting The Bar: When our standards don't live up to our standards (Cullen Murphy, December 2003, The Atlantic Monthly)
Some standards aren't worthy of the name in the first place, and in any event standards will always be in flux. But surely there are a handful on which we might all agree to hold the line—this far and no further, unto the end of days. To start this long-overdue public conversation, I'll propose ten.I. "EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS BEFORE RETURNING TO WORK" ("Los empleados deben lavarse las manos antes de regresar al trabajo").
II. "Women and children first" (except maybe Ann Coulter). [...]
IX. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."—the Golden Rule (worth a try?)
Mr. Murphy is a terrific essayist and the rest of the column pretty good, which makes it all the more disconcerting that in the middle of a discussion of the need to restore social standards he plunks a gratuitous shot at Ann Coulter.
WOULD IT STILL BE A WEDGE WAR IF JFK WERE WAGING IT?:
Friend William Sulik found something neat: two JFK speeches that went undelivered. As he points out, they could be given today by the current White House occupant.
MORE:
Merriman Smith's account of JFK death: From the UPI Archives -- Merriman Smith received the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his coverage of the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy. (Merriman Smith, Nov. 23, 1963, UPI)
It was a balmy, sunny noon as we motored through downtown Dallas behind President Kennedy. The procession cleared the center of the business district and turned into a handsome highway that wound through what appeared to be a park.I was riding in the so-called White House press "pool" car, a telephone company vehicle equipped with a mobile radio-telephone. I was in the front seat between a driver from the telephone company and Malcolm Kilduff, acting White House press secretary for the president's Texas tour. Three other pool reporters were wedged in the back seat.
Suddenly we heard three loud, almost painfully loud cracks. The first sounded as if it might have been a large firecracker. But the second and third blasts were unmistakable. Gunfire.
The president's car, possibly as much as 150 or 200 yards ahead, seemed to falter briefly. We saw a flurry of activity in the Secret Service follow-up car behind the chief executive's bubble-top limousine.
Next in line was the car bearing Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. Behind that, another follow-up car bearing agents assigned to the vice president's protection. We were behind that car.
Our car stood still for probably only a few seconds, but it seemed like a lifetime. One sees history explode before one's eyes and for even the most trained observer, there is a limit to what one can comprehend.
I looked ahead at the president's car but could not see him or his companion, Gov. John B. Connally of Texas. Both men had been riding on the right side of the bubble-top limousine from Washington. I thought I saw a flash of pink which would have been Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy.
Everybody in our car began shouting at the driver to pull up closer to the president's car. But at this moment, we saw the big bubble-top and a motorcycle escort roar away at high speed.
We screamed at our driver, "Get going, get going." We careened around the Johnson car and its escort and set out down the highway, barely able to keep in sight of the president's car and the accompanying Secret Service follow-up car.
They vanished around a curve. When we cleared the same curve we could see where we were heading -- Parkland Hospital, a large brick structure to the left of the arterial highway. We skidded around a sharp left turn and spilled out of the pool car as it entered the hospital driveway.
I ran to the side of the bubble-top.
The president was face down on the back seat. Mrs. Kennedy made a cradle of her arms around the president's head and bent over him as if she were whispering to him.
Gov. Connally was on his back on the floor of the car, his head and shoulders resting in the arms of his wife, Nellie, who kept shaking her head and shaking with dry sobs. Blood oozed from the front of the governor's suit. I could not see the president's wound. But I could see blood spattered around the interior of the rear seat and a dark stain spreading down the right side of the president's dark gray suit.
From the telephone car, I had radioed the Dallas bureau of UPI that three shots had been fired at the Kennedy motorcade. Seeing the bloody scene in the rear of the car at the hospital entrance, I knew I had to get to a telephone immediately.
A STRANGE, STRANGE COUNTRY
Americans rally behind officer who foiled plot. Family shares stress of assault charges, girls hear at school: 'Your daddy is no hero' (Art Moore, WorldNetDaily.com, 11/05/03)
"The fact is," the attorney said, "two trained interrogators, both female, worked with [the Iraqi policeman] for hours and hours, and he wouldn't talk, so they called their commander."The article has links for emailing Col. West, his wife, their attorney and Congress.West strode into the room, according to Puckett, and said to the Iraqi, "If you don't give us this information, I'm going to kill you."
The policeman, "as a demonstration of his seriousness," responded to West with a smile and said, "I love you."
West then took the Iraqi outside and, with the help of colleagues, forced his head down. With one hand on the man's head – to provide protection – and the other holding the pistol, West fired into a weapons-clearing barrel filled with sand.
"There was an immediate outpouring of information," Puckett said. The man told my client everything he wanted to know."
CLOSE THE GAP:
The voting gender gap narrows (Steve Sailer, 11/20/03, UPI)
Data extricated from the collapse of the lone national exit poll in the 2002 congressional elections show that the gap between how men and women vote declined to the narrowest difference since before the 1994 House elections.A United Press International analysis of the results of election night surveys of 17,872 voters shows that much of the GOP's 5-percentage-point improvement in the House voting last year came from its increased appeal to women.
Republican candidates' share of the male vote grew from 54 percent in 2000 to 55 percent last November. Their fraction of the female vote, however, rose from 45 percent to 50 percent. This was the first time in several decades that at least half of women's votes went to GOP House candidates. [...]
The media has tended to view the GOP's difficulties attracting women's votes as a larger problem than the Democrats' equivalent struggles winning men's votes, although under the Constitution, both sexes' ballots are counted equally.
The enormous amount of publicity the gender gap has received is probably due in part to it being widest among the well-educated -- the people most likely to write and read articles about politics.
In reality, though, the celebrated gender gap is dwarfed by the seldom-mentioned disparity within each sex between the married and the unmarried. In 2002, 56 percent of married women voted for the GOP (similar to their husbands' 58 percent) compared to 39 percent of unmarried women (and 44 percent of unmarried men). There's an exceptionally large partisan difference between married women with children (58 percent Republican) and unmarried women with children (32 percent).
One hesitates to give intellectuals credit for too much intelligence, but it can hardly be a coincidence that single people--women and mothers in particular--depend for their sense of economic security on the State and that the Left has mounted a sustained assault against marriage and families. Atomization of society feeds statism.
But the GOP can steal a march on them if it uses private accounts to create a social welfare net that provides security but does so largely by relying on individuals to fund it themselves. Coupled with some restoration of traditional family structures it might be possible to start to undo some of the damage that the 19th Amendment has caused.
ANTI-BUSH/ANTI-SEMITIC:
Soros, Europeans: Die Juden sind unser Unglueck! Holocaust II? (Nicholas Stix, November 24, 2003, A Different Drummer)
On November 5, 2003, billionaire financier George Soros arose at a function to say, in so many words, "Die Juden sind unser Unglueck!" He blamed the Jews, Israel, and the policies of Pres. George W. Bush, for the rise in world anti-Semitism in recent years, most dramatically, since 911."There is a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe. The policies of the Bush administration and the Sharon administration contribute to that. It's not specifically anti-Semitism, but it does manifest itself in anti-Semitism as well. I'm critical of those policies.
"If we change that direction, then anti-Semitism also will diminish. I can't see how one could confront it directly."
Soros also responded to recent remarks by powerful anti-Semites, such as Mahathir Mohammad, who just stepped down as Malaysia’s prime minister, that the Jews, particularly, Jewish financiers like Soros, rule the world.
Mohammad: "The Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them."
Soros: "I'm also very concerned about my own role because the new anti-Semitism holds that the Jews rule the world. As an unintended consequence of my actions, I also contribute to that image."
There are, of course, huge differences between Kristallnacht and Sorosnacht. First and foremost, Hungarian-born George Soros, whose family fled the Nazis, is a Jew! During the Nazi era of 1933-1945, it was unheard of for Jews to blame Jews for anti-Semitism. There were Jews who aided the Nazis in the killing of Jews, but that involved the extraordinary case of the "Kapos," Jews in the death camps who bought themselves a little time, by leading other Jews to the “showers,” where they were gassed to death.
There is, however, precedent for Jews letting other Jews die, through deferring to murderous anti-Semitism. Once Hitler began carrying out his "Final Solution" in early 1943, Rabbi Stephen Wise and other American Jewish leaders found out about the genocide, but refused to publicize it, out of deference to Democrat President Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR was in a position to bomb the death camps, or at the very least, the rail lines leading to them, but instead did nothing, costing millions of Jews their lives.
But this is a different time, a time of wealthy Jewish prostitutes, Jewish anti-Semites, and even Jewish Nazis.
And George Soros was not speaking before an audience of genocidal anti-Semites, a la Yassir Arafat, UN Human Rights Commissar Mary Robinson, or the al Qaeda leadership. Rather, he was speaking before the Jewish Funders Network, a group of multimillionaire Jewish philanthropists and their bureaucrats, in Manhattan’s Harvard Club.
Rather than vilify Soros, the prostitutes, er, philanthropists, were polite to a fault. Event organizers Michael Steinhardt and Mark Charendoff, said nice things, and even saved Soros from further embarrassing himself. According to Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reporter Uriel Heilman, Steinhardt interrupted Soros’ defense of anti-Semitism. "’George Soros does not think Jews should be hated any more than they deserve to be,’ Steinhardt said by way of clarification, eliciting chuckles from the audience."
George Soros was on NPR one night, talking about how Vladimir Putin was threatening Russian democracy. The correspondent, after letting him do his shtick for awhile, asked if having first helped pass Campaign Finance Reform and then spending $25 million of his own money to defeat George W. Bush, he too isn't a threat to democracy--American democracy. Mr. Soros answered that CFR got special interest money out of politics but that as an individual he could have no special interests and, at any rate, had nothing to gain from his personal political activity. The correspondent failed to laugh, never mind follow up on these absurd assertions. If only Mr. Stix had been conducting the interview.
DONKEY CARTS?:
Rockets fired at oil ministry, two hotels in Baghdad (AP, 11/21/03)
More than a dozen rockets fired from donkey carts slammed into Iraq's Oil Ministry and two downtown hotels Friday morning — brazen, coordinated strikes at some of Baghdad's most heavily protected civilian sites that defied a U.S. crackdown.Two more rocket launchers mounted on donkey carts were found within hours, one of them 30 yards from the Italian Embassy, the other near the Academy of Fine Arts, both in the Waziriya neighborhood north of downtown. Neither appeared to have been fired.
Rockets Hit Two Hotels and Ministry in Baghdad (JOHN F. BURNS, 11/21/03, NY Times)
Guests in the room close to where the rockets struck - including this reporter, whose room was 50 feet away from one of the strikes - heard what appeared at first to be a single explosion, suggesting that the weapon used against the hotel might have been a multiple rocket launcher of the type used on Oct. 26 against the Rashid Hotel, base for many senior American military and intelligence officials. One person was killed in that attack.The attack on Friday was potentially the most serious strike on a major target involving foreigners in Baghdad since the Oct. 27 suicide bombing of the International Committee of the Red Cross, one of a series of suicide bombings that day across the city that killed more than 25 people.
The pattern of several of the most serious attacks in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq in recent months has appeared to have been aimed at driving as many Westerners out of the country as possible, isolating the American and British troops who carried the brunt of fighting in the war to topple Saddam Hussein, and making impossible the implementation of plans to spend billions of dollars on reconstruction here.
A voice purporting to be that of Mr. Hussein said in an audiotape released Sunday that those mounting the attacks on the Americans should also concentrate on "foreign agents" who were assisting in the occupation of Iraq, and that the defeat of "the evil ones" meaning the Americans was inevitable.
Gotta wonder why you'd stay in such an obvious target?
OSAMA NEEDS TO STOP WATCHING THE BBC AND CNN:
Istanbul's Nightmare Returns (Walid Phares, November 21, 2003, FrontPageMagazine.com)
Let's read the message of yesterday's bombings -- not just the release sent to the wires by the Jihadists inside and outside Turkey, but the substance of it. Why did al-Qaida and its sub-entities aim at the British consulate and a British bank in the former capital of the Ottoman Empire? The geographical setting is clear. Turkey -- or secular Republican Turkey - is a passage for Democracy to the Muslim region. Weakening the Ankara fortress is a must for the radical Islamists. It remains the real and most imminent reason behind the blasts: It is a blow to Great Britain. Unlike the message trumpeted by some journalists, al-Qaida doesn't fight the United Kingdom because of its alliance with the United States, but because of what the British culture and commitment to freedom mean.Aiming at London from Istanbul, the Jihadists know who their enemies are: President Bush of America and Prime Minister Blair of England. The two leaders have decided to meet amidst raging demonstrations to reset the course of the War on Terrorism. Bin Laden and Ayman al-Thawahiri know very well that after Afghanistan and Iraq, the next stage is a global campaign to support the democratic dissidents in the Middle East. President Bush's latest speech on "Democracy in the Middle East" was a lethal weapon of mass dissemination. Al-Qaida knows this speech, if allowed to germinate in the minds of a thinking people, could harm its control over the masses now pledging their sons -- and daughters -- for a violent jihad against civilization. It is watching students foment political dissent in Iran, intellectuals denouncing fundamentalism in Kuwait and Syrian reformers meeting in Washington, D.C. If the Baathist-Wahabi alliance doesn't break the will of the United States and Great Britain in Iraq, a Mesopotamian tidal wave of anti-terrorism will soon take off. Bin Laden wanted to strike inside the U.S.-British alliance before free Arabs would strike inside his jihad.
Killing British diplomats and British bank employees in Istanbul is al-Qaida's effort to fuel anti-Americanism in London at a time when the two Trans-Atlantic leaders are consolidating their plans (and when tens of thousands of American leftists are meeting to express their hatred of these same targets, Bush and Blair). A reporter for a main TV network illustrated this fall into al-Qaidaís trap. Out of the British capital, the correspondent rushed to conclude that most men and women in the British Isles would punish Blair for pausing with Bush, because this alliance with the President caused English people to be slaughtered in Istanbul. That was exactly what al-Qaida ultimately wanted to achieve: another rift in the Atlantic alliance. Although the bombs hit Istanbul, Osama bin Laden wanted to blow a crater in the U.S.-UK partnership forged on the battlefields of Iraq. What the master of jihad wanted to achieve to turn the West's most powerful weapon to fight terrorism against itself; he wants to defeat the West through their own democracy.
You'd think that al Qaeda would have figured out by now that their campaign has been totally counter-productive. They've even managed to steel Italian spines. In fact, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that a sufficiently lethal bombing in Paris would wake the French up. Okay, that's the outer edge of the realm...
MORE:
-Al-Qaeda reviles Turkey's ties to the West: Though a secular state, religious resentments fester (Peter Goodspeed, 11/21/03, National Post)
There is one chilling realization to draw from yesterday's terror attacks in Istanbul -- al-Qaeda's acolytes are trying to broaden their war with the West and they don't care who suffers.Yesterday, for the fourth time in less than a week, Turkey was the target.
It is not hard to see why.
Overwhelmingly Muslim, Turkey is a moderate secular state crucially situated at the crossroads of East and West. More importantly, Turkey has moved closer to the West than any other Muslim nation in the world. It is a member of NATO, is seeking to enter the European Union and has close ties with both the United States and Israel.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, Turkey has been on the front lines of Washington's war on terror. Istanbul has provided the United States with military support, tracked suspected financial networks, shared intelligence and, like Canada, participated in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) peacekeeping operation in Kabul.
For al-Qaeda's leaders, Turkey is a model of everything they think a Muslim nation shouldn't be.
-Attacks on Turkey Try to Sever a Bridge Between Islam and West (CRAIG S. SMITH, 11/21/03, NY Times)
With its foothold on the European continent and the bulk of its territory in Asia, Turkey has been the site of sweeping ideological battles before. Once part of the Christian Byzantine Empire, and later the center of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, the country in its modern incarnation has tried to finesse its identity by paying lip service to the Islamic world while defining its future among the dynamic economies of the West.Turkey was the first among Muslim nations to recognize Israel and has developed extensive ties with it since then. It has been a model NATO member and has tried hard in recent years to win the favor of the European Union, which Turkey wants to join.
All of this has made the country suspect among Muslim countries, particularly in the Arab world.
Meanwhile, decades of economic malaise have haunted a generation of frustrated, underemployed youth and turned many toward conservative Islam.
An often brutal effort to force the assimilation of the country's restive Kurdish minority into the larger Turkish population also fed passions among Kurdish youth and spawned a generation of closet separatists with a hardened fringe of fighters.
The religion-inspired wars of the 1990's drew some young Turks north into Bosnia or across Iran to Chechnya and Afghanistan. In those places, terrorism experts say, the young men were vulnerable to the ideological zeal and global designs then coalescing into Al Qaeda.
The war in Iraq may have tipped the balance toward actual terrorism. "Before, the threat was more or less theoretical," said Rifat Bali, a writer in Istanbul.
SQUANDERING SOCIAL CAPITAL (via Tom Corcoran):
Church and family can save kids (Miranda Devine, November 16, 2003, Sydney Morning Herald)
We seem to shrug helplessly at the soaring rates of children's mental illness, emotional distress, attention and conduct disorders, substance abuse and suicide.The response of the babyboomer Left to this epidemic of youth misery has been to blame government and economic rationalism.
You will hear them moaning about the boring 1950s, when they grew up in a war-weary society that valued order, civility, domesticity and tranquillity. You will hear them fondly reminisce about the 1960s sexual revolution, their Kombi vans, their often-still-active ponytails.
Never will you hear them accept responsibility for trashing precious social institutions, destroying taboos, devaluing motherhood or squandering the moral capital built up by their forebears. Now, when their children and grandchildren are suffering the consequences, they see higher taxes as the cure. They seem not to listen even when scientific evidence emerges like a slap in the face to say childhood suffering is caused by a lack of spiritual meaning, an absence of expectations and limits and a breakdown in authority structures.
This is the message from an extraordinary American study recently released by 33 psychiatrists, neurologists and social scientists, Hardwired To Connect: The New Scientific Case For Authoritative Communities. The Dartmouth Medical School study says the human brain is "biologically hardwired for enduring attachments to other people and for moral and spiritual meaning". [...]
The study says we needn't be a captive of our genes any more than we are a blank slate for social engineers to mould. Most unpalatable for moral relativists is the study's emphasis on religion and spirituality, finding that the human brain is physically designed, or hardwired, to seek answers to life's purpose and meaning. For adolescents, religion has a protective effect against depression and loneliness. "Personal devotion" or a "direct personal relationship with the Divine" is associated with reduced risk-taking and better mental health.
Finally, the report stresses the importance of "authoritative communities" that set moral frameworks for children, the most important being the family. The "decline in social connectedness", the loss of civic and community groups and falling church attendance is thought to contribute "significantly" to childhood problems. [...]
Parents know how inherently conservative small children are, how they crave routine, discipline, defined limits and a distinction between good and evil. But if their parents and the society rearing them are locked in a perpetual state of adolescence, no wonder so many are anxious and vulnerable.
If you keep hammering away at the foundations, you have no right to act surprised and helpless when the structure teeters.
DRASTIC TIMES/DRASTIC MEASURES (via Bruce Cleaver):
Mums to get $55,000 in fertility rescue plan (Cosima Marriner, November 21, 2003, Sydney Morning Herald)
All mothers should be paid $11,000 a year, tax free, for the first five years of their child's life to arrest the decline in the fertility rate, a Liberal Party think tank has suggested.The Menzies Research Centre study says the payment, which would not be means tested, would allow mothers to stay at home and supplement the family income, or return to work and pay for child care.
It found that none of three models - free child care and paid maternity leave (Sweden), the male breadwinner (Spain) and part-time work (Australia) - had proved successful in encouraging women to have enough children to maintain the population.
Instead, it argues, the Government should provide a home carer's allowance to all families during the child's first five years, ensuring maternal nurturing and easing the financial blow of one partner leaving work.
France and Norway have recently introduced a "mother's salary" with some apparent success.
There should also be tax and/or future benefit consequences for not having enough children.
THE NATIONAL GUARD:
Who Can Win Ohio? (Harold Meyerson, November 19, 2003, Washington Post)
The Democrats' scenario for picking up the White House next year looks increasingly like drawing to an inside straight.That doesn't mean they won't be able to do it. A number of states could fill their hand. But with the continuing rightward gallop of the South, the Democrats are going to have to perform near-perfectly in the swing states of the Midwest.
Like Richard Nixon before him, George W. Bush has waged a war in a way that has polarized the American people -- infuriating Democrats while strengthening his support among conservatives. But as a recent mega-survey from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press makes clear, the American people were drifting apart -- and the South was going south for the Dems -- even before Bush used his war as a wedge.
There's an alternative reason that Republican-waged-wars tend to be wedge issues in a way that Democrat-waged-ones don't: patriotism. Republicans even tend to support Democrat wars--like the Cold War and Vietnam--long after the Democrats have run up the white flag.
New Potatoes With Sun-Dried-Tomato Mash (Grady Spears, November 1998, Texas Monthly)
2 cloves garlic
1/4 cup cilantro
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup coarsely chopped rehydrated sun-dried tomatoes (about 1 ounce or .06 pound dry weight)
1/4 cup grated Asiago or Parmesan cheese
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
4 pounds new potatoes, washed and thinly slicedPreheat the oven to 350 degrees. Place all of the ingredients except the potatoes in a food processor and blend until they form a paste (or mash), thinning with a little water if necessary. Thoroughly coat the sliced potatoes with the tomato mash and place in layers in a baking dish, seasoning each layer with additional salt and pepper to taste. Cover with foil and cook for 45 to 60 minutes or until tender.
JOHN HENRY SURVIVES...BRIEFLY:
Man vs. Machine (Charles Krauthammer, November 21, 2003, Washington Post)
In Game 3 the computer lost because, being a computer, it has (for now) no imagination. Computers can outplay just about any human when the field is open, the pieces have mobility and there are millions of possible tactical combinations. Kasparov therefore steered Game 3 into a position that was utterly static -- a line of immobile pawns cutting across the board like the trenches of the First World War.Neither side could cross into enemy territory. There was, ``thought'' Fritz, therefore nothing to do. It can see 20 moves deep, but even that staggering foresight yielded absolutely no plan of action. Like a World War I general, Fritz took to pacing up and down behind its lines.
Kasparov, on the other hand, had a deep strategic plan. Quietly and methodically, he used the bit of space he had on one side of the board to align his pieces, preparing for the push of a single pawn down the flank to queen -- and win.
Meanwhile, Fritz was reduced to shuffling pieces back and forth. At one point, it moved its bishop one square and then back again on the next move. No human would ever do that. Not just because it is a waste of two moves. It is simply too humiliating. It is an open declaration to your opponent that you have no idea what you're doing, and that maybe checkers is your game.
The observers loved it. ``This move showed that the computer doesn't feel any embarrassment,'' said grandmaster Gregory Kaidanov. It was a moment to savor.
Compare to Mr. Kling, below.
THE PARTY OF THE TORTOISE:
What it Means To Be Conservative (Owen Harries, Winter 2003, Policy)
If the complexity of the object of change-society, the political order-was one reason why Burke feared radical and rapid change, a second and just as powerful reason was his reservation about the proposed engine of change; that is, the role of reason in human affairs. Burke rejected the Enlightenment view of man as a predominantly rational, calculating, logical being. His rational side exists, but it is a small part of his total make-up. 'We are afraid', said Burke, 'to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small'. Habit, instinct, custom, faith, reverence, prejudice-the accumulated practical knowledge acquired consciously and unconsciously through experience-all this was more important than abstract reasoning. Collectively, and for better or worse, it constituted man's nature, his human nature.Burke was not alone in expressing these views. The great Scottish philosopher, David Hume, had insisted on the importance of habit and custom in the human make-up a generation earlier. And a year or two before Burke wrote, across the Atlantic the shapers of the American Constitution and authors of The Federalist Papers-Alexander Hamilton and James Madison-were insisting that in constructing a political order, the aggressive, selfish, acquisitive aspects of man's nature must be taken fully into account. 'A man must be far gone in Utopian speculation', thought Hamilton, 'to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive and rapacious.' [...]
They were all arguing against the prevailing intellectual tide of the times, the Age of Enlightenment, which insisted on the primacy of reason and which saw customs and habits and prejudice as impediments that should, and could, be swept aside to restore the human mind to its pristine state as a clean slate-the famous tabula rasa-on which reason could then write its message. At the same time as Burke was responding to the Revolution, his radical-anarchist contemporary, William Godwin-now forgotten but a very influential and representative intellectual figure in his time-was writing of children as 'a sort of raw material put into our hands', their minds 'like a sheet of white paper'. Dealing with adults, the task was to erase what, over time, had disfigured the white sheet. It was in that act of restoration that the revolutionaries in France saw themselves engaged. For them, what passed for human nature was not something to be taken into account as a given, and either accommodated or curbed, as the authors of The Federalist Papers believed, but to be altered. [...]
When, in what circumstances, do conservative ideas become relevant and attractive? The obvious and usual answer to that question is given by Michael Oakeshott: when there is much to be enjoyed, and when that enjoyment is combined with a sense that what is enjoyed is in danger of being lost. It is the combination of enjoyment and fear that stimulates conservatism.
That seems convincing until one considers: if one is living in and enjoying, say, a liberal or a social democratic or a capitalist society; and if that society suddenly comes under threat, why can't one defend it with liberal arguments, or social democratic or capitalist arguments? Why does one need conservative arguments?
An interesting answer to that question was advanced by a young Samuel Huntington, about 40 years before he wrote The Clash of Civilizations, the book that made him famous beyond academic circles. In an article on 'Conservatism as an Ideology', published in 1957 in The American Political Science Review, Huntington observes that unlike nearly every other ideology, conservatism offers no vision of an ideal society. There is no conservative Utopia. Indeed, conservatism has no substantive institutional content. It can be, and has been, used to defend all sorts of different institutional arrangements, from traditional to feudal to liberal to capitalist to social democratic ones. That is because it is concerned not with content but with process: with change and stability, particularly as they affect political institutions. Its true opposite is not, as is often said, liberalism but radicalism-which is also about change. Conservatism advances arguments that stress the difficulty and danger of rapid change, and the importance of stability and continuity and prudence; radicalism expresses enthusiasm and optimism concerning innovation, and boldness in embracing change.
So when does conservatism become an appropriate ideology? It is, maintains Huntington, the product of intense ideological and social conflict, when consensus breaks down, and when an existing institutional order can no longer be defended in its own terms. 'When the challengers fundamentally disagree with the ideology of the existing society and affirm a basically different set of values, the common framework of discussion is destroyed.' When, say, it is precisely liberal values and institutions that are being rejected, there is no point in appealing to those values to defend them. It is then that conservative arguments become indispensable: arguments which defend the established institutions precisely because they are established, which warn against the destructive affects, the unanticipated consequences of overturning them. When radicalism prevails, conservative arguments must be resorted to in order to counter it.
What could be more radical than the assault on the central social institution of human history: marriage.
EXHUME MCCARTHY:
When Moore is less (David Aaronovitch, November 19, 2003, The Guardian)
Here's a paradox. In the Independent last Friday, Paul Taylor was writing about a recent renaissance in political theatre, both here and in America. He had recently been on Broadway for a performance of Arthur Miller's witch-hunt play, The Crucible. Many present, Taylor said, had watched through tears because the play "had clearly spoken with a piercing directness to that audience as the United Sates enters yet another period where dissent is seen as synonymous with 'unpatriotic' ".At the same time, the writer and TV personality Michael Moore was celebrating yet another tremendous success. Whereas his previous book, Stupid White Men, had taken a year to sell a million copies in the US, his new offering, Dude, Where's My Country?, had, he told his fans, sold the same number in just three weeks.
It just showed, said Moore, "the level of concern/frustration/anger in the country right now over what the Bush administration is up to". What it did not, however, seem to show was an America "where dissent is seen as synonymous with 'unpatriotic' ". Far from it.
But this idea of being under siege is an important part of the radical's self-image in 2003.
As long as they feel a need to be persecuted, couldn't we oblige?
GEEZ, WE SHOULD LIBERATE FRANCE AGAIN:
Survey: Afghans overwhelmingly optimistic, despite violence (PAUL HAVEN, November 19, 2003, Associated Press)
Afghans in relatively stable areas of the country are overwhelmingly optimistic about the future of their nation, despite continued violence and political uncertainty, according to a survey released Wednesday.Some 83 percent of the Afghans surveyed said they feel safer than they did three years ago, when the hard-line Taliban regime was in power. More than three-quarters of those questioned said Afghanistan will be safer still in another year.
The survey was conducted between April and June in eight Afghan provinces by The Human Rights Research and Advocacy Consortium, which includes some major international aid groups like Save the Children, CARE and Oxfam International, as well as Afghan agencies.
That's a higher rigt track/wrong track number than in most Western nations.
November 20, 2003
"YOU HAVE NO IDEA":
German Sept 11 theory stokes anti-US feeling (Kate Connolly, 20/11/2003, Daily Telegraph)
A former German cabinet minister is drawing huge crowds and stoking the fires of popular anti-Americanism with a book arguing that the US government mounted the September 11 attacks in a plot to win global domination.Andreas von Bulow has gone further than Michael Meacher, Tony Blair's former environment minister, who was widely criticised for claiming that America knowingly failed to prevent the attacks.
Mr von Bulow, 66, a former research minister in the German government, believes that September 11, when more than 3,000 people died, was staged to justify the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Berlin has made no official response to the book, but behind closed doors ministers have tried to distance themselves from his radical views.
However, his ideas are very popular in Germany, which is wallowing in a wave of anti-Americanism. Polls show that a fifth of the population, and one in three of those under 30, believe the US government ordered the attacks. [...]
The World Trade Centre collapsed due to explosives, not the impact of the Boeings; no planes flew into the Pentagon or crashed in Pennsylvania; and mobile phone calls made by those on the latter flight were simulated by the CIA.
Mr von Bulow also argues that the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, was involved in the attacks, warning Israelis to avoid the Twin Towers in the preceding days. His "proof" is that only one Israeli died in the attacks.
In a way it's really kind of flattering--it's been so long since they mattered that the last bestseller about Germany was William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Of course, Mr. von Bulow probably thinks that's all a lie too.
MORE BLAME GAMES:
Blair's black day: Bombs, demos and serious mid-term drift - and all the direct result of the prime minister's own decisions (Polly Toynbee, November 21, 2003, The Guardian)
The prime minister has waited for months now with a deadly certainty that the terror attacks would come. "When, not if," he warned spine-chillingly about the threat to Britain. Once he had decided to take the country to war, terrorist retaliation was certain and if ever there was a prime time to expect it, then it was now, during George Bush's state visit. The wonder is only that Britain has escaped for so long. London was fortified beyond endurance this week, but there will always be soft underbellies exposed to Islamist extremist fury. There is no defence against terror. [...]These bombs made yesterday one of the darkest days of Tony Blair's prime ministership. As if that horror were not enough, too many other disparate pigeons came fluttering home to roost at once. Whichever way he turned, things looked black. They were no mere accidents, for everything that happened came as a direct result of his own decisions, all of them taken against the better instincts of most of his party. [...]
Bombs in Istanbul are the only outcome from this presidential visit. George Bush brought no gifts to thank his ally for taking so much damage to support this politically alien president. Nothing has been gained on US illegal trade tariffs: a promise to obey the WTO might have given Blair something to show the Europeans the value of engaging with America. No sign was given of serious intent to intervene in the Israel/Palestine conflict. The president leaves unabated alarm that the US will cut and run from Iraq to suit the presidential election timetable and not the needs of Iraqis. This visit has been all downside for our prime minister.
Never mind the delusion that al Qaeda is killing Westerners because of what we do or don't do, maybe Ms Toynbee could acknowledge that it was a black day for Britain, not just for one man who happens to lead it.
A LESSON TO BE LEARNED:
Daniel, 1988-2000: A child's suicide, unending grief and lessons learned (SARA FRITZ, November 16, 2003, St. Petersburg Times)
Our son, Daniel, was 12 years old when he hanged himself with a belt in his bedroom.On the night of Oct. 27, 2000, my husband and I found him dangling by his neck from a chin-up bar in the doorway between his bedroom and bathroom.
At first, I had difficulty grasping what had happened. His feet were only a few inches off the floor. It looked as if he could have lifted his neck out of the belt by pulling on the bar above him. I found myself searching for some indication that it was a prank.
But when we freed his neck from the makeshift noose and eased his body onto the floor, his head hit the carpet with a heavy thud. His eyes were open, but he was motionless.
Dead. Our precious son was dead.
The horror of that moment still lives within us. Panic rises in our throats whenever our minds begin to re-create the scene. We get a sick, grinding pain deep inside whenever we think of Daniel and all he missed by ending his life so young. After more than three years of grieving, we still cannot fully accept our loss.
Daniel had seemed like a pretty normal kid. He was popular, good-looking and growing up with all the advantages of a well-educated, middle-class family in Arlington, a comfortable suburb of Washington, D.C.
Yet, Daniel's father and I had suspected our son was troubled in ways he wouldn't admit. He never threatened to harm himself, but he seemed depressed and sometimes agitated in the months leading up to his suicide. And even though we sought help for him, we failed to get him what he needed.
Suicide among young people is not uncommon. Experts say it is the third-leading cause of death among people ages 10 to 19. Each year, about 1,600 American teenagers die by suicide, 1-million attempt it, and 1 in 5 consider it.
Our son's death was particularly shocking because he was so young. Only 60 to 70 preteens kill themselves in the United States each year.
My husband, Jim Kidney, and I have chosen to share our story of Daniel's life and death as a cautionary tale for parents of all children, whether they appear to be troubled or not. Many child and teen suicides could be prevented, experts say, if parents and professionals were more attentive and better informed about what causes kids to take their lives.
David Shaffer, a professor of child psychiatry at Columbia University and a leading expert on the subject, cautions that child and teen suicides are not random events, as experts once thought.
"We now know that it's nearly always a fatal complication of an undertreated, mistreated or untreated condition," he says.
Although we will never know what Daniel was thinking when he put his neck into that noose, there is little doubt that he was misdiagnosed by his psychologist and a neurologist, who were treating him for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which is characterized by inattentiveness, hyperactivity and impulsive behavior.
There is some evidence that the drugs he took for ADHD could have led to his suicide.
NPR's Here and Now did a story with Ms Fritz earlier in the week and her tragedy is just horrible to contemplate. It offers the more insidious flip-side of the problem with bogus ADHD diagnoses. Not only are some kids treated as if they had a genuine disorder when all they are is rambunctious or inattentive, but more serious conditions can go untreated or even, as may have been the case here, exacerbated when profoundly ill kids get pigeon-holed with the rest. Postmodernism has done damage to everything it's touched, but the politicization of medicine and disease is killing people. Especially if you're a parent or work with kids, this is a must read.
WHEN PC = VD:
Syphilis increase sparks AIDS concerns (Steve Mitchell, 11/20/2003, United Press International)
Syphilis rates rose dramatically for the second straight year in the United States, particularly among gay and bisexual men, a finding that has health officials worried about an increase in HIV/AIDS cases in the coming years.Overall, the U.S. syphilis rate rose by 9 percent between 2001 and 2002, the second consecutive increase from an all-time low in 2000, according to figures released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
The bulk of the increase occurred among men, rising by about 27 percent overall, including a staggering increase of more than 85 percent among white men and a nearly 36 percent increase among Latino men. Information on sexual orientation is often not collected by health departments but the CDC estimates 40 percent of the increase was in gay and bisexual men.
The total number of syphilis cases increased from 6,100 to more than 6,800, but CDC officials think this probably is only the tip of the iceberg because many cases go undiagnosed.
"The overall number is probably significantly higher," Dr. John Douglas, director of the CDCs division of sexually transmitted diseases, said during a teleconference about the new figures, which appear in the Nov. 21 issue of CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
The rise in syphilis infections indicates a growing number of gay and bisexual men are having unprotected sex, which worries health officials because the men could be spreading other diseases, including HIV/AIDS.
Maybe the culture should stop pretending that homosexuality is no different than heterosexuality?
HOW ABOUT SOME HEALTHY SPECIESISM?:
Man vs. Machine (Arnold Kling, 11/20/2003, Tech Central Station)
The results of the latest match between Gary Kasparov and the top computer X3D Fritz ended in a draw, vindicating Tyler Cowen and Jeff Sonas, who believe that computers have not yet overtaken the top human player. Sonas argues that "Although computers obviously must be improving in recent years, the strongest humans seem to also be improving at about the same rate."As a fan of Moore's Law, I am disappointed by the outcome of the latest chess match. As Cowen implies, the strength of the computers should be doubling each year or two. Yet they seem to be improving no faster than the best humans.
Cowen describes the following process by which computers beat humans at chess.
"The human grandmaster carries a significant advantage out of the opening or early middle game, where it is harder for the machine to calculate all relevant possibilities and positional judgment is at a premium. But as the game progresses, the machine plays perfect defense and the human cannot convert the advantage into a win."
The implication is that the computer only wins by wearing down the human opponent. In Cowen's view, the human is really the better player.
In fact, it is often the case in games between humans that the inferior player takes an early advantage and appears to be "worn down" by the better player. But that is the way games proceed between players of slightly uneven abilities.
How can you be disappointed when your own species retains superiority?
BREAK OUT THE HAIR SHIRT:
The 9/11 Cover-up: What did Bush know about the al Qaeda threat? (David Corn, 11/03, LA Weekly)
[W]hile the World Trade Center ashes were still glowing, Bush and his aides told the public that they had had no reason to suspect this type of horrific attack was about to occur. Yet, as the final report of the joint inquiry of the House and Senate intelligence committees notes, for years the intelligence community had collected information reporting that terrorist outfits, including al Qaeda, were interested in mounting 9/11-like attacks — that is, hijacking airliners and crashing them into high-profile targets in the United States. U.S. intelligence services, the Pentagon, and the Federal Aviation Administration during the Clinton and Bush II years apparently did not take action in response to these reports. That was a systemic failure. Bush has never addressed it publicly, but if pressed he could blame the bureaucrats at the CIA, the Defense Department and the FAA for ignoring clear-and-present hints. [...][T]he preliminary evidence is that the White House has been protecting itself. According to the House and Senate intelligence committees’ final report on 9/11, the committees were told by an intelligence community representative that an August 2001 intelligence report included information that bin Laden wanted to conduct attacks in the United States, that al Qaeda members had been residing and traveling to the United States for years and had apparently maintained a support structure here, that bin Laden was interested in hijacking airliners (to trade for prisoners), that the FBI had discerned patterns of activity consistent with preparations for hijackings, and that bin Laden supporters were planning attacks in the United States with explosives.
That sure is different than a general warning about al Qaeda.
Unfortunately for Mr. Corn's own accusation, it sure is different than a warning that "terrorist outfits, including al Qaeda, were interested in mounting 9/11-like attacks" too. There's no point defending either the government agencies involved or the Clinton and Bush administrations--obviously 9-11 represented a catastrophic breakdown of the core function of the state. Everyone and everything that was supposed to prevent such things failed, leaving those poor passengers as the nation's last line of defense, and even they couldn't have known how dire their situation was until after the 2nd plane hit, which seems to have been too late for the third (though one wonders if it was really intended for the Pentagon) and just in time for the folks on the 4th to die as heroes.
It's easy to forgot now, but prior to that awful day it had been some time since there'd been a domestic hijacking and the standard operating procedure was to not offer resistance--just get the plane back on the ground and let the authorities negotiate the demands. Indeed, had al Qaeda taken those planes for the purposes of a prisoner swap, it would have been a shocking event, but one that had been gamed out thoroughly and about which volumes had been written--a disaster for America in propaganda terms but an almost mundane problem in terms of how security forces would have responded. Obviously, in hindsight, we'd like to have imposed such drastic measures that the course of events might have been changed, but the very absence of hijackings made it appear that the security system worked and the relative nonlethality of past hijackings made them seem almost predictable. The wicked genius of 9-11 was that it diverged so completely from prior hijackings, that it was so unlike what was apparently warned of in those intelligence briefings. In retrospect we think we knew what they were capable of because we'd read it in Tom Clancy or we knew in our hearts that the first Trade Center bombing was serious--but we kid ourselves. Summon up your memories of that day and preceding the furor and the grief you'll recall stunned disbelief. No amount of fiction and expert prognostication could have prepared us: evil on such a scale dwarfs imagination before hand and daunts comprehension even after.
Want proof of the latter? Just look at how bitchy the media gets about Orange Alerts, or whatever, from the Department of Homeland Security after 9-11. Imagine if these intelligence briefings had revealed the precise plans for the attack beforehand and the administration had grounded the airlines or closed the Trade Center until the plotters could be found? No, we can't imagine it, can we? No one would have tolerated such a thing. Heck, we wouldn't now, not for more than a day or two.
If Mr. Corn needs someone to blame, he may as well blame the President. Folks who seek great responsibility have to be prepared to accept great blame when things go wrong--and things have seldom gone more radically wrong than they did on 9-11. So, there. Do we all feel better? Does that advance the ball any in the fight against terror? Does Mr. Bush seem like a guy who needs to be reminded that he's responsible for our national security and that he's already presided over one massive lapse in that responsibility? Seems bloody unlikely.
TOUGH TIMES FOR FULL-MOONERS (via Mr. Whipsnaade):
Kennedy's assassin acted alone: Expert (TIMES OF INDIA, NOVEMBER 20, 2003)
It is a tantalizing tape recording, full of static hiss, popping sounds, and eerie faraway voices. And for years, there has been debate over whether it proves there was a plot to kill President Kennedy.Now, a new analysis of the tape recorded by a Dallas police officer on the day Kennedy was assassinated casts further doubt on the lingering conspiracy theories.
Although some previous studies have suggested that one of the sounds on the tape is a gunshot from the infamous "grassy knoll," forensic acoustics expert Bob Berkovitz said it was extremely unlikely that the sound was gunfire.
"The theory that the noise represents a 'grassy knoll' gunshot is not supported by the computer-based analysis," said Berkovitz, chairman of Sensimetrics Corp., which specializes in research on speech and hearing.
Berkovitz studied the tape for Court TV for its special ˜ "The JFK Assassination: Investigation Reopened" ˜ which was to air Wednesday.
For those who believe a conspiracy was at work on the day JFK was shot ˜ Nov. 22, 1963 ˜ the tape is considered a key piece of evidence. [...]
Berkovitz seized on a snippet of conversation that can be overheard on the recording right at the point where the supposed grassy knoll "shot" is heard. The words "hold everything secure" appear to come from a second radio channel being operated by police that day.
The problem for conspiracy theorists is that the time of the transmission of the words "hold everything secure" on the second radio channel was about a minute after the assassination, meaning that the sound identified as the shot actually came a minute after the shots, according to Berkovitz.
Next they'll try to prove we really did put a man on the moon...
THIS IS JUST DUMB
Attack Geography. Hey, buddy, who do you think you're calling "bucolic"? (Michael Kinsley, Slate, 11/20/03)
Republicans have had a talent for geographical chauvinism since Nixon's southern strategy. Wherever a Democratic candidate happens to be from, that place turns out to be isolated and unrepresentative and not part of the real America. They are having a good time at the moment dissing Vermont, home of former Gov. Howard Dean. It's way up there in the Northeast somewhere. (Yeah, not too far south of the Bush family hangout in Maine.) It doesn't have any black people. Its best-known product is some hippie ice cream. Worst of all, it's (gasp!) "bucolic." . . .I suppose you have to give Kinsley credit for getting a whole column out of Republicans making fun of New England and Arkansas, and it might indicate that things are going pretty well for the administration. But, truth to tell, I haven't seen any Republicans making fun of Vermont. That seems to be coming mostly from Democrats, who believe that not having blacks in his state makes Governor Dean ineligible for the presidency.In 1988, Republicans painted Massachusetts as a foreign country and Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis as an elitist, compared with that po' boy from Texas, the elder George Bush. Massachusetts, to its credit, is a bit south of Vermont. On the other hand, it is full of universities. Need we say more?
When Bill Clinton emerged as Democratic front-runner in 1992, Republicans went to work denigrating Arkansas. . . .
The GOP will be making meat out of Dean's New York background, too. They will have a harder time of it since they have chosen to hold their convention in New York next summer. This was a cynical decision, intended to provide a backdrop for yet one more presidential victory lap in the war on terrorism.
As for the convention, is there a non-cynical way to decide where to hold a political party convention? I'm not even sure that "cynical" means anything in this regard. Kinsley complains that, in 1992, Republicans dismissed New York, the site of the Democratic convention, as "not the real America. Urban. Ethnic. Noisy, crowded, dirty." Can he really not think of any thing that's happened since then (or two things, maybe) that makes New York and the Republican party a more natural fit?
PIG, MEET POKE:
Medicare Reform: The Real Winners (Jonathan Cohn, Nov. 20, 2003, The New Republic)
[G]iven the fundamental irrationality of the American health care system, sometimes doing the right thing in the long-term -- i.e., reforming Medicare -- requires doing the wrong thing in the short-term -- i.e., buying votes by subsidizing politically influential interest groups. But far from doing the right thing in the long-term, this bill actually makes Medicare less efficient and undermines its long-term financial stability.It does this, first, by trying to introduce more competition into Medicare -- a cause Breaux and others have championed for years. In addition to authorizing a future demonstration program in which private insurers would bid for business against traditional Medicare in up to six communities, competition advocates secured financial incentives that would entice more insurance companies to offer Medicare benefits under the existing Medicare-plus-choice program. If this works, it would shift more people out of the old, government-run program and into private managed care plans.
As in the Middle East, stability does not serve our purposes.
WHAT IS THE POINT?
In Mourning, an Intersection of Faiths Funerals for Istanbul Bombing Victims Mix Jewish and Muslim Symbols (Molly Moore, washington Post, 11/19/03)
On Tuesday morning, the simple wooden coffins of Anet and her grandmother were lowered simultaneously into side-by-side graves at Istanbul's Ashkenaz Jewish Cemetery, as rain from a gray sky drenched sobbing relatives and friends. Four other Jews killed in Saturday's truck bomb attacks at Beth Israel and another Istanbul synagogue, including a woman whose husband was one of 19 Muslims killed in the blasts, were buried nearby.In a striking marriage of cultural symbols, each of the six coffins was embossed with the Star of David and draped in the crimson Turkish flag with its white Islamic crescent and star -- an honor reserved for soldiers and government officials or civilians who die as martyrs in the eyes of this predominantly Muslim nation. The brilliant red-covered coffins appeared to float through clouds of black, rain-beaded umbrellas as bearers shouldered them through the crowd. . . .
Throughout the services, Anet's fourth-grade classmates stood at the foot of her tiny coffin, clutching a poster-sized photograph of their friend framed in white carnations. Anet's broad smile and sparkling brown eyes peered from beneath a thick fringe of black bangs, contrasting sharply with the tear-streaked faces and trembling lips of the small mourners.
Her teacher, Necla Ozturk, stood above her young charges, her face grim, her head covered in a long black shawl. "She was the smallest child in the class," Ozturk told reporters who visited her primary school classroom on Monday. "Because of that, we always tried to protect her. But we couldn't protect her from the terrorists." . . .
The coffin of Berta Ozdogan, who was five months pregnant, was lowered into the grave next to Anet's. Her husband, Ahmet, a Muslim, was buried the day before in a Muslim cemetery. The couple had been married six years and acquaintances said that although members of the two families originally opposed the marriage, they had grown to understand and respect the couple's love for each other.
To show his support for his wife, Ahmet often accompanied her to Jewish services. The couple had just entered the Neve Shalom synagogue complex to attend the bar mitzvah of Berta's 13-year-old cousin when the second truck bomb exploded, according to family members.
At Ahmet's funeral, his mother, Inci Ozdogan, said: "Today I'm saying goodbye to my son. Tomorrow I'm saying farewell to my Berta. I don't know what they wanted from my kids. Were they jealous of their happiness? They will meet again on the other side."
FIRST IN WAR, FIRST IN PEACE, FIRST IN VOUCHERS:
Republicans Reach Deal On D.C. Vouchers Plan (Spencer S. Hsu, November 20, 2003, Washington Post)
Congressional Republican leaders struck agreement yesterday on legislation to launch the nation's first federally funded school voucher program next fall in the District, tentatively rolling the $13 million measure and the District's $5.6 billion budget into a giant federal spending bill that Democrats conceded they would not filibuster.The deal leaves the D.C. voucher program poised to clear final hurdles in House and Senate floor votes as early as this weekend, as time winds down before Congress adjourns for the year. The agreement also puts majority Republicans in position to deliver a long-sought victory to conservative education activists and President Bush, though admittedly one based on the slimmest of partisan margins.
Legislation agreed upon last night by a House-Senate conference would permit Secretary of Education Roderick R. Paige to start a five-year pilot program -- in consultation with Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) -- that would provide taxpayer-funded grants of as much as $7,500 to at least 1,700 District schoolchildren for attending private and parochial schools