He makes the ankle-biters look puny...

After being exposed to so much of the infantile carping and sneering of Paul Krugman, it's a keen pleasure to encounter an economist one can admire! Australian Tony McDonald just jumped in and did a great job of work.

The Daily Telegraph | Economist who became a hero:...Before he returned after 10 months service in January, Mr McDonald rose through the ranks of the provisional authority to be senior adviser to Iraqi finance minister Kamal al-Gailani. He helped get payments out to a million pensioners and 1.3 million civil servants through a chaotic banking system.

In a letter to Treasurer Peter Costello, Iraq administrator Paul Bremmer said he "often acted solely upon Tony's macro- economic advice".

Under Saddam, the tax system consisted mostly of imposts on business and very high tariffs, designed to maintain the regime's monopoly on smuggling. Banks were not linked and money was safer "under the bed". Pensioners were paid $US4 a month and public servants' pay depended on how much they contributed to the regime's coffers.

"We were essentially dealing with a gangster economy. No one was happy with it but people had to live within it," he said."It is in the process of being rearranged to be very much more simple, with much more objective measures of overall income."...

Some things change less than you imagine...

Peter Burnet writes:

We tend to imagine that appeasement in the 1930's was an expression of collective fear whereby people cowered in their homes and, somewhat guiltily, refused to concern themselves with Hitler’s threats or his victims. In fact, it was an aggressivly idealistic force that was marked by a gradual demonizing of those victims, a preoccupation with the “underlying causes” of totalitarianism, a scorning of moral distinctions, utopian dreams and a constant blaming of all things Western and democratic for– well, just about everything. For many, it was an inspiring, cutting edge cause that filled young and not-so-young hearts with a sense of noble purpose and the conviction they were fighting for a just and peaceful world.

"two and a half million refugees have returned..."

Tom Bowler pointed me to this interesting piece on Tony Blair and Afghanistan:

...Mr Blair denied that Afghanistan was a "forgotten country". He said: "It is neither forgotten nor is it a country that is going backwards." Conceding that there was "more to do", he said: "The actual prognosis for Afghanistan is good. Sure there are big problems. These nations are failed states of total and absolute degradation. You don't turn them around in two or three years so they become first world countries en route to joining the European Union. It's not like that for a country like Afghanistan."

He said it was "absolutely wrong and unfortunate" if people thought no progress had been made in Afghanistan over the past two or three years.

"There are five and a half million kids in school including over two million girls who were banned from school. The economy has grown by 30 per cent this year and is expected to grow by 20 per cent. The most telling statistic is that two and a half million refugees have returned to Afghanistan," he said.

Donald Anderson, chairman of the select committee, issued a statement challenging his own committee members. "The Independent report is more newspaper spin than any considered view of the committee as a whole," he said...

Pray tell, how many people are pressing into the areas that the UN is "protecting?" How many of the many many French incursions into Africa have resulted in places people want to get into?

Unsound advice...

Joe Carter has a thoughtful critique of General Zinni, A General Misunderstanding.
From his conclusion:

...I have the utmost respect for General Zinni, a man who served his country with honor and distinction. In fact, if this were a different era, I’d even support his nomination as Secretary of Defense. His ideas -- containment, forming international coalitions, preferring stability over democracy -- could form the foundation for a Cold War-era defense policy.

But we are not locked in a standoff with the Soviet Union. The UN doesn’t possess the legitimacy it once had. And we are fighting radical Islam rather than communism. Gen. Zinni’s ideas once had relevance. But that day has long passed and we cannot afford to listen to such unsound advice. Even when it comes from one of the good guys.

More on the Abu Ghraib seven...

Remember the seven Iraqis...hands chopped off? And American doctors and hospitals donated time and effort to help them? Gave them amazing prosthetic hands? That seemed to me like a fascinating, heartwarming story. One that would sell newspapers.

President Bush greeted them at the White House yesterday. Good for him. But our vile despicable America-hating press doesn't consider that "News Fit to Print." Us morons of the public need to be shielded from news that doesn't make America look bad, and doesn't help Kerry.

...But the New York Times, which has offered perhaps the most hysterical coverage of the prison scandal, mentioned not a word in Wednesday editions of the seven torture victims.

That other elite media cheerleader for the U.S. prison scandal, the Washington Post, was nearly as bored as the Times by the Abu Ghraib seven, offering only a few scant references to the Oval Office event in its Wednesday editions.

After introducing the Iraqi torture victims, Bush went on to thank the Texas businessman and surgeon who made their rehabilitation possible and offered to take questions from the reporters on hand.

But the only "torture" journalists wanted to discuss was that allegedly perpetrated by U.S. troops.

"Mr. President, can you say why General Sanchez is being replaced as the top commander in Iraq? Is that in any way related to the prisoner abuse scandal?" asked the first questioner.

Likewise, the second reporter's question had nothing to do with the genuine torture victims sitting in front of him.

After two more off-topic questions, the president thanked the reporters and ended the session. [link]

Infuriating, but it's one more reason to savor the crushing of the Democrats next November...

Update: Take a look at this, in Volokh.

Things you might have missed while reading about prisoner abuse, Chalabi, prisoner abuse, Chalabi, al Sadr, prisoner abuse, bombed out wedding, Chalabi and prisoner abuse...

Chrenkof is back, with Good news from Iraq, part II 

You've seen the first installment - now prepare for the sequel. Because guess what? There's more good news from Iraq that every day slips under the radar or gets lost among all the bad publicity. So, after the phenomenal response to the first "Good news from Iraq", and back by popular demand, here's more good news from Iraq that you might have missed while reading about prisoner abuse, Chalabi, prisoner abuse, Chalabi, al Sadr, prisoner abuse, bombed out wedding, Chalabi and prisoner abuse...

In fact, the economy is going so well, that hundreds of thousands of Iranians... are believed to have crossed into Iraq since the fall of Saddam, looking for work, setting up businesses and buying property...

Keep 'em in mind when the ditzy crowd says we aren't accomplishing anything in Iraq. Iranians are "voting" the opposite. SO, lefty Democrats, how many people are moving to Cuba to enjoy your much-touted "worker's paradise?"

"Why stand we here idle?"

It is in vain, sir, to extentuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace--but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle?

What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.

--Patrick Henry

"are we going to be OK if the coalition forces left the country..."

Is there hope for Iraq? My friend Andrew thinks the Iraqis will tear themselves apart once we leave. But oddly, none of the Iraqi bloggers I read seem worried about the question...

Firas writes:

For a Monday it shouldn’t be so traffic jam in Baghdad, but it is today, with a very hot weather and imagine how it is to drive long distances…….. Any way what I noticed for the few passed days that we have many many check points by IPs [Iraqi Police] in all over Baghdad and they are started new procedures that we even forgot about for about a year now. They are stopping cars without license plates and stopping imported cars with license plates from UAE or Jordan if its being drove not during ministries working hours. I even saw an IP car modified for arresting criminals or any street disturbance which wasn’t seen before because what was left of the IPs and what we started with after April 2003 wasn’t ready to arrest anyone actually they were ready to be killed or beaten by the armed gangs in all over Baghdad who are starting to disappear or being arrested and send to Abo Ghraib jail……….I even was invited to a friend wedding last Friday with my family and we went out the party at 10.00 PM and they weren’t finished yet and the streets were secured all our way home………And there is a very important thing to tell here, all that is with out the coalition forces help anymore, I mean the IPs started to depend on their own resources and doing there job by them selves.

Few weeks ago I was thinking about a very important matter which is, are we going to be OK if the coalition forces left the country or we will face the kayos again……..Until a month ago I used to feel that we need the coalition forces to stay in streets, but now I can say and for sure that if the coalition forces left or stayed inside bases then we can depend on the IPs and the ICDCs and later on the Iraqi army to secure those who are working hard to rebuild the country. But we will need the coalition forces or what ever it’s turning to after the beginning of next July to help rebuilding new methods of working and procedures for our new establishments and ministries. That’s something is really needed after the corruption we had before April 2003 when the ext regime used to pay its employees less than two US Dollars a month and expect them to keep going to work spending about five US Dollars a month for transportation only. You can imagine how was it difficult to live those days....

No Iraqis (except the Ba'athist elite) ever said, "Please leave Saddam in power. We are terrified of the possibility of civil unrest."

#158: Job-o-Meter

KRUGMAN TRUTH SQUAD

You've all heard of the one-trick pony of circus fame. Well Paul Krugman in Delusions of Triumph (05/25/04) has now become a one-trick economist. Once again it’s jobs, jobs, jobs. The reason is simple. Every other measure of U.S. economic performance is stellar. So if you want to grind a partisan ax you find the weakest statistic and pretend it reflects the entire economy. This must be the 5th or 6th recycling of the same "jobs" column.

[The Truth Squad is a group of economists who have long marveled at the writings of Paul Krugman. The Squad Reports are synopses of their discussions. ]

Wow. I never heard of this guy...

The guided-missile destroyer Chung-Hoon, named for World War II hero Rear Adm. Chung-Hoon, sits in a dock at Ingalls Shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss., after it was turned over from Northrop Grumman Ship Systems to the Navy during ceremonies Monday. The destroyer will be commissioned Sept. 18 in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and will be home-ported at Naval Station Pearl Harbor as a member of the Pacific Fleet. Chung-Hoon, who died in 1979, received the Navy Cross for his leadership after a kamikaze attack in 1945 left several of his crew dead and his ship, the USS Sigsbee, severely crippled.
William Colgin, The (Pascagoula) Mississippi Press / AP photo

More on the 70-Year Cycle...

In one of my posts on the subject of party realignment, and the theory of 70-year cycles of realignments in American politics, Lance Jonn Romanoff posted a comment and suggested the book Nemesis of Reform by Clyde Weed. I'm reading it with great interest. Thanks! (and thanks to Zev for suggesting Grand Old Party. Also very good.)

The book is about how the Republicans reacted to the realignment that made the Democrats the majority party in the 1930's, after Republican dominance since the Civil War. I probably won't find time to write about the book in any way that does it justice. But I've encountered a number of interesting items that seem to parallel things that are happening now.

One is that the Republicans reacted to the move leftward of the country and the Dems by moving further right! The polarization of politics increased. This was disastrous for the Republicans electorally. It seems to have happened because the most energetic Republican interest groups were those who felt most threatened by the New Deal. The energy of the party was in the "antis." And because many centrist or Progressive Republicans were supporting Roosevelt.

There was also an enormous failure of perception. Republican leaders couldn't really see or grasp what was happening. They failed to see that the sectional politics they knew were being replaced by class-based politics. And after their heavy defeat in 1932 they began to imagine things were getting better. Contributions were up, as bankers and industrialists reacted to Roosevelt's policies. Republicans felt energized, (and polling hardly existed then, so their data was poor.) They were utterly wrong.

I don't think the 1930's Republicans had any good short-term options. And I don't think the Democrats have any today. We are in a WAR, and Kerry and company can't fake being strong on defense. It's like Kerry trying to be a regular guy but blowing the details of eating cheesesteaks or pizza. No dice. You can't fake it. And even if there were no war, the long Democrat dominance means there is a huge and pressing backlog of reforms that haven't been done because they conflict with Democrat interest groups. Clinton tried to fudge this by being a "New Democrat." But his heart really wasn't in it, and if it had been he would have lacked the necessary support in his party.

The latest lying spin...

The Paper Formerly Known As The Paper Of Record (To borrow Rand Simberg's phrase) is forced to report that lab reports confirm the Sarin found in Iraq. But they are downplaying it like mad, mentioning the minor symptoms of those who handled the shell, but not mentioning the thousands it could have killed if the Sarin had been properly mixed and dispersed.

And pushing the new "stockpile" spin.

...Saddam's alleged stockpile of weapons of mass destruction was the Bush administration's chief stated reason for invading Iraq, but U.S. weapons hunters have been unable to validate the prewar intelligence that described those stockpiles...

Go here to see what was actually said. State of the Union, January 2003. Scroll down to near the bottom. Notice something? Every single thing Bush said about Iraqi WMD's is still valid! Still TRUE! Still cause for concern.

Thanks to Powerline for the links.

The Internet routes around obstacles...

Says a pompous idiot:

..The press isn't reporting bad news from Iraq because they hate America, they're reporting bad news from Iraq because there's lots of bad news in Iraq...

...The enemy has returned to the tactics of the weak….primarily coming after us with IEDs. And not with very much success. The Marines are very competent at finding the things now and, more importantly, local Iraqis, Iraqi Police, and Iraqi militia are telling us where they are or destroying them on their own. That is a significant step towards our ultimate goal. Much of our effort has turned to training Iraqi Security Forces (ISF); both on joint patrols and in training centers we have built over the last months. Result is a quantum improvement in ISF confidence and capabilities and the development of trust and camaraderie between ISF and the Marines conducting the training.. This training combines with our efforts to improve the quality of the average Iraqi life…hard to shoot at someone who is building you a school. The RCT has put almost $5M against schools, clinics, water projects, sewage projects, and ISF infrastructure. We are starting to see the fruits of our efforts This is a mission requiring patient persistence and it is working. Please keep that in the back of your mind when the nay-sayers start screaming...
C.A. Tucker
Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps [link. RTWT]
CO, RCT-7.

If you are reading this you are part of "routing around obstacles." The campaign of suppressio veri suggestio falsi won't last forever. In fact, I'm expecting it to unravel just around October.

Nineteen hours in the air. No smiling flight attendants. No reclining chairs. No in-flight movie...

You should take a look at this, just so that, when next you are suffering the misery of air travel, you can put it all in perspective.

They do seem to have lots of leg room...

Thanks to Donald Sensing

Kerry lies about American traditions...

So, will he be called on it? Only by bloggers...

Mr Kerry said, concerning his peculiar plan to not be nominated at the convention:

"Once again, the Republicans don't know history, and they don't know facts," he said. "The truth is that it used to be that the convention, after nomination, traveled to the home or the state of the nominee to inform them they've been nominated. Woodrow Wilson was at his house in Princeton, N.J.; Harry Truman was in Independence," Mo., he said. "They're trying to make an issue out of something that they're surprised by, because . . . they're very upset someone might have a way of neutralizing their advantage."

"So it was nearly two o'clock in the morning when Truman and Barkley at last made their entrance, striding onto the platform as the band played "Hail to the Chief." (Truman by David McCullough, p. 640-641)

Why do I bother with these details? Because if BUSH said such a thing, certain people would cherish it as evidence that the President is a deep-dyed liar and ignorant...The quote would be passed from hand to hand for decades...smirked over.

Plus I'm annoyed by that "Republicans don't know history" crack. don't bet on it. We've got lonnng memories, you turkey. We haven't forgotten a great many Democrat dirty tricks...If you want to talk Wilson, we are aware that Republicans didn't stand aside and sneer that WWI was "Wilson's war," and pretend we were too fastidious and "moral" to help out. Nor did we stand aloof from Mr Roosevelt's war. Or Truman's, or Kennedy's, or Johnson's wars. WE REMEMBER, you treacherous phonies!

You want to talk TRADITIONS? It's our tradition in time of war for Americans to pull together!

Update...story worth reading.

Remember this story about seven guys who had their hands chopped off by Saddam? There's a heartwarming update in the WaPo:

... Last week, the men had recovered enough for the final fitting of their bionic hands, microprocessor-assisted marvels that receive instructions from the brain via electrodes attached to muscles in the arm. The Iraqis are training themselves to fire the right muscles to control hand functions, a process that will take months. Already, they can throw balls, shake hands, raise a glass.

Agris and North will go back to Baghdad with the seven in early June to make sure they have the proper medical support. Agris has arranged to visit other amputees, and he will help Baghdad hospitals upgrade their knowledge about amputations and prosthetics.

"The thing that'll win hearts and minds is the humanitarian effort, not guns," Agris said. "You take care of someone's child, not only do you help the child but you win over the family. And the family talks to the neighbors and you win over the neighbors. It just escalates."

He thinks Al Fadhly, Joudi, Kadhim, Salah and the other three men -- Laith Aggar, Hassan Al Gereawy and Al'aa Hassan -- will change some minds, too.

"I think we're going to see a ripple effect, especially with a guy like Al Fadhly who's got a job working for the coalition's new TV station. They're bringing back a different attitude, a different look." ...

Outside Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison are, from left, Qasim Kadhim, Salah Zinad, Nazaar Joudi, Laith Aggar, Al'aa Hassan and Basim Al Fadhly. They and three others were ordered by Saddam Hussein to have their hands amputated in 1995.
Photo Credit: Don North

Steps on the road...

The thoughts of parents when the oldest kid graduates from High School are many and varied, and beyond my poor powers as a writer to do justice to. For me, proud and sad and wondering if one is about to be "kicked upstairs" as a new generation emerges and elbows its way to the center of the stage. Astonishing how we sent our young boy to a boy's high school and now suddenly there are all these men. Big competent confident brutes.

Now our guy is headed off to college in the heartlands. North Dakota. To a school where his blond hair and Northern European extraction won't put him in an odd minority. Where Bondoc and Lacayanga and Huypungco are not ordinary last names. A place where I bet high school graduates are not draped with leis! You can see some in the background of the picture...

The oldest struggle of human kind...

...In 2002, the 'New Guidelines for Teaching History' in New Jersey's public schools failed to even mention America's Founding Fathers, the Pilgrims, or the Mayflower. In the Prentice Hall history textbook, used by students in Palm Beach County high schools, titled 'A World Conflict,' the first five pages of the World War II chapter focus entirely on topics such as gender roles in the Armed Forces, racial segregation and the war, internment camps, and women and the war effort. This is the way we introduce World War II to the students. It is all about this stuff, and not about trying to save civilization from a dark age; not about trying to stop a psychopathic killer who would have in fact destroyed the world. No, no, World War II was what do we think about the gender roles in the Armed Forces... --Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado)

They are denigrating the liberation of Iraq for exactly the same reasons those textbooks make a mockery out of what we achieved in WWII.

...And now today we find ourselves involved in another struggle... It is the oldest struggle of human kind, as old as man himself. This is a simple struggle between those of us who believe that man has the dignity and sacred right and the ability to choose and shape his own destiny and those who do not so believe. This irreconcilable conflict is between those who believe in the sanctity of individual freedom and those who believe in the supremacy of the state...

--Ronald Reagan

We give the lie to all their claims. Every claim that things like "Euro-socialism" make people happy and prosperous is given the lie by the way their brightest and most ambitious people flee to the US. Every claim that people are happy under (fill in the blank) local tyranny is given the lie by the hunger of those people for Green Cards.

Every leftish group on the globe is playing up Abu Ghraib, and ignoring all the good deeds our people do. Every one of them attacks the good and noble things of our history, unless, like the Civil Rights Movement, they can be used to justify intrusive big government. The relentless emphasis on Abu Ghraib is done for exactly the same reason as the relentless emphasis on the slave-owning of some of our country's founders.

New blog on block...

Tom Bowler, who leaves comments around here from time to time, has his own blog now, Trilateral Protocols of the NeoCon Brotherhood, Oooops, just kidding. Pretend you didn't see that, or I'm a dead duck.

The one you want is Libertarian Leanings. Check it out...

300 sets of bedding gear...100 sets of pre-packaged clothing...

You may have heard from our darling newsmedia about how we slaughtered women and children at a wedding in Iraq. Here are some of the wedding trinkets found...

...[Brig. Gen. Mark] Kimmitt said troops did not find anything -- such as a wedding tent, gifts, musical instruments, decorations or leftover food -- that would indicate a wedding had been held.

Most of the men there were of military age, and there were no elders present to indicate a family event, he said.

What was found, he said, indicated the building was used as a way station for foreign fighters crossing into Iraq from Syria to battle the coalition.

"The building seemed to be somewhat of a dormitory," Kimmitt said. "You had over 300 sets of bedding gear in it. You had a tremendous number of pre-packaged clothing -- apparently about a hundred sets of pre-packaged clothing.

"[It is] expected that when foreign fighters come in from other countries, they come to this location, they change their clothes into typical Iraqi clothing sets."

At Saturday's briefing for reporters in Baghdad, Kimmitt showed photos of what he said were binoculars designed for adjusting artillery fire, battery packs suitable for makeshift bombs, several terrorist training manuals, medical gear, fake ID cards and ID card-making machines, passports and telephone numbers to other countries, including Afghanistan and Sudan...

The Anti-Change Alliance

Mohammed says:

...Finally, I have a question to the anti-change [alliance] and to our friends in the biased media wherever they might be; if all your stories were true and if we were wrong about everything we did, what suggestions would you offer to make things better? what are your plans?

What?! What did you say? I'm listening.

Intemperate rant...just skip over it...

When you hear of the so-called consciences of Democrats oozing remorse for the sin of being American, think of this story...

These are the people Democrats are FOR. [Yeah, yeah, I know. Not all Dems.] These are the ones they DON'T criticize, since they are busy with the much-more-important-work of criticizing Americans. These are the slimebags they want to help put into power in Iraq. These are the "victims" they want to protect from the brutality of the Americans. These are the "allies" they are tacitly working with to get Kerry elected:

...I looked off to the left at a frontage road and I saw nine cars in rows of three. There was a line of women in front of all the cars, and some of them had children with them. I thought they were just watching us get attacked, and then men started popping up behind them firing at us - they were using the women as shields!! It took me a second to realize that. They were standing on the hoods of the cars behind the women and children; it shocked the hell out of me. Then we started getting hit with small arms fire, which sounded like golf balls hitting metal. I started firing back at them but I couldn’t get passed the women; they were all I could hit, and they started falling down. The men turned around and ran back behind the cars to fire...(via Zhang Fei)

They don't care! They. Do. Not. Care! They are cold-hearted bastards, and would gladly turn Iraq over to whatever murderous thugs happen to seize power.

Read the whole story. It's an account of a fuel convoy getting shot-up in Baghdad. It's WAR. It's hair-raising. It's what Democrats are trying to pretend doesn't exist. Because WE are the good guys and WE are locked in desperate global combat with a lot of real bad guys. And any American who reads this kind of thing is going to say, "Why the hell aren't we supporting these men? They are heroes! Why are we putting 90% of our energy into attacking and hampering them?"

"And why, exactly, are our Democrat leaders not bursting with pride just to be part of the same country as these soldiers? WHY?

...We pulled up behind Mathew Maupin's truck, a fellow soldier who was riding with a civilian also, but no sooner did we get behind his truck then his tanker exploded, the truck swerving off the highway, down through a ditch into a bunch of buildings. It was one big ball of flames. Later on, Matt was seen on the Al-Jazeera network as a hostage, and is believed to be still in their custody. After his truck exploded in front of us, we came upon another truck that was laying on its side in the ditch on our left - it was one of ours. There were Iraqi civilian tankers on both sides of us, which the Iraqis use as roadside bombs - when you drive past them they blow them up.

Behind the military tanker on the right, I saw a man lying on his stomach, popping his head up and down to look at us. He just kept popping his head up, I propped my weapon up on the side mirror of our truck and started aiming for his head; I was either going to shoot him in the head or the back, all I could think at the time was, "he is one of the attackers and he is going to blow up both of the trucks as we pass." I saw that he was holding something up in his left hand. It was white. I didn’t know exactly what it was, my heart was pounding so hard, and I was sure it was a remote detonator, but I kept looking and I didn’t fire at him. As we got closer and closer, I saw that he was an American civilian, and he was holding his ID up trying to let us know he was one of ours. When I was in the hospital later on, I saw the same guy on the news, it was Thomas Hamill, who later escaped his Iraqi captors when he heard American soldiers outside the house he was being held prisoner in...

And when I think of all those lefties sitting like buttery buddhas oozing conscience-juice from every pore, steaming and bubbling with loathing of America, enveloped in a sickly perfume of moral posturing, and utterly oblivious to anything that won't help them get back into political power. Forget it, you clowns. You've forfeited the right to lead America. Come November, you're gone...

Just for your info...

If you were wondering whether the President's daughters were really the bimbos portrayed by comedians, this might be of interest:

Bush twins graduate, join re-election campaign
BATON ROUGE, La. -- For years, they have been as elusive as unicorns, shunning the spotlight and taking no part in their father's high-flying political life.

But today, a new corner is turned in the lives of the Bush twins. President Bush's daughters, Barbara and Jenna, 22, are graduating from their respective universities and plan to join their father's re-election effort, at least for a while...

...Whether Bush wins or loses, Jenna plans to move to New York City to share an apartment with friends and do volunteer work with children, according to People.

Barbara will become a paid staffer, probably this summer, with a pediatric AIDS program based at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, officials said. The job will take her to clinics in Africa...

"While the Bush girls' predecessor, the similarly protected Chelsea Clinton, projected the reserved image of a shy ballerina, the Bush girls are something different....

Rising prices tend to self-correct...

Steve Chapman in The Washington Times:

...The market economy's beauty is rising prices tend to self-correct. They stimulate investment, which in time raises output. But if the government threatens to step in every time prices jump, oil companies will see no point trying to expand reserves or boost production.
    The paradox is this: The surest way to get lower prices tomorrow is to put up with higher prices today, The surest way to get higher prices tomorrow is to insist on lower prices today.
    This is a matter not of theory but experience. When Ronald Reagan scrapped oil and gasoline price controls in 1981, critics said prices would soar. They did, but not for long. Supplies rose, consumption fell and prices began a long decline, which left us all swimming in cheap gas and spoiled beyond belief.
    In reality, today's prices aren't so high. Two dollars a gallon may sound onerous, but after adjustment for inflation, it's less than we paid from 1979 through 1985....(via Betsy Newmark)

Thinking about it, I would tend to turn the "tainting" around. The frequent good-sense one sees in the Washington Times makes the Moonys, by association, seem a bit less flaky.

Quotes...

...As a conservative who reads a lot and takes an interest in history, I tend to accord some weight to the opinions of past generations. I do not subscribe to the fashionable belief that human beings suddenly got much smarter and more moral around 1965, and that everyone who lived prior to that date was a benighted ignoramus. There are plenty of people long dead who seem to me to have been very smart indeed — much smarter than I, in many cases. It is even possible that one or two of them may have been smarter than the editorialists at the New York Times. I don't know, I don't say this necessarily was so, only that I wouldn't altogether rule it out... [link]

--John Derbyshire

Job Market...

by Jayson at Polipundit:

I say we take our own job market survey.

First rule, be honest. And no spinning. Leave that to the Paul Krugmans of the world.

I'll start.

Up until May 7th, I worked for a national law firm. I then started my own business. I'm single and unattached. [Hint, hint, ladies ;-)] I've gone from being an unhappy lawyer who literally banged his head against a wall each day, to being a happy business owner.

So, on a household survey basis, I'm a wash. On a payroll basis, I'm a minus-1. On a job satisfaction basis, well, let's just say that you'd need a hack saw to get the smile off my face.

R.S.V.P., folks.

In fact, they are engineering an "October Surprise" for Bush. Same for Iraq. The press/Democrat/jihadi alliance (The Axis Of Entropy: Putting sand in the gears wherever reform is attempted!) timed their move wrong. They threw what I suspect is their worst at us in May! Is that stupid or what?

Kinda impressive

From OxBlog

KINDA COOL: India is over 80% Hindu. Last week, they kicked a Hindu nationalist party out of power. A plurality was won by the party led by an Italian-born Catholic. She then stepped aside in favor of a Sikh (who happens to be largely responsible for instigating the economic reforms that have made the Indian economy take off the last few years). The new Prime Minister was officially appointed by India's President, who is Muslim.

Bush lied......Not.

The Washington Times: Editorials:

In September 2000, George W. Bush was surely right to criticize Bill Clinton for playing politics with America's long-term national security. (Mr. Clinton released tens of millions of barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) in an effort to force energy prices down in order to increase the presidential prospects of Al Gore.) Today, President Bush is right to reject demands from Sen. John Kerry and other Democrats to divert oil from the SPR to the market in order to force gasoline prices down.

Mr. Bush's rationale today is the same as it was nearly four years ago. "The strategic reserve is an insurance policy meant for sudden disruption of our energy supply," Mr. Bush asserted in September 2000. The SPR, he rightly argued, "should not be used as an attempt to drive down oil prices right before an election. It should not be used for short-term political gain at the cost of long-term national security."...

Bush criticized Clinton on a point of principle; the SPR is not a political slush-fund. So what principle guides Kerry here? Of course any successful politician needs to fudge and compromise now and then. I'll give Mr Kerry a pass on some unprincipled tactical maneuvers. But still, one would like to know what he's really for....

Also, here's a snippet from TIME Magazine. The article (this is a teaser) looks like it's going to savor Abu Ghraib like a rare bottle of Chateau Watergate. But the piece in fact shows that Bush is a real leader. Just think back to Clinton and Somalia:

Just down the hall from Donald Rumsfeld's third-floor office at the Pentagon is a high-tech conference room where U.S. generals arrayed around the globe can talk to the Pentagon boss—and with his boss, if he happens to stop by. That is exactly what happened last week when Central Command chief General John Abizaid, appearing via videophone from Qatar, admitted that he was worried about the political fallout back home from the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal. Hearing this, George W. Bush peered back at Abizaid, who oversees two continuing wars in Asia, and told him to ignore the static. "You worry about getting the job done," Bush said. "You let me worry about the politics and the things back here."

Hang your clothes on a Hickory limb...

I'll pull the troops out: Kerry
United States Democrat John Kerry promised that, if elected president of the United States, he would pull virtually all American combat troops out of Iraq - away from the "death zone" - by the end of his first term.

Pre-emptive surrender. We can expect the same "campaign contributions" Zapatero got. At least I won't feel bad for him when he loses all 50 states. The "death zone." What BS. Typical liberal, only Americans are real. It's the "life zone" for 25 million Iraqis, and hope for the whole Middle East. But Democrats would gladly sacrifice them for votes. Just as they happily sacrificed millions of Vietnamese to death and "re-education camps" and escape in leaky boats.

They'll love him. And leap to aid him in a program of passivity and appeasement and self-loathing...

So Democrats asked the UN and "allies" for permission to fight in Vietnam? I've really got to get a better grasp of history.

Terrorism and regional conflicts have declined across the globe. And many rogue nations are getting nervous and more cooperative. We are winning the War on Terror, though the struggle will be long and hard. The oppressed are with us. But elites everywhere are unhappy with all the nasty talk about freedom and democracy. You can vote for Kerry, so we will be popular at international cocktail parties. Or you can vote for victory, and for liberating the downtrodden...

"Hang your clothes on a Hickory limb. but don't go near the water.." It's a WAR, you dimwit. We are supposed to be in an "active kind of death zone." Dealing death.

Oh boy. We've been hearing tons of news about "peacekeepers" recently. Usually something like "Peacekeepers fail to prevent massacre." Or "Peacekeepers hide in barracks while riot rages."

Did you know there were "peacekeepers" in Mogadishu when our guys were being attacked? And who were too peaceful to help fight? Who stood by peacefully while Americans were slaughtered? Hmmm? Mr Kerry? Mr Kerry? I'm talking to you, you useless lump! Is that your plan? Is them the guys whose "respect" we are desperate for? The "allies" we are desperate for? Or did you mean the peacekeepers of Rawanda? Or the "sex-trade" peacekeepers?

One war, two armies...

Lance Jonn Romanoff has an amazing story about a GI who parachuted at Normany, escaped from a German POW camp, headed east, encountered a Russian unit, and fought with them until wounded.

MOSCOW - Of the million World War II veterans who celebrated Victory Day on Sunday, few, if any, can say that they fought for both the U.S. and Soviet armies.

Joseph Beyrle is an exception.

Beyrle, the 80-year-old father of John Beyrle, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy, was on hand Sunday for the Victory Day parade on Red Square, a stone’s throw from the monument to a man who helped bring him back to life - legendary World War II Marshal Georgy Zhukov...

"This idiot is taking advantage of his father’s name"

I feel a bit silly mentioning the blog IRAQ THE MODEL every other day, but really, it's just too cool. I'd love to go to Iraq, but this is the next-best thing. Today Ali is in a cab, stuck in a traffic jam. The driver is from Sadr City, and we learn a lot about what the people are really thinking...

Duty...

I was in a long comment-discussion here. I thought it was over, but then got one more comment. I should let it drop, but hate having my words twisted into something I didn't mean. (Of course I wandered a lot—my meaning was probably fuzzy.) And it seems very significant to me that my points are repeatedly missed. My theme is that there are duties and restraints that fall to an opposition party in wartime. And I think people are either missing the point because they don't want to confront the issue, or because they are psychologically incapable of seeing it. So, responses to some points:

And I really have to laugh at Weidner's claim that the Democrats should have wanted the matter fixed in private. The fact is that the Pentagon had months to fix this in private, and wilfully ignored the problem

You are blurring two things--what we want and what's necessary. Any loyal American should WANT the problem to be fixed quietly if possible, because the publicity has surely encouraged our enemies. If that wasn't feasable then publicity might be necessary and helpful. Democrats, especially in the Senate, have a LOT of potential leverage, but never even tried to use it to put quiet pressure on the Pentagon for reform. There's a difference between being forced to use publicity and leaping on it as a political opportunity. Come to think of it., the Democrats in Congress also had months to try to fix the problem; it went public in January. They didn't try. They didn't care. When the pictures were leaked they grabbed a political opportunity and ran with it.

Weidner's claim that openly criticizing the government only assists the enemy is a shameful, un-American thing to say. Is he claiming we should shut up and let the government carry on without any criticism?

Total distortion of what I said. I've never said the government shouldn't be criticized, and I didn't say criticizing "only assists the enemy." Assisting the enemy is ONE of the things it does. I would be glad to learn that Dems had embraced publicity reluctantly, as a lesser evil. But I don't think they did. The duty of the opposition party in wartime is to support the war, and within that context to make constructive criticisms. And to avoid destructive criticism even if it hurts you politically [And if you don't agree with that statement, make a case. Don't hide behind Abu Ghraib. Confront the issue. Tell me why I'm wrong.]

Weidner says these prisoners weren't innocent, they were "prisoners believed to have attacked Americans." That's an appalling excuse...

I knew that strawman was coming. I'm not making excuses, OK? I'm NOT arguing in favor of prisoner abuse. That's not even the subject here. The subject was how the Democrats reacted, compared with how I feel a Loyal Opposition should react in wartime. The subject is how this is being presented. If Dems wanted to minimize the harm to our cause, they would have been quick to mention that many of these prisoners were probably thugs. If they wanted to maximize harm they would spin things as if they were a bunch of innocents. (Blurring in the process the difference between innocent-because-nothing's-proven and innocent because they did nothing wrong.)

You mention My Lai. That's a very good illustration. We hear about it endlessly. And always presented in a distorted form to make America look as bad as possible. (No, I am not excusing the My Lai Massacre.) No mention is made of the tens-of-thousands of American officers who didn't order civilians fired upon, despite extreme provocation. No mention is made that the communists were deliberately committing war crimes to try to provoke massacres. If the endless repetition of My Lai were really intended to fix problems and make the world better, then all the facts would be presented. Instead the purpose is moral preening and weakening America.

If Weidner thinks campus leftists aren't concerned about Sudan, he hasn't been hanging around very many campus leftists lately. But it's not a top priority with them, because our own government isn't the one that's doing that stuff. Our own government is doing enough bad things to keep the leftists occupied...

Proves my point very nicely, thank you. They are NOT concerned. You argue for the power of publicity to pressure government to fix problems. So where are the lefties mobilizing publicity to pressure the government to take action in Sudan? Where are the lefties who think a million dead Sudanese might be a teensy bit more important than our humiliating prisoners? Or at least come in a distant second? (And NO, I am not trying to say that dead Sudanese EXCUSE prisoner abuse.) But the actions of campus lefties speak volumes.

Weidner is upset that the news doesn't report on the good our forces do. I rarely see such a blatant whine about the media only reporting bad news, and I'll save this one. But the point is, of course, that as Weidner himself says no number of good deeds are an excuse for bad ones... Even more to the point is that what matters in Iraq is what the Iraqis think of our actions, and it's pretty clear they're a lot more steamed up than any liberal Americans are. No number of schools, or closing Saddam's torture chambers (in order to open our own) will make up for this in their eyes.

I'm pretty sure this is just a falsehood, I follow a lot of Iraqi and military blogs, and I think the reaction of ordinary Iraqis is that Abu Ghraib is bad, but minor compared to the overall situation (see here). (Just being a private in Saddam's army often involved worse abuse than those prisoners endured, as millions of ordinary Iraqis know.) And we have Polls.

Lastly, Weidner disagrees with the notion that we should ask ourselves why our enemy hate us. Why shouldn't we? Understanding one's enemy's motives and behavior is one of the best available tools for fighting them. But Weidner isn't interested in knowing why liberals behave as they do, so I guess he can't be expected to be interested in why our enemy behave as they do...

Actually, we conservatives discuss "why they hate us" frequently. Our grand-strategy for the GWOT flows out of those thoughts, and is not just ad hoc. My problem with the left is that they start with the premise that they hate us because we are doing something wrong. And their conclusions flow from the premise. (and that ties in with the thought of this post, that the world is real for them only when Americans come onstage.) It's that attitude I was referring to, the "we must have done something wrong because they hate us" attitude.

And I am very interested in why liberals behave as they do. I prod the subject all the time. Of necessity I judge from appearances, but I am interested in evidence that I am wrong. I'm pleased to hear that Sudan is an issue on campus. I've filed that as a data point. I suspect that if the US Army were to invade Sudan to end the genocide they would suddenly decide that genocide isn't so bad. But hopefully my suspicions are wrong.

"We know our enemies"

...Are we sad? Yes of course, but we’re absolutely not discouraged because we know our enemies and we know their ways and we decided to go in this battle to the end. They think they can force us to give up but they’re totally mistaken. I’ve tasted freedom, my friends and I’d rather die fighting to preserve my freedom before I find myself trapped in another nightmare of blood and oppression.
--Omar, at IRAQ THE MODEL

It would seem like cheerleading...

Mr Lileks writes:

...The story of the prison abuse might have had a different impact if the media had chosen a different tack. The only news that hits the front page is bad news; the innumerable small fragments of good news don’t make A1 because papers have their standards, you see. We are expected to repair Iraq’s dilapidated electrical grid, so replacing an old generator and turning on the power to a neighborhood that’s had brown-outs for ten years is not news. Two Marines dead in an ambush is news because A) death leads, and B) that “mission accomplished” aircraft carrier photo op needs to be debunked, however subtly, as often as possible. The media has come to believe that reporting more good than bad somehow makes them suspect; it goes contrary to The Mission, which is to find out what’s wrong. I had the idea before Jarvis, but he was first to float it: a rebuilding beat. Every day, a story about what’s being accomplished large and small. I’d also pump for the occasional story of heroism, but I suspect that this would make editors uncomfortable. It might be true but it’s not . . . helpful. It would seem like cheerleading.

And we can’t have that.

This smothering gloom, this suppurating corrosion – this isn’t us. This isn’t who we are. If it is, well, we’re lost, because it contains such potent self-hatred that we’ll shrink from defending ourselves, because what we have built isn’t worth defending. Thanks for the push, al Qaeda! We’ll take it from here...

The press is like those mafia guys in The Godfather: "Nothing personal, it's just business." They're Democrats, so it's their business to sabotage our country in time of (Republican) war. It's their business to heap abuse on our troops, to seek and cherish the bad and ignore the good. It's nothing personal that they make America look as bad as possible, and any country that opposes us look as good as possible. Just business.

What really gripes me is that, as a conservative, I don't forget the past. I don't dump it down the memory hole, or re-write it. So I am intensely aware that most of America's wars in the 20th Century were Democrat wars. And I am very aware that in each of those wars, Republicans put aside most of their partisan rancor and loyally supported their country. And we were glad when our soldiers were successful, even though it would help Dems politically. And sad when they were not successful. No Republicans glowed when our forces were defeated at Kasserine or LZ Bitch. No one called for resignations when 749 lives were thrown away at Slapton Sands.

In time of war we were Americans first and Republicans second. And not once in the 20th, (and now 21st) Century was the favor returned.

Tacit alliances

Belmont Club has an important post, News Coverage as a Weapon. It's the simple truth. Most of the terrorist acts that characterize 4th generational warfare are aimed at the press. Or at strengthening anti-war opposition parties.

Terrorists are in symbiosis with the press. And they are in symbiosis with those political parties that advocate appeasement. They are all three in tacit alliance, they feed off each other.

There is no doubt Saddam had chemical weapons in the not-too-distant past. And there is no evidence that the difficult measures needed to destroy them were undertaken. No evidence that they evaporated like the dew. So, he hid them. (In fact the old Soviet programs to help guys like Saddam and Assad create WMD's included advice on hiding them, and on using the Western press to create a fog of obfuscation.)

Why did Saddam hide his poison gas? Because he knew that our press and some of our politicians would use the situation to viciously attack the administration. He knew that the NYT, and many Democrats, were tacitly allied with him, and would leap at a chance to say "Bush lied." Would grab hungrily for any flimsy excuse to undercut their own country's war efforts and to advance their agenda. And, if the administration was weakened enough, he knew they would gladly let him back into power. And shed not a tear for the millions who would be slaughtered.

So now the real battlefields of the war have become domestic politics, and the press. In this country at least, the political problems will probably be fixed next November. The Democrats are by no means all anti-American, or appeasers. But the ones who are not have not stood up for principle. Have not said that it's wrong for their party to revel in American defeats. So we will probably be rid of many of them in November. As for the press, we've started, reluctantly, to fight back. To get into the news business. It's not a good thing, but it's necessary, and there will be more of it.

As for those non-existant WMD's? Well. bodies tend to float to the surface after a while...

FOXNews.com - Top Stories - Sarin, Mustard Gas Discovered Separately in Iraq:...Gazi George, a former Iraqi nuclear scientist under Saddam's regime, told Fox News that he believes many similar weapons stockpiled by the former regime were either buried underground or transported to Syria. He noted that the airport where the device was detonated is on the way to Baghdad from the Syrian border.

George said the finding likely will just be the first in a series of discoveries of such weapons.

"Saddam is the type who will not store those materials in a military warehouse. He's gonna store them either underground, or, as I said, lots of them have gone west to Syria and are being brought back with the insurgencies," George told Fox News. "It is difficult to look in areas that are not obvious to the military's eyes.

"I'm sure they're going to find more once time passes," he continued, saying one year is not enough for the survey group or the military to find the weapons...

Update: I missed an opportunity for a great title. I could have paraphrased Wm. Randolf Hearst and written,"You provide the pictures and I'll provide the Quagmire."

He's laughing at my spoons!

Johnathan Pearce, at Samizdata, passes on to us this amazing (but also very witty) piece of pomposity by Libertarian writer Sean Gabb:

It is, I admit, inappropriate to ascribe one state of mind to a nation of more than 250 million people. But Americans remind me increasingly of someone from the lower classes who has come into money, and now is sat in the Ritz Hotel, terrified the other diners are laughing at him every time he looks down at his knives and forks. I suppose it is because so many of them are drawn from second and even third rate nationalities. The Americans of English and Scotch extraction took their values and their laws across the Atlantic and spread out over half an immense continent, creating a great nation as they went. They were then joined by millions of paupers from elsewhere who learnt a version of the English language and a few facts about their new country, but who never withheld from their offspring any sense of their own inferiority. The result is a combination of overwhelming power and the moral insight of a tree frog.

And not only are we not gnawing our knuckles worrying if the "first-rate nationalities" (apparently England and Scotland) are laughing at our spoons, we are seriously debating whether there is any hope for Britain, or whether we should just cut our losses and place our bets on more promising countries...(How's that for pompous condescension in response?)

Also: What I speak is English. Right here in California is where it's happening, baby! (Or possibly Texas.) What you speak is a charming regional dialect, a sort of oxbow lake left behind as the mighty Mississippi of English-speaking civilization shifted course.

"Unusable ordnance were buried and forgotten..."

On the subject of WMD's not being found, I heard someone on the radio talking about the seven giant cannon that were used in WWI to bombard paris. Guns with 130-foot long barrels. After the war no trace of them was found! No one knows what happened to them.

On the same subject, there's this:

The Henry L. Stimson Center - DC---CBW Chronicle, Volume III, Issue 3 (December 2001):Washington DC’s congressional representative Eleanor Holmes Norton(D) and Representative Constance Morella (D-Maryland) have requested a General Accounting Office investigation into the Army’s cleanup of buried chemical munitions in the nation’s capital. Buried weapons dating back to World War I, some of which contain chemical agent, were discovered nine years ago in the upscale Spring Valley neighborhood near the campus of American University. The lawmakers announced their plans at a House Government Reform Committee hearing in July 2001 on chemical weapons-related arsenic contamination in Washington, DC. The requested inquiry would include not only the Spring Valley neighborhood (shown in figure 2), but also parts of Catholic University, the University of the District of Columbia, and the Washington Naval Yard. Covering less than 70 square miles, Washington, DC ranks tenth on a list of sites nationwide with potentially buried munitions.

Three years after American University had officially opened its doors, the US government leased some 660 acres of land from the university in 1917 for weapons research and testing. The 1,200 chemists and engineers on staff at the American University Experiment Station would eventually work with nearly fifty different poisonous gases, including mustard gas and lewisite. At the conclusion of the war, most of the weapons were shipped to Edgewood Arsenal in Aberdeen, Maryland. However, as was customary at the time, unusable ordnance were buried and forgotten..

Word Note

I've probably mentioned this before, but I hate it when people use the phrase "grew like Topsy" to mean "grew very fast." It doesn't.

Topsy was the little girl in Uncle Tom's Cabin, who, when asked when she was born, said, "I wasn't born. I just growed." (So the phrase might be applicable to "emergent phenomena.")

Equally annoying are facile explanations for the decline of the Roman Empire. I wrote this because I just heard some guy on the radio saying that "the welfare rolls of Rome grew like Topsy after the time of Julius Caesar."

Fumes of the underworld...

This picture is dedicated to those wonderful folks who think we ought to just forget...

One month after...October 11, 2001. The rubble of the World Trade Center is still smoking.

Priorities

So here's the story.

Saddam Hussein orders 7 guys to have their hands amputated.

TV news producer arranges to have them flown to the US for treatment.

Makes documentary.

And...he can't find any broadcast or network station willing to air his film!

If some GI punched one of those guys in the nose, it would be huge news all over the world. No shortage of air-time would there be. But a story that makes Saddam look bad? No way. A story that makes the US look good? Not interested.

And what really gripes me is that those TV guys probably sit around preening themselves on their moral superiority, compared to the proto-fascist insects of the Bush administration.

And a lot of people get to take what they see on TV as evidence....

(found from a link by Scott Chaffin)

The great sorting-out...

The only good thing about the past month-and-a-half has been the effect it will have on American politics --the great sorting-out of the people with clear vision from the partisan hacks. November's choice cannot now be understood as other than a referendum on how America is going to conduct itself over the next two decades.  The Bush path is clear, and means aggressive confrontation of the enemy up to and including invasion if necessary, versus the Kerry approach of talk to the Security Council and get some subpoenas issued.  The Bush approach is hard and costly, both in lives lost among the military and huge appropriations.  The Kerry approach is suicidal. --Hugh Hewitt, May 16

bogus...

From IraqNow:

...Not ones to let the facts get in the way of a good story, the editors of the Boston Globe chose to run with the pics even over the objections of the reporter on the piece.

The unimpeachable provenance of the photographs? Well, the Boston Globe traces them back as far as a Nation of Islam member.

Nice.

Not to beat on a dead horse, here, but had they actually had a veteran somewhere in the newsroom, he could have taken a look at the photos and instantly said they were fakes:

People hardly ever wear camoflage paint in Iraq. When they do, they don't wear it like that. The face camoflage in the photos on the Sex in War site is not done to military standard, or even close. No one who's ever been in the military would wear it like that.

There are patches missing. Ok, some people in Iraq have patches missing. But only on DCUs--not on obviously worn and faded green camoflage uniforms.

And those T-shirts aren't even issue. Nobody's running around in sleeveless T-shirts, although some guys cut the sleeves off in hot weather. But they aren't those kind of T-shirts, or even that color. Army T-shirts are brown. The Marines wear a sort of aqua green T-shirt.

And any Army or Marine Corps veteran in the newsroom could have spotted that instantly and said 'hey--these pics are bogus.' And thereby saved the newspaper from a major gaffe...

And they ran the pictures over the objections of the reporter on the piece? Hungry, weren't they. Hungry for some delicious moral preening. No doubt they had to communicate their intuition, that our entire military, under the malign influence of Donald Rumsfeld, had turned into trailer-trash torturers...

The sunny utopian image endures...

Another good one from Mark Steyn, The last thing Iraq needs is the cheats of the UN:

'War without the UN is unthinkable," huffed The Guardian's Polly Toynbee a year ago, just before it happened. For a certain type of person, any action on the international scene without the UN is unthinkable. And, conversely, anything that happens under the UN imprimatur is mostly for the unthinking.

No matter how corrupt and depraved it is in practice, the organization's sunny utopian image endures. Say the initials "UN" to your average member of Ms Toynbee's legions of the unthinking and they conjure up not UN participation in the sex-slave trade in Bosnia, nor the UN refugee extortion racket in Kenya, nor the UN cover-up of the sex-for-food scandal in West Africa, nor UN complicity in massacres, but some misty Unesco cultural event compered by the late Sir Peter Ustinov featuring photogenic children.

So the question now is whether the UN Oil-for-Food programme is just another of those things that slip down the memory hole, and we all go back to parroting the lullaby that "only the UN can bring legitimacy to Iraq/Afghanistan/Your Basket Case Here"...

Yet Democrats keep repeating that we need the UN. It's robotic and delusional. Seriously delusional! Marching-off-the-cliff delusional. The UN is not just corrupt, it's evil. It's a club for despots.

Kind of sums it up...

...On issue after issue, the American people have a clear choice. My opponent is against personal retirement accounts; against giving patients more control over their medical decisions through health savings accounts; against providing parents more choices over education for their children; against tax relief for all Americans. He seems to be against every idea that gives Americans more authority and more choices and more control over our own lives...[link]

--President Bush

Lunch with the Prime Minister...

Peter Robinson, at The Corner writes:

A couple of dozen fellows here at the Hoover Institution had lunch today with Josemaria Aznar, until just two months ago the prime minister of Spain. The event was off the record, but I can pass along one observation: Aznar conveys a seriousness about terrorism that I’ve seen matched only by that of George W. Bush and Tony Blair.

In one of Osama bin Laden’s tape recorded messages, Aznar noted, bin Laden spoke of the need to recapture “Al Andalus,” calling on radical Islam, in effect, to reconquer Spain. Aznar felt certain that it will prove only a matter of time before Europe suffered another terrorist attack as catastrophic as that in Madrid—and that between now and November terrorists would do all they could to disrupt elections here in the United States.

Sirs, we are at war!

Natalie Solent was kind enough to translate the comment in Italian that Sergio posted here. It's interesting to get feedback from afar...

70-year cycle reducks...

I wrote here about the theory that dominance of American political parties moves in a 70-year cycle, and how strong the parallels are between what we see now, and politics in the 1930's (and probably in the 1860's, though I haven't been thinking much about that.)

I've criticized the Bush-haters for being totally negative, for being only against, and not for anything. But that's exactly how Republicans were in the 1930's. Stunned and bewildered and bitter. ...

Another interesting parallel I've been meaning to blog is the Panic of 1893. That was during the time of Republican dominance, from the 1860's to the 1930's. But the Democrats held the White House, under President Grover Cleveland. However, the Democrats then were the party that was against government action to mitigate such a crisis. They were the party of small government and State's Rights. They had no real ideas or policy to deal with the situation, and the confident Republicans crushed them in the next election. The actual measures being advocated were very different from today's, but the politics were very similar to the demise of Herbert Hoover.

Does anyone know who came up with the 70-year cycle theory? It's been a part of my mental-landscape for decades, but I don't remember whose idea it is.

Also, I've added a new posting category called: 70-Year Cycle.

"Those were the peaceful and stable times..."

The blog IRAQ THE MODEL has the most fascinating stuff. Mohammed, Ali and Omar tell tales of everyday life that illuminate what's going on in Iraq. If you are one of those people who wishes we had left the Iraqis to Saddam's tenderness, you better not read it! All those uncles and cousins and their odd stories are just too real and charming.

Ali's recent post Ibrahim and the dark future I've seen quoted several times. But only the first part, the conversation between Ali's oldest uncle and his stuffed-shirt 16 year old son Ibrahim. (which is a don't-miss!)

But the rest of the post also interested me. Ali writes about his simple delight in having a stable currency! A luxury we take for granted. And what that might mean for the country...

...Saddam’s regime used to sell dollars at half the market price, for about one week or so, in small amounts and spread rumors that the sanctions were going to be lifted as part of a secret agreement, and when the price goes below even that of the bank, as many people change their dollars into dinars in the hope that it will rise more, the Mukhabarat, through their men in the market, would buy back more than what the banks had sold, striking two birds in one stone; giving Iraqis a false hope to keep them busy and stimulate the greed of rapid fortune that occurs at such circumstances, and getting extra profit to keep his regime alive (this was not just a guess, I knew this from many Mukhabarat’s men with big mouths). The results were as expected disastrous; few people get rich and thousands get bankrupt, which led in many times to furious disputes between people about unsettled businesses or debts in Iraqi Dinars that mounted to murder in some cases. Those were the peaceful and stable times...

Speaks for itself...

After playing a pivotal role as the first to broadcast photographs of Iraqi prisoner abuse which U.S. military officials feared would lead to death of Americans overseas, CBS News has declined to show the beheading of an American civilian killed in an apparent retaliation for the Iraqi images.

The decision--made first by the staff of the CBS Evening News, including managing editor Dan Rather--now an official news division policy, came on the same night that the network announced it was going to air footage of an American casually talking about killing Iraqi prisoners on tonight's 60 Minutes II program. [link]

This is how an American talks...

Rumsfeld Addresses Troops After Surprise Visit to Baghdad:

..."Like each of you I'm sure, and like most Americans, I was stunned," Rumsfeld said. "It was a body blow. And with six or seven investigations under way and a country that has values and a military justice system that has values, we know that those involved, whoever they are, will be brought to justice. And we've spent the day talking to people and seeing the steps that have been taken to see that those types of abuses to people for whom we have responsibility and custody will not happen again."

Rumsfeld stressed that the values of those accused of abusing Iraqi prisoners are not the values of America or the vast majority of America's military personnel.

"And we're proud of you, each of you," Rumsfeld said. "We're proud of your service. We know each of you is here because you volunteered to serve your country. You said that that is important to you, and it's important to our country that we have the freedom that we all enjoy."

Speaking after Rumsfeld, Gen. Myers said that he was proud to "stand up here in this uniform, the same uniform you wear, and be part of this team."

"You have never let us down," Myers said. "Never, ever. I have so much confidence in you. Every time that I have to go in front of the public and talk about our military, sometimes it's about the good things we do; most of the time it's about that. Occasionally it's about the few who stray. But I have never lost confidence in the folks that wear this uniform."...

Where the jobs are going...

Don't miss this chart, (part of this NYT article.) It shows which sorts of jobs are increasing in number, which decreasing:

...Over the past decade the biggest employment gains came in occupations that rely on people skills and emotional intelligence — like nurse and lawyer — and among jobs that require imagination and creativity: designer, architect and photographer. But not all of the new jobs require advanced degrees or exceptional artistic talent; note the rise of employment for hair stylists and cosmetologists.

Trying to preserve existing jobs will prove futile — trade and technology will transform the economy whether we like it not. Americans will be better off if they strive to move up the hierarchy of human talents. That's where our future lies

Butterburr...

Andrea, concerning the selection of the images we should see, by our all-wise elite newsmedia:

...First we had the images of the people jumping from the World Trade Center, which were a no-no, because people might get all upset and sad (or worse, upset and mad). Now there is the butchering of Nick Berg by orcs disguised as humans. Wouldn’t we, Precioussss, prefer instead to watch the Abu Ghraib video nasties over and over again? Watching a fellow citizen have his head sawed (not chopped or cut – sawed) off by some man-shaped piece of sewage might get us all angry at other people, which is a no-no. (Unless those Other People are George Bush and crew. It’s okay to get mad at them. Just don’t get mad at any foreigners. Foreigners, especially ones who hate us, are Our Betters™. They know we don’t deserve to live.) Watching some grinning female diddling a prisoner in a hood is good, because it makes us feel all crawly and disgusting, and people who are paralysed by self-disgust can’t do anything to defend themselves...

The Great Divide...

Andrew Sullivan writes:

In the blogosphere, we are sometimes in tune with national moods. My gut tells me that the Nick Berg video has had much more psychic impact in this country than the Abu Ghraib horrors. I even notice some small evidence for this. Every political blog site has just seen an exponential jump in traffic - far more than anything that occurred during the Abu Ghraib unfolding. My traffic went through the roof yesterday, and, according to Alexa, so did everyone else's. People who have tuned the war out suddenly tuned the war in. They get it. Will the mainstream media?

Question for the teeming masses who read my blog...

Yesterday I posted this, Sunshine patriot, in response to something Andrew Cory wrote. He responded with this. We are obviously not on the same wavelength.

SO, question: Was my post not comprehensible? Not clear? It is admittedly an odd and rambling thing, but I thought my point was simple enough. (And I don't think it was a defense of torture. Does it sound that way to you?)

I'm not asking if I'm right or wrong here. Just if I was clear. And what do you think my point was? Maybe everyone sees something different...

The fewer men, the greater share of honour...

I predict, thinking about the previous post, that stories like this are going to spread, be passed around, and become part of our culture.

When I was young, when you thought of selfless volunteers helping out in foreign lands, you thought of JFK, Democrats and the Peace Corps. The popular image of the Republican was someone in a blue blazer at the country club.

I predict that in the not-too-distant future, the image of the volunteer will be something like a young MBA or CPA going to Iraq and Afghanistan, instead of hitting the career fast-track. Republicans, many of them...And gentlemen in England now-a-bed, Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here...

Quagmiristas, don't read this...

You gotta read this great article on the young volunteers working for the CPA:

..."When you go over there you hear the stories of what happened to the Iraqi people, you just want to do whatever you can to help, in whatever way possible. You can't help it, your heart goes out to them," Ledeen says.

"Contact with Iraqis has been inspiring," Brendan Lund says. "We've established such strong ties. By coming into the Green Zone [to see whether we're alright after there's been an attack], they put themselves at risk, because it's an admission that they are cooperating with or supporting the Coalition forces, which to some of their neighbors is not a popular idea right now.

"The majority of Iraqis support the effort. They don't want the U.S. here forever but they know that they need us now."

Ledeen's group lost one of its translators — she was murdered — but the next day all of her Iraqi colleagues nevertheless showed up for work. Another translator told her, at a time of heavy bombing in the Green Zone, simply: "I would die for you."...
. . . . . . . .

...If no one knows about the good stories, then surely no one knows about all the volunteers working day and night to make those good stories happen. Energetic, passionate young people going abroad to work on traditionally left-wing causes get plenty of accolades from the media. But risk your life to bring democracy to Iraq and in the eyes of many in the liberal elite you don't qualify as a humanitarian: You're a privileged Republican child interested only in advancing your already flourishing career.

Speak to a few of the volunteers, however, and a completely different picture emerges. Ledeen tells the story of an Iraqi colleague in the Ministry of Finance — an older man with a family — who found a grenade in his home. He said he supposed it was an occupational hazard, and added, "I really admire you. You're all so young, you don't have to be here." Ledeen responded, "It's the opposite. We're here because we're young. We're going to have to live in this world for a long time, and we don't really like it right now."...

Legends...

A little bit of "Urban Legend" updating from Hoystory. When you hear, as we often do, that "10,000 women used to die each year from illegal abortions," that figure is someone's estimate made in 1936!

"...By 1972, the year before the Roe vs. Wade decision, the Centers for Disease Control reported that 39 women died from illegal or self-induced abortions..."

Sunshine patriot...

I mentioned with disgust in this post Senator Kennedy's statement: "Shamefully we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management, U.S. management." In the comments my friend Andrew wrote:

How is it loathsome to note that Saddam used to torture people where are (hopefully _were_) torturing people? Or do you deny that we are (were) torturing people?
Posted by Andrew Cory at May 12, 2004 12:09 AM

If you have to ask, you will never understand...
Posted by John Weidner at May 12, 2004 06:41 AM

Try me.
Posted by Andrew Cory at May 12, 2004 08:28 AM

It's the place from which he's speaking that's the wrongness. I recently read Washington's Crossing. (Don't miss it folks. It's great.) and I'm thinking right now about our soldiers marching through snow and mud, retreating from catastrophe at New York, our army reduced to a few thousand men, then turning, attacking with shocking effectiveness and skill against some of the world's best, winning at Trenton and Princeton...That was us. Not some strangers in a dim past. WE were there. We were passionate debaters both then and now, and many of the questions are exactly the same. (For instance whether problem of whether to aid other peoples who were seeking liberty, or stay home and tend to our knitting, was a hot-button from the earliest days of the Republic)

If you're American, and you know about those people (you probably won't learn much in school) then you love them. You don't excuse their flaws and mistakes, or eschew criticism. But you love them first, like parents love their children. And they did commit crimes, though those tended to be things like treating a Tory to some tar and feathers, or burning his barn. [Tory meaning loyalist, not the British political party] Americans were shocked utterly by the rapes and the looting at gunpoint that came with European troops. Imagine some prissy little Sociology professor telling you the Continentals were just a bunch of racists and war criminals!

This new war was imposed on us at 9/11. And the invasion of Iraq was debated and approved by Congress. Our country is now at war! It is wrong to now assume an attitude of distance. Of remoteness. Of, "this icky war is something the cat dragged in. It has nothing to do with me." Mr Kennedy, as an American citizen, should be with our soldiers in spirit. Sandstorms in Iraq should chafe his skin. On a hot day he should be thinking about our guys wearing body armor at 120 degrees. His first reaction should have been, "If it will save our soldiers we should torture a bunch more of those scumbags!" Then he should have had second thoughts, and said to himself, "No, that's not us. That's not what we are all about. We shouldn't do it even if it saves some of our lives. And the responsibility is mine, as a US citizen, and I think it's what our guys would really want."

That's how an American reacts. Mr Kennedy's words are wrong because they reek of distance. Of lofty disdain for ordinary soldiers and their problems. It was something the Mayor of Paris might be expected to say.

I recently had a long comments-debate about Abu Ghraib here, with Sgt Stryker. We disagreed, but I was never offended. He's one of us, he's criticizing from inside. Not looking down at our people like they were bugs.

(The short answer: He's a Tory. He should be tarred-and-feathered.)

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman...--Tom Paine

"The voters are morons"

I have not the slightest doubt that Democrats are buffing up their "The voters are morons" theme for after the elections next november.

They're right. Us voters is morons.

Have you noticed that whenever Dems start in on their usual moral-equivalence-we-are-just-as-bad-as-they-are line, they always start with a little prologue, a sort of weasel-word proem?...something like, "Of course we deplore the horrid crime just committed by [terrorist group de juor]. BUT..........

Well Dems, the voters aren't going to notice the escape-clause. They are too stupid. All they will remember is that when you criticize the other guys, you are cool, bland...dispassionate.

But when it's time to condemn America, your eyes start to sparkle, your cheeks look rosy, you sit up straighter.....you sort of glow.

We've noticed.

A grim but salutary service...

Andrew Sullivan writes:

...In fact, of course, the Berg beheading does a grim but salutary service. In the midst of our own deserved self-criticism, we are suddenly reminded of the larger stakes, the wider war, why we are in Iraq in the first place. Most Americans do not in any way excuse Abu Ghraib, but also see that any sort of moral equivalence between our flawed democracy and Islamism's pathological hatred is obscene. In a purely strategic sense, stiffening American resolve and inflaming American outrage at this juncture is exactly what a smart al Qaeda would avoid. But there is no such thing as a smart al Qaeda. Evil can sometimes be stupid, and often is. Hitler, remember, invaded the Soviet Union...

We are also reminded that part of what we are fighting in Iraq is Al Qaeda! Remember all that "Bush Lied" crap? And "Iraq is a sideshow--a distraction from the fight against Al Qaeda?"

And the "Bush Lied" crowd really dodged a bullet when the Al Qaeda chemical weapon plot was stopped in Jordan. 20 tons of poison gas, including VX! Trucked from Syria. It's very that Syria has the advanced technical capacity to produce VX. So guess where it probably came from? Chew on it, you "Bush Lied" ninnies. You are lucky it didn't happen; 80,000 dead would be hard for our newsmedia to suppress, even though they are enlisted in your war, and not the War on Terror.

Update: I just heard on the radio some clips of Democrats referring to this as a cycle of violence! Get it? It's our sins that killed Mr Berg. Al Qaeda would not do bad things, if we weren't committing atrocities. That's the same thing they say about Israel. Hamas shreds men women and children with bombs full of nails, Israel kills a Hamas leader, and all the blobbo pundits and politicians start up the, "mumble gurble cycle-of-violence mumble mumble must-exercise-restraint grobble grobble ancient grievances mumble mumble..." Now these Democrats are saying the same crap about my country!

I got bad news for you, Senator Porkbottom. Al Qaeda are not enlistees in your Global War against Bush! They are not your allies. They will happily cut your throat when the opportunity occurs. And if they are "retaliating" in a cycle of violence, exactly what American evils were they forced to respond to when they cut Danny Pearl's throat? What sins did we commit, to bring on 9/11?

And bad news for Democrats. The American people are not going to buy your moral-equivalence-we-are-just-as-bad-as-they-are line. You said it about us and the Soviets, you say it about Israel, and now you are saying it about us and the terrorists. And it's always been a filthy lie. And come November, you're OUT. You're history!

How I love the Internet!

In this post I wrote about Salvadoran Cpl. Samuel Toloza, who attacked Iraqi scumballs with a knife when he ran out of ammunition. It included this quote:

...Phil Kosnett, who leads the Coalition Provisional Authority office in this holy Shi'ite city, says he owes his life to Salvadorans who repelled a well-executed insurgent attack on his three-car convoy in March. He has nominated six of them for the U.S. Army's Bronze Star medal.
    "You hear this snotty phrase 'coalition of the billing' for some of the smaller contingents," said Mr. Kosnett, referring to the apparent eagerness of some nations to charge their Iraq operations to Washington. "The El Sals? No way. These guys are punching way above their weight. They're probably the bravest and most professional troops I've every worked with."...

So who just commented to set things straight? "Forget the Washington Times - I'm Phil's wife and I assure you this was an understated version of the story. It also appeared in several other papers throughout the world." -- Thank you Alison Kosnett!

And thanks to the other guys who commented. This is all tons more fun when I don't have to do it alone...

Give him the bum's Rush...

I caught a little of Rush Limbaugh this morning. He mentioned the infamous remark for which he has been catching so much flack. The context (I'm not meaning this as an excuse, mind, just providing a little info you'll never get from the press) was that he had at that point only seen two of the pictures, and he was bantering with his assistant (part of his schtick), not pronouncing an opinion aimed "at the audience."

But what I found very interesting was that, although the remark has been turning up in hundreds of newspapers, TV shows, columns, etc, not one single journalist has called Rush to ask about it!

And also, though over 10 hours of airtime on America's most popular radio show has been devoted to seriously discussing Abu Ghraib, not one other thing Rush has said has been reported anywhere!

Ahhh, our free press. A bulwark of Liberty. Protecting us from complicated ideas. And from those fascistic conservatives and Republicans...

Update: There was another loathsome remark just made about Abu Ghraib. Right on the Senate floor. But his one is not getting press attention. Even though it was made by a famous politician, and is something that would sell a lot of papers. In fact it is being suppressed from news reports.

I wonder why.....