January 19, 2002
JONATHAN TURLEY'S column about the WTC statue is excellent, but he gets a fact wrong that I feel duty-bound to correct. He re-states by inference the common perception that the Iwo Jima photograph was staged by photographer Joe Rosenthal. In fact, the film of the flag-raising was staged--that film represents the second flag-raising on Mt. Suribachi, and the first, smaller flag being replaced by a larger, more inspiring one. Joe Rosenthal, the photographer, wasn't warned that the second flag-raising was underway. He happened to swing around and snap the shutter as the Marines here hoisting the flag--he had no idea until much later that his photo had even come out, much less that it would become the icon we now know it to be. Check out Flags of our Fathers by James Bradley, whose father was among Iwo Jima's flag raisers for a complete telling of the story.
January 18, 2002
The Saudis have a set of goals, it seems--get our troops off their soil and re-establish their own preeminence in the region. From the experience of Somalia, the world learned that America can be cowed and forced to retreat by a few casualties. From the experience of the African embassy bombings and the bombing of the Cole, the world learned that if we do respond, we're not likely to respond in any meaningful way. The Saudis themselves learned to block our investigations into bombings on their soil directed against Americans, and that we would respond timidly. We needed their oil and their cooperation, or so the thinking went.
Given these impressions, I'm coming around to the belief that the Saudis have been behind UBL and Sept 11th all along. It was a hit-and-run attack, designed to intimidate us, horrify us, and scare us. Their government-controlled press has been mouthing anti-American sentiments throughout, peppered with the occassional nicety to keep us from getting too upset. Their actions have been the opposite of cooperative, in essence standing with the terrorists as opposed to standing with us.
So what should we do--invade, stay put, leave? I think we should leave Saudi Arabia--to the Turks.
January 17, 2002
Kaplan's opening piece was riveting reading, and devastatingly logical. He praised Pres Bush and his team for foreseeing clearly how the war in Afghanistan would progress, and especially praised the President for not withering from press fire when two weeks of bombing hadn't quite toppled the Taliban. Wright's response? Well, the intellectual equivalent of a big, Great Dane-style yawn. Remember, Wright thought that bombing would help the terrorists, but he isn't impressed that the administration has had a better handle on things than he has, and he isn't impressed that we've made much progress in the war--though al Qaida is on the run and the Taliban is a bad memory. He pokes at Bush for worrying about North Korea (though they've been testing some nasty missiles the past few years), for resisting nation building exercises (a thankless task that no president should entertain lightly, though Sideline Bob is all too happy to promote it) and for generally being Bush.
And then he gets all gloomy again, decrying the spread of information technology and its effect of allowing terrorists to operate without bases (though they always seem to build bases the first chance they get--if they'd just listen to Bob they could cut down on their property taxes). He's starting to sound like the Unabomber to me--technology is going to get us, globalization is our nemesis, etc. To his credit, when Wrongway Robert gets around to listing potential threats in the next few years, he doesn't throw in any conservative group. Ecoterrorists get a mention, neo-Nazis also get a mention (and if any of you suggest to me that Nazis are conservatives I'll disabuse you of that notion), but no anti-abortion activitists, no Boy Scouts, not even the Congressional Republican Caucus. They must've slipped his mind. Whoever the terrorists turn out to be, Bob thinks a few of them could kill tens of thousands of Americans. Oddly enough he's right. President Bush has set about making sure tomorrow's terrorists die today, that supporting states cease that support, and that the next batch of terrorists can't find any place to set up shop. Bob doesn't think that will work. He doesn't think anything the President comes up with will work, and refuses to change his mind when it does.
He finishes with a question--does Bush have a plan that's up to the challenge of stopping future terrorists? In Nixonian fashion, Bob intimates that he has a 'secret plan' to fix the world. Let me guess, Bob--we'll have to give up missile defense (which he manages to jab early in the piece), raise taxes, sign Kyoto (because we all know how miffed UBL was that we backed out of Kyoto), restrain 'globalization' (which he thinks will, you guessed it, help the terrorists--does anything ever actually hurt the terrorists?), spend trillions more in foreign aid programs, empower the UN to put a blue helmet on every street corner, dole out prescription drugs to the elderly, tighten our gun control laws, and vote Democratic in every election from dog catcher to President. Oh yeah, and dump Israel, get our troops out of Saudi Arabia and ban SUVs. Does that about sum it up, Bob? If we do all that, will we actually hurt the terrorists?
In his four-day tour of the country, Danforth visited a church where Khartoum's police tear gassed and beat worshipers on Easter Sunday. He visited a polio vaccination facility in Mapel, where government-supported militias have made it impossible for doctors to administer the vaccine to rebel-controlled areas in the province. And he heard government ministers deny allegations of slavery and abductions of non-Muslims, despite the fact he heard in his last tour of Sudan in November from the survivors of the practice.
Sounds real peaceful to me.
"New York City Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scopetta today announced that he will consider new options for a fitting memorial to honor the members of the fire department who died and those who worked tirelessly at the World Trade Center following the Sept. 11 attacks.
"Bruce Ratner, president and CEO of Forrest City Ratner Companies, said he would continue to underwrite the cost of the memorial."
"I will support the Fire Department's decision on what consitutes a fitting and inspiring memorial that pays tribute to these heroes," Ratner is quoted as saying. "That has been my desire ever since the World Trade Center attack."
Commissioner Scopetta and Mr. Ratner will consider various possibilities that would pay tribute to all members of the Department, the FDNY said, adding that "they would continue to discuss and explore ideas to create a lasting permanent memorial."
The press release does not what they plan to do now, or that they'll even use the photo in the monument at all. But they are on the defensive now, thanks to a deluge of public indignation. My prediction: the monument will depict the photo, and will now depict the three firemen in it.
Surveying this scene and thinking ahead to the most tempestuous year for European politics since the fall of the Berlin Wall, I cannot resist rephrasing Marx and Engels at the start of the Communist Manifesto: “A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of conservatism. All the powers of Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: the Commission and the unions; Schröder and Jospin; German environmentalists and French énarque spies. Let the chattering classes tremble at a conservative revolution. The conservatives have nothing to lose but their seats, they have a world to win.”
Kaletsky then proceeds to completely misdiagnose the state of conservatism in America, which thanks to a real conservative president espousing real conservative ideas such as sweeping tax cuts and a strong national defense before 9-11, is on the uptick. Combine that with a fairly ineffective liberal Democratic opposition espousing tax increases and looking increasingly out-of-touch on issues like gun control, and the situation looks all the better for the US right.
Still, Kaletsky predicts that the European right will take power in the next year or so, and finishes with a warning to Tony Blair: ignore the Tories at your peril. Good advice.
This sort of illegal nonsense is one more very good reason to establish a voucher system, unlimited parental choice, and possibly pull the young-uns out of the system alltogether.
January 16, 2002
There is an irony to Raimondo's anti-blogger rant on antiwar.com. I once served in the military, and at that time I was sworn to die to defend, among other things, freedom of speech. In Justin's case, that's the right to be a raving idiot. I'd still die to defend that right, for myself, for the press, and even for Justin though he's my political opponent. Sadly, an anti-war type like Justin wouldn't extend the same courtesy to his opponents, and as a result would allow any old tyrant to sweep away all our rights without a fuss. They're anti-war as a principle--nothing is worth fighting for. Not your rights or mine, not even his own. It's a child's worldview, and one that should be exposed for its utter wrongness whenever it pops up.
But anyway, welcome Doug. You've been added to the links section on the right.
Since we're on the subject of football, here are my picks for this weekend's Divisional Round of the playoffs:
Ravens over the Steelers by 6--yes, I hate the Ravens, but they're right where they were last year at this time, and that's bad news for Pittsburgh. The Ravens are disrespected underdogs, going on the road to face a team that is on paper superior to them and actually outplayed them twice this season. None of that will matter, because the Ravens defense will bring out the old Kordell Stewart, and the revitalized running game will allow them to kick a couple of field goals and then sit on whatever lead they build up. Like I said, I don't want this to happen, but I fear and think that it will.
Raiders over the Patriots by at least 10--Tom Whatshisname's Cinderella season comes to an end, and Jerry Rice will score twice.
Da Bears will take care of the Eagles, with a late field goal--Donovan McNabb has played well lately and he'll do well against the Bears, but it won't be enough. Plus, I truly hate the Eagles as Enemy #1 (if you're keeping tabs, the Skins are Enemy #2) so I just hope they get whacked this weekend.
And the Rams will outlast the Pack in a slugfest--I think this will be the most entertaining game to watch this weekend. Warner vs Favre, Faulk vs Green, etc etc.
Those are my picks and I'm sticking to them.
January 15, 2002
The Democratic argument for aiming Enron as a political arrow at Bush is that there's no reward in Washington for good behavior. Fiscal responsibility lets Republicans brand Democrats as the party of higher taxes. Democratic support for campaign-finance reforms lets the press brand them as hypocrites for playing by the rules of the system they haven't been able to change. Al Gore's comparative scrupulousness about tactics in the Florida recount helped hand the election to Bush.
That whole passage is full of bias, but focus on that last sentence again. Al Gore's...scrupulouseness? Cherry-picking which counties to recount, demand a shift in established counting standards, etc is evidence of being too nice? Only if you wanted Gore to win from the beginning, and saw no harm in changing the election rules multiple times during the election and recounts, does Gore's behavior look "scrupulous." To others, it looked downright smarmy.
Slate is known to have no Republicans on its staff, so it's no surprise that tilted writing like the above sneaks out in its stories. The surprise is that Slate continues to insist that it's so scrupulously unbiased.
What most libs miss is that they're often just as fundamentalistic and intolerant as any Christian fundamentalist can ever be--they're just operating from a different playbook. Listen to a lib talk about the "religious right," or "fundamentalists" or Christians, and substitute any of today's racial slurs in place of the religious group being slimed. That's intolerance, a brand of which I encounter nearly every day here in the Baltimore-DC area. But it's a pc version of intolerance, at least to that segment of the populace. They have the proverbial log in their own eyes while trying to remove the speck from ours.
All of this started when Jeff Jarvis wrote a silly screed about the "myth" of media bias. Jeff, all I can say is open your eyes. When two people on opposite sides of an issue are invited to debate on CNN or elsewhere, watch how they're identified. Nine times out of ten, the conservative will be labelled as such, while the lib will get a generic label. More often than not, the conservative will be outnumbered at least two-to-one on such "debate" shows, and the host/moderator will usually spin the nastiest questions toward the lone conservative while softballing the libs. In print, lib point of views are often passed off as canon, while conservative views are either left out or distorted.
As a case in point, read this op-ed that appeared in the Baltimore Sun on Jan 6th. The writer, a poli-sci prof at one of the local universities, says that a run by an up-and-coming Democrat could hurt the reigning Lt Gov in next year's race (also a Dem), helping the Republicans. He says that's bad, without elaborating, assuming that his readers will just agree that anything that helps Republicans is self-evidently bad. The Sun has published no counter to this article, so the Republicans haven't had their say or been allowed to make their own case. It's a small example, but it represents the behavior of most of the media. It's not a cabalist mentality that creates media bias--it just results from the simple fact of life that most j-students are libs and get their educations at lib institutions.
I've been watching the Ken Burns Mark Twain piece now airing on PBS, and I have to say that while it isn't as bad as some bloggers say, it still could use a boatload of solid editing. At one point in the first night's fare, the narrator was talking about life around the Clemens' household, and the only visual was a shot of some bronze angel on a bedpost. They stayed with that shot for what seemed like half an hour, no slow push into it, no tracking across it, no motion at all. It really was a snore.
Let’s take it as a given that George W. Bush lacks the intelligence to hold down a really demanding job like columnist at the New York Times or Slate. Let’s take it as read that he’s a stupid man leading the stupid party of a stupid country. Granted all that, his blissful indifference to the hotshots of the International Who’s Who is as brilliant a distillation of global reality as any. Bush couldn’t name the Prime Minister of Hoogivsadamistan, but in the weeks before 11 September, having already spotted his predecessor’s neglect of the matter, his administration was working on new strategies to combat international terrorism. What a chump, eh? Too dumb to be Prime Minister of Canada.
"It's no laughing matter," Letterman said. "He had a cut on his forehead, his cheek was bruised, and this president is not even married to Hillary."
January 14, 2002
The Enron "scandal," such that it is, is a refutation of the CFR logic: CFR proponents claim that money buys influence, which in turn puts legislators and government officials in the pocket of those giving them the money. If that were true, Enron would have been saved by the legion of House and Senate members to whom it has given money, to say nothing of the administration to which it gave a reported half a million dollars. Instead, it failed in spite of all those donations. Exactly whose influence did Enron buy, Mr. Whitcover, if no one lifted a finger to save it?
"The symbolism is far more important than representing the actual people," said Kevin James, a member of the Vulcan Society, which represents black firefighters.
"I think the artistic expression of diversity would supersede any concern over factual correctness," he added, citing the city's struggle for healing and reconciliation since the attacks.
The expression of diversity supersedes concern over getting the facts right? Huh?
Worse still, the Ravens now have their running game back, with Terry Allen and Jason Brookins bringing in fresh legs after returning from injuries, so we can look for more QB-free football from them. They're soooooo boring, and they're dangerous to the game as a result. I thought I would never, ever, ever say this---but "Go Steelers!" It's all probably moot anyway, since the Rams seem destined to conquer the NFL for their alien overlords again this year.
And thanks for outing me, Damian. I'll remember it....I have a loooong memory.