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3DHS / Is this really the dawn of a new day for the left?
« on: November 07, 2006, 11:56:23 PM »
The True Ideological Battle
BY ARTHUR C. BROOKS
Tuesday, November 7, 2006
In their 2004 book, "The Right Nation," John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge chronicle America's rightward tilt. "If American politics is a seesaw, it is an unevenly balanced one. Imagine Dennis Hastert at one end of the seesaw and Nancy Pelosi on the other end, and you have some idea about which party is sitting with its legs dangling in the air. In the war between two Americas, Hastertland has been winning."
Until today, that is. This midterm election, in the view of many optimistic liberals, will be a forceful repudiation of the inevitability of American conservatism. A victory after so many years of losses will mark the beginning of the end to the country's nightmarish reactionary drift. According to Howard Dean, "The American people are fed up and want to change course. Democrats are offering the American people a new direction." But will it really be the dawn of a new day for the American left? After a cold look at the evidence, liberals might decide to take the champagne off the ice. The victory, assuming there is one, will hardly be glorious, and long-term trends are still distinctly right wing.
Some doomsday scenarios envision a 45-seat shift in the House of Representatives and a substantial Democratic majority in the Senate. These predictions, when looking at the actual data, are probably unrealistic. My colleague Danny Hayes, a political scientist who studies polling, says that the most reasonable picture has the Democrats winning 20-30 seats and taking narrow control of the House, while failing to win the Senate. This assessment is consistent with what most mainstream pollsters are predicting.
No bloodbath--but still major progress for the left, right? Not really. We are in the midst of a deeply unpopular war, and an electorate in a foul mood. A Washington Post-ABC News poll last week found that more than 30% of likely voters planned to cast their ballots on Nov. 7 for Democrats specifically as a sign of opposition to George Bush. Congressional Republicans are hardly helping their own cause, between corruption and sexual misconduct. And the Republican Congress has so alienated authentic conservative voters with its porky profligacy that lots of Republicans will probably stay home.
By all rights, the Republicans left in Congress after this election should be able to pool to work in one minivan. Instead, they are probably facing a 10% setback in House seats--hardly a disaster by midterm election standards. What's more, many of the Democrats at the vanguard of today's political "revolution" are not exactly left-wing zealots. Robert Casey, who leads incumbent Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, opposes abortion rights. On issues of gun control and immigration, Senate candidate Harold Ford of Tennessee sounds like a Republican. James Webb, who seeks to unseat Virginia Sen. George Allen, actually used to be a Republican. The lesson is that Democrats can win modestly if the Republicans implode, and preferably if they look more or less like Republicans. This is hardly a mythic victory for the American left; indeed, the larger cultural picture--in which the election is but a minor political datum--remains strikingly bleak for American liberalism.
Consider the effect of religious faith, which endures as the most important cultural fault line. On the whole, America is fundamentally religious, with 85% of people expressing allegiance to an organized faith and a third attending a house of worship weekly. Secularism is an exotic taste--except on the political left. According to the General Social Survey, liberals are a third less likely than the rest of the population to worship regularly, and less than half as likely as conservatives. The percentage of self-described liberals who say they have "no religion" has more than doubled since the early '70s.
This cultural trend represents a growing political liability for the left. Only about one in four Americans currently say they believe that the Democratic Party is friendly toward religion, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The practical impact of this belief is nicely described by author Stephen Carter in his book, "The Dissent of the Governed." He describes two black evangelical women who change their affiliations from liberal political groups to conservative Christian organizations, explaining that "they preferred a place that honored their faith and disdained their politics over a place that honored their politics and disdained their faith." These women are part of a real trend among religious Americans: According to the National Election Surveys, religious Democrats are more likely than any other group to change their party affiliation. Between 2000 and 2002, they were nearly four times more likely to do so than secular Republicans.
There's certainly more to ideology than faith, of course. Another major cultural force is immigration, which--as liberals hope and conservatives fear --has the power to counteract the conservatizing effects of religion. "Today we march, tomorrow we vote," was the slogan chanted earlier this year by Latinos demonstrating in the streets against Republican-led immigration crackdowns. The warning made the blood of many conservatives run cold. It shouldn't have; the political mobilization of Latinos may actually expand the cultural dominance of the American right. According to the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey in 2000, while American Latinos are about as likely as non-Latinos to say they are politically conservative, those not (yet) registered to vote are significantly more conservative than both voting Latinos and the population at large. In other words, a growing, more politically active Latino U.S. probably means a more conservative U.S. as well.
This counterintuitive fact is good news for the cultural right. But can Republicans capitalize politically on this pattern? Some doubt it, given the party's perceived hostility to immigration and apparent willingness to overlook the racial insensitivity of Sen. George Allen's "macaca" remark about an Indian-American man at a recent campaign event.
So much for religious folks and immigrants. What about young people? Maybe the left can, like it always has, look to the culture of youth to jumpstart the progressive movement. But even here, things are going conservatives' way. The left's traditional edge among young adults shrank from 1974 to 2004, as the percentage of adults 18-25 who labeled themselves political liberals fell by 12%, and the percentage saying they were conservative rose by 143%.
Waning youth support for the left may be partly due to the adroitness of conservative causes. But it probably also has to do with liberal inability or unwillingness to build an authentic youth grass-roots movement. A new and hotly debated book by Columbia University sociologist Dana Fisher documents the fact that most liberal political groups have dismantled their grassroots operations since the mid-'90s and subcontracted their activism to a small group of for-profit and nonprofit companies. In other words, the Republican canvasser at your door is a volunteer and true believer. But the kid asking for your signature and contribution for the local Democratic Party is probably a paid employee. This may be evidence that the left can no longer build grass-roots support to maintain itself, or that it has cut corners and sent its support-building mechanisms ideologically offshore. Either way, it bodes ill for progressive causes.
These are just three examples of the cultural patterns that continue to strengthen the right in America. Many more can be found in fertility patterns, the effects of education, and elsewhere. They tell us that conservatives have much to smile about, no matter what happens today at the polls. Reasonable people will disagree as to whether this is grounds for celebration or a call to fight. Either way, however, it is undeniable that the true ideological battle in America goes far deeper than a midterm election.
http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009210
BY ARTHUR C. BROOKS
Tuesday, November 7, 2006
In their 2004 book, "The Right Nation," John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge chronicle America's rightward tilt. "If American politics is a seesaw, it is an unevenly balanced one. Imagine Dennis Hastert at one end of the seesaw and Nancy Pelosi on the other end, and you have some idea about which party is sitting with its legs dangling in the air. In the war between two Americas, Hastertland has been winning."
Until today, that is. This midterm election, in the view of many optimistic liberals, will be a forceful repudiation of the inevitability of American conservatism. A victory after so many years of losses will mark the beginning of the end to the country's nightmarish reactionary drift. According to Howard Dean, "The American people are fed up and want to change course. Democrats are offering the American people a new direction." But will it really be the dawn of a new day for the American left? After a cold look at the evidence, liberals might decide to take the champagne off the ice. The victory, assuming there is one, will hardly be glorious, and long-term trends are still distinctly right wing.
Some doomsday scenarios envision a 45-seat shift in the House of Representatives and a substantial Democratic majority in the Senate. These predictions, when looking at the actual data, are probably unrealistic. My colleague Danny Hayes, a political scientist who studies polling, says that the most reasonable picture has the Democrats winning 20-30 seats and taking narrow control of the House, while failing to win the Senate. This assessment is consistent with what most mainstream pollsters are predicting.
No bloodbath--but still major progress for the left, right? Not really. We are in the midst of a deeply unpopular war, and an electorate in a foul mood. A Washington Post-ABC News poll last week found that more than 30% of likely voters planned to cast their ballots on Nov. 7 for Democrats specifically as a sign of opposition to George Bush. Congressional Republicans are hardly helping their own cause, between corruption and sexual misconduct. And the Republican Congress has so alienated authentic conservative voters with its porky profligacy that lots of Republicans will probably stay home.
By all rights, the Republicans left in Congress after this election should be able to pool to work in one minivan. Instead, they are probably facing a 10% setback in House seats--hardly a disaster by midterm election standards. What's more, many of the Democrats at the vanguard of today's political "revolution" are not exactly left-wing zealots. Robert Casey, who leads incumbent Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, opposes abortion rights. On issues of gun control and immigration, Senate candidate Harold Ford of Tennessee sounds like a Republican. James Webb, who seeks to unseat Virginia Sen. George Allen, actually used to be a Republican. The lesson is that Democrats can win modestly if the Republicans implode, and preferably if they look more or less like Republicans. This is hardly a mythic victory for the American left; indeed, the larger cultural picture--in which the election is but a minor political datum--remains strikingly bleak for American liberalism.
Consider the effect of religious faith, which endures as the most important cultural fault line. On the whole, America is fundamentally religious, with 85% of people expressing allegiance to an organized faith and a third attending a house of worship weekly. Secularism is an exotic taste--except on the political left. According to the General Social Survey, liberals are a third less likely than the rest of the population to worship regularly, and less than half as likely as conservatives. The percentage of self-described liberals who say they have "no religion" has more than doubled since the early '70s.
This cultural trend represents a growing political liability for the left. Only about one in four Americans currently say they believe that the Democratic Party is friendly toward religion, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. The practical impact of this belief is nicely described by author Stephen Carter in his book, "The Dissent of the Governed." He describes two black evangelical women who change their affiliations from liberal political groups to conservative Christian organizations, explaining that "they preferred a place that honored their faith and disdained their politics over a place that honored their politics and disdained their faith." These women are part of a real trend among religious Americans: According to the National Election Surveys, religious Democrats are more likely than any other group to change their party affiliation. Between 2000 and 2002, they were nearly four times more likely to do so than secular Republicans.
There's certainly more to ideology than faith, of course. Another major cultural force is immigration, which--as liberals hope and conservatives fear --has the power to counteract the conservatizing effects of religion. "Today we march, tomorrow we vote," was the slogan chanted earlier this year by Latinos demonstrating in the streets against Republican-led immigration crackdowns. The warning made the blood of many conservatives run cold. It shouldn't have; the political mobilization of Latinos may actually expand the cultural dominance of the American right. According to the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey in 2000, while American Latinos are about as likely as non-Latinos to say they are politically conservative, those not (yet) registered to vote are significantly more conservative than both voting Latinos and the population at large. In other words, a growing, more politically active Latino U.S. probably means a more conservative U.S. as well.
This counterintuitive fact is good news for the cultural right. But can Republicans capitalize politically on this pattern? Some doubt it, given the party's perceived hostility to immigration and apparent willingness to overlook the racial insensitivity of Sen. George Allen's "macaca" remark about an Indian-American man at a recent campaign event.
So much for religious folks and immigrants. What about young people? Maybe the left can, like it always has, look to the culture of youth to jumpstart the progressive movement. But even here, things are going conservatives' way. The left's traditional edge among young adults shrank from 1974 to 2004, as the percentage of adults 18-25 who labeled themselves political liberals fell by 12%, and the percentage saying they were conservative rose by 143%.
Waning youth support for the left may be partly due to the adroitness of conservative causes. But it probably also has to do with liberal inability or unwillingness to build an authentic youth grass-roots movement. A new and hotly debated book by Columbia University sociologist Dana Fisher documents the fact that most liberal political groups have dismantled their grassroots operations since the mid-'90s and subcontracted their activism to a small group of for-profit and nonprofit companies. In other words, the Republican canvasser at your door is a volunteer and true believer. But the kid asking for your signature and contribution for the local Democratic Party is probably a paid employee. This may be evidence that the left can no longer build grass-roots support to maintain itself, or that it has cut corners and sent its support-building mechanisms ideologically offshore. Either way, it bodes ill for progressive causes.
These are just three examples of the cultural patterns that continue to strengthen the right in America. Many more can be found in fertility patterns, the effects of education, and elsewhere. They tell us that conservatives have much to smile about, no matter what happens today at the polls. Reasonable people will disagree as to whether this is grounds for celebration or a call to fight. Either way, however, it is undeniable that the true ideological battle in America goes far deeper than a midterm election.
http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009210
1443
3DHS / Kerry & low hanging fruit
« on: November 05, 2006, 05:31:00 PM »
Election season is bad time for slip of the quip
November 5, 2006
BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist
My face time with John Kerry has been brief but choice. In 2003, I was at a campaign event in New Hampshire chatting with two old coots in plaid. The senator approached and stopped in front of us. The etiquette in primary season is that the candidate defers to the cranky Granite Stater's churlish indifference to status and initiates the conversation: "Hi, I'm John Kerry. Good to see ya. Cold enough for ya? How 'bout them Sox?" Etc. Instead, Kerry just stood there nose to nose, staring at us with an inscrutable semi-glare on his face. After an eternity, an aide stepped out from behind him and said, "The senator needs you to move."
"Well, why couldn't he have said that?" muttered one of the old coots. Why indeed?
Right now the Democratic Party needs the senator to move. Preferably to the South Sandwich Islands, until Tuesday evening, or better still, early 2009.
He won't, of course. A vain thin-skinned condescending blueblood with no sense of his own ridiculousness, Senator Nuancy Boy is secure in little else except his belief in his indispensability. We've all heard the famous "joke" now: "You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don't, you get stuck in Iraq." (Rimshot!) Yet, tempting as it is to enjoy his we-support-our-dumb-troops moment as merely the umpteenth confirmation of the senator's unerring ability to SwiftBoat himself, it belongs in a slightly different category of Kerry gaffe than, say, the time they went into Wendy's and Teresa didn't know what chili was.
Whatever he may or may not have intended (and "I was making a joke about how stupid Bush is but I'm the only condescending liberal in America too stupid to tell a Bush-is-stupid joke without blowing it" must rank as one of the all-time lame excuses), what he said fits what too many upscale Dems believe: that America's soldiers are only there because they're too poor and too ill-educated to know any better. That's what they mean when they say "we support our troops." They support them as victims, as children, as potential welfare recipients, but they don't support them as warriors and they don't support the mission.
So their "support" is objectively worthless. The indignant protest that "of course" "we support our troops" isn't support, it's a straddle, and one that emphasizes the Democrats' frivolousness in the post-9/11 world. A serious party would have seen the jihad as a profound foreign-policy challenge they needed to address credibly. They could have found a Tony Blair -- a big mushy-leftie pantywaist on health and education and all the other sissy stuff, but a man at ease with the projection of military force in the national interest. But we saw in Connecticut what happens to Democrats who run as Blairites: You get bounced from the ticket. In the 2004 election, instead of coming to terms with it as a national security question, the Democrats looked at the war on terror merely as a Bush wedge issue they needed to neutralize. And so they signed up with the weirdly incoherent narrative of John Kerry -- a celebrated anti-war activist suddenly "reporting for duty" as a war hero and claiming that, even though the war was a mistake and his comrades were murderers and rapists, his four months in the Mekong rank as the most epic chapter in the annals of the Republic.
It's worth contrasting the fawning media admiration for Kerry's truncated tour of duty with their total lack of interest in Bob Dole's years of service two presidential campaigns earlier. That convention night in Boston was one of the freakiest presentations in contemporary politics: a man being greeted as a combination of Alexander the Great and the Duke of Wellington for a few weeks' service in a war America lost. But Kerry is the flesh-and-blood embodiment of the Democratic straddle, of the we-oppose-the-war-but-support-our-troops line. That's why anti-war Dems, outspinning themselves, decided they could support a soldier who opposed a war. And as Kerry demonstrates effortlessly every time he opens his mouth, if you detach the heroism of a war from the morality of it, what's left but braggadocio? Or, as the senator intoned to me back in New Hampshire when I tried to ask what he would actually do about Iraq, Iran or anything else, "Sometimes truly courageous leadership means having the courage not to show any leadership." (I quote from memory.)
In fairness to Kerry, he didn't invent the Democrats' tortured relationship with the military. But ever since Eugene McCarthy ran against Lyndon Johnson and destroyed the most powerful Democrat of the last half-century, the Democratic Party has had a problematic relationship with the projection of power in the national interest.
- President Jimmy Carter confined himself to one screwed-up helicopter mission in Iran;
- Bill Clinton bombed more countries in a little more than six months than the Zionist neocon warmonger Bush has in six years but, unless you happened to be in that Sudanese aspirin factory, it was as desultory and uncommitted as his sex life and characterized by the same inability to reach (in Ken Starr's word) "completion."
- As for John Kerry, since he first slandered the American military three decades ago, he's been wrong on every foreign policy question and voted against every significant American weapons system.
To be sure, like Kerry in 2004 deciding that the murderers and rapists were now his brave "band of brothers," the left often discover a sudden enthusiasm for the previous war once a new one's come along.
- Since Iraq, they've been all in favor of Afghanistan, though back in the fall of 2001 they were convinced it was a quagmire, graveyard of empire, unwinnable, another Vietnam, etc.
- Oh, and they also discovered a belated enthusiasm for the first President Bush's shrewd conduct of the 1991 Gulf War, though at the time Kerry and most other Democrats voted against that one, too.
In this tedious shell game, no matter how frantically the left shuffles the cups, you never find the one shriveled pea of The Military Intervention We're Willing To Support When it Matters.
To be sure, the progressives deserve credit for having refined their view of the military: not murderers and rapists, just impoverished suckers too stupid for anything other than soldiering. The left still doesn't understand that it's the soldier who guarantees every other profession -- the defeatist New York Times journalist, the anti-American college professor, the insurgent-video-of-the-day host at CNN, the hollow preening blowhard senator.
Kerry's gaffe isn't about one maladroit Marie Antoinette of the Senate but a glimpse into the mind-set of too many Americans.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/steyn/123615,CST-EDT-steyn05.article
November 5, 2006
BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist
My face time with John Kerry has been brief but choice. In 2003, I was at a campaign event in New Hampshire chatting with two old coots in plaid. The senator approached and stopped in front of us. The etiquette in primary season is that the candidate defers to the cranky Granite Stater's churlish indifference to status and initiates the conversation: "Hi, I'm John Kerry. Good to see ya. Cold enough for ya? How 'bout them Sox?" Etc. Instead, Kerry just stood there nose to nose, staring at us with an inscrutable semi-glare on his face. After an eternity, an aide stepped out from behind him and said, "The senator needs you to move."
"Well, why couldn't he have said that?" muttered one of the old coots. Why indeed?
Right now the Democratic Party needs the senator to move. Preferably to the South Sandwich Islands, until Tuesday evening, or better still, early 2009.
He won't, of course. A vain thin-skinned condescending blueblood with no sense of his own ridiculousness, Senator Nuancy Boy is secure in little else except his belief in his indispensability. We've all heard the famous "joke" now: "You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don't, you get stuck in Iraq." (Rimshot!) Yet, tempting as it is to enjoy his we-support-our-dumb-troops moment as merely the umpteenth confirmation of the senator's unerring ability to SwiftBoat himself, it belongs in a slightly different category of Kerry gaffe than, say, the time they went into Wendy's and Teresa didn't know what chili was.
Whatever he may or may not have intended (and "I was making a joke about how stupid Bush is but I'm the only condescending liberal in America too stupid to tell a Bush-is-stupid joke without blowing it" must rank as one of the all-time lame excuses), what he said fits what too many upscale Dems believe: that America's soldiers are only there because they're too poor and too ill-educated to know any better. That's what they mean when they say "we support our troops." They support them as victims, as children, as potential welfare recipients, but they don't support them as warriors and they don't support the mission.
So their "support" is objectively worthless. The indignant protest that "of course" "we support our troops" isn't support, it's a straddle, and one that emphasizes the Democrats' frivolousness in the post-9/11 world. A serious party would have seen the jihad as a profound foreign-policy challenge they needed to address credibly. They could have found a Tony Blair -- a big mushy-leftie pantywaist on health and education and all the other sissy stuff, but a man at ease with the projection of military force in the national interest. But we saw in Connecticut what happens to Democrats who run as Blairites: You get bounced from the ticket. In the 2004 election, instead of coming to terms with it as a national security question, the Democrats looked at the war on terror merely as a Bush wedge issue they needed to neutralize. And so they signed up with the weirdly incoherent narrative of John Kerry -- a celebrated anti-war activist suddenly "reporting for duty" as a war hero and claiming that, even though the war was a mistake and his comrades were murderers and rapists, his four months in the Mekong rank as the most epic chapter in the annals of the Republic.
It's worth contrasting the fawning media admiration for Kerry's truncated tour of duty with their total lack of interest in Bob Dole's years of service two presidential campaigns earlier. That convention night in Boston was one of the freakiest presentations in contemporary politics: a man being greeted as a combination of Alexander the Great and the Duke of Wellington for a few weeks' service in a war America lost. But Kerry is the flesh-and-blood embodiment of the Democratic straddle, of the we-oppose-the-war-but-support-our-troops line. That's why anti-war Dems, outspinning themselves, decided they could support a soldier who opposed a war. And as Kerry demonstrates effortlessly every time he opens his mouth, if you detach the heroism of a war from the morality of it, what's left but braggadocio? Or, as the senator intoned to me back in New Hampshire when I tried to ask what he would actually do about Iraq, Iran or anything else, "Sometimes truly courageous leadership means having the courage not to show any leadership." (I quote from memory.)
In fairness to Kerry, he didn't invent the Democrats' tortured relationship with the military. But ever since Eugene McCarthy ran against Lyndon Johnson and destroyed the most powerful Democrat of the last half-century, the Democratic Party has had a problematic relationship with the projection of power in the national interest.
- President Jimmy Carter confined himself to one screwed-up helicopter mission in Iran;
- Bill Clinton bombed more countries in a little more than six months than the Zionist neocon warmonger Bush has in six years but, unless you happened to be in that Sudanese aspirin factory, it was as desultory and uncommitted as his sex life and characterized by the same inability to reach (in Ken Starr's word) "completion."
- As for John Kerry, since he first slandered the American military three decades ago, he's been wrong on every foreign policy question and voted against every significant American weapons system.
To be sure, like Kerry in 2004 deciding that the murderers and rapists were now his brave "band of brothers," the left often discover a sudden enthusiasm for the previous war once a new one's come along.
- Since Iraq, they've been all in favor of Afghanistan, though back in the fall of 2001 they were convinced it was a quagmire, graveyard of empire, unwinnable, another Vietnam, etc.
- Oh, and they also discovered a belated enthusiasm for the first President Bush's shrewd conduct of the 1991 Gulf War, though at the time Kerry and most other Democrats voted against that one, too.
In this tedious shell game, no matter how frantically the left shuffles the cups, you never find the one shriveled pea of The Military Intervention We're Willing To Support When it Matters.
To be sure, the progressives deserve credit for having refined their view of the military: not murderers and rapists, just impoverished suckers too stupid for anything other than soldiering. The left still doesn't understand that it's the soldier who guarantees every other profession -- the defeatist New York Times journalist, the anti-American college professor, the insurgent-video-of-the-day host at CNN, the hollow preening blowhard senator.
Kerry's gaffe isn't about one maladroit Marie Antoinette of the Senate but a glimpse into the mind-set of too many Americans.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/steyn/123615,CST-EDT-steyn05.article
1444
3DHS / Don't believe Bush?....what about the terrorists?
« on: November 04, 2006, 11:11:28 AM »
Mideast terror leaders to U.S.: Vote Democrat
Withdrawal from Iraq would embolden jihadists to destroy Israel, America
Posted: November 2, 2006
By Aaron Klein
© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com
JERUSALEM – Everybody has an opinion about next Tuesday's midterm congressional election in the U.S. – including senior terrorist leaders interviewed by WND who say they hope Americans sweep the Democrats into power because of the party's position on withdrawing from Iraq, a move, as they see it, that ensures victory for the worldwide Islamic resistance.
The terrorists told WorldNetDaily an electoral win for the Democrats would prove to them Americans are "tired."
They rejected statements from some prominent Democrats in the U.S. that a withdrawal from Iraq would end the insurgency, explaining an evacuation would prove resistance works and would compel jihadists to continue fighting until America is destroyed.
They said a withdrawal would also embolden their own terror groups to enhance "resistance" against Israel.
"Of course Americans should vote Democrat," Jihad Jaara, a senior member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group and the infamous leader of the 2002 siege of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, told WND.
"This is why American Muslims will support the Democrats, because there is an atmosphere in America that encourages those who want to withdraw from Iraq. It is time that the American people support those who want to take them out of this Iraqi mud," said Jaara, speaking to WND from exile in Ireland, where he was sent as part of an internationally brokered deal that ended the church siege.
Jaara was the chief in Bethlehem of the Brigades, the declared "military wing" of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party.
Together with the Islamic Jihad terror group, the Brigades has taken responsibility for every suicide bombing inside Israel the past two years, including an attack in Tel Aviv in April that killed American teenager Daniel Wultz and nine Israelis.
Muhammad Saadi, a senior leader of Islamic Jihad in the northern West Bank town of Jenin, said the Democrats' talk of withdrawal from Iraq makes him feel "proud."
"As Arabs and Muslims we feel proud of this talk," he told WND. "Very proud from the great successes of the Iraqi resistance. This success that brought the big superpower of the world to discuss a possible withdrawal."
Abu Abdullah, a leader of Hamas' military wing in the Gaza Strip, said the policy of withdrawal "proves the strategy of the resistance is the right strategy against the occupation."
"We warned the Americans that this will be their end in Iraq," said Abu Abdullah, considered one of the most important operational members of Hamas' Izzedine al-Qassam Martyrs Brigades, Hamas' declared "resistance" department. "They did not succeed in stealing Iraq's oil, at least not at a level that covers their huge expenses. They did not bring stability. Their agents in the [Iraqi] regime seem to have no chance to survive if the Americans withdraw."
Abu Ayman, an Islamic Jihad leader in Jenin, said he is "emboldened" by those in America who compare the war in Iraq to Vietnam.
"[The mujahedeen fighters] brought the Americans to speak for the first time seriously and sincerely that Iraq is becoming a new Vietnam and that they should fix a schedule for their withdrawal from Iraq," boasted Abu Ayman.
The terror leaders spoke as the debate regarding the future of America's war in Iraq has perhaps become the central theme of midterm elections, with most Democrats urging a timetable for withdrawal and Republicans mostly advocating staying the course in Iraq.
President Bush has even said he would send more troops if Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Baghdad, said they are needed to stabilize the region
The debate became especially poignant following remarks by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the 2004 presidential candidate who voted in support of the war in Iraq. Earlier this week he intimated American troops are uneducated, and it is the uneducated who "get stuck in Iraq."
Kerry, under intense pressure from fellow Democrats, now says his remarks were a "botched joke."
Many Democratic politicians and some from the Republican Party have stated a withdrawal from Iraq would end the insurgency there.
In a recent interview with CBS's "60 Minutes," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, stated, "The jihadists (are) in Iraq. But that doesn't mean we stay there. They'll stay there as long as we're there."
Pelosi would become House speaker if the Democrats win the majority of seats in next week's elections.
WND read Pelosi's remarks to the terror leaders, who unanimously rejected her contention an American withdrawal would end the insurgency.
Islamic Jihad's Saadi, laughing, stated, "There is no chance that the resistance will stop."
He said an American withdrawal from Iraq would "prove the resistance is the most important tool and that this tool works. The victory of the Iraqi revolution will mark an important step in the history of the region and in the attitude regarding the United States."
Jihad Jaara said an American withdrawal would "mark the beginning of the collapse of this tyrant empire (America)."
"Therefore, a victory in Iraq would be a greater defeat for America than in Vietnam."
Jaara said vacating Iraq would also "reinforce Palestinian resistance organizations, especially from the moral point of view. But we also learn from these (insurgency) movements militarily. We look and learn from them."
Hamas' Abu Abdullah argued a withdrawal from Iraq would "convince those among the Palestinians who still have doubts in the efficiency of the resistance."
"The victory of the resistance in Iraq would prove once more that when the will and the faith are applied victory is not only a slogan. We saw that in Lebanon (during Israel's confrontation against Hezbollah there in July and August); we saw it in Gaza (after Israel withdrew from the territory last summer) and we will see it everywhere there is occupation," Abdullah said.
While the terror leaders each independently urged American citizens to vote for Democratic candidates, not all believed the Democrats would actually carry out a withdrawal from Iraq.
Saadi stated, "Unfortunately I think those who are speaking about a withdrawal will not do so when they are in power and these promises will remain electoral slogans. It is not enough to withdraw from Iraq. They must withdraw from Afghanistan and from every Arab and Muslim land they occupy or have bases."
He called both Democrats and Republicans "agents of the Zionist lobby in the U.S."
Abu Abdullah commented once Democrats are in power "the question is whether such a courageous leadership can [withdraw]. I am afraid that even after the American people will elect those who promise to leave Iraq, the U.S. will not do so. I tell the American people vote for withdrawal. Abandon Israel if you want to save America. Now will this Happen? I do not believe it."
Still Jihad Jaara said the alternative is better than Bush's party.
"Bush is a sick person, an alcoholic person that has no control of what is going on around him. He calls to send more troops but will very soon get to the conviction that the violence and terror that his war machine is using in Iraq will never impose policies and political regimes in the Arab world."
Withdrawal from Iraq would embolden jihadists to destroy Israel, America
Posted: November 2, 2006
By Aaron Klein
© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com
JERUSALEM – Everybody has an opinion about next Tuesday's midterm congressional election in the U.S. – including senior terrorist leaders interviewed by WND who say they hope Americans sweep the Democrats into power because of the party's position on withdrawing from Iraq, a move, as they see it, that ensures victory for the worldwide Islamic resistance.
The terrorists told WorldNetDaily an electoral win for the Democrats would prove to them Americans are "tired."
They rejected statements from some prominent Democrats in the U.S. that a withdrawal from Iraq would end the insurgency, explaining an evacuation would prove resistance works and would compel jihadists to continue fighting until America is destroyed.
They said a withdrawal would also embolden their own terror groups to enhance "resistance" against Israel.
"Of course Americans should vote Democrat," Jihad Jaara, a senior member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group and the infamous leader of the 2002 siege of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, told WND.
"This is why American Muslims will support the Democrats, because there is an atmosphere in America that encourages those who want to withdraw from Iraq. It is time that the American people support those who want to take them out of this Iraqi mud," said Jaara, speaking to WND from exile in Ireland, where he was sent as part of an internationally brokered deal that ended the church siege.
Jaara was the chief in Bethlehem of the Brigades, the declared "military wing" of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party.
Together with the Islamic Jihad terror group, the Brigades has taken responsibility for every suicide bombing inside Israel the past two years, including an attack in Tel Aviv in April that killed American teenager Daniel Wultz and nine Israelis.
Muhammad Saadi, a senior leader of Islamic Jihad in the northern West Bank town of Jenin, said the Democrats' talk of withdrawal from Iraq makes him feel "proud."
"As Arabs and Muslims we feel proud of this talk," he told WND. "Very proud from the great successes of the Iraqi resistance. This success that brought the big superpower of the world to discuss a possible withdrawal."
Abu Abdullah, a leader of Hamas' military wing in the Gaza Strip, said the policy of withdrawal "proves the strategy of the resistance is the right strategy against the occupation."
"We warned the Americans that this will be their end in Iraq," said Abu Abdullah, considered one of the most important operational members of Hamas' Izzedine al-Qassam Martyrs Brigades, Hamas' declared "resistance" department. "They did not succeed in stealing Iraq's oil, at least not at a level that covers their huge expenses. They did not bring stability. Their agents in the [Iraqi] regime seem to have no chance to survive if the Americans withdraw."
Abu Ayman, an Islamic Jihad leader in Jenin, said he is "emboldened" by those in America who compare the war in Iraq to Vietnam.
"[The mujahedeen fighters] brought the Americans to speak for the first time seriously and sincerely that Iraq is becoming a new Vietnam and that they should fix a schedule for their withdrawal from Iraq," boasted Abu Ayman.
The terror leaders spoke as the debate regarding the future of America's war in Iraq has perhaps become the central theme of midterm elections, with most Democrats urging a timetable for withdrawal and Republicans mostly advocating staying the course in Iraq.
President Bush has even said he would send more troops if Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Baghdad, said they are needed to stabilize the region
The debate became especially poignant following remarks by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the 2004 presidential candidate who voted in support of the war in Iraq. Earlier this week he intimated American troops are uneducated, and it is the uneducated who "get stuck in Iraq."
Kerry, under intense pressure from fellow Democrats, now says his remarks were a "botched joke."
Many Democratic politicians and some from the Republican Party have stated a withdrawal from Iraq would end the insurgency there.
In a recent interview with CBS's "60 Minutes," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, stated, "The jihadists (are) in Iraq. But that doesn't mean we stay there. They'll stay there as long as we're there."
Pelosi would become House speaker if the Democrats win the majority of seats in next week's elections.
WND read Pelosi's remarks to the terror leaders, who unanimously rejected her contention an American withdrawal would end the insurgency.
Islamic Jihad's Saadi, laughing, stated, "There is no chance that the resistance will stop."
He said an American withdrawal from Iraq would "prove the resistance is the most important tool and that this tool works. The victory of the Iraqi revolution will mark an important step in the history of the region and in the attitude regarding the United States."
Jihad Jaara said an American withdrawal would "mark the beginning of the collapse of this tyrant empire (America)."
"Therefore, a victory in Iraq would be a greater defeat for America than in Vietnam."
Jaara said vacating Iraq would also "reinforce Palestinian resistance organizations, especially from the moral point of view. But we also learn from these (insurgency) movements militarily. We look and learn from them."
Hamas' Abu Abdullah argued a withdrawal from Iraq would "convince those among the Palestinians who still have doubts in the efficiency of the resistance."
"The victory of the resistance in Iraq would prove once more that when the will and the faith are applied victory is not only a slogan. We saw that in Lebanon (during Israel's confrontation against Hezbollah there in July and August); we saw it in Gaza (after Israel withdrew from the territory last summer) and we will see it everywhere there is occupation," Abdullah said.
While the terror leaders each independently urged American citizens to vote for Democratic candidates, not all believed the Democrats would actually carry out a withdrawal from Iraq.
Saadi stated, "Unfortunately I think those who are speaking about a withdrawal will not do so when they are in power and these promises will remain electoral slogans. It is not enough to withdraw from Iraq. They must withdraw from Afghanistan and from every Arab and Muslim land they occupy or have bases."
He called both Democrats and Republicans "agents of the Zionist lobby in the U.S."
Abu Abdullah commented once Democrats are in power "the question is whether such a courageous leadership can [withdraw]. I am afraid that even after the American people will elect those who promise to leave Iraq, the U.S. will not do so. I tell the American people vote for withdrawal. Abandon Israel if you want to save America. Now will this Happen? I do not believe it."
Still Jihad Jaara said the alternative is better than Bush's party.
"Bush is a sick person, an alcoholic person that has no control of what is going on around him. He calls to send more troops but will very soon get to the conviction that the violence and terror that his war machine is using in Iraq will never impose policies and political regimes in the Arab world."
1445
3DHS / It's a Botched Joke epidemic
« on: November 04, 2006, 03:15:27 AM »
Maybe It's Just a Botched Joke
Earlier this week Seymour Hersh, a writer for The New Yorker, denounced America's military in a speech he delivered in a foreign country. McGill Daily has this account of Hersh's talk at the Montreal university:
"The bad news," investigative reporter Seymour Hersh told a Montreal audience last Wednesday, "is that there are 816 days left in the reign of King George II of America." The good news? "When we wake up tomorrow morning, there will be one less day." . . If Americans knew the full extent of U.S. criminal conduct, they would receive returning Iraqi veterans as they did Vietnam veterans, Hersh said. "In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation," he said. "It isn't happening now, but I will tell you--there has never been an [American] army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq."
Something tells us we are not alone in suspecting that this is how John Kerry* would talk were he not constrained by the need to face the voters occasionally.
* "You know, education--if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."
http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110009194
Earlier this week Seymour Hersh, a writer for The New Yorker, denounced America's military in a speech he delivered in a foreign country. McGill Daily has this account of Hersh's talk at the Montreal university:
"The bad news," investigative reporter Seymour Hersh told a Montreal audience last Wednesday, "is that there are 816 days left in the reign of King George II of America." The good news? "When we wake up tomorrow morning, there will be one less day." . . If Americans knew the full extent of U.S. criminal conduct, they would receive returning Iraqi veterans as they did Vietnam veterans, Hersh said. "In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation," he said. "It isn't happening now, but I will tell you--there has never been an [American] army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq."
Something tells us we are not alone in suspecting that this is how John Kerry* would talk were he not constrained by the need to face the voters occasionally.
* "You know, education--if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."
http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110009194
1446
3DHS / "If I don't win, the awards show loses credibility,"
« on: November 04, 2006, 12:41:10 AM »
Kanye West Sore Loser at MTV Europe Awards
Nov 3, 2006
By JAN M. OLSEN
COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) - Rap star Kanye West was named Best Hip Hop artist but still came off as a sore loser at the MTV Europe Music Awards.
Kanye apparently was so disappointed at not winning for Best Video that he crashed the stage Thursday in Copenhagen when the award was being presented to Justice and Simian for "We Are Your Friends."
In a tirade riddled with expletives, Kanye said he should have won the prize for his video "Touch The Sky," because it "cost a million dollars, Pamela Anderson was in it. I was jumping across canyons."
"If I don't win, the awards show loses credibility," Kanye said.
The rapper grabbed the Best Hip Hop award earlier in the night in a star-studded event hosted by Justin Timberlake in the Danish capital.
Timberlake won the Best Pop and Best Male awards while the Red Hot Chili Peppers won Best Album. Christina Aguilera was named Best Female artist at the annual awards show broadcast live in 17 countries.
British band Muse won the Best Alternative category, and Depeche Mode earned the Best Group award.
"Wow, guys, this is totally unexpected," said Rihanna as she received the Best R&B award. In September, the 18-year-old music star won the same category in the Music of Black Origin award in London.
The show was split between two venues: a convention hall on the city outskirts where Timberlake was in charge and an outdoor stage on Copenhagen's main square where R&B songstress Kelis introduced the artists.
Rapper Snoop Dogg, Australian band Jets and The Killers of Denmark had crowds jumping up and down in temperatures just above freezing at the outdoor venue.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers were nominated in four categories, but only won one for the album "Stadium Arcadium."
Best song went to Gnarls Barkley for "Crazy."
British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen entertained the audience with his English-mangling character Borat Sagdiyev, a Kazakh TV journalist, and poked fun at Madonna who is trying to adopt an African child.
"My only concern is that this singing transvestite will not be such a good father," Borat said in a mock video link from Kazakhstan.
Other award presenters included R&B singer Cassie, Daniel Craig - the sixth actor to play agent James Bond - Fat Joe, "Jackass" star Johnny Knoxville and the Sugababes.
MTV's European awards are held in a different city every year. The winners are selected by fans across Europe.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20061103/D8L5JBHO0.html
Nov 3, 2006
By JAN M. OLSEN
COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) - Rap star Kanye West was named Best Hip Hop artist but still came off as a sore loser at the MTV Europe Music Awards.
Kanye apparently was so disappointed at not winning for Best Video that he crashed the stage Thursday in Copenhagen when the award was being presented to Justice and Simian for "We Are Your Friends."
In a tirade riddled with expletives, Kanye said he should have won the prize for his video "Touch The Sky," because it "cost a million dollars, Pamela Anderson was in it. I was jumping across canyons."
"If I don't win, the awards show loses credibility," Kanye said.
The rapper grabbed the Best Hip Hop award earlier in the night in a star-studded event hosted by Justin Timberlake in the Danish capital.
Timberlake won the Best Pop and Best Male awards while the Red Hot Chili Peppers won Best Album. Christina Aguilera was named Best Female artist at the annual awards show broadcast live in 17 countries.
British band Muse won the Best Alternative category, and Depeche Mode earned the Best Group award.
"Wow, guys, this is totally unexpected," said Rihanna as she received the Best R&B award. In September, the 18-year-old music star won the same category in the Music of Black Origin award in London.
The show was split between two venues: a convention hall on the city outskirts where Timberlake was in charge and an outdoor stage on Copenhagen's main square where R&B songstress Kelis introduced the artists.
Rapper Snoop Dogg, Australian band Jets and The Killers of Denmark had crowds jumping up and down in temperatures just above freezing at the outdoor venue.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers were nominated in four categories, but only won one for the album "Stadium Arcadium."
Best song went to Gnarls Barkley for "Crazy."
British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen entertained the audience with his English-mangling character Borat Sagdiyev, a Kazakh TV journalist, and poked fun at Madonna who is trying to adopt an African child.
"My only concern is that this singing transvestite will not be such a good father," Borat said in a mock video link from Kazakhstan.
Other award presenters included R&B singer Cassie, Daniel Craig - the sixth actor to play agent James Bond - Fat Joe, "Jackass" star Johnny Knoxville and the Sugababes.
MTV's European awards are held in a different city every year. The winners are selected by fans across Europe.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20061103/D8L5JBHO0.html
1447
3DHS / Where'd she go?
« on: November 04, 2006, 12:37:40 AM »
WHERE'S NANCY?
**Update** Fri Nov 03 2006 11:58:29 ET
The woman who would be speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has oddly stayed out of the national spotlight in the week leading up to the big vote.
The high profile, potentially history-making democrat has turned low-key.
The last photo of vanishing Pelosi on the wires was from an October 21 fundraiser.
And since Pelosi appeared on the controversial October 22 broadcast of 60 MINUTES, national TV hits have all but been nonexistent.
[Pelosi did appear on CNBC's On the Money on 10/24 and on ABC on 10/26, as THINK PROGRESS points out. But the sightings have dramatically dwindled.]
Former Speaker of the House, Republican Newt Gingrich believes he knows one reason why the congresswoman has largely dropped out of public sight ever since 60 MINUTES.
"It seems clear that some Americans have glimpsed a future with her third in line for the presidency, and they don't like what they see," says Gingrich. "She has become largely invisible as a result."
A source close to the congresswoman explains she has been busy behind the scenes.
Pelosi made a brief public appearance with Bill Clinton this week in San Francisco.
After providing a long schedule of her weekend events, a Pelosi aide added that her favorite stop was the taping of a World Wrestling Entertainment podcast on the importance of young people voting, the WHITE HOUSE BULLETIN reports.
Developing...
http://www.drudgereport.com/flash1.htm
**Update** Fri Nov 03 2006 11:58:29 ET
The woman who would be speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has oddly stayed out of the national spotlight in the week leading up to the big vote.
The high profile, potentially history-making democrat has turned low-key.
The last photo of vanishing Pelosi on the wires was from an October 21 fundraiser.
And since Pelosi appeared on the controversial October 22 broadcast of 60 MINUTES, national TV hits have all but been nonexistent.
[Pelosi did appear on CNBC's On the Money on 10/24 and on ABC on 10/26, as THINK PROGRESS points out. But the sightings have dramatically dwindled.]
Former Speaker of the House, Republican Newt Gingrich believes he knows one reason why the congresswoman has largely dropped out of public sight ever since 60 MINUTES.
"It seems clear that some Americans have glimpsed a future with her third in line for the presidency, and they don't like what they see," says Gingrich. "She has become largely invisible as a result."
A source close to the congresswoman explains she has been busy behind the scenes.
Pelosi made a brief public appearance with Bill Clinton this week in San Francisco.
After providing a long schedule of her weekend events, a Pelosi aide added that her favorite stop was the taping of a World Wrestling Entertainment podcast on the importance of young people voting, the WHITE HOUSE BULLETIN reports.
Developing...
http://www.drudgereport.com/flash1.htm
1448
3DHS / Why should we believe his apology?
« on: November 03, 2006, 11:27:40 AM »
When Trent Lott made racially offensive comments four years ago his critics (including this columnist) looked back at things he'd said decades earlier to illustrate his poor record on racial issues. So it seems only fair to do the same to John Kerry. It turns out that what he actually said, as opposed to what he claims he meant to say, is very similar to what he said 34 years ago, when he was running for Congress, as the Associated Press reports:
In 1972, as he ran for the House, he was less apologetic in his comments about the merits of a volunteer army. He declared in the questionnaire that he opposed the draft but considered a volunteer army "a greater anathema."
"I am convinced a volunteer army would be an army of the poor and the black and the brown," Kerry wrote. "We must not repeat the travesty of the inequities present during Vietnam. I also fear having a professional army that views the perpetuation of war crimes as simply 'doing its job.' "Equally as important, a volunteer army with our present constitutional crisis takes accountability away from the president and put the people further from control over military activities," he wrote.
The reason Kerry's comments have had such resonance is because many observers have long suspected that he has not abandoned, or even moderated, the antimilitary and anti-American views he espoused back in the early 1970s, when he told a Senate hearing this about his fellow veterans:
They had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
And indeed, Kerry seems to stand by this outrageous slander. Yesterday he told Don Imus:
I've told the truth in the past. I've never done anything except tell the truth. And I'm not going to take anybody's comment to suggest that somehow my telling the truth was a mistake. The American people rely on the truth. And when I came back from Southeast Asia, I told the truth.
If he stands by his slanders from all those years ago, why should we believe him now when he says he was only trying to slander the president of the United States?
http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110009184
In 1972, as he ran for the House, he was less apologetic in his comments about the merits of a volunteer army. He declared in the questionnaire that he opposed the draft but considered a volunteer army "a greater anathema."
"I am convinced a volunteer army would be an army of the poor and the black and the brown," Kerry wrote. "We must not repeat the travesty of the inequities present during Vietnam. I also fear having a professional army that views the perpetuation of war crimes as simply 'doing its job.' "Equally as important, a volunteer army with our present constitutional crisis takes accountability away from the president and put the people further from control over military activities," he wrote.
The reason Kerry's comments have had such resonance is because many observers have long suspected that he has not abandoned, or even moderated, the antimilitary and anti-American views he espoused back in the early 1970s, when he told a Senate hearing this about his fellow veterans:
They had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
And indeed, Kerry seems to stand by this outrageous slander. Yesterday he told Don Imus:
I've told the truth in the past. I've never done anything except tell the truth. And I'm not going to take anybody's comment to suggest that somehow my telling the truth was a mistake. The American people rely on the truth. And when I came back from Southeast Asia, I told the truth.
If he stands by his slanders from all those years ago, why should we believe him now when he says he was only trying to slander the president of the United States?
http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110009184
1449
3DHS / A Short Summary of Kerry's "apology"
« on: November 03, 2006, 05:19:58 AM »
1. What I said wasn't really what I said.
2. I'm sorry if you misinterpreted what I was saying by taking it at face value.
3. Republicans suck.
Why it is so hard just to say, "I'm sorry for what I said"?
2. I'm sorry if you misinterpreted what I was saying by taking it at face value.
3. Republicans suck.
Why it is so hard just to say, "I'm sorry for what I said"?
1450
3DHS / Racial vs Intellectual Diversity
« on: November 03, 2006, 05:13:33 AM »
With all the hoopla surrounding what Sowell was supposedly saying about "diversity", here's another article on the subject. Let's see how quickly this author is referred to as a racist
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DIVERSITY ADULATION
There are some ideas so ludicrous and mischievous that only an academic would take them seriously. One of them is diversity. Think about it. Are you for or against diversity? When's the last time you said to yourself, "I'd better have a little more diversity in my life"? What would you think if you heard a Microsoft director tell his fellow board members that the company should have more diversity and manufacture kitchenware, children's clothing and shoes? You'd probably think the director was smoking something illegal.
Our institutions of higher learning take diversity seriously and make it a multimillion-dollar operation. Juilliard School has a director of diversity and inclusion; Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a manager of diversity recruitment; Toledo University, an associate dean for diversity; the universities of Harvard, Texas A&M, California at Berkeley, Virginia and many others boast of officers, deans, vice-presidents and perhaps ministers of diversity.
George Leef, director of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh, N.C., writes about this in an article titled "Some Questions about Diversity" in the Oct. 5 issue of "Clarion Call." Mr. Leef suggests that only in academia is diversity pursued for its own sake, but there's a problem: Everyone, even if they are the same ethnicity, nationality or religion, is different. Suppose two people are from the same town in Italy. They might differ in many important respects: views on morality, religious and political beliefs, recreation preferences and other characteristics.
Mr. Leef says that some academics see diversity as a requirement for social justice -- to right historical wrongs. The problem here is that if you go back far enough, all groups have suffered some kind of historical wrong. The Irish can point to injustices at the hands of the British, Jews at the hands of Nazis, Chinese at the hands of Indonesians, and Armenians at the hands of the Turks. Of course, black Americans were enslaved, but slavery is a condition that has been with mankind throughout most of history. In fact, long before blacks were enslaved, Europeans were enslaved. The word slavery comes from Slavs, referring to the Slavic people, who were early slaves. White Americans, captured by the Barbary pirates, were enslaved at one time or another. Whites were indentured servants in colonial America. So what should the diversity managers do about these injustices?
When academics call for diversity, they're really talking about racial preferences for particular groups of people, mainly blacks. The last thing they're talking about is intellectual diversity. According to a recent national survey, reported by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni in "Intellectual Diversity," 72 percent of college professors describe themselves as liberal and 15 percent conservative. Liberal professors think their classrooms should be used to promote a political agenda. The University of California recently abandoned a provision on academic freedom that cautioned against using the classroom for propaganda. The president said the regulation was "outdated."
Americans, as taxpayers and benefactors, have been exceedingly generous to our institutions of higher learning. That generosity has been betrayed. Rich Americans, who acquired their wealth through our capitalist system, give billions to universities. Unbeknownst to them, much of that money often goes to faculty members and programs that are openly hostile to donor values. Universities have also failed in their function of the pursuit of academic excellence by having dumbed down classes and granting degrees to students who are just barely literate and computationally incompetent.
What's part of Williams' solution? Benefactors should stop giving money to universities that engage in racist diversity policy. Simply go to the university's website, and if you find offices of diversity, close your pocketbook. There's nothing like the sound of pocketbooks snapping shut to open the closed minds of administrators.
BY WALTER E. WILLIAMS
RELEASE: WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2006
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/articles/06/adulation.html
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DIVERSITY ADULATION
There are some ideas so ludicrous and mischievous that only an academic would take them seriously. One of them is diversity. Think about it. Are you for or against diversity? When's the last time you said to yourself, "I'd better have a little more diversity in my life"? What would you think if you heard a Microsoft director tell his fellow board members that the company should have more diversity and manufacture kitchenware, children's clothing and shoes? You'd probably think the director was smoking something illegal.
Our institutions of higher learning take diversity seriously and make it a multimillion-dollar operation. Juilliard School has a director of diversity and inclusion; Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a manager of diversity recruitment; Toledo University, an associate dean for diversity; the universities of Harvard, Texas A&M, California at Berkeley, Virginia and many others boast of officers, deans, vice-presidents and perhaps ministers of diversity.
George Leef, director of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh, N.C., writes about this in an article titled "Some Questions about Diversity" in the Oct. 5 issue of "Clarion Call." Mr. Leef suggests that only in academia is diversity pursued for its own sake, but there's a problem: Everyone, even if they are the same ethnicity, nationality or religion, is different. Suppose two people are from the same town in Italy. They might differ in many important respects: views on morality, religious and political beliefs, recreation preferences and other characteristics.
Mr. Leef says that some academics see diversity as a requirement for social justice -- to right historical wrongs. The problem here is that if you go back far enough, all groups have suffered some kind of historical wrong. The Irish can point to injustices at the hands of the British, Jews at the hands of Nazis, Chinese at the hands of Indonesians, and Armenians at the hands of the Turks. Of course, black Americans were enslaved, but slavery is a condition that has been with mankind throughout most of history. In fact, long before blacks were enslaved, Europeans were enslaved. The word slavery comes from Slavs, referring to the Slavic people, who were early slaves. White Americans, captured by the Barbary pirates, were enslaved at one time or another. Whites were indentured servants in colonial America. So what should the diversity managers do about these injustices?
When academics call for diversity, they're really talking about racial preferences for particular groups of people, mainly blacks. The last thing they're talking about is intellectual diversity. According to a recent national survey, reported by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni in "Intellectual Diversity," 72 percent of college professors describe themselves as liberal and 15 percent conservative. Liberal professors think their classrooms should be used to promote a political agenda. The University of California recently abandoned a provision on academic freedom that cautioned against using the classroom for propaganda. The president said the regulation was "outdated."
Americans, as taxpayers and benefactors, have been exceedingly generous to our institutions of higher learning. That generosity has been betrayed. Rich Americans, who acquired their wealth through our capitalist system, give billions to universities. Unbeknownst to them, much of that money often goes to faculty members and programs that are openly hostile to donor values. Universities have also failed in their function of the pursuit of academic excellence by having dumbed down classes and granting degrees to students who are just barely literate and computationally incompetent.
What's part of Williams' solution? Benefactors should stop giving money to universities that engage in racist diversity policy. Simply go to the university's website, and if you find offices of diversity, close your pocketbook. There's nothing like the sound of pocketbooks snapping shut to open the closed minds of administrators.
BY WALTER E. WILLIAMS
RELEASE: WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 2006
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/articles/06/adulation.html
1452
3DHS / Diversity's Oppressions
« on: October 31, 2006, 02:09:19 AM »
Why Iraq has proven to be so hard to pacify.
BY THOMAS SOWELL
Monday, October 30, 2006
Iraq is not the first war with ugly surprises and bloody setbacks. Even World War II, idealized in retrospect as it never was at the time--the war of "the greatest generation"--had a long series of disasters for Americans before victory was finally achieved.
The war began for Americans with the disaster at Pearl Harbor, followed by the tragic horror of the Bataan death march, the debacle at the Kasserine Pass and, even on the eve of victory, being caught completely by surprise by a devastating German counterattack that almost succeeded at the Battle of the Bulge.
Other wars--our own and other nations'--have likewise been full of nasty surprises and mistakes that led to bloodbaths. Nevertheless, the Iraq war has some special lessons for our time, lessons that both the left and the right need to acknowledge, whether or not they will.
What is it that has made Iraq so hard to pacify, even after a swift and decisive military victory? In one word: diversity.
That word has become a sacred mantra, endlessly repeated for years on end, without a speck of evidence being asked for or given to verify the wonderful benefits it is assumed to produce.
Worse yet, Iraq is only the latest in a long series of catastrophes growing out of diversity. These include "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans, genocide in Rwanda and the Sudan, the million lives destroyed in intercommunal violence when India became independent in 1947 and the even larger number of Armenians slaughtered by Turks during World War I.
Despite much gushing about how we should "celebrate diversity," America's great achievement has not been in having diversity but in taming its dangers that have run amok in many other countries. Americans have by no means escaped diversity's oppressions and violence, but we have reined them in.
Another concept whose bitter falsity has been painfully revealed in Iraq is "nation-building." People are not building blocks, however much some may flatter themselves that they can arrange their fellow human beings' lives the way you can arrange pieces on a chess board.
The biggest and most fatuous example of nation-building occurred right after World War I, when the allied victors dismembered the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Woodrow Wilson assigned a young Walter Lippman to sit down with maps and population statistics and start drawing lines that would define new nations.
Iraq is one of those new nations. Like other artificial creations in the Balkans, Africa and elsewhere, it has never had the cohesion of nations that evolved over the centuries out of the experiences of peoples who worked out their own modi vivendi in one way or another.
Tito's dictatorship held Yugoslavia together, as other dictatorships held together other peoples forced into becoming a nation by the decisions of outsiders who drew their boundaries on maps and in some cases--Nigeria, for example--even gave them their national name.
Even before 9/11, there were some neoconservatives who talked about our achieving "national greatness" by creating democratic nations in various parts of the world.
How much influence their ideas have had on the actual course of events is probably something that will not be known in our generation. But we can at least hope that the Iraq tragedy will chasten the hubris behind notions of "nation-building" and chasten also the pious dogmatism of those who hype "diversity" at every turn, in utter disregard of its actual consequences at home or abroad. Free societies have prerequisites, and history has not given all peoples those prerequisites, which took centuries to evolve in the West.
However we got into Iraq, we cannot undo history--even recent history--by simply pulling out and leaving events to take their course in that strife-torn country. Whether or not we "stay the course," terrorists are certainly going to stay the course in Iraq and around the world.
Political spin may say that Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terror, but the terrorists themselves quite obviously believe otherwise, as they converge on that country with lethal and suicidal resolve.
Whether we want to or not, we cannot unilaterally end the war with international terrorists. Giving the terrorists an epoch-making victory in Iraq would only shift the location where we must face them or succumb to them.
Abandoning Iraqi allies to their fate would ensure that other nations would think twice before becoming or remaining our allies. With a nuclear Iran looming on the horizon, we are going to need all the allies we can get.
http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009170
BY THOMAS SOWELL
Monday, October 30, 2006
Iraq is not the first war with ugly surprises and bloody setbacks. Even World War II, idealized in retrospect as it never was at the time--the war of "the greatest generation"--had a long series of disasters for Americans before victory was finally achieved.
The war began for Americans with the disaster at Pearl Harbor, followed by the tragic horror of the Bataan death march, the debacle at the Kasserine Pass and, even on the eve of victory, being caught completely by surprise by a devastating German counterattack that almost succeeded at the Battle of the Bulge.
Other wars--our own and other nations'--have likewise been full of nasty surprises and mistakes that led to bloodbaths. Nevertheless, the Iraq war has some special lessons for our time, lessons that both the left and the right need to acknowledge, whether or not they will.
What is it that has made Iraq so hard to pacify, even after a swift and decisive military victory? In one word: diversity.
That word has become a sacred mantra, endlessly repeated for years on end, without a speck of evidence being asked for or given to verify the wonderful benefits it is assumed to produce.
Worse yet, Iraq is only the latest in a long series of catastrophes growing out of diversity. These include "ethnic cleansing" in the Balkans, genocide in Rwanda and the Sudan, the million lives destroyed in intercommunal violence when India became independent in 1947 and the even larger number of Armenians slaughtered by Turks during World War I.
Despite much gushing about how we should "celebrate diversity," America's great achievement has not been in having diversity but in taming its dangers that have run amok in many other countries. Americans have by no means escaped diversity's oppressions and violence, but we have reined them in.
Another concept whose bitter falsity has been painfully revealed in Iraq is "nation-building." People are not building blocks, however much some may flatter themselves that they can arrange their fellow human beings' lives the way you can arrange pieces on a chess board.
The biggest and most fatuous example of nation-building occurred right after World War I, when the allied victors dismembered the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Woodrow Wilson assigned a young Walter Lippman to sit down with maps and population statistics and start drawing lines that would define new nations.
Iraq is one of those new nations. Like other artificial creations in the Balkans, Africa and elsewhere, it has never had the cohesion of nations that evolved over the centuries out of the experiences of peoples who worked out their own modi vivendi in one way or another.
Tito's dictatorship held Yugoslavia together, as other dictatorships held together other peoples forced into becoming a nation by the decisions of outsiders who drew their boundaries on maps and in some cases--Nigeria, for example--even gave them their national name.
Even before 9/11, there were some neoconservatives who talked about our achieving "national greatness" by creating democratic nations in various parts of the world.
How much influence their ideas have had on the actual course of events is probably something that will not be known in our generation. But we can at least hope that the Iraq tragedy will chasten the hubris behind notions of "nation-building" and chasten also the pious dogmatism of those who hype "diversity" at every turn, in utter disregard of its actual consequences at home or abroad. Free societies have prerequisites, and history has not given all peoples those prerequisites, which took centuries to evolve in the West.
However we got into Iraq, we cannot undo history--even recent history--by simply pulling out and leaving events to take their course in that strife-torn country. Whether or not we "stay the course," terrorists are certainly going to stay the course in Iraq and around the world.
Political spin may say that Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terror, but the terrorists themselves quite obviously believe otherwise, as they converge on that country with lethal and suicidal resolve.
Whether we want to or not, we cannot unilaterally end the war with international terrorists. Giving the terrorists an epoch-making victory in Iraq would only shift the location where we must face them or succumb to them.
Abandoning Iraqi allies to their fate would ensure that other nations would think twice before becoming or remaining our allies. With a nuclear Iran looming on the horizon, we are going to need all the allies we can get.
http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009170
1453
3DHS / The Non-Contract With America
« on: October 29, 2006, 01:11:59 AM »
What Democrats aren't saying about their agenda, so we will.
Saturday, October 28, 2006
A joke in Washington these days is that the only thing that can save the Republicans on Election Day is the Democrats. House Speaker-in-waiting Nancy Pelosi seems to get this joke, because with few exceptions she's kept her Members tight-lipped and unspecific: As New York Senator Chuck Schumer has put it, why take the focus off the GOP?
This is in notable contrast to 1994, when the Gingrich Republicans ended a 40-year Democratic House majority by laying out a 10-item agenda known as the Contract with America. What Democrats are campaigning on this year is a Non-Contract with America--mostly generalities about "helping the middle class" and "ending the corruption in Washington."
As a campaign strategy, this may well pay off. But if they do win, Democrats will have to fill their campaign vacuum with something, and the best clue to what that would be is what they've already proposed. We've taken some time to inspect these policy priorities and thought we'd share a few of the highlights, if that's the right word. (Warning: Keep sharp objects away from drug-company and Wal-Mart shareholders.)
Tax increases. The Bush tax cuts expire in 2010, and any chance that they'll be made permanent will vanish with a Democratic Congress. The question is whether Democrats will try to raise taxes even sooner. Most Democrats voted against the Bush tax cuts, but this week Ms. Pelosi said on CNBC's "Kudlow & Co." that "Democrats like tax cuts. We support middle-class tax cuts."
The same isn't true, however, for the "investor" tax cuts of 2003 that coincided with the acceleration of the current expansion. Ms. Pelosi says reversing these tax cuts "at the high end" would be "an earlier resort." This would raise the top income and dividend tax rate back to 39.6% from 35%, and the capital-gains rate back to 20% from 15%, substantially raising the cost of new investment in the United States. Economist John Rutledge estimates that raising the dividend rate alone would reduce the value of the S&P 500 stocks by between 5% and 8.5%, roughly a $500 to $700 billion decline in the wealth of the 52% of American households that own stock.
"Paygo budgeting." President Bush would no doubt promise to veto any direct tax increase, but having the power of the purse would give Democrats plenty of leverage. What if they framed the political choice as a tax increase on "the rich" versus funding the war on terror?
Democrats have also pledged to restore so-called pay-as-you-go budget rules, which sound like a restraint on budget deficits but in practice restrain only tax cuts. They don't apply to the growth of current entitlement programs or to domestic discretionary spending, only to tax cuts or new entitlements. This formula would probably take us back to the 1980s, when Democrats insisted on higher domestic spending while fighting Ronald Reagan's increases in defense spending.
Health-care regulation. Big Pharma and private insurers, watch out. Michigan's John Dingell, who would run the Energy and Commerce Committee, has co-sponsored the "Patients Before Profits Act" that would gut funding for the new Medicare Advantage plans that are proving so popular with seniors. Instead, he and the other Democrats who run health-care panels want to direct all seniors into a single government-run Medicare drug plan. Another proposal from top Democrats, the Medicare for All Act, would make all Americans, of any age, eligible for Medicare and pay for it with a new 1.7% payroll tax on workers and 7% on employers.
Ms. Pelosi has also pledged to pass, in her first 100 hours as Speaker, legislation to require the government to "negotiate lower drug prices." That's a euphemism for imposing price controls on new medicines, which can take as much as $800 million in research and development to bring to market. The actor Michael J. Fox is getting headlines for his ads in favor of Democrats who support stem-cell research, but price controls would do far more to delay the introduction of new treatments for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or cancer.
The union label. AFL-CIO headquarters would be rocking with hope once again. A job-killing hike in the minimum wage, to $7.25 from $5.15, would whisk through Congress, and we'd expect that Mr. Bush would sign it.
But another top priority for Democrats is the Employee Free Choice Act, which has at least 215 co-sponsors in the House and 44 in the Senate. This would allow labor to turn workplaces into union shops without an election or secret ballot. Unions would merely have to gather signatures from a majority of workers at a work site, which means labor organizers could strong-arm employees who opposed such a petition. This would almost surely pass the House.
Democrats have also moved well to the left on trade since the Bill Clinton-Nafta era. Mr. Bush's trade-promotion authority, allowing up-or-down votes on trade deals without amendment, expires next July, and there's little chance House Democrats would extend it. The entire Democratic leadership opposed free trade with tiny Oman and with Central America, so deals now in the works with Vietnam and other countries would also be long shots. Sorry, Robert Rubin.
Energy. The Pelosi Democrats favor a "windfall" profits tax on oil companies and a virtual moratorium on drilling for more domestic oil in Alaska and on the outer continental shelf (where the U.S. may have more energy than Saudi Arabia). These policies would make the U.S. more dependent on foreign oil. There would also be an effort to pass new, and higher, fuel-mileage mandates, which would make things tougher on what's left of Detroit. And lobbying would begin for the U.S. to sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and to subsidize, even more than Republicans already have, ethanol and other "alternative" fuels.
We could go on, in particular in the regulatory arena, where agencies would be under greater pressure to restrict mergers, among other things. But you get the idea. A Democratic triumph would produce a major shift in the national policy debate, and we can understand why Ms. Pelosi isn't plastering most of this agenda on billboards around the country. Not everything would become law, to be sure, especially if Mr. Bush were finally willing to use his veto pen. However, elections have consequences, and we thought our readers might like to know about them before November 7.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/weekend/hottopic/?id=110009166
Saturday, October 28, 2006
A joke in Washington these days is that the only thing that can save the Republicans on Election Day is the Democrats. House Speaker-in-waiting Nancy Pelosi seems to get this joke, because with few exceptions she's kept her Members tight-lipped and unspecific: As New York Senator Chuck Schumer has put it, why take the focus off the GOP?
This is in notable contrast to 1994, when the Gingrich Republicans ended a 40-year Democratic House majority by laying out a 10-item agenda known as the Contract with America. What Democrats are campaigning on this year is a Non-Contract with America--mostly generalities about "helping the middle class" and "ending the corruption in Washington."
As a campaign strategy, this may well pay off. But if they do win, Democrats will have to fill their campaign vacuum with something, and the best clue to what that would be is what they've already proposed. We've taken some time to inspect these policy priorities and thought we'd share a few of the highlights, if that's the right word. (Warning: Keep sharp objects away from drug-company and Wal-Mart shareholders.)
Tax increases. The Bush tax cuts expire in 2010, and any chance that they'll be made permanent will vanish with a Democratic Congress. The question is whether Democrats will try to raise taxes even sooner. Most Democrats voted against the Bush tax cuts, but this week Ms. Pelosi said on CNBC's "Kudlow & Co." that "Democrats like tax cuts. We support middle-class tax cuts."
The same isn't true, however, for the "investor" tax cuts of 2003 that coincided with the acceleration of the current expansion. Ms. Pelosi says reversing these tax cuts "at the high end" would be "an earlier resort." This would raise the top income and dividend tax rate back to 39.6% from 35%, and the capital-gains rate back to 20% from 15%, substantially raising the cost of new investment in the United States. Economist John Rutledge estimates that raising the dividend rate alone would reduce the value of the S&P 500 stocks by between 5% and 8.5%, roughly a $500 to $700 billion decline in the wealth of the 52% of American households that own stock.
"Paygo budgeting." President Bush would no doubt promise to veto any direct tax increase, but having the power of the purse would give Democrats plenty of leverage. What if they framed the political choice as a tax increase on "the rich" versus funding the war on terror?
Democrats have also pledged to restore so-called pay-as-you-go budget rules, which sound like a restraint on budget deficits but in practice restrain only tax cuts. They don't apply to the growth of current entitlement programs or to domestic discretionary spending, only to tax cuts or new entitlements. This formula would probably take us back to the 1980s, when Democrats insisted on higher domestic spending while fighting Ronald Reagan's increases in defense spending.
Health-care regulation. Big Pharma and private insurers, watch out. Michigan's John Dingell, who would run the Energy and Commerce Committee, has co-sponsored the "Patients Before Profits Act" that would gut funding for the new Medicare Advantage plans that are proving so popular with seniors. Instead, he and the other Democrats who run health-care panels want to direct all seniors into a single government-run Medicare drug plan. Another proposal from top Democrats, the Medicare for All Act, would make all Americans, of any age, eligible for Medicare and pay for it with a new 1.7% payroll tax on workers and 7% on employers.
Ms. Pelosi has also pledged to pass, in her first 100 hours as Speaker, legislation to require the government to "negotiate lower drug prices." That's a euphemism for imposing price controls on new medicines, which can take as much as $800 million in research and development to bring to market. The actor Michael J. Fox is getting headlines for his ads in favor of Democrats who support stem-cell research, but price controls would do far more to delay the introduction of new treatments for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or cancer.
The union label. AFL-CIO headquarters would be rocking with hope once again. A job-killing hike in the minimum wage, to $7.25 from $5.15, would whisk through Congress, and we'd expect that Mr. Bush would sign it.
But another top priority for Democrats is the Employee Free Choice Act, which has at least 215 co-sponsors in the House and 44 in the Senate. This would allow labor to turn workplaces into union shops without an election or secret ballot. Unions would merely have to gather signatures from a majority of workers at a work site, which means labor organizers could strong-arm employees who opposed such a petition. This would almost surely pass the House.
Democrats have also moved well to the left on trade since the Bill Clinton-Nafta era. Mr. Bush's trade-promotion authority, allowing up-or-down votes on trade deals without amendment, expires next July, and there's little chance House Democrats would extend it. The entire Democratic leadership opposed free trade with tiny Oman and with Central America, so deals now in the works with Vietnam and other countries would also be long shots. Sorry, Robert Rubin.
Energy. The Pelosi Democrats favor a "windfall" profits tax on oil companies and a virtual moratorium on drilling for more domestic oil in Alaska and on the outer continental shelf (where the U.S. may have more energy than Saudi Arabia). These policies would make the U.S. more dependent on foreign oil. There would also be an effort to pass new, and higher, fuel-mileage mandates, which would make things tougher on what's left of Detroit. And lobbying would begin for the U.S. to sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and to subsidize, even more than Republicans already have, ethanol and other "alternative" fuels.
We could go on, in particular in the regulatory arena, where agencies would be under greater pressure to restrict mergers, among other things. But you get the idea. A Democratic triumph would produce a major shift in the national policy debate, and we can understand why Ms. Pelosi isn't plastering most of this agenda on billboards around the country. Not everything would become law, to be sure, especially if Mr. Bush were finally willing to use his veto pen. However, elections have consequences, and we thought our readers might like to know about them before November 7.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/weekend/hottopic/?id=110009166
1454
3DHS / An interesting Obama Theory
« on: October 28, 2006, 02:33:02 PM »
Winning by Losing
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, October 27, 2006
When, just a week ago, Barack Obama showed a bit of ankle and declared the mere possibility of his running for the presidency, the chattering classes swooned. Now that every columnist in the country has given him advice, here's mine: He should run in '08. He will lose in '08. And the loss will put him irrevocably on a path to the presidency.
Obama's political challenge is to turn his current fame and sizzle, which will undoubtedly dissipate, into something concrete. In physics, it's the problem of converting kinetic energy into potential energy: Use the rocket fuel behind his current popularity to propel him to a higher national plane from which he would eventually move almost laterally to the presidency
First, at a time of ideological weariness, he has the persona: an affecting personal history, fine intelligence, remarkable articulateness and refreshing charm.
Second, this is a uniquely open race. Not since 1952 has there been a presidential election with no incumbent president or vice president running. Right now there is no serious challenger to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. The Democrats' quadrennial great white hope -- the young, attractive Southern governor in the mode of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton -- was going to be Mark Warner, former governor of Virginia. Warner has bowed out.
Third, the country hungers for a black president. Not all of the country, but enough that, on balance, race would be an asset. It is no accident that when, a decade ago, another attractive, articulate African American with no experience in electoral office went on a book tour, he was met not just with rock star adulation but with a loud national chorus urging him to run for the presidency.
The object of affection then was Colin Powell. Today it is Obama. Race is only one element in their popularity, but an important one. A historic one. Like many Americans, I long to see an African American ascend to the presidency. It would be an event of profound significance, a great milestone in the unfolding story of African Americans achieving their rightful, long-delayed place in American life.
Of course there is racism in America. Call me naive, but I believe that just as Joe Lieberman was a net positive for the Democrats in 2000 -- more people were attracted to him as a man of faith than were turned away because of anti-Semitism -- there are more Americans who would take special pride in a black president than there are those who would reject one because of racism.
These are strong reasons for Obama to run. Nonetheless, he will not win. The reason is Sept. 11, 2001. The country will simply not elect a novice in wartime.
During our last great war, the Cold War, no foreign policy novice won the presidency, except for Carter in the anomalous Watergate election of 1976. The only foreign policy novices elected in the past half-century -- Bill Clinton and George W. Bush -- won the presidency during our holiday from history between the fall of the Soviet Union and Sept. 11.
In any circumstance, it is fairly audacious for any freshman senator to even think of the presidency. When freshman Sen. John F. Kennedy began his preparation for 1956, he was really seeking the vice presidency. And, unlike Obama, he had already served three terms in the House, which in turn had followed a celebrated military tour in the Pacific in World War II.
In 1956 Kennedy was preparing for a serious presidential run in 1960. Obama should be thinking ahead as well -- using '08 to cure his problem of inexperience. Run for the Democratic nomination and lose. He only has to do reasonably well in the primaries to become such a compelling national figure as to be invited onto the ticket as vice presidential nominee. If John Edwards, the runner-up in '04 did well enough to be made running mate, a moderately successful Obama would be the natural choice for '08.
Then, if the Democrats win, he will have all the foreign policy credentials he needs for life. Even if the ticket loses, assuming he acquits himself reasonably well, he immediately becomes the presumptive front-runner in the next presidential cycle. And if by some miracle he hits the lottery and wins in '08, well, then it is win-win-win.
He's a young man with a future. But the future recedes. He needs to run now. And lose. And win by losing.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/26/AR2006102601253.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(sirs; of course my query is "What makes Barack any different than any other hard core liberal Democrat?". From an ideological and voting record standpoint, he's no different than Schumer, than Clinton, than Kennedy, than Reid, etc.)
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, October 27, 2006
When, just a week ago, Barack Obama showed a bit of ankle and declared the mere possibility of his running for the presidency, the chattering classes swooned. Now that every columnist in the country has given him advice, here's mine: He should run in '08. He will lose in '08. And the loss will put him irrevocably on a path to the presidency.
Obama's political challenge is to turn his current fame and sizzle, which will undoubtedly dissipate, into something concrete. In physics, it's the problem of converting kinetic energy into potential energy: Use the rocket fuel behind his current popularity to propel him to a higher national plane from which he would eventually move almost laterally to the presidency
First, at a time of ideological weariness, he has the persona: an affecting personal history, fine intelligence, remarkable articulateness and refreshing charm.
Second, this is a uniquely open race. Not since 1952 has there been a presidential election with no incumbent president or vice president running. Right now there is no serious challenger to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. The Democrats' quadrennial great white hope -- the young, attractive Southern governor in the mode of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton -- was going to be Mark Warner, former governor of Virginia. Warner has bowed out.
Third, the country hungers for a black president. Not all of the country, but enough that, on balance, race would be an asset. It is no accident that when, a decade ago, another attractive, articulate African American with no experience in electoral office went on a book tour, he was met not just with rock star adulation but with a loud national chorus urging him to run for the presidency.
The object of affection then was Colin Powell. Today it is Obama. Race is only one element in their popularity, but an important one. A historic one. Like many Americans, I long to see an African American ascend to the presidency. It would be an event of profound significance, a great milestone in the unfolding story of African Americans achieving their rightful, long-delayed place in American life.
Of course there is racism in America. Call me naive, but I believe that just as Joe Lieberman was a net positive for the Democrats in 2000 -- more people were attracted to him as a man of faith than were turned away because of anti-Semitism -- there are more Americans who would take special pride in a black president than there are those who would reject one because of racism.
These are strong reasons for Obama to run. Nonetheless, he will not win. The reason is Sept. 11, 2001. The country will simply not elect a novice in wartime.
During our last great war, the Cold War, no foreign policy novice won the presidency, except for Carter in the anomalous Watergate election of 1976. The only foreign policy novices elected in the past half-century -- Bill Clinton and George W. Bush -- won the presidency during our holiday from history between the fall of the Soviet Union and Sept. 11.
In any circumstance, it is fairly audacious for any freshman senator to even think of the presidency. When freshman Sen. John F. Kennedy began his preparation for 1956, he was really seeking the vice presidency. And, unlike Obama, he had already served three terms in the House, which in turn had followed a celebrated military tour in the Pacific in World War II.
In 1956 Kennedy was preparing for a serious presidential run in 1960. Obama should be thinking ahead as well -- using '08 to cure his problem of inexperience. Run for the Democratic nomination and lose. He only has to do reasonably well in the primaries to become such a compelling national figure as to be invited onto the ticket as vice presidential nominee. If John Edwards, the runner-up in '04 did well enough to be made running mate, a moderately successful Obama would be the natural choice for '08.
Then, if the Democrats win, he will have all the foreign policy credentials he needs for life. Even if the ticket loses, assuming he acquits himself reasonably well, he immediately becomes the presumptive front-runner in the next presidential cycle. And if by some miracle he hits the lottery and wins in '08, well, then it is win-win-win.
He's a young man with a future. But the future recedes. He needs to run now. And lose. And win by losing.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/26/AR2006102601253.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(sirs; of course my query is "What makes Barack any different than any other hard core liberal Democrat?". From an ideological and voting record standpoint, he's no different than Schumer, than Clinton, than Kennedy, than Reid, etc.)
1455
3DHS / Open letter to the Left
« on: October 28, 2006, 02:08:25 AM »
as applied from the open letter to Andy Rooney via Larry Elder
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Open letter to Andy Rooney
Posted: October 26, 2006
Dear Mr. Rooney,
You ask, in your recent "60 Minutes" commentary, for the president to finally flat-out "explain" why we have troops in Iraq. While busy preparing your commentaries, you perhaps failed to hear the president explain this – over and over and over again.
Allow me to try.
The world changed for many – apparently not you – after 9-11.
Saddam Hussein violated numerous United Nations resolutions following the first Persian Gulf War. Saddam's military continuously shot at U.S. and British planes patrolling the Northern and Southern No-Fly Zones. He offered $25,000 to families of homicide bombers. We know he possessed chemical and biological weapons because he used them during the Iraq/Iran war, and on his own people, the Kurds.
The October '02 National Intelligence Estimate concluded with "high confidence" – the highest certainty allowed – that Saddam possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. All 16 intelligence agencies contributing to the NIE unanimously agreed on the chemical and biological weapons assumptions, with disagreement only on how far along Saddam was toward acquiring nukes.
Weapons inspectors found no WMD stockpiles, leading many Americans to feel that the president either lied or cherry-picked intelligence to lead us into war. But
- the Robb-Silverman Commission concluded that the president didn't lie.
- the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee's 511-page report concluded that the president did not lie.
- the British Butler Commission, which examined whether Prime Minister Tony Blair "sexed up" the intelligence to make a case for war, concluded the PM didn't lie.
Kenneth Pollack, an opponent of the Iraq war, served as Iraq expert and intelligence analyst in the Clinton administration. Pollack writes that during his 1999-2001 tour on the National Security Council, " ... the intelligence community convinced me and the rest of the Clinton administration that Saddam had reconstituted his WMD programs following the withdrawal of the U.N. inspectors, in 1998, and was only a matter of years away from having a nuclear weapon. ... The U.S. intelligence community's belief that Saddam was aggressively pursuing weapons of mass destruction pre-dated Bush's inauguration, and therefore cannot be attributed to political pressure. ... Other nations' intelligence services were similarly aligned with U.S. views. ... Germany ... Israel, Russia, Britain, China and even France held positions similar to that of the United States. … In sum, no one doubted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction."
Meanwhile, neighboring Iran defiantly pursues nuclear weapons. Bush reasoned that a free, democratic and prosperous Iraq would destabilize Iran, accomplishing regime change without military force. This would encourage the rest of the Arab world to direct their grievances toward their own leaders, rather than against the "infidels."
We remain in Iraq because, as former Secretary of State James Baker put it, "If we picked up and left right now ... you would see the biggest civil war you've ever seen. Every neighboring country would be involved in there, doing its own thing, Turkey, Iran, Syria, you name it, and even our friends in the Gulf."
Former Secretary of State and informal Bush adviser Henry Kissinger – who knows something about the consequences of cutting and running – wrote, "Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy."
The political aim of our Islamofascist enemies is a worldwide Caliphate, or Islamic world. Renowned Islam expert Bernard Lewis recently reiterated his support for the war: "The response to 9-11 came as a nasty surprise [to bin Laden and his followers]. They were expecting more of the same – bleating and apologies – instead of which they got a vigorous reaction, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. And as they used to say in Moscow: It is no accident, comrades, that there has been no successful attack in the United States since then. ... [T]he effort is difficult and the outcome uncertain, but I think the effort must be made. Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us."
True, 2,800 of our best have died. Any figure above zero is a tragedy. But America – on both sides of the Civil War – lost more than 600,000 soldiers, or 2 percent of the country's population of 31 million. Of our country's 132 million, we lost more than 400,000 in World War II, or .3 percent of our population. In the Korean War, we lost 37,000, and the Vietnam War saw 58,000 dead.
Many people say that after failing to find stockpiles of WMD, Bush "switched" rationales for the war. Consider this excerpt from a New York Times editorial about a speech Bush gave weeks before the coalition entered Iraq:
"President Bush sketched an expansive vision last night of what he expects to accomplish by a war in Iraq. Instead of focusing on eliminating weapons of mass destruction, or reducing the threat of terror to the United States, Mr. Bush talked about establishing a 'free and peaceful Iraq' that would serve as a 'dramatic and inspiring example' to the entire Arab and Muslim world, provide a stabilizing influence in the Middle East and even help end the Arab-Israeli conflict."
Still confused? Please write back, and I'll try again.
Sincerely yours,
Larry Elder
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52624
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Open letter to Andy Rooney
Posted: October 26, 2006
Dear Mr. Rooney,
You ask, in your recent "60 Minutes" commentary, for the president to finally flat-out "explain" why we have troops in Iraq. While busy preparing your commentaries, you perhaps failed to hear the president explain this – over and over and over again.
Allow me to try.
The world changed for many – apparently not you – after 9-11.
Saddam Hussein violated numerous United Nations resolutions following the first Persian Gulf War. Saddam's military continuously shot at U.S. and British planes patrolling the Northern and Southern No-Fly Zones. He offered $25,000 to families of homicide bombers. We know he possessed chemical and biological weapons because he used them during the Iraq/Iran war, and on his own people, the Kurds.
The October '02 National Intelligence Estimate concluded with "high confidence" – the highest certainty allowed – that Saddam possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. All 16 intelligence agencies contributing to the NIE unanimously agreed on the chemical and biological weapons assumptions, with disagreement only on how far along Saddam was toward acquiring nukes.
Weapons inspectors found no WMD stockpiles, leading many Americans to feel that the president either lied or cherry-picked intelligence to lead us into war. But
- the Robb-Silverman Commission concluded that the president didn't lie.
- the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee's 511-page report concluded that the president did not lie.
- the British Butler Commission, which examined whether Prime Minister Tony Blair "sexed up" the intelligence to make a case for war, concluded the PM didn't lie.
Kenneth Pollack, an opponent of the Iraq war, served as Iraq expert and intelligence analyst in the Clinton administration. Pollack writes that during his 1999-2001 tour on the National Security Council, " ... the intelligence community convinced me and the rest of the Clinton administration that Saddam had reconstituted his WMD programs following the withdrawal of the U.N. inspectors, in 1998, and was only a matter of years away from having a nuclear weapon. ... The U.S. intelligence community's belief that Saddam was aggressively pursuing weapons of mass destruction pre-dated Bush's inauguration, and therefore cannot be attributed to political pressure. ... Other nations' intelligence services were similarly aligned with U.S. views. ... Germany ... Israel, Russia, Britain, China and even France held positions similar to that of the United States. … In sum, no one doubted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction."
Meanwhile, neighboring Iran defiantly pursues nuclear weapons. Bush reasoned that a free, democratic and prosperous Iraq would destabilize Iran, accomplishing regime change without military force. This would encourage the rest of the Arab world to direct their grievances toward their own leaders, rather than against the "infidels."
We remain in Iraq because, as former Secretary of State James Baker put it, "If we picked up and left right now ... you would see the biggest civil war you've ever seen. Every neighboring country would be involved in there, doing its own thing, Turkey, Iran, Syria, you name it, and even our friends in the Gulf."
Former Secretary of State and informal Bush adviser Henry Kissinger – who knows something about the consequences of cutting and running – wrote, "Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy."
The political aim of our Islamofascist enemies is a worldwide Caliphate, or Islamic world. Renowned Islam expert Bernard Lewis recently reiterated his support for the war: "The response to 9-11 came as a nasty surprise [to bin Laden and his followers]. They were expecting more of the same – bleating and apologies – instead of which they got a vigorous reaction, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. And as they used to say in Moscow: It is no accident, comrades, that there has been no successful attack in the United States since then. ... [T]he effort is difficult and the outcome uncertain, but I think the effort must be made. Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us."
True, 2,800 of our best have died. Any figure above zero is a tragedy. But America – on both sides of the Civil War – lost more than 600,000 soldiers, or 2 percent of the country's population of 31 million. Of our country's 132 million, we lost more than 400,000 in World War II, or .3 percent of our population. In the Korean War, we lost 37,000, and the Vietnam War saw 58,000 dead.
Many people say that after failing to find stockpiles of WMD, Bush "switched" rationales for the war. Consider this excerpt from a New York Times editorial about a speech Bush gave weeks before the coalition entered Iraq:
"President Bush sketched an expansive vision last night of what he expects to accomplish by a war in Iraq. Instead of focusing on eliminating weapons of mass destruction, or reducing the threat of terror to the United States, Mr. Bush talked about establishing a 'free and peaceful Iraq' that would serve as a 'dramatic and inspiring example' to the entire Arab and Muslim world, provide a stabilizing influence in the Middle East and even help end the Arab-Israeli conflict."
Still confused? Please write back, and I'll try again.
Sincerely yours,
Larry Elder
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52624