When Congressmen David Bonior, Mike Thompson, and Jim McDermott travelled to Iraq in 2002, Saddam Hussein's intelligence operatives picked up the tab, the federal government alleges. Read my piece on National Review Online on how the trio's ideological tourism carried on a shameful tradition of junkets to totalitarian nations by leftists willing to excuse the misdeeds of America's enemies.
Remember when everyone was naive enough to believe the Internet would extend freedom of speech? Instead, the international nature of the web has extended the tentacles of censors into formerly free places. Lawsuits, death threats, and shutdowns of websites muffle voices that once were free.
Are Islamic terrorists wholly without a sense of irony? Geert Wilders' film Fitna posits that Islam is a religion that inspires violence and intolerance. Within 24 hours of the documentary's posting on the web, Muslims objecting to the movie threatened to kill people associated with LiveLeak, the British company hosting Fitna. In their rebuttal, Muslim extremists confirm the film's message.
Iranian leaders said the film proved that Westerners harbored a "vendetta" against Islam. It actually proves the reverse, that Muslim terrorists harbor so much hatred against non-Muslims that they become savages in acting out that hatred. Muslims kill thousands of innocent Westerners and Westerners respond with calls to protect Muslims living in the West and to insist that Islam is a religion of peace. A Westerner makes a film critical of Islam and Muslims file lawsuits, threaten death, and recall ambassadors. There is a disproportionality in the offenses, and remarkably, a disproportionality in the reactions to them. Do the inhabitants of the Muslim world not see the difference in producing a film and killing thousands of people?
Cowards, naturally, had a field day condeming the film. The president of the European Union said Fitna had "no other purpose than inflaming hatred." Dutch prosecutors are investigating whether the film broke any laws, Holland's president condemned the film, and media groups within the Netherlands plan legal suits based on unauthorized use of video clips. Even the cartoonist who scribbled the famous drawing of Muhammed with the bomb turban vows to sue Wilders. "There is no justification for hate speech or incitement to violence," United Nations Secretary General Ban ki-Moon said in a statement. "The right of free expression is not at stake here." (It is, and if a man's name suggests he wants to ban the moon, then less intrusive items, such as Internet movies, might not be safe from his prohibition list, either.) In response to the death threats, LiveLeak dropped the film, which can be seen here in bootlegged form off Google (warning: it is gruesome). Free speech is underground. Censors are ascendant. Welcome to 2008.
Many of Fitna's clips come straight from Islamic terrorists, who foolishly advertised their acts of barbarism on the web for all to see. Now they regret that Geert Wilders has posted what they had posted and quoted what they have said. In response to his thesis that Islamists are violent the Islamists threaten to kill Wilders. And in response to this...listen to the crickets. Where is George W. Bush, who naively believed he could democratize the Middle East, when fanatics seek to Islamize the West? Geert Wilders stands alone. In these times, that's a better place to be than standing with the mob.
Dutch conservative Geert Wilders' Fitna (watch it here on the updated link) has been made available online. It may prove the most expensive film ever made if Wilders' enemies make him pay for his documentary. Music by Tchaikovsky, ugly visuals supplied by Islamic terrorists, a script straight from the Koran, Fitna is horrifying and graphic. Please do yourself a favor and don't watch, if you (as I am) are appalled by unpleasant images of gruesome deaths. It is, as the moving music and too-grisly images suggest, propaganda. But propaganda is not necessarily false. It's theme suggests that Islam is not a peaceful religion hijacked by extremists, but an extremist religion that has hijacked otherwise peaceful people. It supports this thesis with copious quotes from the Koran, a book I have not read in its entirety. Thus, I can't attest to whether the quotes accurately reflect the spirit of Islam, or whether they, like mined quotes from the Old Testament, distort the overall message of the religion. A second theme seems to be whether tolerance of intolerance is actually the enemy of tolerance. Allowing hordes of Mulsims to invade the Netherlands has led to assassinations, death threats, violence, and the loss of what made the Netherlands the Netherlands. Don't let this movie come to a country near you is the explicit warning. Is Fitna an alarm bell signaling Europe to "wake up" or the cinematic chronicling of how Europe slept as an intruder murdered it? This is a debatable point, which in itself is amazing given the death threats and censorship the mere idea of this fifteen-minute film unleashed. While the merits of the film are thankfully up for debate, the filmmaker's courage is not.
"There used to be an organization for people who believed in a truly limited government--limited taxes, limited spending, limited interference in individual lives and limited intervention in foreign affairs," Michael Grunwald writes in Time. "That organization was known as the Republican Party. But the only one of those beliefs that still motivates the G.O.P. establishment is limited taxes. In 2008, people who still hold all of them joined the Ron Paul Revolution." Grunwald argues that Ron Paul scares the GOP. Perhaps he does--not as a harbinger of its future but as a conscience-nagging reminder of its past.
If the intensity rather than the quantity of votes won elections, Ron Paul would be awaiting his coronation in St. Paul. Alas, the number of votes is what matters and in no state did Paul win even a plurality. Ron Paul lost because his campaign failed to effectively channel the energy of his volunteers, because the candidate was easily baited into discussions on the periphery, and because his supporters harbored many people who hang out atop the grassy knoll, in Roswell, and outside Area 51. Above all else, though, Ron Paul lost because--and this is a hard pill to swallow--restraining government is not very popular with voters right now.
Dr. Paul, a veteran, an obstetrician who delivered thousands of babies, a man of principle who refused medicare/medicaid for his patients, student aid for his children, and a congressional pension for himself, is an attractive and articulate candidate. His message, unfortunately, is not attractive--at least not in the times we live. We are a long way from Ronald Reagan, even longer from Calvin Coolidge.
When a candidate airs a culturally conservative message, as Mike Huckabee did this year and Pat Buchanan did in 1992 and 1996, voters rush to the booths. Talk about federalism, limited government, and a Washingtonian foriegn policy, on the other hand, and voters rush to the other candidates. This is depressing but true. How else to explain Paul's failure to attract the level of support that Huckabee or Buchanan did? In other words, one can present a hard-core conservative message on cultural matters and win the allegiance of hordes of voters. But a candidate who focuses on a traditional American foreign policy of minding our own business or who calls for drastically reducing the size of government faces the abuse of not only liberals in the media, but of fellow Republicans as well.
In research for A Conservative History of the American Left, I came across an amazing editorial from a farmer's periodical from more than a century ago. It counseled populists to not get discouraged by political defeats. It triumphantly noted that "the cranks always win." Initially ridiculed as cranks, cooks, and extremists, contrarian political movements often succeed by virtue of the tenacity of activists and the power of ideas.
More than a hundred years ago, that Kansas editor wrote: "The cranks are those who do not accept the existing order of things, and propose to change them. The existing order of things is always accepted by the majority, therefore the cranks are always in the minority. They are always progressive thinkers and always in advance of their time, and they always win. Called fanatics and fools at first, they are sometimes persecuted and abused. But their reforms are generally righteous, and time, reason and argument bring men to their side. Abused and ridiculed, then tolerated, then respectfully given a hearing, then supported. This has been the gauntlet that all great reforms and reformers have run, from Galileo to John Brown." The rhetoric is inspiring, even for one who disdains economic populism.
On the Right, "crank" Barry Goldwater lost the presidency in 1964 but won it in the 1980 recount. The "Buchanan Fence," roundly condemned as a xenophobe's pipedream in 1992, is being constructed sixteen years after it was initially proposed and ridiculed. It's not even controversial any longer. What idea of Ron Paul's will take hold? An honest currency? Fidelity to the Constitution? A restrained foreign policy? All of them? You can't blame a crank for hoping.
"The science of government being therefore so practical in itsef, and intended for such practical purposes, a matter which requires experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be, it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again, without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes."
--Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790
Is there something of the "cafeteria Catholic" in Catholic conservatives who support the Iraq war? There is an irony here if there is an affirmative answer to that question. Many of the Catholic hawks who dismiss the Church's counsel on Iraq sternly lecture Catholics who divert from the Church on matters from preistly celibacy to liberation theology. They are, in the view of many conservative Catholics, cafeteria Catholics who put on their trays Catholic theology that flatters their views and leave on the shelves Catholic theology that doesn't.
Dan McCarthy explores the disconnect between the Church's negative assessment of the Iraq war and the American Catholic Right's support for it in "Life Beyond the Party." The piece, as all good articles do, provokes a few thoughts.
"The Catholic Church, one of the strongest and most outspoken pro-life institutions worldwide, has been forthright in condemning the Iraq adventure," McCarthy notes on TakiMag.com. "Yet pro-life Catholic conservatives would hardly know that from reading Catholic-inflected conservative magazines like First Things or National Review. From those sources, they will only hear the likes of George Weigel and Michael Novak complaining about Vatican bureaucrats who just don't have the moral clarity to support the invasion and occupation of the Middle East. The pope himself has signaled his thought on the matter clearly enough, but Catholic hawks refuse to relay that signal to their readers--let alone show how it relates to the Church's teaching on other life matters, such as abortion."
McCarthy finds the killing in places such as Iraq as something even more extreme than garden-variety abortion. "Indeed, the proper comparison for an unjust war is not to legalized abortion, which is bad enough, but to forced abortion, since the state not only countenances illicit killing but carries out the act." Comparisons aside, what would make a conservative fervantly pro-life and in favor of an unprovoked preemptive war? In simplistic terms, an aversion to all things sexual and an affinity for all things martial pollutes the genetic make-up of too many conservatives. The argument that the war is a life-saving measure, particularly in view of the even bloodier carnage that may take place should U.S. forces leave, is another possible contributing explanation (and one sans the arm-chair psychoanalysis).
McCarthy highlights the hypocrisy of Republican conservatives taking anti-war Catholic conservatives to task for supporting pro-abortion but anti-war James Webb in his Virginia Senate run and opposing pro-life but pro-war George W. Bush, as the Republican conservatives propel the political careers of such rabidly pro-abortion candidates as Joe Lieberman and Rudolph Giuliani. The war, it seems, trumps abortion as a salient issue for many Catholics both for and against it.
McCarthy cites several articles by conservative Catholic hawks, mainly James Hitchcock's "Abortion and the 'Catholic Right'" from the Human Life Review and Joseph Bottum's "The New Fusionism" from First Things, that contend that support for an aggressive foreign policy and opposition to abortion have fused together. The authors wonder: What Catholic conservative would endanger the pro-life cause by attacking the war that the politicians opposing abortion endorse? But the question is more easily reversed: Why don't pro-life hawks give up the war since its unpopularity risks harming the pro-life cause? In any case, this fusionism, which does seem to have taken hold, is not only artificial but antipodal. A coalition between those who want to take lives on the battlefield and save them in the abortuary? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, particularly when the battlefield deaths aren't on an actual battlefield but in an environment habitated by people who did nothing to launch the war.
When the pope condemns the Iraq war, he does not, of course, speak for God. Good Catholics can and do disagree on the war (just as good conservatives and good Americans can and do). The pope is relying on Church teaching, from the Ten Commandments to just-war theory. But opposition to the Iraq war isn't Church teaching. Such a condemnation does not carry the weight of, say, the Church's acceptance of the Nicene Creed. But it should give Catholic hawks pause in their zeal for a nation-building occupation that resulted from a preemptive war that preempted nothing. That it hasn't affected much deep thought is what makes McCarthy's article so interesting.
Did you see the light? Last week, the brightest light ever to appear to the naked eye finally made its way to earth--only it was faint and not bright when it arrived. The luminescence resulted from an exploding star 7.5 billion light years away. The distance is astounding; the distance in time, even more so. What people saw from earth last week was an event that predated the earth. The explosion happened 7.5 billion years ago. Earthlings just got a chance to see it now because it takes a lot of time for light to travel halfway across the known universe. To put the distance in perspective, the light you see from the sun takes about eight minutes to reach your eye. The sun is 93 million miles away. I won't begin to calculate how far away a star was whose light took 7.5 billion years to get here. I say "was" because, although it only now presented to us evidence of its existence, that star certainly ceased to exist when it blazed so brilliantly. The gamma-ray burst was so intense that many of the objects launched into space by it travelled at nearly the speed of light. "If someone just happened to be looking at the right place at the right time," NASA's Stephen Holland noted, "they saw the most distant object ever seen by human eyes without optical aid."
Racist! McCarthyism! Democrats are using words against fellow Democrats that they normally reserve for Republicans. An adviser to Barack Obama compares Bill Clinton to "McCarthy." Another calls Hillary Clinton a "monster." A Hillary Clinton adviser accuses Barack Obama of "imitating Ken Starr." Obama supporters called Geraldine Ferraro "racist." James Carville, on Easter weekend no less, labeled Bill Richardson a "Judas" for endorsing Senator Obama (If Richardson is Judas, who does Carville think Mrs. Clinton is?). It's getting nasty. Will those feeling the sting of these epithets be hesitant to so freely hurl them in the future?
The 4,000th American war death in Iraq is a grim milestone. Numbers tend to simultaneously grab attention and desensitize. Behind those numbers were people, who had lives and families. But we don't see them, just the abstraction of a number. The 4,001st death will not be nearly as arresting a headline, but it will certainly be worse than 4,000 as 4,000 was worse than 3,999. Is there a number that would make the Iraq war prohibitive? If not 4,000 American lives, then 14,000? 40,000? 400,000? Alas, there is no calculator that can spit out a figure that shows when a war's benefits outweigh its costs. If America had lost not a single one of its 4,000 sons and daughters fighting in Iraq, the war would still not have been worth fighting. Anarchy, 100,000 or so dead Iraqis, hundreds of thousands displaced, $600 billion down the drain and counting, $3.26 for a gallon of gasoline, and a decline in American prestige globally, aside from the deaths of 4,000 of America's best, are what the war has wrought. The seizure of weapons of mass destruction from the wrong hands, the model that would serve as the catalyst domino for the democritization of the region, the thwarting of a fledgling nuclear power, and the disruption of an operational alliance between Hussein and al Qaeda would all justify this war, we were once told. Such were the bad premises upon which the war was waged. Bad premises beget bad results, the worst of which is the escalating number of the dead.
When Nobel laureate and Russian exile Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to the United States in the mid-1970s, President Gerald Ford, to his eternal shame, refused to meet with him. It is to her eternal credit that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi traveled to meet the Dalai Lama, who, like Solzhenitsyn, is a Nobel Peace Prize recipient and is exiled from his homeland. Some people cozy up to power. Others side with justice.
Say it, don't spray it. The FlynnFiles readership wants the news, not the weather. It's open thread Friday. But please: use Listerine before you make your comments. There have been complaints.
The website "Stuff White People Like" has extracted from my brain all of the things that annoy me about modern society but that I had a hard time articulating. My grievances, I discover, are mostly against other white people my age. This explains why I have no friends. The site lists 90 things that white people like (all of the entries, save maybe five, I hate). Number 23, for instance, is microbreweries. The site informs: "Being able to walk into a bar and order a beer that no one has heard of makes white people feel good about their alcohol drinking palate." "Many white people will tell you that they are very into soccer," reads #80. "But be careful, it's a trap." This entry focuses on "the idea of soccer," which seduces many white people into proclaiming their love of soccer but fails to induce them to actually play or watch it. "If you then attempt to engage them about your favorite soccer team or talk about famous moments in soccer history, you are likely to be met with blank stares. This is because white people don't actually enjoy watching soccer, they just like telling their friends that they are into it." "An interesting fact about white people is that they firmly believe that all of the world's problems can be solved through 'awareness,'" states #18. Hating Their Parents, Gifted Children, and Having Gay Friends are a few other of the ninety entries on this must-read website. I add "Kids Who Use Their Parents' First Names," "Super-Dressed Up People Who Show Up to Church Only on Christmas and Easter," "Bike-Riders Who Wear Helmets," and "Parents Who Sue the Parents of the Kid Who Punches Their Kid in the Face."
The oceans have not become warmer over the last five years. "There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant," explains Josh Willis of NASA, which unleashed a fleet of seafaring robots to measure temperature change. The inconvenient findings left the National Public Radio reporter to speculate that maybe "scientists are somehow misinterpreting the data from the diving buoys," or perhaps "scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them," or there's a chance "something more mysterious is going on." Sounds like a mystery that only Aquaman could solve. One possibility the article did not consider is that claims of global warming and its impact on the earth (and its oceans) are overblown.
A slice of pizza is much more expensive now than it was a year ago. This is because a fifty-pound bag of flour has doubled in price in less than a month. Beer prices have risen dramatically. This is because the price of hops per pound is nearly ten times what it was one year ago. An extremely fat, short, and jolly man at the packie informed me that he expects Sam Adams and other mass-market high-end beers to exceed $10 a six-pack by year's end. The national average for a gallon of regular gasoline is $3.28, up about fifty cents from a year ago. What do pizza, beer, and gasoline have in common? They are commodities that normal people consume on a regular basis. The rise in prices cut into the disposable income of people who don't have much to dispose. I'm no soothsayer, but these are what they call in the augery business "bad omens."
It's five years later. Weapons of mass destruction have not been found. An operational relationship between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda has never been established. Iraq had as much to do with 9/11 as Mongolia had to do with Pearl Harbor. The White House has admitted the intelligence buttressing the claim of Hussein seeking uranium from Niger was a hoax. Under American occupation, Iraq is a far more deadly incubator of terrorism than it was under Saddam Hussein. When since-ousted Bush economic advisor Larry Lindsey estimated that the war could cost $200 billion, others in the Bush administration scoffed. The war has cost more than $600 billion thus far. Almost 4,000 Americans have given their lives for this war of choice, and a greater number have given their limbs, damaged their mental health, and sacrificed marriages and family lives. Nearly 100,000 Iraqis have lost their lives since the outbreak of war and the ensuing chaos. The prospect of an independent longterm democracy in Iraq that keeps order and protects fundamental rights is bleak. America's reputation has been damaged enormously. The Iraq war has been a massive failure, almost without parallel in the history of the United States. The presumptions undergirding it, from bad intelligence to support for unprovoked war to a desire to serve as a crusader against the world's bad guys to the notion that American troops should act as nation-building social workers, have been tremendously harmful. Why did we go five years ago? Why do we stay five years from then?
Barack Obama prescribed himself more of the "medicine" that got his candidacy sick in the first place. Senator Obama's candidacy, even to many who would never think of voting for a liberal Democrat, was refreshing in that it presented a multiracial candidate who had seemingly transcended race. His candidacy wasn't built on race, but on the candidate. That's the way it should be. He represented to many Americans a future in which racial animosity wasn't stoked but healed. In his speech today, Obama spoke of a Constitution "stained by this nation's original sin of slavery," spoke of a "white community" (as if such thing existed), and spoke in a language of division (Asians, African Americans, Hispanics) instead of a language of inclusion (Americans). It was race-laden when the candidate needed to return to the sucessful tactic of studiously avoiding the subject. Candidate Obama would have been wise to have heeded the wisdom of his opponent's predecessor in the Senate: America would benefit from "benign neglect" of the issue of race.
Do people ever stop to think why, say, Massachusetts, Ohio, and South Carolina are called states? The Declaration of Independence refers to "free and independent states." Readers of antiquarian books are struck by the usage of "the United States are," rather than "the United States is," when collectively refering to America's states. What does "state" mean? In every application, save for its current use as a designation for the 50 governed areas that make up the United States, "state" means, well, state, i.e., an independent political unit. Examples of states, then, would include France, Sweden, and Germany. The geograpic boundaries of these states have not remained stable for too long, as Sweden once included Norway, Germany included parts of present-day Poland, and France bickered with Germany over the Saarland.
If the maps of European states have changed, why has not the geography of American states? They can. Article 4, Section 3 of the Constitution states: "New states may be admitted by the Congress into this union; but no new states shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other state; nor any state be formed by the junction of two or more states, or parts of states, without the consent of the legislatures of the states concerned as well as of the Congress." But with states as eager to lose taxpaying counties as the federal government was to lose the South, examples of states giving up territory are meager.
The Associated Press has a neat article on the American state not known as Jefferson. Never heard of it? That's because Jefferson never became a state. In 1941, a secessionist movement brewed in several of California's northern counties. Poor roads served as part of the impetus for secession. "Our Roads Are Not Passable, Hardly Jackassable," went the rallying cry. Before the movement could pick up steam, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and "Jefferson" passed into history as its namesake had more than a century prior.
Similar movements, more quirky and cute than well-organized and serious, have sprung up in other states. Residents of the Upper Peninsula have dreamed of splitting from Michigan to become "Superior." Killington, Vermont has attempted to form a Granite State diaspora in the Green Mountain State. A legislator from Maryland's Eastern Shore submitted a bill to the state general assembly to incorporate a new state from coastal areas of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia to form Delmarva. A lot of talk, but no successful action. Aside from the Founding-era separation of states from their western claims, only Maine, constitutionally extracted from Massachusetts, and West Virginia, unconstitutionally extracted from Virginia, have become states out of other U.S. states.
So why, almost seven decades later, do inhabitants of Orefornia/Caligon still buzz over the state of Jefferson? "It's more mythical than anything else," Pete LaFortune, executive director of Yreka's Chamber of Commerce, told the AP. "The State of Jefferson is that state of independence. It's that state of being able to take care of yourself--the Jeffersonian ideals that the government is not the answer. People are the answer."
In a perfect world, Ashley Alexandra Dupre's celebrity clock would be at 14:59 and ticking. Alas, ours is not a perfect world and fifteen minutes can last years. What reality shows, skin magazines, and musick producers will burden us with her into the next decade?
I'm beginning to suspect much of Ashley Alexandra Dupre's sob story is as phony as her plethora of names. A video report by the Associated Press shows the house where former New York governor Eliot Spitzer's call girl grew up. It's practically a mansion. The homelessness and poverty she describes on her since-pulled MySpace bio, it seems, was of the voluntary variety, if it existed at all. And abuse? I'm interested in what kind of abuse. Getting grounded? A family friend described the circumstances surrounding Ashley running away from home: "She crashed up [her stepdad's] Porsche and wanted another one, and he wouldn't give it to her, so she left."
Dupre may have briefly had it rough upon leaving home, but her bio on MySpace strikes me as something designed to give her "street cred." Remember all of Vanilla Ice's "word to ya mutha" and "I'm from the streets" talk? It turned out he was just a regular suburban dude. Methinks something similar is at work with this young lady's biography. One of the perverse aspects of contemporary culture is the desire to muck up, rather than spruce up, one's personal history and roots. Alas, to go from oppulence to whoredom does not an inspiring narrative make.
There is a Marxist script, which an earlier post to some degree resembled, that posits that poverty is the cause of vice, that prostitution, theft, the drug trade, and much else that scourges our world results from economics. The world is rarely that simplistic. My earlier juxtaposition of Moneybags Eliot and Poor Ashley contained a poetic truth but a prosaic falsehood. In this particular case, that narrative did not fit no matter what Ms. Dupre's invented biography claimed. Greed, not poverty, catapulted Ashley into the world of high-priced prostitution. And lust, not a Fort Knox bank account, catapulted her client into that world as well. Hopefully boredom will catapult the rest of us out of their story.
Should Barack Obama decide to jettison Jerimiah "God Damn America" Wright as his spiritual advisor, this guy is available to replace him.
Forensic investigators have found three sites at a former Manson Family hideout in Death Valley that may contain human remains. A gold prospector who guided Manson Family members through the desert four decades ago led the forensic scientists through the sun-drenched no-man's-land. Using a device that sniffs for chemicals consistent with a decomposing human body, the investigators detected soil that may be hiding dead people. Another device using infrared spectroscopy detected pits beneath the topsoil, suggesting the possibility of a crude grave. The next step? Dig. Who might reside in these sandy sepulchers? Miners, runaways, drifters--the pool of victims is limited. It's not called Death Valley for nothing.
Muslim leaders want to root out "Islamophobia." The suggested means of doing so will increase anti-Islamic sentiment. Unwittingly, or not, anti-discrimination fanatics often stoke what they profess to abhor. It's good for business. "Muslims are being targeted by a campaign of defamation, denigration, stereotyping, intolerance and discrimination," Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary general of the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference, explained to the gathering of his group. "Islamophobia cannot be dealt with only through cultural activities but (through) a robust political engagement." That "robust political engagement" is a euphemism for cross-border censorship by means of legal suits against writers, cartoonists, filmmakers, and others who run afoul of Islamic sensibilities and escape extremist vengence.
More than two thousand years ago a band of Roman patriots killed a usurper. They are not typically described in such favorable terms, and the act's intentions didn't match its results. "Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more," Shakespeare's Brutus explains. "Had you rather Caesar were living and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men? As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him: but, as he was ambitious, I slew him." Yet, Caesar's name became at once honored and the title of dictators--czar, shah, kaiser--and the empire permanently replaced the republic. The assassination of Julius Caesar more than 2050 years ago represents a conflict between two conservative values, freedom and skepticism of revolutionary change. Unfortunately for Rome, the patriots got revolution and lost freedom.
The constitutionality of the District of Columbia's authoritarian ban on the private ownership of firearms is being questioned in the courts. The effectiveness of the ban is finally being questioned in mainstream media outlets. In an outstanding article, the Associated Press notes: "Since the ban was passed, more than 8,400 people have been murdered in the district, many killed by handguns. Nearly 80 percent of the 181 murders in 2007 were committed with guns." How? Guns are illegal in Washington, DC.
Geraldine Ferraro is the last person in American politics who should be lashing out at identity politics benefitting Barack Obama. Before resigning from an auxiliary fundraising position on the Clinton campaign, the former representative from Queens observed: "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept."
Maybe, maybe not. Senator Obama is a very intelligent, charismatic, and articulate spokesman for the liberal cause. Sure, he's a political Music Man, but the Democrats have often swooned for the Harold Hills as their Republican counterparts have snoozed to the Gerald Fords, Bob Doles, and, yeah, John McCains.
What, other than being a woman, inspired Walter Mondale to select her as his vice presidential nominee in 1984? She had been in the House of Representatives for six years in 1984. Barack Obama has been in the Senate for four years. Whereas more than half the electorate are women, about ten percent are black. Numerically, there does not seem to be a whole lot of advantages for Obama there. Couldn't Ferraro's argument be applied just as readily to Hillary Clinton? If Obama's race does benefit him--I'm not convinced that as a whole it does--what does this do to the argument, made incessantly by liberals like Geraldine Ferraro, that racism still flourishes in America?
This is the Democratic Party the Geraldine Ferraros and Bill Clintons of the world made. It's a political organization built on identity politics and stoking the grievances (real and imagined) of women, minorities, and the poor. It's fitting that the monster has finally turned on its creators.
Say what you want about Eliot Spitzer's ethics, but at least have the decency to grant that he has exquisite taste in high-priced hookers. The absence of an Adam's apple certainly is not the only attribute that distinguishes Ashley Alexandra Dupre from others in her field. Spitzer could have done a lot worse for thousands of dollars an hour--just wait 'til his lawyers get through with him. Hearing Ashley Alexandra Dupre's music tempts me to advise her to keep her night job, but hanging out with the likes of Eliot Spitzer has a tendency to ruin one's reputation. With the audio more about the visual, Ashley's music, certainly, will be coming to a radio station too near you too soon. Did you catch Ms. Dupre's, or is it Ms. Youman's, or Ms. Kristin's MySpace bio? It runs about 400 words, but remarkably reverts to the first-person more than fifty times. "I am all about my music, and my music is all about me," it begins. To sum up the remaining 390 words, "I, me, mine." Five "me's," thirteen "my's," thirty "I's," and various indirect references to, who else, Ashley Alexandra Dupre. This has to be some kind of record, and should inspire psychoanalytic connections between narcissism and high-priced prostitution. Gimme. Gimme. Gimme. She apparently has something in common with her famous repeat customer. More obvious than the relationship between ego and greed are the connections between Ms. Dupre's background and her vocation. An abusive home, drugs, and homelessness are among the hard experiences that led her to the easy money. One could imagine Dr. Drew, just upon hearing her profession and nothing else, divining Ashley's sad biography. Elyssa Spitzer, just a few years Ashley's junior, never had to choose between the streets and the sheets, did she? Ashley's more infamous client is heir to a half-billion dollar fortune. He didn't run away from home as his favorite call girl did. His parents sent him to a tony private high school, then to Princeton, and then to Harvard Law. Pappy Bernard Spitzer was really the only donor Eliot needed for most of his political campaigns. And it is this juxtaposition between wealth and poverty--what wealthy people know impoverished people will do to get wealth and what impoverished people know wealthy people will do with their wealth--that makes this whole affair so tawdry. Where's the "crusader of the year" when we need him?
"The craving to change the world is perhaps a reflection of the craving to change ourselves. The untenability of a situation does not by itself always give rise to a desire for change. Our quarrel with the world is an echo of the endless quarrel proceeding within us. The revolutionary agitator must first start a war in every soul before he can find recruits for his war with the world."
--Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind, 1954
Would Eliot Spitzer allow an aide embroiled in a prostitution scandal to continue working for him? I doubt it. There is a double standard for politicans and those who serve them. The latter are expendable and can't be allowed to drag down the former. The former are irreplaceable and must at all costs be allowed to retain power. At least that's how many politicians see themselves. Is the governor of New York a public servant or is the public his servant? Eliot Spitzer would provide a reassuring answer to that question by resigning, a troublesome answer to that question by holding on to power. We will know in the coming days how he sees himself.
The pressure on Spitzer to resign comes from an unlikely source, a media that normally highlights hypocrisy when Republicans find themselves embroiled in sexual scandals but excuses Democrats--perhaps because the sin meshes better with the philosophy they preach--for similar offenses. Spitzer, because of his holier-than-thou stance on the malfeasance of the powerful, doesn't get such a pass. "Pride Goes Before a Fall," "'Moral Crusader' Gets His Comeuppance," "Spitzer, Ethics Crusader, Now Probed Over His Own Conduct," and "Spitzer, Hypocrite and Idiot, Must Resign" were typical headlines.
But as Tim Carney writes on HumanEvents.com, that "crusader" reputation that now serves as the petard hoisting Spitzer, was itself a media creation. "Once we see Spitzer in this more accurate light--as a government bully rather than a reformer--he looks less like a hypocrite and more like a man high on power and high on himself. It was only fitting that Spitzer would get tied up in the 'Emperor's Club.' And now even his media see that this emperor has no clothes."
Why resign? Because it would spare the public, and his family, from an onslaught of media seediness. We'll get interviews with the call girl. We'll find out his bedroom interests. We'll get Spitzer partisans defining deviancy down by downplaying the governor's transgressions. Eliot, we don't need it. You did something that plenty of middle-aged men do without fear of their sin being broadcast for the world to see. But you're the governor of New York and they're not. Public servants serve the public, not the other way around. The best way for you to do that is to resign and spare the public all of the nasty details.
Steve Forbes writes that George W. Bush is acting like Jimmy Carter. Both men tethered foreign policy to abstractions: the latter, to "human rights"; the former, to "democracy." But it is not foreign policy, but fiscal policy where Forbes sees the similarity. It's the Bush administration's policy of a weak dollar to stimulate the economy. "Rotten ideas never seem to die.," Forbes writes. "The Fed's notion that it must choose between economic growth and inflation is absolutely false. Experience has repeatedly shown that there is no tradeoff between inflation and a vigorous economy. We can have both excellent growth and a stable currency." The 1980s and '90s prove this. And the 1970s prove that recession and an inflated dollar can go hand in hand.
It's the type of high-profile crime Eliot Spitzer would have had a field day prosecuting. Still, I can't rejoice in any karmic justice Spitzer's legal troubles may or may not present. Wouldn't it have been better to have defeated the New York governor's noxious ideas at the ballot box than to see him go down through a personal scandal involving an overpriced call girl? Live by litigiousness, die by litigiousness, I guess. But the problem with politics by other means, the politics of personal destruction, or whatever you want to call it is that it doesn't get you anywhere. Destroying this politician or that politician doesn't win anyone over to your ideas or rebut the opposition's ideas. It's also a zero-sum game. For every Eliot Spitzer, there's a David Vitter; for every Barney Frank, a Mark Foley; for every Bill Clinton, a Bob Livingston. This is not to excuse their misdeeds, just to point out that no party has the market cornered on scandal. There's certainly something seedy and troublesome about a trusted government offical paying thousands of dollars for sex. But more troublesome and seedy is a society that gets pleasure in the demise of famous people. Political talk shows now resemble the literature in the supermarket checkout line. Spitzer's transgressions reflect poorly on him. America's obsessions with such transgressions reflect poorly on us. Lust is a sin. Gossip is too.
Nom de plumes are as old as plumes and certainly older than blog posts. But a foolish state legislator in Kentucky wants to outlaw them for online use. Good luck. The Internet ain't called the world wide web for nothing. Attempting to exert control across national borders, let alone state borders, is a daunting task.
The bill's small-minded sponsor says that he wants to protect against online bullies. I do too. That's why I support the right to use pen names on Internet sites. Bullies often disguise themselves as the bullied to more effectively bully others into doing what they want or shutting up about what they don't want to hear. One of their favorite ploys is to whine about being offended. This is offensive to me--one who makes a living off of words--as it always appears directly aimed at silencing the one and intimidating the many. This trick doesn't work when you can't identify the "offender."
In a perfect world, we would all take ownership of the words we use. I do. But I make my living off words. People who make their living in some other manner can't afford the hassle of the speech police. That's why they use Internet handles. Anonymity, at least in an age of political correctness, makes for a freer discussion. Aside from political blogs, there are whistleblower sites and sites rating professors, cops, and others where the lack of anonymity would crush the endeavors.
The bill is silent about what it seeks to do about libraries and book stores that carry works by Mark Twain, George Orwell, and O. Henry. Stage names, too, don't get addressed. Should Kentucky television stations be forced to note that it was really Marion Morrison who starred in The Searchers? Would one hear disc jockeys on Kentucky radio stations say, "And that was Like a Rolling Stone by Robert Zimmerman"? In other words, the use of invented names isn't confined to the Internet even if the purview of this bill is.
Had such a law been in place 225 years ago, The Federalist Papers might never have been written. Had it been in place last week, those posting on this site would have been silenced, forced to reveal their identities, or, and this is an especially appealing option, encouraged to break a bad law. Don't fret. Should the bill become law, you won't be held liable for using an Internet handle. I will. The first offense will carry a $500 fine, with suceeding transgressions costing $1,000 a piece.
When you think rock n roll, "La Isla Bonita," "Like a Virgin," and "Vogue" come to mind, wrong? The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducts Madonna into its club tonight. To quote a brilliant, brilliant mind, "The Rock n Roll Hall of Fame is about as rock n roll as Wilfred Brimley." Sorry, rock n roll and hall of fames don't mix. Madonna's membership in this stupid clique proves it. Do you recall a power chord on any of her records? Who was her drummer, C3PO? Cheap Trick, The Faces, and The J. Geils Band never sold as many records as Madonna. But Madonna never sold a rock record. Why are they out while she is in? Why is there even a Rock n Roll Hall of Fame?
I share many of the objections conservatives have with John McCain. I just question their authority to cry "unclean" after serving as George W. Bush's bootlickers for so long.
"Conservative leaders, particularly those in talk radio, cannot and will not be silent," Brent Bozell wrote this weekend about John McCain in the Washington Post. "They will not betray their principles and their audiences." Hey, Brent: did you miss the last seven years? Prescription drug giveaways, nationalization of airport security, nation buidling, a new federal department, amicus briefs for affirmative action and gun control--where was the conservative outrage? Many conservatives, in fact, did "betray their principles and their audiences." I am not speaking of Bush, who outlined his drug entitlement program and enhanced role for the federal bureaucracy in education during his 2000 run for the presidency, but of movement intellectuals, leaders, and activists who, unlike Bush, aren't politicians and therefore have less of an excuse.
Certainly many fine conservatives--Bruce Bartlett, Richard Viguerie, and Don Devine come to mind--courageously put conscience above career to speak against the leftward direction Bush took America (particularly on fiscal policy). But most prominent conservatives supported Bush wholeheartedly. It would have been bad had they merely stayed silent. But their transgressions were far worse than that. They loudly cheered the man who introduced America to a $3 trillion government.
Bozell writes of McCain, "He claims to be a champion of freedom but gave us McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform--which, by limiting free speech during elections, is perhaps the greatest infringement ever on the First Amendment. He claims to be a champion of U.S. sovereignty but offered us the McCain-Kennedy immigration reform bill that would give millions of illegal immigrants the chance to become citizens; that's amnesty, no matter how much he denies it. He claims to be a champion of the unborn but has waffled in the past, supporting federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research. This year, he won the endorsement of Republicans for Choice. He claims to be a fiscal conservative who will make the Bush tax cuts permanent, but he also voted against them." What of this litany, aside from the "tax cuts" vote, couldn't also be applied to George W. Bush?
How is McCain different than Bush? He opposes harsh interrogation methods on terror suspects, engenders admiration from detested media types, namedrops Jesus far less, and refuses to pretend that the conservative movement is a kingmaker--an assessment that his coronation in St. Paul will validate. From Iraq to campaign laws infringing on speech to amnesty for illegal aliens, McCain and Bush are Republicans cut out of the same cloth. For party conservatives, pointing out the policy similarities of the two men is somehow seen as a compliment to McCain. It's not. Certainly a case could be made that McCain is more conservative than Bush, but, and this is the significant point, a case can't be made that either of these men is a conservative.
Rather than the watch dog over the Republican Party that Bozell portrays it as, the conservative movement, particularly in this decade, has served as the GOP's lap dog. This is sad. The conservative movement once primaried Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Bush I, challenged the party's power structure over the Panama Canal giveaway, and revolted over a 3 percent tax increase. They even criticized President Reagan every so often. But that was long ago. Power has replaced principles as the movement's raison d'etre, and if John McCain appears as though he will attain the power that comes with the presidency, look for the conservative movement's jeers to quickly become cheers.
Andrew Sullivan, expert on all things gay, links to an Australian site that offers the Gayest Songs of All Time. I'm no gaylord, but the list strikes me as conflating disco and gay music. I realize the post-sexual revolution, pre-AIDS gay golden age coincided with disco. But methinks the list gives short shrift to the non-disco pop-culture influence of gay music. My list includes a tune co-written by Paul Schaeffer, a song off an album called "Age of Consent," and a number by the king of seedy detailing the unseemly side of alternative lifestyles. Breeders, come out of the musical closet and celebrate:
10. Queen--I Want To Break Free
9. Depeche Mode--Strangelove
8. Human League--Don't You Want Me?
7. David Bowie--Boys Keep Swinging
6. Lou Reed--Rock Minuet
5. USA for Africa--We Are the World
4. Weather Girls--It's Raining Men
3. Bronski Beat--Small Town Boy
2. Pet Shop Boys--Go West
1. Erasure--Respect
Should Barack Obama win the Democratic nomination, he has a patron that he should thank. Jesse Jackson was the first, and last, credible African American candidate for president. Like Obama, he's from Chicago. And like Obama, he's had some run-ins with the Clintons. Despite the commonalities, it's not likely that you will see the two together anytime soon. Obama's too politically adept to be cavorting with the likes of Jackson as he's seeking the presidency (Should he win, he'll let his kooks out by inauguration day). Jackson's candidacy was about race. Obama's candidacy is about transcending race. That difference is what makes Obama legitimate and Jackson--really the first of the unelected celebrity candidates--an also ran.
One of Jackson's crusades after he lost consecutive Democratic nominations to Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis was to make the Democratic Party more, well, democratic. Just as the post-1968 Democrats shifted power from party bosses to primary voters, the post-1988 Democrats shifted power from majorities to proportionalities. The winner-take-all (or almost all) primaries punished candidates such as Jackson, who could perform respectably from state to state, but could never actually win a primary. He was being cheated out of delegates, the argument went, and voters were being cheated out of delegate representation. Jackson's positions carried the day, and the Democrats generally adopted primary formulas that allocated delegates in proportion to the election day vote.
How does that work in practice? Well, last night in Texas, John McCain got 51 percent of the vote--the exact percentage won by Hillary Clinton. "Just win, baby" does not apply here. Whereas McCain earned 121 delegates to sixteen for his nearest competitor Mike Huckabee, Hillary Clinton earned 65 delegates to Obama's 61. Factor in the Texas caucus, which Obama likely won, and Hillary's victory seems not so much a victory after all. Delegates matter, and Hillary may not leave Texas with more of the Lone Star state's delegates than Obama. That's crazy, but crazy's how the Democrats operate.
Even if Hillary Clinton has stolen Barack Obama's momentum, it will be an uphill fight for her to wrest the nomination from him, too. This is because the proportional allocation of delegates in Democratic primaries makes primary and caucus season less of a state-by-state battle and more of a long-haul contest. By always remaining competitive, overperforming in caucuses, and putting together an impressive winning streak, Senator Obama has made it difficult for Senator Clinton to catch up. It's possible, particularly if Florida and Michigan--Clinton has done so well in larger states--are allowed to revote. But the odds are not in Hillary's favor. This is because Jesse Jackson, back in 1988 with an agreement with the Dukakoids, changed the rules. If Obama and Clinton were battling for delegates under Republican rules, it is almost certain that Clinton would be ahead.
Fighting for votes and not for states in the primaries is probably a bad idea. Politicos don't like it because it drags out the process and denies a party a united front. I don't like it because it presents a distorted picture of how the presidential electoral process works. I realize a good many Democrats simply are applying to themselves the rules they wished governed American politics. But the fact is that the Electoral College doesn't allocate votes by percentages. Come November, the candidates will be vying for electoral votes that are almost always tied to states. Should Obama lose Texas by a few percentage points in November as he did last night, he will get none--not roughly half--of the state's votes. In other words, the way Democrats--actually many independents and Republicans are involved, but that's a complaint for another day--select their presidential nominee is dissimilar to the way America selects its president. Could this be a reason why they've had such a hard time electing presidents the last forty years?
On a night when Republicans provided a definitive answer, Democrats added more questions. Hillary Clinton was left for dead after Iowa. She came back and won New Hampshire. Obama-worshipping scribes wrote post mortems prior to last night's vote. Hillary responded by winning Ohio and Texas. She may not overcome Barack Obama's delegate advantage. But Hillary Clinton has made it a race again and justified the continuation of her candidacy. She stopped Obama's big mo. Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul won their first primaries of the 2008 election season, only they were congressional and not presidential primaries. John McCain numerically wrapped up enough delegates for the Republican nomination. His victory speech should be replayed for the benefit of insomniacs everywhere. Mike Huckabee dropped out. His concession speech showed why he had outperformed expectations. Twelve more contests loom.
"I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University."
--William F. Buckley Jr.
Does your state provide gender-reassignment treatment to convicted murderers at taxpayer expense? Mine does. I live in Massachusetts, where the people are enlightened--just ask them. They read the Boston Globe. They've been to Emerson's Old Manse. They even know people who teach at Harvard.
Robert Kosilek murdered his wife in 1990. Now, eighteen years later Michelle Kosilek finds herself in prison for the same crime. Where is the justice? It's bad enough that Michelle is imprisoned for a crime that Robert committed, but the fact that the state won't pay for his/her sex change just goes too far. Somebody call the ACLU.
"My breasts have shrunk, genitals have regained previous size and function, facial hair is thicker and scalp hair is thinner, all related to an elevated testosterone level," Michelle explained to the court. She wants a sex change and she wants it now. You see, the estrogen treatments and electrolysis the state provided were not enough. The Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, Kosilek's legal brief informs, enshrines a right to a sex change at taxpayer's expense. If it ensures estrogen treatment, is it such a leap to say that it provides surgery too?
In your state, they probably execute murderers. In my state, they provide them sex changes.
When a conservative radio host mentions a Democratic presidential candidate's middle name, the presumptive Republican nominee rushed to forcefully dub it "inappropriate." But when professional feminist Gloria Steinem dropped an F-bomb, railed against "the gynocide" against women, and belittled John McCain's sacrifice in Vietnam, Hillary Clinton could not muster a negative word about Steinem or the words she used at her campaign event. There is a double standard between the parties on what's acceptable behavior and speech. "I am so grateful that [Hillary Clinton] hasn't been trained to kill anybody," Steinem noted at the Clinton event. "And she probably didn't even play war games as a kid. It's a great relief from Bush in his jump suit and from Kerry saluting." Earth to Democrats: hang around with the likes of Bill Ayers, Gloria Steinem, and Al Sharpton at your own peril.
Comedians using politics to get laughs is cool. Comedians getting used by politicians to win votes is lame. With several do-or-die primaries for Hillary Clinton looming, the former first lady appeared on Saturday Night Live and delivered its show-opening catchphrase. Hillary is hardly the first politician to appear on Saturday Night Live. After 9/11, Rudy Giuliani appeared on the program and did an outstanding job, particularly on Janet Reno's Dance Party. Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama have appeared on SNL this election cycle. Last weekend, Tina Fey delivered a political rant disguised as comedy. It was essentially a two-minute advertisement for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. It wasn't funny, and I guess that's my main complaint: when politics and comedy mix, comedy should rise to the top. I liked SNL better when a radiation-made giant Jimmy Carter appeared on weekend update, when Chevy Chase played Gerald Ford as Chevy Chase and not Gerald Ford, and when Dana Carvey's caricatures of George H.W. Bush made you think of Dana Carvey whenever you saw the real president speak. I liked it better because it made me laugh. "That would be terrible," Tina Fey sarcastically noted of a Clinton presidency, "having two intelligent, qualified people working together to solve problems." People laugh at such "jokes" out of political solidarity, not because they are funny.
A Conservative History of the American Left has been chosen as April's "main selection" for the Conservative Book Club. This is an honor, and one that comes with massive exposure for the book. In mailboxes, in magazines, and online it's tough for conservatives to escape the Conservative Book Club. That's good news for my book. "Dan Flynn's much-anticipated forthcoming Conservative History of the American Left (which will be a Main Selection for us in April) demonstrates the high cost that the Left has always paid for disdaining the wisdom of the past," Elizabeth Kantor, showing that she grasps one of the book's main themes, writes in announcing CBC's April main selection. "The American Left has repeatedly crashed and burned because Leftists were constitutionally opposed to learning anything from the mistakes of earlier generations of Leftists."
