It seems that the noise factor over the Iraq war from the left has died down a bit. Depression has set in over the realization of being so very wrong on all fronts and not being as smart as the guy they hate the most. The following is a great opinion piece on the whys.
Read on. To see the original article, click on the title of this post.
When Good News Strikes
March 08, 2005, 7:49 a.m.
Rich Lowry - NR Online
Glum liberals’ try coping with a changing world.
If the world that Democrats have been living in lately were made into a reality disaster show, it would be called “When Good News Strikes.”
One of the inconveniences of political debate is that occasionally reality intrudes to invalidate a given position no matter how much its partisans want to believe it. This is what has been happening recently to the argument that the invasion of Iraq produced an irrecoverable mess. Although surely setbacks still await us in Iraq and the Middle East, stunning headlines from the region have left many liberals perversely glum about upbeat news.Schadenfreude has faded into its happiness-hating opposite, gluckschmerz. Liberal journalist Kurt Andersen has written in New York magazine of the guilty “pleasure liberals took in bad news from Iraq, which seemed sure to hurt the administration.” According to Andersen, the successful Iraqi elections changed the mood. For Bush critics, this inspiring event was “unexpectedly unsettling,” since they so “hat[ed] the idea of a victory presided over by the Bush team.”The legendary liberal editor Charlie Peters confessed to his own attack of gluckschmerz: “New York Post columnist John Podhoretz asked liberals: ‘Did you momentarily feel a rush of disappointment [at the news of the Jan. 30 Iraq election] because you knew, you just knew, that this was going to redound to the credit of George W. Bush?’ I plead guilty …” On his show the other night, comedian Jon Stewart — half-jokingly — expressed a feeling of dread at the changes in the Middle East and the credit President Bush will get for them. “Oh my God!” he said. “He’s gonna be a great — pretty soon, Republicans are gonna be like, ‘Reagan was nothing compared to this guy.’ Like, my kid’s gonna go to a high school named after him, I just know it.” Stewart is badly in need of the consolation of a yet-to-be-written pop theological tract, “When Good Things Happen to Bad Presidents.”The Democratic foreign-policy expert who was Stewart’s guest that night, Nancy Soderberg, tried to comfort him, pointing out that the budding democratic revolution in the Middle East still might fail: “There’s always hope that this might not work.” There is historical precedent for that, of course. Liberal revolutions failed in Europe in 1848 and Eastern Europe in 1968. What is an entirely new phenomenon is liberals calling such reverses for human freedom — half-jokingly or not — occasions for “hope.”Soderberg added: “There’s still Iran and North Korea, don’t forget. There’s hope.” The way Bogart and Bergman “will always have Paris,” liberals now tell themselves they “will always have Iran and North Korea.” No matter the good news anywhere else, these nuke-hungry rogue states will provide grounds for bad-mouthing Bush foreign policy. But these two intractable problems won’t seriously detract from Bush’s world-changing accomplishment should he succeed in transforming the Middle East.Some liberals are reluctantly giving him his due. The New York Times surveyed the fresh air sweeping the region and concluded, “The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit.” Liberal commentator Daniel Schorr remarked: “During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, President Bush said that ‘a liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region.’ He may have had it right.”Has the administration gotten a few fortunate breaks in the Middle East lately? Well, yes. Asked how he seemed to make so many lucky saves, the great Montreal Canadien goalie Ken Dryden explained that it was his job to be in the right position to get lucky. By toppling Saddam Hussein and insisting on elections in Iraq, while emphasizing the power of freedom, Bush has put the United States in the right position to encourage and take advantage of democratic irruptions in the region.And so we have created the conditions for being pleasantly surprised by the positive drift of events in the Middle East, or unpleasantly surprised — depending on your politics.
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
What Will Happen To Hezbollah When Syria Leaves Lebanon?
The recent world pressure on Syria to exit Lebanon may have unintended consequences. I found a letter on NR Online to Jonah Goldberg from a Lebanese Christian living in Lebanon that is pretty mich right on in my estimation and mostly is a good thing.
MORE HEZBOLLAH [Jonah Goldberg]
I've gotten several emails along these lines:
Dear Jonah,
I read about you asking for an argument as to why Hezbollah would not control Lebanon if Syria withdraws. I am Christian Lebanese and here is my take:
1- Syrian presence is not keeping Hezbollah in check but is giving it a role beyond its natural size.
2- The support of Hizbollah is limited to a part of the Shiite community which has a plurality but is still a minority in Lebanon.
3- Any attempt by Hizbollah to expand beyond Shiite areas will unite all Lebanese against it. Hizballah knows that the West will arm the Christians and Druze against Hezbollah in such an event. Hezbollah will never attempt such a thing.
4- Most Hezbollah supporters are not interested in living under Islamic law but only in the social benefits Hezbollah gives them and which is paid for by Iran. Hezbollah gave up enforcing Islamic law even in areas it controls. It's all about money. If the money flow is turned off, Hezbollah will shrink to a fraction of its size.
5- The Lebanese Parliament has 128 seats divided 64-64 Christian-Muslim. On the muslim half, the Shiites get only 27 seats. This the theoretical ceiling of Shiite power. Today they only have 12 seats.
6- In a free Lebanon, Hezbollah will not have the power to continue its fight against Israel. The Christians will call for peace with Israel. The Druze and Sunnis will say not before peace in Israel-Palestine is achieved. But Christians, Druze, and Sunnis will oppose Hezbollah exposing Lebanon to Israeli retaliation. The net result will be the return to 1949 armistice agreement. It is the Syrian presence that allowed Hezbollah go against the will of the majority. Without Syria, Hezbollah's hands are tied.
Thank You
MORE HEZBOLLAH [Jonah Goldberg]
I've gotten several emails along these lines:
Dear Jonah,
I read about you asking for an argument as to why Hezbollah would not control Lebanon if Syria withdraws. I am Christian Lebanese and here is my take:
1- Syrian presence is not keeping Hezbollah in check but is giving it a role beyond its natural size.
2- The support of Hizbollah is limited to a part of the Shiite community which has a plurality but is still a minority in Lebanon.
3- Any attempt by Hizbollah to expand beyond Shiite areas will unite all Lebanese against it. Hizballah knows that the West will arm the Christians and Druze against Hezbollah in such an event. Hezbollah will never attempt such a thing.
4- Most Hezbollah supporters are not interested in living under Islamic law but only in the social benefits Hezbollah gives them and which is paid for by Iran. Hezbollah gave up enforcing Islamic law even in areas it controls. It's all about money. If the money flow is turned off, Hezbollah will shrink to a fraction of its size.
5- The Lebanese Parliament has 128 seats divided 64-64 Christian-Muslim. On the muslim half, the Shiites get only 27 seats. This the theoretical ceiling of Shiite power. Today they only have 12 seats.
6- In a free Lebanon, Hezbollah will not have the power to continue its fight against Israel. The Christians will call for peace with Israel. The Druze and Sunnis will say not before peace in Israel-Palestine is achieved. But Christians, Druze, and Sunnis will oppose Hezbollah exposing Lebanon to Israeli retaliation. The net result will be the return to 1949 armistice agreement. It is the Syrian presence that allowed Hezbollah go against the will of the majority. Without Syria, Hezbollah's hands are tied.
Thank You
Friday, February 25, 2005
Merchants of Despair - The New Democrats Under Dean
Yes. It's Victor again. He is saying what I have been thinking every since the 2000 Presidential Election. It's also why you can't ever have a reasonable debate or discuss other possibilites that are real world with the lefty crowd that seems to dominate the Democrats these days. Dean is determined to turn all of the Democratic party into the types that Victor describes perfectly in this article. Read on. To see the original article, click on the title of this post.
Merchants of Despair
Sort of for the war, sort of...
By: Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
Much of the recent domestic critique of American efforts in the Middle East has long roots in our own past — and little to do with the historic developments on the ground in Iraq
1. "It's America's fault."Some on the hard left sought to cite our support for Israel or general "American imperialism" in the Middle East as culpable for bin Laden's wrath on September 11. Past American efforts to save Muslims in Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia, Kuwait, and Afghanistan counted for little. Even less thanks were earned by billions of dollars given to Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority. The Islamofascist vision of a Dark Age world run by unelected imams — where women were in seclusion, homosexuals were killed, Jews were terrorized, Christians were routed, and freedom was squelched — registered little, even though such visions were by definition at war with all that Western liberalism stands for.
This flawed idea that autocrats supposedly hate democracy more for what it does rather than for what it represents is not new. On the eve of World War II isolationists on the right insisted that America had treated Germany unfairly after World War I and wrongly sided with British imperialism in its efforts to rub in their past defeat. "International Jewry" was blamed for poisoning the good will between the two otherwise friendly countries by demanding punitive measures from a victimized Germany. Likewise, poor Japan was supposedly unfairly cut off from American ore and petroleum, and hemmed in by provocative Anglo Americans.
By the late 1940s things had changed, and now it was the turn of the old Left, which blamed "fascists" for ruining the hallowed American-Soviet wartime alliance by "isolating" and "surrounding" the Russians with hostile bases and allies. The same was supposedly true of China: We were lectured ad nauseam by idealists and "China hands" that Mao "really" wanted to cultivate American friendship, but was spurned by our right-wing ideologues — as if there were nothing of the absolutism and innate thuggery in him that would soon account for 50 million or more murdered and starved.
Ditto the animosity from dictators like Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro. The Left assured us instead that both were actually neo-Jeffersonians whose olive branches were crushed by Cold Warriors, and who then — but only then — went on to plan their own gulags in Vietnam and Cuba.
2. "Americans are weak."Before we went into Afghanistan, we were hectored that the country's fierce people, colonial history, rugged terrain, hostile neighbors, foreign religion, and shattered infrastructure made victory unlikely. We also forget now how the Left warned us of terrible casualties and millions of refugees before the Iraq war, and then went dormant until the insurgents emerged. At that point it resurfaced to assure that Iraq was lost and precipitate withdrawal our only hope, only to grow quiet again after the recent Iraqi election — a cycle that followed about the same 20-month timetable of military victory to voting in Afghanistan.
Now a new geopolitical litany has arisen: The reserves are "shattered"; North Korea, Syria, and Iran are untouchable while we are "bogged down" in the Sunni Triangle; a schedule for withdrawal from Iraq needs to be spelled out; there is no real American-trained Iraqi army; the entire Arab world hates us; blah, blah, blah...
In 1917, "a million men over there" was considered preposterous for a Potemkin American Expeditionary Force; by late 1918 it was chasing Germany out of Belgium. Charles Lindbergh returned from an obsequious visitation with Goering to warn us that the Luftwaffe was unstoppable. Four years later it was in shambles as four-engine American bombers reduced the Third Reich to ashes.
Japanese Zeroes, supposed proof of comparative American backwardness in 1941-2, were the easy targets of "Turkey Shoots" by 1944 as American fighters blew them out of the skies. Sputnik "proved" how far we were behind the socialist workhorse in Russia, even as we easily went to the moon first a little over a decade later. The history of the American military and economy in the 20th century is one of being habitually underestimated, even as the United States defeated Prussian imperialism, German Nazism, Italian fascism, Japanese militarism, and Stalinist Communism.
Nor in our more recent peacetime were we buried by stagflation, Jimmy Carter's "malaise," Japan, Inc., and all the other supposed bogeymen that were prophesized to overwhelm the institutional strength of the American state, its free-enterprise system, and the highly innovative and individualistic nature of the American people.
3. "They are supermen." When suicide murderers dominated the news of the Intifada, followed by the car bombers and beheaders of the Sunni Triangle, many in the West despaired that there was no thwarting such fanatics. Perhaps they simply believed more in their cause than we did in ours. How can you stop someone who kills to die rather than merely dying to kill?
That Ariel Sharon in two years defeated the Intifada by decapitating the Hamas leadership, starting the fence, announcing withdrawal from Gaza, and humiliating Arafat was forgotten. In the same manner few now write or think about how the United States military went into the heart of darkness in Fallujah and simply destroyed or routed the insurgents of that fundamentalist stronghold in less than two weeks, an historic operation that ensured a successful turnout on election day and an eventual takeover by an elected Iraqi government.
So this paradox of exaggerating the strength of our weaker enemies is likewise an American trademark. Spiked-helmeted Prussians were considered vicious pros who would make short work of doughboy hicks who had trained with brooms and sticks. Indeed, the German imperial army of World War I may have been made up of the most formidable foot soldiers of any age. Still, it was destroyed in less than four years by supposedly decadent and corrupt liberal democracies.
The Gestapo was the vanguard of a new Aryan super-race, pitiless and proud in its martial superiority. How could soda-jockeys of the Depression ever fight something like the Waffen SS with poor equipment, little training, and a happy-go-lucky attitude rather than an engrained death wish? Rather easily as it turned out, as the Allies not only defeated Nazism but literally annihilated it in about five years. Kamikazes were also felt to be otherworldly in their eerie death cult — who, after all, in the United States would take off to ram his Corsair or Hellcat into a Japanese ship? No matter — the U.S. Navy, Marines, and Army Air Corps were not impressed, and rather quickly destroyed not merely the death pilots but the very culture that launched them.
4. "We are alone."George Bush was said to have alienated the world, as if our friends in Eastern Europe, Britain, Australia, and a billion in India did not matter. Yet the same was said in 1941 when Latin America, Asia, and Africa were in thrall to the Axis. Neutrals like Spain, Argentina, and Turkey wanted little to do with a disarmed United States that had unwisely found itself in a two-front war with the world's most formidable military powers.
By the 1950s we seemed to have defeated Germany and Japan only to have subsequently "lost" China and Eastern Europe once more. Much of Asia and Latin America deified the mass-murdering Stalin and Mao while deriding elected American presidents. The Richard Clarks and Joe Wilsons of that age lectured about a paranoid Eisenhower administration, clumsy CIA work, and the general hopelessness of ever defeating global Communism, whose spores sprouted almost everywhere in the form of Nasserism, Pan-Arabism, Baathism, Castroism, and various "national liberationist" movements.
5. Why?Why do Americans do all this to themselves? In part, the nature of an open society is constant self-critique, especially at times of national elections. Our successes at creating an affluent and free citizenry also only raise the bar ever higher as we sense we are closer to heaven on earth — and with a little more perfection could walk more like gods than crawl as mere men.
There are also still others among us who are impatient with the give and take of a consensual society. They harbor a secret admiration for the single-mindedness of the zealot in pursuit of a utopian cause — hence the occasional crazy applause given by some Americans to the beheading "Minutemen" of the Sunni Triangle or the "brave" "combat teams" who killed 3,000 on September 11.
Finally, the intellectual class that we often read and hear from is increasingly divorced from much of what makes America work, especially the sort of folk who join the military. They have little appreciation that the U.S. Marine Corps is far more deadly than Baathist diehards or Taliban remnants — or that a fleet of American bombers with GPS bombs can do more damage in a few seconds than most of the suicide bombers of the Middle East could do in a year.
It is wise to cite and publicize our errors — and there have been many in this war. Humility and circumspection are military assets as well. And we should not deprecate the danger of our enemies, who are cruel and ingenious. Moreover, we should never confuse the sharp dissent of the well-meaning critic with disloyalty to the cause.
But nor should we fall into pessimism, when in less than four years we have destroyed the two worst regimes in the Middle East, scattered al Qaeda, avoided another promised 9/11 at home, and sent shock waves of democracy throughout the Arab world — so far at an aggregate cost of less than what was incurred on the first day of this unprovoked war. Car bombs are bad news, but in the shadows is the real story: The terrorists are losing, and radical reform, the likes of which millions have never seen, is right on the horizon. So this American gloominess is not new. Yet, if the past is any guide, our present lack of optimism in this struggle presages its ultimate success.
A final prediction: By the end of this year, formerly critical liberal pundits, backsliding conservative columnists, once-fiery politicians, Arab "moderates," ex-statesmen and generals emeriti, smug stand-up comedians, recently strident Euros — perhaps even Hillary herself — will quietly come to a consensus that what we are witnessing from Afghanistan and the West Bank to Iraq and beyond, with its growing tremors in Lebanon, Libya, Egypt, and the Gulf, is a moral awakening, a radical break with an ugly past that threatens a corrupt, entrenched, and autocratic elite and is just the sort of thing that they were sort of for, sort of all along — sort of...
— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.
Merchants of Despair
Sort of for the war, sort of...
By: Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
Much of the recent domestic critique of American efforts in the Middle East has long roots in our own past — and little to do with the historic developments on the ground in Iraq
1. "It's America's fault."Some on the hard left sought to cite our support for Israel or general "American imperialism" in the Middle East as culpable for bin Laden's wrath on September 11. Past American efforts to save Muslims in Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia, Kuwait, and Afghanistan counted for little. Even less thanks were earned by billions of dollars given to Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority. The Islamofascist vision of a Dark Age world run by unelected imams — where women were in seclusion, homosexuals were killed, Jews were terrorized, Christians were routed, and freedom was squelched — registered little, even though such visions were by definition at war with all that Western liberalism stands for.
This flawed idea that autocrats supposedly hate democracy more for what it does rather than for what it represents is not new. On the eve of World War II isolationists on the right insisted that America had treated Germany unfairly after World War I and wrongly sided with British imperialism in its efforts to rub in their past defeat. "International Jewry" was blamed for poisoning the good will between the two otherwise friendly countries by demanding punitive measures from a victimized Germany. Likewise, poor Japan was supposedly unfairly cut off from American ore and petroleum, and hemmed in by provocative Anglo Americans.
By the late 1940s things had changed, and now it was the turn of the old Left, which blamed "fascists" for ruining the hallowed American-Soviet wartime alliance by "isolating" and "surrounding" the Russians with hostile bases and allies. The same was supposedly true of China: We were lectured ad nauseam by idealists and "China hands" that Mao "really" wanted to cultivate American friendship, but was spurned by our right-wing ideologues — as if there were nothing of the absolutism and innate thuggery in him that would soon account for 50 million or more murdered and starved.
Ditto the animosity from dictators like Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro. The Left assured us instead that both were actually neo-Jeffersonians whose olive branches were crushed by Cold Warriors, and who then — but only then — went on to plan their own gulags in Vietnam and Cuba.
2. "Americans are weak."Before we went into Afghanistan, we were hectored that the country's fierce people, colonial history, rugged terrain, hostile neighbors, foreign religion, and shattered infrastructure made victory unlikely. We also forget now how the Left warned us of terrible casualties and millions of refugees before the Iraq war, and then went dormant until the insurgents emerged. At that point it resurfaced to assure that Iraq was lost and precipitate withdrawal our only hope, only to grow quiet again after the recent Iraqi election — a cycle that followed about the same 20-month timetable of military victory to voting in Afghanistan.
Now a new geopolitical litany has arisen: The reserves are "shattered"; North Korea, Syria, and Iran are untouchable while we are "bogged down" in the Sunni Triangle; a schedule for withdrawal from Iraq needs to be spelled out; there is no real American-trained Iraqi army; the entire Arab world hates us; blah, blah, blah...
In 1917, "a million men over there" was considered preposterous for a Potemkin American Expeditionary Force; by late 1918 it was chasing Germany out of Belgium. Charles Lindbergh returned from an obsequious visitation with Goering to warn us that the Luftwaffe was unstoppable. Four years later it was in shambles as four-engine American bombers reduced the Third Reich to ashes.
Japanese Zeroes, supposed proof of comparative American backwardness in 1941-2, were the easy targets of "Turkey Shoots" by 1944 as American fighters blew them out of the skies. Sputnik "proved" how far we were behind the socialist workhorse in Russia, even as we easily went to the moon first a little over a decade later. The history of the American military and economy in the 20th century is one of being habitually underestimated, even as the United States defeated Prussian imperialism, German Nazism, Italian fascism, Japanese militarism, and Stalinist Communism.
Nor in our more recent peacetime were we buried by stagflation, Jimmy Carter's "malaise," Japan, Inc., and all the other supposed bogeymen that were prophesized to overwhelm the institutional strength of the American state, its free-enterprise system, and the highly innovative and individualistic nature of the American people.
3. "They are supermen." When suicide murderers dominated the news of the Intifada, followed by the car bombers and beheaders of the Sunni Triangle, many in the West despaired that there was no thwarting such fanatics. Perhaps they simply believed more in their cause than we did in ours. How can you stop someone who kills to die rather than merely dying to kill?
That Ariel Sharon in two years defeated the Intifada by decapitating the Hamas leadership, starting the fence, announcing withdrawal from Gaza, and humiliating Arafat was forgotten. In the same manner few now write or think about how the United States military went into the heart of darkness in Fallujah and simply destroyed or routed the insurgents of that fundamentalist stronghold in less than two weeks, an historic operation that ensured a successful turnout on election day and an eventual takeover by an elected Iraqi government.
So this paradox of exaggerating the strength of our weaker enemies is likewise an American trademark. Spiked-helmeted Prussians were considered vicious pros who would make short work of doughboy hicks who had trained with brooms and sticks. Indeed, the German imperial army of World War I may have been made up of the most formidable foot soldiers of any age. Still, it was destroyed in less than four years by supposedly decadent and corrupt liberal democracies.
The Gestapo was the vanguard of a new Aryan super-race, pitiless and proud in its martial superiority. How could soda-jockeys of the Depression ever fight something like the Waffen SS with poor equipment, little training, and a happy-go-lucky attitude rather than an engrained death wish? Rather easily as it turned out, as the Allies not only defeated Nazism but literally annihilated it in about five years. Kamikazes were also felt to be otherworldly in their eerie death cult — who, after all, in the United States would take off to ram his Corsair or Hellcat into a Japanese ship? No matter — the U.S. Navy, Marines, and Army Air Corps were not impressed, and rather quickly destroyed not merely the death pilots but the very culture that launched them.
4. "We are alone."George Bush was said to have alienated the world, as if our friends in Eastern Europe, Britain, Australia, and a billion in India did not matter. Yet the same was said in 1941 when Latin America, Asia, and Africa were in thrall to the Axis. Neutrals like Spain, Argentina, and Turkey wanted little to do with a disarmed United States that had unwisely found itself in a two-front war with the world's most formidable military powers.
By the 1950s we seemed to have defeated Germany and Japan only to have subsequently "lost" China and Eastern Europe once more. Much of Asia and Latin America deified the mass-murdering Stalin and Mao while deriding elected American presidents. The Richard Clarks and Joe Wilsons of that age lectured about a paranoid Eisenhower administration, clumsy CIA work, and the general hopelessness of ever defeating global Communism, whose spores sprouted almost everywhere in the form of Nasserism, Pan-Arabism, Baathism, Castroism, and various "national liberationist" movements.
5. Why?Why do Americans do all this to themselves? In part, the nature of an open society is constant self-critique, especially at times of national elections. Our successes at creating an affluent and free citizenry also only raise the bar ever higher as we sense we are closer to heaven on earth — and with a little more perfection could walk more like gods than crawl as mere men.
There are also still others among us who are impatient with the give and take of a consensual society. They harbor a secret admiration for the single-mindedness of the zealot in pursuit of a utopian cause — hence the occasional crazy applause given by some Americans to the beheading "Minutemen" of the Sunni Triangle or the "brave" "combat teams" who killed 3,000 on September 11.
Finally, the intellectual class that we often read and hear from is increasingly divorced from much of what makes America work, especially the sort of folk who join the military. They have little appreciation that the U.S. Marine Corps is far more deadly than Baathist diehards or Taliban remnants — or that a fleet of American bombers with GPS bombs can do more damage in a few seconds than most of the suicide bombers of the Middle East could do in a year.
It is wise to cite and publicize our errors — and there have been many in this war. Humility and circumspection are military assets as well. And we should not deprecate the danger of our enemies, who are cruel and ingenious. Moreover, we should never confuse the sharp dissent of the well-meaning critic with disloyalty to the cause.
But nor should we fall into pessimism, when in less than four years we have destroyed the two worst regimes in the Middle East, scattered al Qaeda, avoided another promised 9/11 at home, and sent shock waves of democracy throughout the Arab world — so far at an aggregate cost of less than what was incurred on the first day of this unprovoked war. Car bombs are bad news, but in the shadows is the real story: The terrorists are losing, and radical reform, the likes of which millions have never seen, is right on the horizon. So this American gloominess is not new. Yet, if the past is any guide, our present lack of optimism in this struggle presages its ultimate success.
A final prediction: By the end of this year, formerly critical liberal pundits, backsliding conservative columnists, once-fiery politicians, Arab "moderates," ex-statesmen and generals emeriti, smug stand-up comedians, recently strident Euros — perhaps even Hillary herself — will quietly come to a consensus that what we are witnessing from Afghanistan and the West Bank to Iraq and beyond, with its growing tremors in Lebanon, Libya, Egypt, and the Gulf, is a moral awakening, a radical break with an ugly past that threatens a corrupt, entrenched, and autocratic elite and is just the sort of thing that they were sort of for, sort of all along — sort of...
— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Diversitoids - Are you one?
I know all of you just love the term "diversity". But what does it mean to be a Diversitoid? John Derbyshire explains. Warning! Humor and opinion ahead. Not for the faint hearted Diversitoid. Read on. To see the original article, click on the title of this post.
Down Among the Diversitoids
February 22, 2005, 2:54 p.m.
John Derbyshire
National Review Online
Derb and the pod people.
I was to be on a panel discussion at the AAAS annual meeting in Washington DC. I mis-remembered the time, though, thinking the event was at 11 A.M., when in fact it was at noon, so I had an hour to kill. Wandering around the conference center idly, looking for something interesting, I came across a meeting hall with an easel outside saying GENDER AND ETHNIC DIVERSITY IN ACADEMIC SCIENCE. Thinking this might be right up my street, I peered inside. About 30 people were listening to a woman lecturer. The people had their backs to me and were clustered at the far end of the room, facing the speaker. I went in and sat in one of the empty rows at the back.
The woman, whose name I think was Leslie, was 40ish, with very slightly African-American coloring and appearance, and gray hair frizzed out in a large obtuse isosceles triangle like the girl in the Dilbert strip. She was speaking about some court case in Kentucky. A woman college teacher had been denied tenure and sued her employer. Apparently she had lost the case. Leslie was analyzing why. "The biggest difficulty is proving intentional discrimination..." (Especially, I imagine, when it hasn't occurred.) Leslie's entire address was addled with diversity-speak clichés: "respecting differences"..."inclusivity"..."fostering a diverse environment"..."truth to power"...
I lost interest after a minute or so and began to scrutinize the audience. Around half of them were men. These men, who were all white, divided into two subgroups. The larger subgroup consisted of older guys in jackets and ties. The smaller was younger and more obviously campus-resident: beards, ponytails, natural-fiber shirts and sweaters, sneakers or peculiar-shaped shoes, no ties of course. The women were mostly middle-aged or older. Two of them were black — much blacker than Leslie. Several (though neither black woman) had the cropped, truculent look of the modern lesbian. I don't think any of them was wearing makeup.
Leslie finished with her analysis of the court case, which had apparently come up in the context of an audience question. She announced the end of questions and introduced the next speaker.
This was a pleasant-looking fiftyish white woman named JoAnn Moody. Ms. Moody is a big name in the world of diversity, I soon gathered. She has written a book on the subject. This book is highly thought of by diversicrats, to judge from the Amazon reviews.
Ms. Moody was obviously an old hand at the Diversity Seminar game. First she had us all (I had decided to join in here) move the chairs round into a horseshoe arrangement. Then she distributed a printed, single-sheet "scenario" and instructed us to read it.
The "scenario" was a brief, imaginary conversation between three people, all "European-American males," comprising the search committee looking to hire "a director of finance for a large public university in Virginia." The three committee members were a Progressive, a Reactionary, and a neutral Chairman. That was not what Ms. Moody's scenario called them, but that was plainly what was meant to be conveyed by their words. Two candidates for the finance position are discussed. One is Tom, another "European-American male" with a Harvard MBA. The other is Mary, a single black woman with an MBA from "a second-tier school."
Reactionary of course wants to hire the Harvard guy: "He's got to be sound; he's just that type of guy... He reminds me so much of Mervin... Now there was a finance director to hold up as a standard..." Progressive wants to give some special consideration to Mary: "I'd like to make sure that our interview takes at least two hours... It'll take us some time to really feel comfortable with her..." Reactionary disagrees. He thinks all candidates should get precisely equal treatment. "I am gender-blind and color-blind. All I care about is excellence. And we'll know it when we see it..." He then wonders aloud whether Mary, who is single, would be comfortable in the "family-oriented" town.
After we'd all read this little tale — it covered two sides of a standard quarto sheet — Ms. Moody led a discussion. What was going on here? She asked. "Why, it's the Good Ol' Boy network," offered one of the black women, to nods of agreement. "They just want to hire someone like them." Similar comments followed. Ms. Moody played the neutral reflector, skillfully guiding the discussion from one diversi-cliché to the next, occasionally prompting us with the approved word or phrase from the diversi-liturgy. "So," she murmured, after a few exchanges, "we could say that a European-American male from a prestigious school comes with extra points, as it were. Right?" They all nodded. A couple of them jotted down the words in notebooks. Extra points. As it were.
Sitting round in the horseshoe like that, I got a closer look at my fellow participants. The women were, of course, the most enthusiastic. The whole affair, in fact, was running on estrogen. The general atmosphere was that peculiar mix of insistent niceness and angry menace that women are so good at. We are frail, sweet, and sorely oppressed, and you had better be nice to us... OTHERWISE WE WILL SMASH YOU TO PIECES. There was much talk of "sensitivity" and "understanding"; words like "efficiency," "measurement," "standards," came up only as pejoratives. The idea that excellence could be quantified was greeted with unanimous scorn and laughter. A person foolish enough to let slip the word "objectivity" was quickly hooted down by the others. There is no such thing as objectivity! I made a quiet, uncollectable bet with myself that I was the only person in the room with a degree in anything more mathematically rigorous than sociology.
Underneath all the soothing talk about "inclusiveness" and "sensitivity" I began to spot some darker waters flowing. Someone raised Reactionary's comment about being "gender-blind and color-blind." This occasioned a great burst of laughter. "That's what they always say!" "Of course it is!" I am perfectly certain I was the only person in the room thinking the thought: What if it's true? But of course, to these people, it cannot ever be true. As one of the black women said: "Nobody who's lived in the United States can be gender-blind and color-blind." What about me, who has lived only half my life here? Best not ask. One of the fundamental axioms of the diversity ideology is the innate selfishness, cruelty, and dishonesty of white males everywhere. Useless to dispute it. Of course that's what you would say! You're one of them!
The men were more interesting studies than the women. The older guys with jackets and ties looked cowed and didn't say much. The younger ones, the ones with earth shoes and collarless natural-fiber shirts, seemed almost as keen on diversity as the women. What brings a man, particularly a "European-American male," to an affair like this? I wondered. In the case of the older, PC-whipped-looking guys, the answer was probably just the determination to find out where all the "diversity" landmines are planted, so they could make it to retirement and pension in one piece. Good luck to them. But what about these younger ones? They really seemed to believe this stuff. What was driving them? The hope of making some easy pickups from among liberated no-commitment women? I looked round again at the women. No, not that, definitely couldn't be that.
I suppose the most charitable explanation would be misguided patriotism. This is, after all, a diverse nation, and will remain so. Those are facts. We do all have to get along somehow, and it is possible these young male diversicrats believe that by mouthing this vapid cant and submitting to these petty humiliations, they are helping to preserve and improve the nation — a sort of sacrificial masochism. Somehow I couldn't make myself believe this. Masochism, sure, but patriotic? Just looking at those men, it was hard to see any of them flying a Stars and Stripes from his mountain bike. What, then? Just a cynical desire to hold on to a well-paid and undemanding job? No, they didn't seem at all cynical. Very few people are as good at acting as these men would have had to be to be practicing cynicism in that room. They were sincere. They believed the diversity stuff, including all the stuff about how rotten and wicked and malicious they, we, "European-American males," are inside. They really believed it all. They loved Big Sister. I had fallen among pod people.
There was, it seemed to me, something horribly ignoble about these young men. To yield not just meekly but enthusiastically to the stripping away of their privileges, real and imagined; to acquiesce so whole-heartedly in their dispossession, seemed so...unmanly. Not that they looked particularly unmanly in themselves. One of them was large and muscular — though it was the cosmetic muscularity of the gym, not anything intended for actual — ugh! — physical work. (I hasten to add that there were no obvious indications that he might belong to a behavioral minority group.) So why was he jeering along with the others at the mention of "objectivity"? Why did he hoot along with the rest at "gender-blind and color-blind"?
I began to long for Bertrans de Born to ride in on his destrier and cut a swathe through us with his broadsword, howling blood, war, and mayhem. I began to long for anyone or anything, in fact, that might bring with it some spirit, some courage, some damn-your-eyes contrariness, some masculine insolence, some testosterone. All right, we "European-American males" had it all our own way for too long. All right, we beat up on blacks and shut women out of our clubs. It was wrong, wrong. We are guilty, guilty. All right, the world of tomorrow, in fact of today, is a woman's world. All right, all right, all right: but... couldn't we at least go down fighting?
For a wild moment I had the impulse to stand up and say something outrageous in the style of Ali G . "'Scuse me, Missus Muddy. Wot wid all dese colored folk and lezzies yous wantin' to give all da good jobs to, isn't you afraid dat yous white race maybe might die out?" I didn't have the nerve, of course. In any case, I was dressed all wrong: business suit, white shirt (good honest polyester!) and tie.
Besides, part of me had been sucked into the thing. I am more than usually susceptible to Stockholm Syndrome at the best of times. A diversity seminar is the worst kind of place for a person with that weakness. The diversity ideology is, as Peter Wood pointed out in his fine book on the subject (which I reviewed here) "a closed loop of thought and experience. Once one enters this loop and accepts the main propositions of diversity, it is difficult to see out of it."
Diversity is, in short, a cult; and I started to feel that if I hung out in that room much longer, I should be in need of some serious deprogramming. In any case, it was time for my own event. I snuck out quietly, leaving the pod people all ululating in happy unison at someone's mention of Larry Summers.
Down Among the Diversitoids
February 22, 2005, 2:54 p.m.
John Derbyshire
National Review Online
Derb and the pod people.
I was to be on a panel discussion at the AAAS annual meeting in Washington DC. I mis-remembered the time, though, thinking the event was at 11 A.M., when in fact it was at noon, so I had an hour to kill. Wandering around the conference center idly, looking for something interesting, I came across a meeting hall with an easel outside saying GENDER AND ETHNIC DIVERSITY IN ACADEMIC SCIENCE. Thinking this might be right up my street, I peered inside. About 30 people were listening to a woman lecturer. The people had their backs to me and were clustered at the far end of the room, facing the speaker. I went in and sat in one of the empty rows at the back.
The woman, whose name I think was Leslie, was 40ish, with very slightly African-American coloring and appearance, and gray hair frizzed out in a large obtuse isosceles triangle like the girl in the Dilbert strip. She was speaking about some court case in Kentucky. A woman college teacher had been denied tenure and sued her employer. Apparently she had lost the case. Leslie was analyzing why. "The biggest difficulty is proving intentional discrimination..." (Especially, I imagine, when it hasn't occurred.) Leslie's entire address was addled with diversity-speak clichés: "respecting differences"..."inclusivity"..."fostering a diverse environment"..."truth to power"...
I lost interest after a minute or so and began to scrutinize the audience. Around half of them were men. These men, who were all white, divided into two subgroups. The larger subgroup consisted of older guys in jackets and ties. The smaller was younger and more obviously campus-resident: beards, ponytails, natural-fiber shirts and sweaters, sneakers or peculiar-shaped shoes, no ties of course. The women were mostly middle-aged or older. Two of them were black — much blacker than Leslie. Several (though neither black woman) had the cropped, truculent look of the modern lesbian. I don't think any of them was wearing makeup.
Leslie finished with her analysis of the court case, which had apparently come up in the context of an audience question. She announced the end of questions and introduced the next speaker.
This was a pleasant-looking fiftyish white woman named JoAnn Moody. Ms. Moody is a big name in the world of diversity, I soon gathered. She has written a book on the subject. This book is highly thought of by diversicrats, to judge from the Amazon reviews.
Ms. Moody was obviously an old hand at the Diversity Seminar game. First she had us all (I had decided to join in here) move the chairs round into a horseshoe arrangement. Then she distributed a printed, single-sheet "scenario" and instructed us to read it.
The "scenario" was a brief, imaginary conversation between three people, all "European-American males," comprising the search committee looking to hire "a director of finance for a large public university in Virginia." The three committee members were a Progressive, a Reactionary, and a neutral Chairman. That was not what Ms. Moody's scenario called them, but that was plainly what was meant to be conveyed by their words. Two candidates for the finance position are discussed. One is Tom, another "European-American male" with a Harvard MBA. The other is Mary, a single black woman with an MBA from "a second-tier school."
Reactionary of course wants to hire the Harvard guy: "He's got to be sound; he's just that type of guy... He reminds me so much of Mervin... Now there was a finance director to hold up as a standard..." Progressive wants to give some special consideration to Mary: "I'd like to make sure that our interview takes at least two hours... It'll take us some time to really feel comfortable with her..." Reactionary disagrees. He thinks all candidates should get precisely equal treatment. "I am gender-blind and color-blind. All I care about is excellence. And we'll know it when we see it..." He then wonders aloud whether Mary, who is single, would be comfortable in the "family-oriented" town.
After we'd all read this little tale — it covered two sides of a standard quarto sheet — Ms. Moody led a discussion. What was going on here? She asked. "Why, it's the Good Ol' Boy network," offered one of the black women, to nods of agreement. "They just want to hire someone like them." Similar comments followed. Ms. Moody played the neutral reflector, skillfully guiding the discussion from one diversi-cliché to the next, occasionally prompting us with the approved word or phrase from the diversi-liturgy. "So," she murmured, after a few exchanges, "we could say that a European-American male from a prestigious school comes with extra points, as it were. Right?" They all nodded. A couple of them jotted down the words in notebooks. Extra points. As it were.
Sitting round in the horseshoe like that, I got a closer look at my fellow participants. The women were, of course, the most enthusiastic. The whole affair, in fact, was running on estrogen. The general atmosphere was that peculiar mix of insistent niceness and angry menace that women are so good at. We are frail, sweet, and sorely oppressed, and you had better be nice to us... OTHERWISE WE WILL SMASH YOU TO PIECES. There was much talk of "sensitivity" and "understanding"; words like "efficiency," "measurement," "standards," came up only as pejoratives. The idea that excellence could be quantified was greeted with unanimous scorn and laughter. A person foolish enough to let slip the word "objectivity" was quickly hooted down by the others. There is no such thing as objectivity! I made a quiet, uncollectable bet with myself that I was the only person in the room with a degree in anything more mathematically rigorous than sociology.
Underneath all the soothing talk about "inclusiveness" and "sensitivity" I began to spot some darker waters flowing. Someone raised Reactionary's comment about being "gender-blind and color-blind." This occasioned a great burst of laughter. "That's what they always say!" "Of course it is!" I am perfectly certain I was the only person in the room thinking the thought: What if it's true? But of course, to these people, it cannot ever be true. As one of the black women said: "Nobody who's lived in the United States can be gender-blind and color-blind." What about me, who has lived only half my life here? Best not ask. One of the fundamental axioms of the diversity ideology is the innate selfishness, cruelty, and dishonesty of white males everywhere. Useless to dispute it. Of course that's what you would say! You're one of them!
The men were more interesting studies than the women. The older guys with jackets and ties looked cowed and didn't say much. The younger ones, the ones with earth shoes and collarless natural-fiber shirts, seemed almost as keen on diversity as the women. What brings a man, particularly a "European-American male," to an affair like this? I wondered. In the case of the older, PC-whipped-looking guys, the answer was probably just the determination to find out where all the "diversity" landmines are planted, so they could make it to retirement and pension in one piece. Good luck to them. But what about these younger ones? They really seemed to believe this stuff. What was driving them? The hope of making some easy pickups from among liberated no-commitment women? I looked round again at the women. No, not that, definitely couldn't be that.
I suppose the most charitable explanation would be misguided patriotism. This is, after all, a diverse nation, and will remain so. Those are facts. We do all have to get along somehow, and it is possible these young male diversicrats believe that by mouthing this vapid cant and submitting to these petty humiliations, they are helping to preserve and improve the nation — a sort of sacrificial masochism. Somehow I couldn't make myself believe this. Masochism, sure, but patriotic? Just looking at those men, it was hard to see any of them flying a Stars and Stripes from his mountain bike. What, then? Just a cynical desire to hold on to a well-paid and undemanding job? No, they didn't seem at all cynical. Very few people are as good at acting as these men would have had to be to be practicing cynicism in that room. They were sincere. They believed the diversity stuff, including all the stuff about how rotten and wicked and malicious they, we, "European-American males," are inside. They really believed it all. They loved Big Sister. I had fallen among pod people.
There was, it seemed to me, something horribly ignoble about these young men. To yield not just meekly but enthusiastically to the stripping away of their privileges, real and imagined; to acquiesce so whole-heartedly in their dispossession, seemed so...unmanly. Not that they looked particularly unmanly in themselves. One of them was large and muscular — though it was the cosmetic muscularity of the gym, not anything intended for actual — ugh! — physical work. (I hasten to add that there were no obvious indications that he might belong to a behavioral minority group.) So why was he jeering along with the others at the mention of "objectivity"? Why did he hoot along with the rest at "gender-blind and color-blind"?
I began to long for Bertrans de Born to ride in on his destrier and cut a swathe through us with his broadsword, howling blood, war, and mayhem. I began to long for anyone or anything, in fact, that might bring with it some spirit, some courage, some damn-your-eyes contrariness, some masculine insolence, some testosterone. All right, we "European-American males" had it all our own way for too long. All right, we beat up on blacks and shut women out of our clubs. It was wrong, wrong. We are guilty, guilty. All right, the world of tomorrow, in fact of today, is a woman's world. All right, all right, all right: but... couldn't we at least go down fighting?
For a wild moment I had the impulse to stand up and say something outrageous in the style of Ali G . "'Scuse me, Missus Muddy. Wot wid all dese colored folk and lezzies yous wantin' to give all da good jobs to, isn't you afraid dat yous white race maybe might die out?" I didn't have the nerve, of course. In any case, I was dressed all wrong: business suit, white shirt (good honest polyester!) and tie.
Besides, part of me had been sucked into the thing. I am more than usually susceptible to Stockholm Syndrome at the best of times. A diversity seminar is the worst kind of place for a person with that weakness. The diversity ideology is, as Peter Wood pointed out in his fine book on the subject (which I reviewed here) "a closed loop of thought and experience. Once one enters this loop and accepts the main propositions of diversity, it is difficult to see out of it."
Diversity is, in short, a cult; and I started to feel that if I hung out in that room much longer, I should be in need of some serious deprogramming. In any case, it was time for my own event. I snuck out quietly, leaving the pod people all ululating in happy unison at someone's mention of Larry Summers.
Friday, February 18, 2005
The Middle East Despots and Their Euro Allies Are Desperate And On The Run.
Things are changing for the better in the Middle East. The loud and desperate tones the antiAmerican Euros and Middle East Despots use to condemn the US, tells us in retrospect the Democratic heat is on high and they are feeling it big time.
Victor Davis Hanson says this in a more eloquent way than I can and he is spot on in his assessment. Read on. To see the original article, click on the title of this post.
Unsung Victories
The effects of American policy throughout the Middle East are gradually being felt.
By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
February 18, 2005
Last week, Mr. Abbas ordered the ruins of Yasir Arafat's Gaza headquarters cleared away. The Israelis had destroyed the building in 2002, and Mr. Arafat had kept the ruins as a kind of memorial. Suddenly, in a day, it was gone." — New York Times, Sunday, February 13, 2005.
In the war against the Islamic fascists and their supporters there have been a number of unheralded victories that have played some role in changing the landscape of the Middle East and eroding the power of the Islamists.
The first bold move was to censure and then ignore Yasser Arafat for his complicity in unleashing suicide bombers, his rampant corruption, and his stifling of Palestinian dissidents. At the time of the change in American policy, other members of the quartet — the Russians, the Europeans, and the U.N. — were aghast. The "moderate" Arab world protested vehemently. Pundits here alleged Texas recklessness and clung to the silly idea of the Arafat/Sharon moral equivalence, as if a freely elected democratic leader, subject to an open press and a free opposition, was the same as a thug who ordered lynchings and jailed or murdered dissidents.
Review press accounts from the summer of 2002: Neither ally nor neutral approved of Bush's act of ostracism and instead warned of disaster. Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller, whose country then held the EU's rotating presidency, lectured that without dialogue with Arafat "Israel could not stop Palestinian violence through force." A circumspect Colin Powell visited the region often to smooth over hurt feelings and in the process to soften Bush's bold action. Dennis Ross, remember, had met with the American-subsidized Arafat almost 500 times, and it was said that the latter visited the Clinton White House more than any other foreign leader — a fact apparently lost on the Palestinian street, which still spontaneously cheered on news of September 11.
Lost in all the controversy was the simple fact that Arafat had come to power through a rigged vote. He proceeded to corrupt the state, censure the media, and let thugs terrorize Palestinian reformers while he systematically looted public monies. His legacy was a ruined economy, murder, and systematic theft.
All knew this; few would say it publicly; none would do anything about it.
Calumny followed as the Israelis unilaterally went on to start their fence, take out the terrorist elite of Hamas, plan to abandon Gaza, and, pace Mr. Moeller, precisely through force crush the intifada. In those bleak months of suicide murdering, Arafat courted the world's sycophantic press as he railed against Sharon from his pathetic bunker at Ramallah.
Then something unexpected happened. Almost imperceptibly in his last two years, he devolved from a feared dictator to a defrocked terrorist to finally an irrelevant functionary. That metamorphosis proved critical as a prerequisite to his demise, as Arafat slowly lost his four-decade-acquired capital of intimidation — critical for any Middle East autocrat — and with it his grip on the popular imagination of the West Bank. In the Middle East a tyrant can look murderous or even psychopathic, but not impotent — and especially not ridiculous.
Thus when he died, far from being sanctified as a mythical strongman, he was almost immediately forgotten and his legacy is currently undergoing a sort of Trotsky-like erasure. Postmortem stories almost immediately spread about absconded funds, tawdry fights broke out over his estate, and, mirabile dictu, a few signs of freedom emerged on the West Bank as elections mysteriously followed and with them renewed discussions of peace. The American ostracism did not ensure that we would see a settlement, only the chance that we could — and that is some progress in the Middle East.
Later in April 2003, the United States withdrew its troops from Saudi Arabia — most pilots and crews in the desert. The ostensible reason for their original deployment — protection from Saddam Hussein's army in Kuwait and monitoring the no-fly zones — was no longer valid. But many strategists thought Americans were still needed in the kingdom to ensure the free flow of the world's oil supply and perhaps to secure the royal family from the very terrorists that many in the clan had subsidized and abetted. Were we "abandoning" an "old and trusted" ally, or finally coming to our senses that the subsidized protection of a near-criminal state had to cease under the changed conditions of the post-Cold War Middle East?In reality, Americans in uniform were subject to humiliating conditions, such as female military personnel being forced to veil when leaving bases, while helping to ready planes to protect a country where a great many were privately happy that 15 of their jihadists had murdered 3,000 Americans. Our presence among the "holy shrines" only played into bin Laden's hands, as his 1998 fatwa revealed. The Saudi state media often blamed the Americans or the Zionists for most of their own self-inflicted pathologies, hoping that such smears and billions in bribes to terrorists and Wahhabi fanatics might deflect popular outrage onto us.
But by withdrawing, the United States took the first steps in a long overdue disengagement from an autocratic dynasty that will either change under a consensual government into a titular and ceremonial royalty — like the British crown heads — or, as in the case of Iran's shah, be driven out by theocratic fundamentalists. Finally, the United States at last is beginning to cut loose from an octopus whose petroleum tentacles have wrapped deeply around banks, lobbyists, defense contractors, and lawyers in Washington and New York, both Republicans and Democrats, oilmen and multiculturalists alike. It is neither a wise nor a moral thing to have much to do with 7,000 royal cousins who have siphoned $700 billion from their country while unemployment there reaches 40 percent and while women, laborers from the third world, Christians, and assorted others are treated as undesirables.
Now in hindsight, few seem to object to the ostracism of Arafat or estrangement from Saudi Arabia. The moral?
As a rule of thumb in matters of the Middle East, be very skeptical of anything that Europe (fearful of terrorists, eager for profits, tired of Jews, scared of their own growing Islamic minorities) and the Arab League (a synonym for the autocratic rule of Sunni Muslim grandees and secular despots) cook up together. If a EU president, a Saudi royal, and a Middle East specialist in the State Department or a professor in an endowed Middle Eastern Studies chair agree that the United States is "woefully naïve," "unnecessarily provocative" or "acting unilaterally," then assume that we are pretty much on the right side of history and promoting democratic reform. "Sobriety" and "working with Arab moderates" is diplo-speak for supporting or abetting an illiberal hierarchy.
There are other key decisions to be made that will go mostly unnoticed by the world's media. We should decide now to distance ourselves from the Mubarak regime, and to be ready for a dynastic squabble with the passing of the present strongman. We have over the years given $50 billion to that "moderate" dictatorship not to attack Israel — as if it would really start a fifth war it would surely lose. It didn't.
But Egypt did unleash venom against us and become the intellectual nexus of Arab anti-Americanism. In the Arab world, a change in American policies to promote democracy was publicized as "anti-Arab" by state-run media — in almost the identical manner that former support for the corrupt status quo was once condemned as "anti-Arab" by Middle East intellectuals. No matter: Despite the short-term lose-lose proposition, no one ever went wrong in the long-term by standing on the side of freedom.
No longer should we remain in thrall to any Arab government that with its left hand rounds up over-the-top terrorists, while with its right gives others less violent a pass to unleash virulent hatred of America. The Rubicon has been crossed in Iraq, and we can no longer watch Americans die for democracy in the Sunni Triangle while giving billions to a regime that kills off consensual government in Cairo. Diplomats can work out the details without sounding either moralistic or naive, smiling and assuring the Egyptians that our friendship will be only strengthened from a new understanding, as the money dries up and we part without acrimony — even as in desperation Mubarak readjusts to his "helpful" role as a third-party interlocutor in Iraq and Palestine.
The American effort to democratize postwar Afghanistan and Iraq has placed a heavy burden on the United States to develop a coherent and consistent policy of supporting reformers throughout the Middle East. We should continue with demands for elections in a Lebanon free of a tyrannical Syria, elevate dissidents in Iran onto the world stage, pressure for change in the Gulf, and say goodbye to Wahhabi Saudi Arabia. If Western elites are really worried about the legitimacy of past elections in Iraq, let them go instead to Lebanon where they can worry first about having any at all, and then later complain about the proper degree of voter participation. The forces of history have been unleashed and we should cease apologizing for the deluge and instead steer the waves in the right direction.
Americans understandably focus on the hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet just as important are the unsung successes that received little praise, and then have a weird tendency to drift off into the collective global amnesia as if they arose from natural, not American-induced, reform.— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.
Victor Davis Hanson says this in a more eloquent way than I can and he is spot on in his assessment. Read on. To see the original article, click on the title of this post.
Unsung Victories
The effects of American policy throughout the Middle East are gradually being felt.
By Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
February 18, 2005
Last week, Mr. Abbas ordered the ruins of Yasir Arafat's Gaza headquarters cleared away. The Israelis had destroyed the building in 2002, and Mr. Arafat had kept the ruins as a kind of memorial. Suddenly, in a day, it was gone." — New York Times, Sunday, February 13, 2005.
In the war against the Islamic fascists and their supporters there have been a number of unheralded victories that have played some role in changing the landscape of the Middle East and eroding the power of the Islamists.
The first bold move was to censure and then ignore Yasser Arafat for his complicity in unleashing suicide bombers, his rampant corruption, and his stifling of Palestinian dissidents. At the time of the change in American policy, other members of the quartet — the Russians, the Europeans, and the U.N. — were aghast. The "moderate" Arab world protested vehemently. Pundits here alleged Texas recklessness and clung to the silly idea of the Arafat/Sharon moral equivalence, as if a freely elected democratic leader, subject to an open press and a free opposition, was the same as a thug who ordered lynchings and jailed or murdered dissidents.
Review press accounts from the summer of 2002: Neither ally nor neutral approved of Bush's act of ostracism and instead warned of disaster. Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller, whose country then held the EU's rotating presidency, lectured that without dialogue with Arafat "Israel could not stop Palestinian violence through force." A circumspect Colin Powell visited the region often to smooth over hurt feelings and in the process to soften Bush's bold action. Dennis Ross, remember, had met with the American-subsidized Arafat almost 500 times, and it was said that the latter visited the Clinton White House more than any other foreign leader — a fact apparently lost on the Palestinian street, which still spontaneously cheered on news of September 11.
Lost in all the controversy was the simple fact that Arafat had come to power through a rigged vote. He proceeded to corrupt the state, censure the media, and let thugs terrorize Palestinian reformers while he systematically looted public monies. His legacy was a ruined economy, murder, and systematic theft.
All knew this; few would say it publicly; none would do anything about it.
Calumny followed as the Israelis unilaterally went on to start their fence, take out the terrorist elite of Hamas, plan to abandon Gaza, and, pace Mr. Moeller, precisely through force crush the intifada. In those bleak months of suicide murdering, Arafat courted the world's sycophantic press as he railed against Sharon from his pathetic bunker at Ramallah.
Then something unexpected happened. Almost imperceptibly in his last two years, he devolved from a feared dictator to a defrocked terrorist to finally an irrelevant functionary. That metamorphosis proved critical as a prerequisite to his demise, as Arafat slowly lost his four-decade-acquired capital of intimidation — critical for any Middle East autocrat — and with it his grip on the popular imagination of the West Bank. In the Middle East a tyrant can look murderous or even psychopathic, but not impotent — and especially not ridiculous.
Thus when he died, far from being sanctified as a mythical strongman, he was almost immediately forgotten and his legacy is currently undergoing a sort of Trotsky-like erasure. Postmortem stories almost immediately spread about absconded funds, tawdry fights broke out over his estate, and, mirabile dictu, a few signs of freedom emerged on the West Bank as elections mysteriously followed and with them renewed discussions of peace. The American ostracism did not ensure that we would see a settlement, only the chance that we could — and that is some progress in the Middle East.
Later in April 2003, the United States withdrew its troops from Saudi Arabia — most pilots and crews in the desert. The ostensible reason for their original deployment — protection from Saddam Hussein's army in Kuwait and monitoring the no-fly zones — was no longer valid. But many strategists thought Americans were still needed in the kingdom to ensure the free flow of the world's oil supply and perhaps to secure the royal family from the very terrorists that many in the clan had subsidized and abetted. Were we "abandoning" an "old and trusted" ally, or finally coming to our senses that the subsidized protection of a near-criminal state had to cease under the changed conditions of the post-Cold War Middle East?In reality, Americans in uniform were subject to humiliating conditions, such as female military personnel being forced to veil when leaving bases, while helping to ready planes to protect a country where a great many were privately happy that 15 of their jihadists had murdered 3,000 Americans. Our presence among the "holy shrines" only played into bin Laden's hands, as his 1998 fatwa revealed. The Saudi state media often blamed the Americans or the Zionists for most of their own self-inflicted pathologies, hoping that such smears and billions in bribes to terrorists and Wahhabi fanatics might deflect popular outrage onto us.
But by withdrawing, the United States took the first steps in a long overdue disengagement from an autocratic dynasty that will either change under a consensual government into a titular and ceremonial royalty — like the British crown heads — or, as in the case of Iran's shah, be driven out by theocratic fundamentalists. Finally, the United States at last is beginning to cut loose from an octopus whose petroleum tentacles have wrapped deeply around banks, lobbyists, defense contractors, and lawyers in Washington and New York, both Republicans and Democrats, oilmen and multiculturalists alike. It is neither a wise nor a moral thing to have much to do with 7,000 royal cousins who have siphoned $700 billion from their country while unemployment there reaches 40 percent and while women, laborers from the third world, Christians, and assorted others are treated as undesirables.
Now in hindsight, few seem to object to the ostracism of Arafat or estrangement from Saudi Arabia. The moral?
As a rule of thumb in matters of the Middle East, be very skeptical of anything that Europe (fearful of terrorists, eager for profits, tired of Jews, scared of their own growing Islamic minorities) and the Arab League (a synonym for the autocratic rule of Sunni Muslim grandees and secular despots) cook up together. If a EU president, a Saudi royal, and a Middle East specialist in the State Department or a professor in an endowed Middle Eastern Studies chair agree that the United States is "woefully naïve," "unnecessarily provocative" or "acting unilaterally," then assume that we are pretty much on the right side of history and promoting democratic reform. "Sobriety" and "working with Arab moderates" is diplo-speak for supporting or abetting an illiberal hierarchy.
There are other key decisions to be made that will go mostly unnoticed by the world's media. We should decide now to distance ourselves from the Mubarak regime, and to be ready for a dynastic squabble with the passing of the present strongman. We have over the years given $50 billion to that "moderate" dictatorship not to attack Israel — as if it would really start a fifth war it would surely lose. It didn't.
But Egypt did unleash venom against us and become the intellectual nexus of Arab anti-Americanism. In the Arab world, a change in American policies to promote democracy was publicized as "anti-Arab" by state-run media — in almost the identical manner that former support for the corrupt status quo was once condemned as "anti-Arab" by Middle East intellectuals. No matter: Despite the short-term lose-lose proposition, no one ever went wrong in the long-term by standing on the side of freedom.
No longer should we remain in thrall to any Arab government that with its left hand rounds up over-the-top terrorists, while with its right gives others less violent a pass to unleash virulent hatred of America. The Rubicon has been crossed in Iraq, and we can no longer watch Americans die for democracy in the Sunni Triangle while giving billions to a regime that kills off consensual government in Cairo. Diplomats can work out the details without sounding either moralistic or naive, smiling and assuring the Egyptians that our friendship will be only strengthened from a new understanding, as the money dries up and we part without acrimony — even as in desperation Mubarak readjusts to his "helpful" role as a third-party interlocutor in Iraq and Palestine.
The American effort to democratize postwar Afghanistan and Iraq has placed a heavy burden on the United States to develop a coherent and consistent policy of supporting reformers throughout the Middle East. We should continue with demands for elections in a Lebanon free of a tyrannical Syria, elevate dissidents in Iran onto the world stage, pressure for change in the Gulf, and say goodbye to Wahhabi Saudi Arabia. If Western elites are really worried about the legitimacy of past elections in Iraq, let them go instead to Lebanon where they can worry first about having any at all, and then later complain about the proper degree of voter participation. The forces of history have been unleashed and we should cease apologizing for the deluge and instead steer the waves in the right direction.
Americans understandably focus on the hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet just as important are the unsung successes that received little praise, and then have a weird tendency to drift off into the collective global amnesia as if they arose from natural, not American-induced, reform.— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.
Friday, February 11, 2005
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice - May I Say One Word In Admiration - WOW!
Get ready for the Shock and Awe Condi is leaving in the wake of her visits abroad. Rich Lowry says it far better than I can. Read on. To see the original article click on the title of this post.
Rice on Tour
“Look, this is America!”
By: Rich Lowry
National Review Online
February 11, 2005
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's just-concluded trip to Europe signals that the United States is back in the diplomacy business in earnest again. Part of the reason is that after four years of Colin Powell, the United States now has a secretary of State in full.
A contradiction President Bush's critics have never confronted is that they spent the past four years lamenting the Bush administration's poor diplomacy at the same time they celebrated its top diplomat. They only turned on Powell when he took the administration's case against Saddam Hussein to the world with his February 2003 speech to the United Nations — never mind this is the sort of thing written in a secretary of State's job description (it wasn't Powell's fault that the prewar intelligence was so grievously flawed).
Rice was helped in Europe by having a wind at her back from Bush's reelection and the Jan. 30 vote in Iraq, and there will surely be difficult days ahead for her (can you say Pyongyang?). But her tenure, following directly on the heel's Powell's, will probably offer a tale of two secretaries of State.
Rice gets things Powell never did. For instance, that leaking to Bob Woodward and other Washington Post reporters is not the secretary of State's chief responsibility. Powell was so obviously the primary source for so many journalistic accounts of intra-administration fights that he often deserved a co-byline. Or that being known as a dissenter from administration policy only undermines your standing and your credibility as a spokesman for the United States.
Powell was the least-traveled secretary of State in 30 years, for a couple of reasons. One was that he wanted to stay home to be better able to engage in the vicious intramural fighting necessary to undermine the president's policy. The other was that he considered travel an inconvenience. That is understandable, even if Powell didn't have to deal, like the rest of us, with security lines and metal-detector wandings. But shouldn't it have been a sign he was better suited to be secretary of the interior?
Rice, in contrast, supports the president's policy and is loyal to him, so she has no need to hang around in Washington to indulge in bureaucratic backstabbing. She is also young and vigorous, a workout obsessive who could beat most other foreign ministers in the world in a 5k race and is up to the rigors of foreign travel.
This is a good thing, because Rice's trip proved the Woody Allen truism that 80 percent of life is showing up. If you are willing to stand before a potentially hostile foreign audience (in Paris, of all places!) and explain U.S. policy, or stand next to a foreign counterpart and take skeptical questions from reporters, your very act of being there shows a level of attention and caring that wins points. And when you are as winsome as Condi Rice, you might actually move some people. Has Gerhard Schroeder yet fully recovered from his Rice-induced swoon?
Indeed, it would take a heart of stone and an utter disregard for symbolism not to be a little moved at the images of Rice shaking hands with foreign dignitaries. Those pictures fairly yelled — "Look, this is America!" The message of her ascension to the top echelon of the U.S. government couldn't have come at a better time. When Bush is trying to reform a part of the world that has the lowest possible regard for women, Rice implicitly says women are as capable as men. When Bush wants Middle Eastern governments to respect pluralism and people of all faith and ethnicities, Rice implicitly says race and creed needn't matter. When Bush is extolling the power of freedom and American ideals, Rice implicitly says liberty and respect for human dignity can triumph over injustice, as they did in her 1950s-era Birmingham, Ala.
She, in other words, is a secretary of State to make us proud. Her trip therefore coupled national pride with diplomatic niceties. What a combination.
Rice on Tour
“Look, this is America!”
By: Rich Lowry
National Review Online
February 11, 2005
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's just-concluded trip to Europe signals that the United States is back in the diplomacy business in earnest again. Part of the reason is that after four years of Colin Powell, the United States now has a secretary of State in full.
A contradiction President Bush's critics have never confronted is that they spent the past four years lamenting the Bush administration's poor diplomacy at the same time they celebrated its top diplomat. They only turned on Powell when he took the administration's case against Saddam Hussein to the world with his February 2003 speech to the United Nations — never mind this is the sort of thing written in a secretary of State's job description (it wasn't Powell's fault that the prewar intelligence was so grievously flawed).
Rice was helped in Europe by having a wind at her back from Bush's reelection and the Jan. 30 vote in Iraq, and there will surely be difficult days ahead for her (can you say Pyongyang?). But her tenure, following directly on the heel's Powell's, will probably offer a tale of two secretaries of State.
Rice gets things Powell never did. For instance, that leaking to Bob Woodward and other Washington Post reporters is not the secretary of State's chief responsibility. Powell was so obviously the primary source for so many journalistic accounts of intra-administration fights that he often deserved a co-byline. Or that being known as a dissenter from administration policy only undermines your standing and your credibility as a spokesman for the United States.
Powell was the least-traveled secretary of State in 30 years, for a couple of reasons. One was that he wanted to stay home to be better able to engage in the vicious intramural fighting necessary to undermine the president's policy. The other was that he considered travel an inconvenience. That is understandable, even if Powell didn't have to deal, like the rest of us, with security lines and metal-detector wandings. But shouldn't it have been a sign he was better suited to be secretary of the interior?
Rice, in contrast, supports the president's policy and is loyal to him, so she has no need to hang around in Washington to indulge in bureaucratic backstabbing. She is also young and vigorous, a workout obsessive who could beat most other foreign ministers in the world in a 5k race and is up to the rigors of foreign travel.
This is a good thing, because Rice's trip proved the Woody Allen truism that 80 percent of life is showing up. If you are willing to stand before a potentially hostile foreign audience (in Paris, of all places!) and explain U.S. policy, or stand next to a foreign counterpart and take skeptical questions from reporters, your very act of being there shows a level of attention and caring that wins points. And when you are as winsome as Condi Rice, you might actually move some people. Has Gerhard Schroeder yet fully recovered from his Rice-induced swoon?
Indeed, it would take a heart of stone and an utter disregard for symbolism not to be a little moved at the images of Rice shaking hands with foreign dignitaries. Those pictures fairly yelled — "Look, this is America!" The message of her ascension to the top echelon of the U.S. government couldn't have come at a better time. When Bush is trying to reform a part of the world that has the lowest possible regard for women, Rice implicitly says women are as capable as men. When Bush wants Middle Eastern governments to respect pluralism and people of all faith and ethnicities, Rice implicitly says race and creed needn't matter. When Bush is extolling the power of freedom and American ideals, Rice implicitly says liberty and respect for human dignity can triumph over injustice, as they did in her 1950s-era Birmingham, Ala.
She, in other words, is a secretary of State to make us proud. Her trip therefore coupled national pride with diplomatic niceties. What a combination.
Thursday, February 10, 2005
The Democrat Minority Leaders Are Preventing Social Security Reform Bipartisanship.
I believe that we have the actual answer as to why Democrats aren't crossing the aisle to support Social Security Reform. Read on. Click on the title of the post to see the original article.
Congressman: Democrat Leadership Threatening 'Retribution' for Dems Who Cooperate with White House
by Allan H. Ryskind
Posted Feb 10, 2005
Human Events Online
Rep. Paul Ryan (R.-Wis.) was asked at a CATO conference in Washington yesterday whether he had persuaded any Democrats to back his plan to rescue Social Security from its financial troubles. Under his legislation (HR 4851), no new taxes would be needed to pay for "transition costs," participation in the new system would be voluntary and individuals would be allowed to divert a portion of their payroll tax into a mutual fund.A questioner from the audience, stressing his own Democratic credentials, said he believed Ryan's plan should attract members of his own party and wondered whether the Wisconsin lawmaker had secured any Democratic sponsors. Ryan said he had been working with friends on the "other side of the aisle" who were favorable toward his solution, but he faced an enormous problem: intense pressure on his colleagues from the minority leadership."We were in planning stages [with friendly Democrats]," said Ryan. But each essentially told him: "I like what you're doing. I like this bill. I think it's the right way to go. But my party leadership will break my back. The retribution that they are promising us is as great as I have ever seen. We can't do it."Ryan said he believed the only thing that can assure passage is an outpouring from America's grassroots.
Congressman: Democrat Leadership Threatening 'Retribution' for Dems Who Cooperate with White House
by Allan H. Ryskind
Posted Feb 10, 2005
Human Events Online
Rep. Paul Ryan (R.-Wis.) was asked at a CATO conference in Washington yesterday whether he had persuaded any Democrats to back his plan to rescue Social Security from its financial troubles. Under his legislation (HR 4851), no new taxes would be needed to pay for "transition costs," participation in the new system would be voluntary and individuals would be allowed to divert a portion of their payroll tax into a mutual fund.A questioner from the audience, stressing his own Democratic credentials, said he believed Ryan's plan should attract members of his own party and wondered whether the Wisconsin lawmaker had secured any Democratic sponsors. Ryan said he had been working with friends on the "other side of the aisle" who were favorable toward his solution, but he faced an enormous problem: intense pressure on his colleagues from the minority leadership."We were in planning stages [with friendly Democrats]," said Ryan. But each essentially told him: "I like what you're doing. I like this bill. I think it's the right way to go. But my party leadership will break my back. The retribution that they are promising us is as great as I have ever seen. We can't do it."Ryan said he believed the only thing that can assure passage is an outpouring from America's grassroots.
AARP Is Obsfucating Social Security Reform
Even though in a few years, I could be considered a member of the AARP, I am not joining ever! This organization is not helping Retired Americans achieve their dream by blocking reform of the system. Read on. To see the original article, click on the title of this post.
AARP’s Agenda
February 10, 2005
AARP distorts the public-opinion data on Social Security.
By Peter Ferrara - National Review Online
AARP released a poll last month purportedly showing that the public agrees with it on a personal-account option for Social Security — opposing the idea by 48 percent to 43 percent. That poll seemed odd, since it was way out of line with polls going back over ten years now consistently showing large majorities supporting personal accounts.
So USA Next, the rapidly growing organization for future-looking, 21st-century seniors, asked nationally renowned pollster John McLaughlin to look into the AARP poll. What he found might remind you a little of what bloggers found when they looked into the supposed documents behind Dan Rather's phony CBS story about President Bush's National Guard service.
First, the survey excluded everyone under age 30. To AARP, they don't exist, even though they made up 17 percent of voters in the last election.Those over 60 constituted 34 percent of the survey sample, even though they represented 24 percent of voters in the last election. Thirty-three percent of the survey's respondents reported that they regularly receive Social Security benefits, yet only 20.7 percent of all adults do.The AARP survey also included 37 percent Democrats and 31 percent Republicans. But that is hopelessly outdated, as voters in the last election were identified as 37 percent Republican and 37 percent Democrat.Another example: AARP asked respondents in the survey whether they agree with the statement, "Social Security should be protected as a guaranteed benefit, and should not be privatized." But Social Security benefits are not guaranteed under current law. Moreover, personal-account reforms would not downgrade the status of Social Security benefits, as the question implies.
USA Next then engaged McLaughlin to do a real survey on personal accounts. McLaughlin found that 55 percent of voters would support allowing workers a free choice to shift some of their payroll taxes into their own personal-savings and investment accounts, with only 27 percent opposed.
McLaughlin also asked voters what they would think if the personal accounts were backed up by a federal guarantee ensuring that workers would all receive at least as much as promised by Social Security under current law. Such a guarantee is included in the bill introduced by Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) and Sen. John Sununu (R., N.H.). In this case, support for the idea soars to 64 percent.
By contrast, voters overwhelmingly oppose by 71 percent to 17 percent eliminating the long-term Social Security deficits by reducing future promised benefits by 30 percent. This is what shifting the basic Social Security benefit formula from wage indexing to price indexing would do. Many think-tank warriors have strongly indicated their great willingness to sacrifice the political prospects of elected Republicans by having them add such price indexing to a personal-account-reform package.
These survey results show the importance of crafting personal-account reforms carefully. When personal accounts are done right, they are overwhelmingly popular. If Democrats fight without reason against such reform, Republicans are only going to gain politically in base Democrat constituency groups such as African Americans, Hispanics, and low- and moderate-income workers.
But adding overwhelmingly unpopular ideas like price indexing to the reform is only going to undermine the popularity of personal accounts, give the Democrats a real basis of opposition, and probably kill the whole reform effort. Those who support price indexing simply don't understand the personal accounts.
If the accounts are large enough, as in the Ryan-Sununu plan, then the accounts will eventually eliminate the long-term deficits of Social Security without any benefit cuts like price indexing to the old Social Security structure. That is because so much of the Social Security benefit obligations are shifted to the accounts that the old program is left in permanent surplus. This has been established by the official scores of various reform plans by the chief actuary of Social Security. It can be accomplished as well by phasing in the large accounts more slowly, though that would delay the achievement of permanent solvency.
Finally, the public should recognize from the analysis of these polls that AARP is a liberal lobbying group, not an honest representative of seniors. Most important, USA Next now offers members all the benefits that AARP does. So unless you support high taxes and big government, as AARP does on every issue, there is no longer reason to belong to AARP.
— Peter Ferrara is a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Innovation and director of the Social Security Project for the Free Enterprise Fund.
* * *
AARP’s Agenda
February 10, 2005
AARP distorts the public-opinion data on Social Security.
By Peter Ferrara - National Review Online
AARP released a poll last month purportedly showing that the public agrees with it on a personal-account option for Social Security — opposing the idea by 48 percent to 43 percent. That poll seemed odd, since it was way out of line with polls going back over ten years now consistently showing large majorities supporting personal accounts.
So USA Next, the rapidly growing organization for future-looking, 21st-century seniors, asked nationally renowned pollster John McLaughlin to look into the AARP poll. What he found might remind you a little of what bloggers found when they looked into the supposed documents behind Dan Rather's phony CBS story about President Bush's National Guard service.
First, the survey excluded everyone under age 30. To AARP, they don't exist, even though they made up 17 percent of voters in the last election.Those over 60 constituted 34 percent of the survey sample, even though they represented 24 percent of voters in the last election. Thirty-three percent of the survey's respondents reported that they regularly receive Social Security benefits, yet only 20.7 percent of all adults do.The AARP survey also included 37 percent Democrats and 31 percent Republicans. But that is hopelessly outdated, as voters in the last election were identified as 37 percent Republican and 37 percent Democrat.Another example: AARP asked respondents in the survey whether they agree with the statement, "Social Security should be protected as a guaranteed benefit, and should not be privatized." But Social Security benefits are not guaranteed under current law. Moreover, personal-account reforms would not downgrade the status of Social Security benefits, as the question implies.
USA Next then engaged McLaughlin to do a real survey on personal accounts. McLaughlin found that 55 percent of voters would support allowing workers a free choice to shift some of their payroll taxes into their own personal-savings and investment accounts, with only 27 percent opposed.
McLaughlin also asked voters what they would think if the personal accounts were backed up by a federal guarantee ensuring that workers would all receive at least as much as promised by Social Security under current law. Such a guarantee is included in the bill introduced by Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) and Sen. John Sununu (R., N.H.). In this case, support for the idea soars to 64 percent.
By contrast, voters overwhelmingly oppose by 71 percent to 17 percent eliminating the long-term Social Security deficits by reducing future promised benefits by 30 percent. This is what shifting the basic Social Security benefit formula from wage indexing to price indexing would do. Many think-tank warriors have strongly indicated their great willingness to sacrifice the political prospects of elected Republicans by having them add such price indexing to a personal-account-reform package.
These survey results show the importance of crafting personal-account reforms carefully. When personal accounts are done right, they are overwhelmingly popular. If Democrats fight without reason against such reform, Republicans are only going to gain politically in base Democrat constituency groups such as African Americans, Hispanics, and low- and moderate-income workers.
But adding overwhelmingly unpopular ideas like price indexing to the reform is only going to undermine the popularity of personal accounts, give the Democrats a real basis of opposition, and probably kill the whole reform effort. Those who support price indexing simply don't understand the personal accounts.
If the accounts are large enough, as in the Ryan-Sununu plan, then the accounts will eventually eliminate the long-term deficits of Social Security without any benefit cuts like price indexing to the old Social Security structure. That is because so much of the Social Security benefit obligations are shifted to the accounts that the old program is left in permanent surplus. This has been established by the official scores of various reform plans by the chief actuary of Social Security. It can be accomplished as well by phasing in the large accounts more slowly, though that would delay the achievement of permanent solvency.
Finally, the public should recognize from the analysis of these polls that AARP is a liberal lobbying group, not an honest representative of seniors. Most important, USA Next now offers members all the benefits that AARP does. So unless you support high taxes and big government, as AARP does on every issue, there is no longer reason to belong to AARP.
— Peter Ferrara is a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Innovation and director of the Social Security Project for the Free Enterprise Fund.
* * *
Friday, February 04, 2005
How Wrong Can You Be And Still Think You're Right?
Victor David Hanson gets it right again. The Liberal Elites are so wrong about everything in Iraq yet they still deny the proof and claim to be right??!! Read on. To see the original article click on the title of the post. Warning - Opinion and humor ahead!
The Global Throng
Why the world’s elites gnash their teeth.
Victor David Hanson - National Review Online
Do we even remember "all that" now? The lunacy that appeared after 9/11 that asked us to look for the "root causes" to explain why America may have "provoked" spoiled mama's boys like bin Laden and Mohammed Atta to murder Americans at work? Do we recall the successive litany of "you cannot win in Afghanistan/you cannot reconstruct such a mess/you cannot jumpstart democracy there"? And do we have memory still of "Sharon the war criminal," and "the apartheid wall," and, of course, "Jeningrad," the supposed Israeli-engineered Stalingrad — or was it really Leningrad? Or try to remember Arafat in his Ramallah bunker talking to international groupies who flew in to hear the old killer's jumbled mishmash about George Bush, the meanie who had ostracized him.
Then we were told that if we dared invade the ancient caliphate, Saddam would kill thousands and exile millions more. And when he was captured in a cesspool, the invective continued during the hard reconstruction that oil, Halliburton, the Jews, the neocons, Richard Perle, and other likely suspects had suckered us into a "quagmire" or was it now "Vietnam redux"? And recall that in response we were supposed to flee, or was it to trisect Iraq? The elections, remember, would not work — or were held too soon or too late. And give the old minotaur Senator Kennedy his due, as he lumbered out on the eve of the Iraqi voting to hector about its failure and call for withdrawal — one last hurrah that might yet rescue the cherished myth that the United States had created another Vietnam and needed his sort of deliverance.
And then there was the parade of heroes who were media upstarts of the hour — the brilliant Hans Blixes, Joe Wilsons, Anonymouses, and Richard Clarkes — who came, wrote their books, did their fawning interviews on 60 Minutes, Nightline, and Larry King, and then faded to become footnotes to our collective pessimism.
Do not dare forget our Hollywood elite. At some point since 9/11, Michael Moore, Sean Penn, Meryl Streep, Jessica Lange, Whoopi Goldberg, and a host of others have lectured the world that their America is either misled, stupid, evil, or insane, bereft of the wisdom of Hollywood's legions of college drop-outs, recovering bad boys, and self-praised autodidacts.
Remember the twisted logic of the global throng as well: Anyone who quit the CIA was a genius in his renegade prognostication; anyone who stayed was a toady who botched the war. Three- and four-star generals who went on television or ran for office were principled dissidents who "told the truth"; officers in the field who kept quiet and saved Afghanistan and Iraq were "muzzled" careerists. Families of the 9/11 victims who publicly trashed George Bush offered the nation "grassroots" cries of the heart; the far greater number who supported the war on terror were perhaps "warped" by their grief.
There were always the untold "minor" embarrassments that we were to ignore as the slight slips of the "good" people — small details like the multibillion-dollar Oil-for-Food scandal that came to light due to the reporting of a single brave maverick, Claudia Rosett, or Rathergate, disclosed by "pajama"-clad bloggers without journalism degrees from Columbia, sojourns at the Kennedy School, or internships with the Washington Post. To put it into Animal Farm speak: elite New York Times, CBS News, and PBS good; populist bloggers, talk-radio, and cable news bad.
In place of Harry Truman and JFK we got John Kerry calling the once-maimed Prime Minister Allawi a "puppet," Senator Murray praising bin Laden's social-welfare work, Senator Boxer calling Secretary of State Rice a veritable liar for agreeing with the various casus belli that Boxer's own Senate colleagues had themselves passed in October 2002. And for emotional and financial support, the Democratic insiders turned to George Soros and Michael Moore, who assured them that their president was either Hitlerian, a dunce, or a deserter.
Then there was our media's hysteria: Donald Rumsfeld should be sacked in the midst of war; Abu Ghraib was the moral equivalent of everything from Saddam's gulag to the Holocaust; the U.S. military purportedly tried to kill reporters; and always the unwillingness or inability to condemn the beheaders, fascists, and suicide murderers, who sought to destroy any shred of liberalism. Meanwhile, the isolation of a corrupt Arafat, the withdrawal of 10,000 Americans from a Wahhabi theocracy, the transformation of the world's far-right monstrosities into reformed democracies, and the pull-back of some troops from Germany and the DMZ went unnoticed.
What explains this automatic censure of the United States, Israel, and to a lesser extent the Anglo-democracies of the United Kingdom and Australia? Westernization, coupled with globalization, has created an affluent and leisured elite that now gravitates to universities, the media, bureaucracies, and world organizations, all places where wealth is not created, but analyzed, critiqued, and lavishly spent.
Thus we now expect that the New York Times, Harper's, Le Monde, U.N. functionaries who call us "stingy," French diplomats, American writers and actors will all (1) live a pretty privileged life; (2) in recompense "feel" pretty worried and guilty about it; (3) somehow connect their unease over their comfort with a pathology of the world's hyperpower, the United States; and (4) thus be willing to risk their elite status, power, or wealth by very brave acts such as writing anguished essays, giving pained interviews, issuing apologetic communiqués, braving the rails to Davos, and barking off-the-cuff furious remarks about their angst over themes (1) through (3) above. What a sad contrast they make with far better Iraqis dancing in the street to celebrate their voting.
There is something else to this shrillness of the global throng besides the obvious fact of hypocrisy — that very few of the world's Westernized cynical echelon ever move to the ghetto to tutor those they champion in the abstract, reside in central Africa to feed the poor, give up tenure to ensure employment for the exploited lecturer, or pass on the Washington or New York A-list party to eat in the lunch hall with the unwashed. Davos after all, is not quite central Bolivia or the Sudan.
First, there is a tremendous sense of impotence. Somehow sharp looks alone, clever repartee, long lists of books read and articles cited, or global travel do not automatically result in commensurate power. So what exactly is wrong with these stupid people of Nebraska who would elect a dense, Christian-like George Bush when a Gore Vidal, George Soros, Ben Affleck, Bruce Springsteen, or Ted Kennedy warned them not to?
If the American Left is furious over the loss of most of the nation's governorships and legislatures, the U.S. House, the Senate, the presidency, and soon the Supreme Court, the Europeans themselves are furious over America's power — as if Red America is to Blue America as America is to Europe itself. Thus how can a mongrel culture of Taco Bell, Bud Light, and Desperate Housewives project such military and political influence abroad when the soft, subtle triangulation of far more cultured diplomats and sophisticated intellectuals from France, Germany, and Scandinavia is ignored by thugs from Iran, North Korea, and most of the Middle East?
Why would the world listen to a stumbling George Bush when it could be mesmerized by a poet, biographer, aristocrat, and metrosexual of the caliber of a Monsieur Dominique de Villepin? Why praise brave Iraqis lining up to vote, while at the same hour the defeated John Kerry somberly intones on Tim Russert's show that he really did go into Cambodia to supply arms to the mass-murdering Khmer Rouge — a statement that either cannot be true or is almost an admission of being a party to crimes against humanity if it is.
Second, political powerlessness follows from ideological exhaustion. Communism and Marxism are dead. Stalin and Mao killed over 80 million and did not make omelets despite the broken eggs. Castro and North Korea are not classless utopias but thugocracies run by megalomaniac dictators who the world prays will die any minute. The global Left knows that the Cold War is over and was lost by the Left, and that Eastern Europeans and Central Americans probably cherish the memory of a Ronald Reagan far more than that of a Francois Mitterrand or Willy Brandt.
But it is still more disheartening than that. In the 1960s and 1970s we were told that free-market America was becoming an anachronism. Remember Japan, Inc., whose amalgam of "Asian Values" and Western capitalism presaged the decline of the United States? Europeanists still assured us that a 35-hour work week, cradle-to-grave entitlement, and secularism were to be the only workable Western paradigms — before high unemployment, low growth, stagnant worker productivity, unassimilated minorities, declining birthrates, and disarmament suggested that just maybe something is going very wrong in a continent that is not so eager for either God or children.
Perhaps the result of this frustration is that European intellectuals damn the United States for action in Iraq, but lament that they could do nothing in the Balkans. Democrats at home talk of the need for idealism abroad, but fear the dirty road of war that sometimes is part of that bargain — thus the retreat into "democracy is good, BUT..." So here we have the global throng that focuses on one purported American crime to the next, as it simmers in the luxury of its privilege, education, and sophistication — and exhibits little power, new ideas, intellectual seriousness, or relevance.
In this context, the Iraqi elections were surely poorly attended, or illegitimate, or ruined by violence, or irrelevant, or staged by America — or almost anything other than a result of a brave, very risky, and costly effort by the United States military to destroy a fascist regime and offer something better in its place.
Yet as Yeehah! Howard Dean takes over the Democratic party, as Kojo Annan's dad limps to the end of his tenure, and as a Saddam-trading Jacques Chirac talks grandly of global airfare taxes to help the poor, they should all ask themselves whether a weary public is listening any longer to the hyped and canned stories of their own courage and brilliance.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.
The Global Throng
Why the world’s elites gnash their teeth.
Victor David Hanson - National Review Online
Do we even remember "all that" now? The lunacy that appeared after 9/11 that asked us to look for the "root causes" to explain why America may have "provoked" spoiled mama's boys like bin Laden and Mohammed Atta to murder Americans at work? Do we recall the successive litany of "you cannot win in Afghanistan/you cannot reconstruct such a mess/you cannot jumpstart democracy there"? And do we have memory still of "Sharon the war criminal," and "the apartheid wall," and, of course, "Jeningrad," the supposed Israeli-engineered Stalingrad — or was it really Leningrad? Or try to remember Arafat in his Ramallah bunker talking to international groupies who flew in to hear the old killer's jumbled mishmash about George Bush, the meanie who had ostracized him.
Then we were told that if we dared invade the ancient caliphate, Saddam would kill thousands and exile millions more. And when he was captured in a cesspool, the invective continued during the hard reconstruction that oil, Halliburton, the Jews, the neocons, Richard Perle, and other likely suspects had suckered us into a "quagmire" or was it now "Vietnam redux"? And recall that in response we were supposed to flee, or was it to trisect Iraq? The elections, remember, would not work — or were held too soon or too late. And give the old minotaur Senator Kennedy his due, as he lumbered out on the eve of the Iraqi voting to hector about its failure and call for withdrawal — one last hurrah that might yet rescue the cherished myth that the United States had created another Vietnam and needed his sort of deliverance.
And then there was the parade of heroes who were media upstarts of the hour — the brilliant Hans Blixes, Joe Wilsons, Anonymouses, and Richard Clarkes — who came, wrote their books, did their fawning interviews on 60 Minutes, Nightline, and Larry King, and then faded to become footnotes to our collective pessimism.
Do not dare forget our Hollywood elite. At some point since 9/11, Michael Moore, Sean Penn, Meryl Streep, Jessica Lange, Whoopi Goldberg, and a host of others have lectured the world that their America is either misled, stupid, evil, or insane, bereft of the wisdom of Hollywood's legions of college drop-outs, recovering bad boys, and self-praised autodidacts.
Remember the twisted logic of the global throng as well: Anyone who quit the CIA was a genius in his renegade prognostication; anyone who stayed was a toady who botched the war. Three- and four-star generals who went on television or ran for office were principled dissidents who "told the truth"; officers in the field who kept quiet and saved Afghanistan and Iraq were "muzzled" careerists. Families of the 9/11 victims who publicly trashed George Bush offered the nation "grassroots" cries of the heart; the far greater number who supported the war on terror were perhaps "warped" by their grief.
There were always the untold "minor" embarrassments that we were to ignore as the slight slips of the "good" people — small details like the multibillion-dollar Oil-for-Food scandal that came to light due to the reporting of a single brave maverick, Claudia Rosett, or Rathergate, disclosed by "pajama"-clad bloggers without journalism degrees from Columbia, sojourns at the Kennedy School, or internships with the Washington Post. To put it into Animal Farm speak: elite New York Times, CBS News, and PBS good; populist bloggers, talk-radio, and cable news bad.
In place of Harry Truman and JFK we got John Kerry calling the once-maimed Prime Minister Allawi a "puppet," Senator Murray praising bin Laden's social-welfare work, Senator Boxer calling Secretary of State Rice a veritable liar for agreeing with the various casus belli that Boxer's own Senate colleagues had themselves passed in October 2002. And for emotional and financial support, the Democratic insiders turned to George Soros and Michael Moore, who assured them that their president was either Hitlerian, a dunce, or a deserter.
Then there was our media's hysteria: Donald Rumsfeld should be sacked in the midst of war; Abu Ghraib was the moral equivalent of everything from Saddam's gulag to the Holocaust; the U.S. military purportedly tried to kill reporters; and always the unwillingness or inability to condemn the beheaders, fascists, and suicide murderers, who sought to destroy any shred of liberalism. Meanwhile, the isolation of a corrupt Arafat, the withdrawal of 10,000 Americans from a Wahhabi theocracy, the transformation of the world's far-right monstrosities into reformed democracies, and the pull-back of some troops from Germany and the DMZ went unnoticed.
What explains this automatic censure of the United States, Israel, and to a lesser extent the Anglo-democracies of the United Kingdom and Australia? Westernization, coupled with globalization, has created an affluent and leisured elite that now gravitates to universities, the media, bureaucracies, and world organizations, all places where wealth is not created, but analyzed, critiqued, and lavishly spent.
Thus we now expect that the New York Times, Harper's, Le Monde, U.N. functionaries who call us "stingy," French diplomats, American writers and actors will all (1) live a pretty privileged life; (2) in recompense "feel" pretty worried and guilty about it; (3) somehow connect their unease over their comfort with a pathology of the world's hyperpower, the United States; and (4) thus be willing to risk their elite status, power, or wealth by very brave acts such as writing anguished essays, giving pained interviews, issuing apologetic communiqués, braving the rails to Davos, and barking off-the-cuff furious remarks about their angst over themes (1) through (3) above. What a sad contrast they make with far better Iraqis dancing in the street to celebrate their voting.
There is something else to this shrillness of the global throng besides the obvious fact of hypocrisy — that very few of the world's Westernized cynical echelon ever move to the ghetto to tutor those they champion in the abstract, reside in central Africa to feed the poor, give up tenure to ensure employment for the exploited lecturer, or pass on the Washington or New York A-list party to eat in the lunch hall with the unwashed. Davos after all, is not quite central Bolivia or the Sudan.
First, there is a tremendous sense of impotence. Somehow sharp looks alone, clever repartee, long lists of books read and articles cited, or global travel do not automatically result in commensurate power. So what exactly is wrong with these stupid people of Nebraska who would elect a dense, Christian-like George Bush when a Gore Vidal, George Soros, Ben Affleck, Bruce Springsteen, or Ted Kennedy warned them not to?
If the American Left is furious over the loss of most of the nation's governorships and legislatures, the U.S. House, the Senate, the presidency, and soon the Supreme Court, the Europeans themselves are furious over America's power — as if Red America is to Blue America as America is to Europe itself. Thus how can a mongrel culture of Taco Bell, Bud Light, and Desperate Housewives project such military and political influence abroad when the soft, subtle triangulation of far more cultured diplomats and sophisticated intellectuals from France, Germany, and Scandinavia is ignored by thugs from Iran, North Korea, and most of the Middle East?
Why would the world listen to a stumbling George Bush when it could be mesmerized by a poet, biographer, aristocrat, and metrosexual of the caliber of a Monsieur Dominique de Villepin? Why praise brave Iraqis lining up to vote, while at the same hour the defeated John Kerry somberly intones on Tim Russert's show that he really did go into Cambodia to supply arms to the mass-murdering Khmer Rouge — a statement that either cannot be true or is almost an admission of being a party to crimes against humanity if it is.
Second, political powerlessness follows from ideological exhaustion. Communism and Marxism are dead. Stalin and Mao killed over 80 million and did not make omelets despite the broken eggs. Castro and North Korea are not classless utopias but thugocracies run by megalomaniac dictators who the world prays will die any minute. The global Left knows that the Cold War is over and was lost by the Left, and that Eastern Europeans and Central Americans probably cherish the memory of a Ronald Reagan far more than that of a Francois Mitterrand or Willy Brandt.
But it is still more disheartening than that. In the 1960s and 1970s we were told that free-market America was becoming an anachronism. Remember Japan, Inc., whose amalgam of "Asian Values" and Western capitalism presaged the decline of the United States? Europeanists still assured us that a 35-hour work week, cradle-to-grave entitlement, and secularism were to be the only workable Western paradigms — before high unemployment, low growth, stagnant worker productivity, unassimilated minorities, declining birthrates, and disarmament suggested that just maybe something is going very wrong in a continent that is not so eager for either God or children.
Perhaps the result of this frustration is that European intellectuals damn the United States for action in Iraq, but lament that they could do nothing in the Balkans. Democrats at home talk of the need for idealism abroad, but fear the dirty road of war that sometimes is part of that bargain — thus the retreat into "democracy is good, BUT..." So here we have the global throng that focuses on one purported American crime to the next, as it simmers in the luxury of its privilege, education, and sophistication — and exhibits little power, new ideas, intellectual seriousness, or relevance.
In this context, the Iraqi elections were surely poorly attended, or illegitimate, or ruined by violence, or irrelevant, or staged by America — or almost anything other than a result of a brave, very risky, and costly effort by the United States military to destroy a fascist regime and offer something better in its place.
Yet as Yeehah! Howard Dean takes over the Democratic party, as Kojo Annan's dad limps to the end of his tenure, and as a Saddam-trading Jacques Chirac talks grandly of global airfare taxes to help the poor, they should all ask themselves whether a weary public is listening any longer to the hyped and canned stories of their own courage and brilliance.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.
Medication Versus Recreation With Drugs
The following article details the two legal recreational drugs and their effect on our society. It also can be used to show how ridiculous the DEA's position is on the Drug Inquisition. Notice that I don't call it the "War On Drugs" because it isn't. It is a War on American Citizens by the U.S. Government because they recreate with their drug of choice which doesn't happen to be one of the Government sanctioned recreational drugs, Alcohol or Nicotine. The DEA would have you believe the bald faced lie that illegal Drugs are the more dangerous. This flys in the face of the staggering statistics that show Nicotine and Alcohol are ten to 100 times more lethal per year by just calculating the deaths attributed to their consumption. All illegal drugs combined are responsible for approximately 4,000 to 10,000 deaths per year while perscription drugs, alcohol and nicotine are responsible for over 400,000 deaths per year in the U.S. alone. Which would you consider more dangerous? Illegal drugs are not all bad as well. As example, Marijuana is very useful for the treatment of many medical conditions encountered by Chemotherapy patients and others with terminal illnesses and is responsible for NO deaths on record yet the DEA labels this beneficial natural occurring substance the "most dangerous illegal drug". There are also approximately 20,000,000 adults in this country recreating with this drug without permanent ill effects. Organizations like the DP Alliance, NORML and Change In Direction combat this illogical thinking and have had some recent sucesses in stopping the DEA from purveying this false and misleading propaganda. Read on. To see the original article, click on the title of this post.
Alcohol abuse kills as many people around the world as tobacco and high blood pressure, a new study shows.
And researchers charge that popular alcohol control measures, such as school-based abstinence programs, have proven to be ineffective.
“These programs may reduce drinking in the short-term, but within two or three years they have no discernible effect,” study researcher Robin Room, PhD, tells WebMD. “This has been shown in study after study.”
Getting Drunk Not Heart Healthy
The news about alcohol and health has been largely favorable in recent years, with an increasing number of studies touting the health benefits of light to moderate alcohol consumption. But the new research sheds light on the downside of drinking.
Room and colleagues report that alcohol is responsible for 4 percent of worldwide disease, contributing to more than 60 different medical conditions. Tobacco is responsible for 4.1 percent and high blood pressure, 4.4 percent.
Moderate drinking, up to two drinks a day for men and one drink a day for women, is now widely believed to help protect against heart disease. But binge drinking has the opposite effect.
“If you get drunk on the weekends you are not helping your heart,” Room says.
Room added that most people probably drink more than they need to reap alcohol’s health benefits.
“One of the special things about alcohol is that you can be both benefiting from it and harmed by it, or harming others, at the same time,” he says. “The same drink can have both effects.”
75,000 Deaths in U.S.
CDC alcohol researcher Robert Brewer, MD, says binge drinking was responsible for more than half of the 75,000 deaths due to excessive drinking in the United States in 2001.
Binge drinking is commonly defined as five or more drinks at one sitting for a man and four for a woman.
In a study published last September, Brewer and CDC colleagues reported that three-quarters of those who died from alcohol abuse were male and 6% were under the age of 21.
Figures from the World Health Organization suggest that alcohol abuse is responsible for roughly 1.8 million deaths annually worldwide.
Brewer tells WebMD that binge drinking is on the rise in the United States, increasing by almost 30 percent since the early 1990s.
“(The CDC) is not in the business of telling people that it is wrong to drink,” he says. “Our focus is on excessive drinking, and our study affirmed that excessive drinking is a very serious public health problem.”
Getting Drunk Cheaper Than Movie
In the Lancet review, Room and colleagues outlined several measures that do seem to help curb alcohol abuse, including strengthening drunken driving laws and increasing taxes on alcohol. Room researches the public health impact of substance abuse at Sweden’s Stockholm University.
The problem of excessive drinking is of particular concern on college campuses. Henry Wechsler, PhD, conducts studies at the Harvard School of Public Health about drinking among college students.
Wechsler blames the alcohol industry for targeting young drinkers and fighting legislation that could help reduce alcohol abuse. He says ease of availability and price are major factors in the culture of college drinking.
“It is cheaper to get drunk on the weekend than to go to a movie,” he says. “And around college campuses most bars and liquor stores have price-based specials.”
The promotions have gone beyond the traditional two-for-one drinks and "happy hour." Wechsler says they may now involve supersizing alcoholic beverages and single price "all-you-can-drink" specials.By Salynn Boyles, reviewed by Michael W. Smith, MD
Alcohol abuse kills as many people around the world as tobacco and high blood pressure, a new study shows.
And researchers charge that popular alcohol control measures, such as school-based abstinence programs, have proven to be ineffective.
“These programs may reduce drinking in the short-term, but within two or three years they have no discernible effect,” study researcher Robin Room, PhD, tells WebMD. “This has been shown in study after study.”
Getting Drunk Not Heart Healthy
The news about alcohol and health has been largely favorable in recent years, with an increasing number of studies touting the health benefits of light to moderate alcohol consumption. But the new research sheds light on the downside of drinking.
Room and colleagues report that alcohol is responsible for 4 percent of worldwide disease, contributing to more than 60 different medical conditions. Tobacco is responsible for 4.1 percent and high blood pressure, 4.4 percent.
Moderate drinking, up to two drinks a day for men and one drink a day for women, is now widely believed to help protect against heart disease. But binge drinking has the opposite effect.
“If you get drunk on the weekends you are not helping your heart,” Room says.
Room added that most people probably drink more than they need to reap alcohol’s health benefits.
“One of the special things about alcohol is that you can be both benefiting from it and harmed by it, or harming others, at the same time,” he says. “The same drink can have both effects.”
75,000 Deaths in U.S.
CDC alcohol researcher Robert Brewer, MD, says binge drinking was responsible for more than half of the 75,000 deaths due to excessive drinking in the United States in 2001.
Binge drinking is commonly defined as five or more drinks at one sitting for a man and four for a woman.
In a study published last September, Brewer and CDC colleagues reported that three-quarters of those who died from alcohol abuse were male and 6% were under the age of 21.
Figures from the World Health Organization suggest that alcohol abuse is responsible for roughly 1.8 million deaths annually worldwide.
Brewer tells WebMD that binge drinking is on the rise in the United States, increasing by almost 30 percent since the early 1990s.
“(The CDC) is not in the business of telling people that it is wrong to drink,” he says. “Our focus is on excessive drinking, and our study affirmed that excessive drinking is a very serious public health problem.”
Getting Drunk Cheaper Than Movie
In the Lancet review, Room and colleagues outlined several measures that do seem to help curb alcohol abuse, including strengthening drunken driving laws and increasing taxes on alcohol. Room researches the public health impact of substance abuse at Sweden’s Stockholm University.
The problem of excessive drinking is of particular concern on college campuses. Henry Wechsler, PhD, conducts studies at the Harvard School of Public Health about drinking among college students.
Wechsler blames the alcohol industry for targeting young drinkers and fighting legislation that could help reduce alcohol abuse. He says ease of availability and price are major factors in the culture of college drinking.
“It is cheaper to get drunk on the weekend than to go to a movie,” he says. “And around college campuses most bars and liquor stores have price-based specials.”
The promotions have gone beyond the traditional two-for-one drinks and "happy hour." Wechsler says they may now involve supersizing alcoholic beverages and single price "all-you-can-drink" specials.By Salynn Boyles, reviewed by Michael W. Smith, MD
I Found An Unbiased Assessment Of The Social Security Reform Plan
The clip that follows is an excerpt of some of the great levelheaded assessment done by CATO. To visit the CATO Social Security Reform site click on the title of this post.
Crisis for the “There Is No Crisis” Crowd
The anti-reform coalition has made a mantra out of the phrase “there is no crisis” when it comes to Social Security. They have even constructed a blog dedicated exclusively to convincing the world there is no Social Security crisis called “There Is No Crisis.”
But it appears the anti-ownership crowd has miscalculated in making this their principal talking point. According to a Cato Institute survey conducted by Zogby International, only 6.7% of all Americans agree with this sentiment. Meanwhile, a majority of Americans (52.2%) believe Social Security “is facing serious problems" and requires "major changes." Moreover, a plurality of older Americans (37.8%) feel Social Security is facing serious problems and requires major changes. You can read the entire poll by clicking here.
In addition to being untrue, the “there is no crisis” argument against Social Security choice is simply -- literally -- unbelievable.
Cato/Zogby Poll: Majority Backs Individual Accounts for Social Security
A majority of Americans agree that younger workers should be allowed to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in individual accounts, according to a new poll conducted by Zogby International for the Cato Institute. [Read More]
Crisis for the “There Is No Crisis” Crowd
The anti-reform coalition has made a mantra out of the phrase “there is no crisis” when it comes to Social Security. They have even constructed a blog dedicated exclusively to convincing the world there is no Social Security crisis called “There Is No Crisis.”
But it appears the anti-ownership crowd has miscalculated in making this their principal talking point. According to a Cato Institute survey conducted by Zogby International, only 6.7% of all Americans agree with this sentiment. Meanwhile, a majority of Americans (52.2%) believe Social Security “is facing serious problems" and requires "major changes." Moreover, a plurality of older Americans (37.8%) feel Social Security is facing serious problems and requires major changes. You can read the entire poll by clicking here.
In addition to being untrue, the “there is no crisis” argument against Social Security choice is simply -- literally -- unbelievable.
Cato/Zogby Poll: Majority Backs Individual Accounts for Social Security
A majority of Americans agree that younger workers should be allowed to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in individual accounts, according to a new poll conducted by Zogby International for the Cato Institute. [Read More]
Tough Guys Don't Mince Words When It Comes To Destroying Terrorists.
I know many out there are going to be shocked by this Marine's comments. Remember that this guy is a war hardened soldier that is tougher than nails and talks that way. I for one think his comment is great because it is the absolute truth for him and his troops. I really don't care if it 'offends' those who don't have the guts to put themselves at risk in front of an enemy that uses any dirty tactic they can to kill innocents and coalition soldiers. It's about time those scum learned just how tough American soldiers can be in the face of terrorism and the oppression of women and innocent. Also the Marines are truly 'Devil Dogs' when it comes to finding, killing and capturing Terrorists. They have a burning yearning to avenge all coalition soldiers, free Afghan and Iraq government officials as well as innocent civilians that have been the victims of this scourge. This is an excerpt of the original article. Read on. If you want to see the original article click on the title of this post. Also the article is a little misleading as the General never refers to law abiding Afghans as he is talking about the Taliban, Iraq Dead Enders and al Qaeda terrorists. The writer spins the General's words to infer that meaning. Another example of Media Spin! Even though the article is from Fox News it was written by an AP reporter that is famous for slanting news toward the negative to please the liberal and leftist Democrat class.
Marine General's Comments Stir Outrage
Friday, February 04, 2005
WASHINGTON — A decorated Marine Corps general said, "It's fun to shoot some people" and poked fun at the manhood of Afghans as he described the wars U.S. troops are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
His boss, the commandant of the Marine Corps (search), said Thursday that the comments reflected "the unfortunate and harsh realities of war" but that the general has been asked to watch his words in public.
Lt. Gen. James Mattis (search), a career infantry officer who is now in charge of developing better ways to train and equip Marines, made the comments Tuesday while speaking to a forum in San Diego.
According to an audio recording, he said, "Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. ... It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right up front with you, I like brawling."
He added, "You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."
Marine General's Comments Stir Outrage
Friday, February 04, 2005
WASHINGTON — A decorated Marine Corps general said, "It's fun to shoot some people" and poked fun at the manhood of Afghans as he described the wars U.S. troops are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
His boss, the commandant of the Marine Corps (search), said Thursday that the comments reflected "the unfortunate and harsh realities of war" but that the general has been asked to watch his words in public.
Lt. Gen. James Mattis (search), a career infantry officer who is now in charge of developing better ways to train and equip Marines, made the comments Tuesday while speaking to a forum in San Diego.
According to an audio recording, he said, "Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. ... It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right up front with you, I like brawling."
He added, "You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."
Thursday, February 03, 2005
The Purple Finger Salute To Iraqi Freedom
If someone disses the Iraq election, remind them that millions of Iraqi's are giving that attitude the purple finger salute. I am dyeing my right index finger purple to the first knuckle in solidarity with the free Iraqi's that gave terrorism and the Islamofascists the purple finger salute on Januay 30th. How about you?
Social Security Reform And Private Accounts - An Informed Opinion
Although I remain skeptical, I am listening intently to all sides and I will not decide anything on this topic until I see all of the information in an unbiased fashion. This is an interesting take on the proposed private accounts that is part of President Bush's Social Security Reform Plan. Read on. If you would like to see the original article, click on the title.
Take the Krugman 6.5% Challenge
It’s dirty work (not really), but someone has to do it.
Paul Krugman and Dean Baker have a challenge for those of us who advocate Social Security reform with personal accounts.
Krugman, of course, is America’s most dangerous liberal pundit — but maybe you’ve never heard of Baker. He’s co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a leftist think-tank funded by George Soros. Krugman and Baker were recently cited as “excellent sources” on Social Security reform by the Communist Party USA.
Here’s the challenge, from Krugman’s New York Times column Tuesday:
Mr. Baker has devised a test he calls “no economist left behind”: he challenges economists to make a projection of economic growth, dividends and capital gains that will yield a 6.5 percent rate of return over 75 years. Not one economist who supports privatization has been willing to take the test.
But the offer still stands. Ladies and gentlemen, would you care to explain your position?
Krugman is using Baker’s test to try to suggest that stocks can’t possibly have the kind of returns in the future that they’ve had in the past — so Social Security reform with personal accounts that could invest in stocks is bound to fail. And he’s suggesting that Baker’s brilliance has stunned the opponents of reform into silence. Hardly — it’s just that none of us would have bothered to pay attention to someone like Baker if Krugman hadn’t elevated him to the pages of America’s so-called “newspaper of record.”
It’s dirty work, but someone has to do it.
Actually, it isn’t especially difficult. But to make the exercise interesting, I’ll limit myself to data Krugman himself offers in his very same Times column. Stand back, everybody — here goes.
Krugman states that the return on stocks from dividends and share repurchases is 3 percent. He states that “profits grow at the same rate as the economy,” and notes that “economic growth ... averaged 3.4 percent per year over the last 75 years.” It’s simple arithmetic that if dividends grow at the rate of earnings growth, and earnings grow at the rate of GDP growth, and if the dividend and repurchase yield stays at 3 percent, then stock prices must rise each year by 3.4 percent.
That’s 3 percent per year in yield plus 3.4 percent in capital gains. Sounds like a 6.4 percent return, to me. Just a hair shy of the 6.5 percent Krugman and Baker asked for, but I am still going to declare victory.
Even without the arithmetic, there’s nothing so unusual about thinking that stocks could return something like 6.5 percent, after inflation, over the next 75 years. After all, they’ve returned exactly that over the last 75 years, according to Ibbotson Associates. Stocks are somewhat more highly valued today than they have been on average in the past, but that may well be nothing more sinister than a reflection of the risk-reduction opportunities in today’s globalized economy. Besides, today’s valuations are fully reflected in the 3 percent dividend and repurchase yield that Krugman himself posited.
What does the guru of long-term stock investing — celebrated Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel — have to say about it? According to a Krugman column two weeks ago, “even Jeremy Siegel, whose ‘Stocks for the Long Run’ is often cited by those who favor stocks over bonds, has conceded that ‘returns on stocks over bonds won’t be as large as in the past.’” The point being that Americans would be better off leaving their Social Security taxes invested in the bonds held by the system’s trust funds, rather than investing in stocks through personal accounts.
But Krugman Truth Squad member Jim Glass, on the Scrivener.net blog, caught Krugman “Dowdifying” that quotation. What Siegel really said, after the sentence Krugman deceptively selected was, “I see a 5%-to-6% return on stocks, adjusted for inflation. I’m pessimistic about real bond returns.”
Okay, 5 to 6 percent isn’t quite 6.5 percent. But it’s close. And it’s a heck of a lot better than the rates of return offered by today’s Social Security system. According to the Congressional Budget Office, Social Security offers very poor returns for the median quintile of household earners — the present value of their payroll taxes is greater than the present value of their future benefits.
But Krugman does make one good point in Tuesday’s column. He states that stock returns in the neighborhood of 6.5 percent will not be possible over the coming 75 years if economic growth is as low as the 1.9 percent rate used by the actuaries of the Social Security Administration in their solvency estimates. He says that for that to occur, “you have to believe that half a century from now, the average stock will be priced like technology stocks at the height of the Internet bubble — and that stock prices will nonetheless keep on rising.”
How did Krugman figure that out? The Princeton economics professor — who some people think could someday win the Nobel Prize — had to ask Dean Baker to “help me out with that calculation (there are some technical details I won’t get into).” Indeed, Krugman probably needed the help — he never has had a very firm grasp of stock market valuation. During that “height of the Internet bubble,” Krugman wrote in his Times column that “I'm not sure that the current value of the Nasdaq is justified, but I’m not sure that it isn’t.”
Hmmm. That wasn’t exactly the unambiguous call to sell techstocks that Jeremy Siegel issued at the height of the bubble, when he wrote a piece titled “Big-Cap Tech Stocks Are a Sucker Bet.” No, as new ex officio Krugman Truth Squad member James Neel put it in an e-mail, “Krugman was for the bubble valuation of Nasdaq before he was against it.”
Today, once again, Krugman wants it both ways. He’s sure that stocks will perform poorly in the future, but he says, “if the economy grows fast enough to generate a rate of return that makes privatization work, it will also yield a bonanza of payroll tax revenue that will keep the current system sound for generations to come.” But that’s simply not true.
Kent Smetters, the Wharton professor who has pioneered the analysis of Social Security’s solvency beyond the deceptively arbitrary 75-year timeframe most often cited, told me that faster economic growth amounts to “very little over the long term.” Krugman’s analysis — which focuses on the higher taxes collected in the near term — ignores the reality that correspondingly “higher benefits come outside the 75-year window.” So you collect more now, but you just pay it out later. That’s largely because a 1977 law, passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by Democratic President Jimmy Carter, indexed Social Security benefits to economy-wide wage growth.
I’d conclude by turning Krugman’s challenge back on him: “Ladies and gentlemen, would you care to explain your position?” But I can’t — I’ve been writing the Krugman Truth Squad column long enough to know that he’s no gentleman.
— Donald Luskin is chief investment officer of Trend Macrolytics LLC, an independent economics and investment-research firm. He welcomes your visit to his blog and your comments at don@trendmacro.com.
Take the Krugman 6.5% Challenge
It’s dirty work (not really), but someone has to do it.
Paul Krugman and Dean Baker have a challenge for those of us who advocate Social Security reform with personal accounts.
Krugman, of course, is America’s most dangerous liberal pundit — but maybe you’ve never heard of Baker. He’s co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a leftist think-tank funded by George Soros. Krugman and Baker were recently cited as “excellent sources” on Social Security reform by the Communist Party USA.
Here’s the challenge, from Krugman’s New York Times column Tuesday:
Mr. Baker has devised a test he calls “no economist left behind”: he challenges economists to make a projection of economic growth, dividends and capital gains that will yield a 6.5 percent rate of return over 75 years. Not one economist who supports privatization has been willing to take the test.
But the offer still stands. Ladies and gentlemen, would you care to explain your position?
Krugman is using Baker’s test to try to suggest that stocks can’t possibly have the kind of returns in the future that they’ve had in the past — so Social Security reform with personal accounts that could invest in stocks is bound to fail. And he’s suggesting that Baker’s brilliance has stunned the opponents of reform into silence. Hardly — it’s just that none of us would have bothered to pay attention to someone like Baker if Krugman hadn’t elevated him to the pages of America’s so-called “newspaper of record.”
It’s dirty work, but someone has to do it.
Actually, it isn’t especially difficult. But to make the exercise interesting, I’ll limit myself to data Krugman himself offers in his very same Times column. Stand back, everybody — here goes.
Krugman states that the return on stocks from dividends and share repurchases is 3 percent. He states that “profits grow at the same rate as the economy,” and notes that “economic growth ... averaged 3.4 percent per year over the last 75 years.” It’s simple arithmetic that if dividends grow at the rate of earnings growth, and earnings grow at the rate of GDP growth, and if the dividend and repurchase yield stays at 3 percent, then stock prices must rise each year by 3.4 percent.
That’s 3 percent per year in yield plus 3.4 percent in capital gains. Sounds like a 6.4 percent return, to me. Just a hair shy of the 6.5 percent Krugman and Baker asked for, but I am still going to declare victory.
Even without the arithmetic, there’s nothing so unusual about thinking that stocks could return something like 6.5 percent, after inflation, over the next 75 years. After all, they’ve returned exactly that over the last 75 years, according to Ibbotson Associates. Stocks are somewhat more highly valued today than they have been on average in the past, but that may well be nothing more sinister than a reflection of the risk-reduction opportunities in today’s globalized economy. Besides, today’s valuations are fully reflected in the 3 percent dividend and repurchase yield that Krugman himself posited.
What does the guru of long-term stock investing — celebrated Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel — have to say about it? According to a Krugman column two weeks ago, “even Jeremy Siegel, whose ‘Stocks for the Long Run’ is often cited by those who favor stocks over bonds, has conceded that ‘returns on stocks over bonds won’t be as large as in the past.’” The point being that Americans would be better off leaving their Social Security taxes invested in the bonds held by the system’s trust funds, rather than investing in stocks through personal accounts.
But Krugman Truth Squad member Jim Glass, on the Scrivener.net blog, caught Krugman “Dowdifying” that quotation. What Siegel really said, after the sentence Krugman deceptively selected was, “I see a 5%-to-6% return on stocks, adjusted for inflation. I’m pessimistic about real bond returns.”
Okay, 5 to 6 percent isn’t quite 6.5 percent. But it’s close. And it’s a heck of a lot better than the rates of return offered by today’s Social Security system. According to the Congressional Budget Office, Social Security offers very poor returns for the median quintile of household earners — the present value of their payroll taxes is greater than the present value of their future benefits.
But Krugman does make one good point in Tuesday’s column. He states that stock returns in the neighborhood of 6.5 percent will not be possible over the coming 75 years if economic growth is as low as the 1.9 percent rate used by the actuaries of the Social Security Administration in their solvency estimates. He says that for that to occur, “you have to believe that half a century from now, the average stock will be priced like technology stocks at the height of the Internet bubble — and that stock prices will nonetheless keep on rising.”
How did Krugman figure that out? The Princeton economics professor — who some people think could someday win the Nobel Prize — had to ask Dean Baker to “help me out with that calculation (there are some technical details I won’t get into).” Indeed, Krugman probably needed the help — he never has had a very firm grasp of stock market valuation. During that “height of the Internet bubble,” Krugman wrote in his Times column that “I'm not sure that the current value of the Nasdaq is justified, but I’m not sure that it isn’t.”
Hmmm. That wasn’t exactly the unambiguous call to sell techstocks that Jeremy Siegel issued at the height of the bubble, when he wrote a piece titled “Big-Cap Tech Stocks Are a Sucker Bet.” No, as new ex officio Krugman Truth Squad member James Neel put it in an e-mail, “Krugman was for the bubble valuation of Nasdaq before he was against it.”
Today, once again, Krugman wants it both ways. He’s sure that stocks will perform poorly in the future, but he says, “if the economy grows fast enough to generate a rate of return that makes privatization work, it will also yield a bonanza of payroll tax revenue that will keep the current system sound for generations to come.” But that’s simply not true.
Kent Smetters, the Wharton professor who has pioneered the analysis of Social Security’s solvency beyond the deceptively arbitrary 75-year timeframe most often cited, told me that faster economic growth amounts to “very little over the long term.” Krugman’s analysis — which focuses on the higher taxes collected in the near term — ignores the reality that correspondingly “higher benefits come outside the 75-year window.” So you collect more now, but you just pay it out later. That’s largely because a 1977 law, passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by Democratic President Jimmy Carter, indexed Social Security benefits to economy-wide wage growth.
I’d conclude by turning Krugman’s challenge back on him: “Ladies and gentlemen, would you care to explain your position?” But I can’t — I’ve been writing the Krugman Truth Squad column long enough to know that he’s no gentleman.
— Donald Luskin is chief investment officer of Trend Macrolytics LLC, an independent economics and investment-research firm. He welcomes your visit to his blog and your comments at don@trendmacro.com.
Let's Define Media Spin For Those Who Are Confused
I have recieved several comments lately accusing me of spin. Obviously, the commenters don't understand what media spin is when reading an article or news report or, for that matter, political blogs. Media Spin is the distortion of recent events in the guise of an objective news report. Analysis of the news is OPINION not media spin. Just because an opinion appears in an Op Ed piece doesn't mean that it is spin. To be media spin, some distortion of commonly known facts about a current event has to take place in an Op Ed piece or news report or blog. I can have an opinion and state facts about an event without resorting to media spin tactics. I check my sources very carefully and I only comment on what I can prove independently from a wide variety of sources. If this constitutes spin in some people's minds, it is their failure to grasp the difference that is the problem. So it goes.
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith, A True American Hero And Medal OF Honor Recipient For His Selfless Service in Iraq
I have posted this article in it's entirety so you would not miss anything. Read on. To see the original article, click on the title.
Iraq hero joins hallowed group
President Bush will present America's top award for bravery to the family of the sergeant who died defending his soldiers.
By ALEX LEARY, Times Staff Writer
Published February 2, 2005
THE LAST FULL MEASURE OF DEVOTION
For a multimedia report on the story of Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith, published as a special section in the Times last year, click here.
Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith, who spent his boyhood in Tampa, became a man in the Army and died outside Baghdad defending his outnumbered soldiers from an Iraqi attack, will receive America's highest award for bravery.
President Bush will present the Medal of Honor to Smith's wife, Birgit, and their children Jessica, 18, and David, 10, at a ceremony at the White House, possibly in March.
The official announcement will come soon, but the Pentagon called Mrs. Smith with the news Tuesday afternoon.
"We had faith he was going to get it," Mrs. Smith said from her home in Holiday, "but the phone call was shocking. It was overwhelming. My heart was racing, and I got sweaty hands. I yelled, "Oh, yes!' ... I'm still all shaky.
"People know what's he's done ... people know that to get a Medal of Honor you have to be a special person or do something really great."
What Paul Smith did on April 4, 2003, was climb aboard an armored vehicle and, manning a heavy machine gun, take it upon himself to cover the withdrawal of his men from a suddenly vulnerable position. Smith was fatally wounded by Iraqi fire, the only American to die in the engagement.
"I'm in bittersweet tears," said Smith's mother, Janice Pvirre. "The medal isn't going to bring him back. ... It makes me sad that all these other soldiers have died. They are all heroes."
With the medal, Smith joins a most hallowed society.
Since the Civil War, just 3,439 men (and one woman) have received the Medal of Honor. It recognizes only the most extreme examples of bravery - those "above and beyond the call of duty."
That oft-heard phrase has a specific meaning: The medal cannot be given to those who act under orders, no matter how heroic their actions. Indeed, according to Library of Congress defense expert David F. Burrelli, it must be "the type of deed which, if he had not done it, would not subject him to any justified criticism."
From World War II on, most of the men who received the medal died in the action that led to their nomination. There are but 129 living recipients.
Smith is the first soldier from the Iraq war to receive the medal, which had not previously been awarded since 1993. In that year, two Army Special Services sergeants were killed in Somalia in an action described in the bestselling book Black Hawk Down.
The officer who called Birgit Smith on Tuesday nominated her husband for the medal.
Lt. Col. Thomas Smith (no relation) sent in his recommendation in May 2003, beginning a process that involved reviews at 12 levels of the military chain of command before reaching the White House. On Tuesday, Lt. Col. Smith expressed satisfaction that the wait was over, and great admiration for his former subordinate.
In the Army, he said, you hear about men who won the Medal of Honor. "You think they are myths when you read about them. It's almost movielike. You just don't think you'd ever meet someone like that."
Paul Smith, he said, was not a "soft soldier" who suddenly got tough under fire. "This was a guy whose whole life experience seemed building toward putting him in the position where he could do something like this. He was demanding on his soldiers all the time and was a stickler for all the things we try to enforce. It's just an amazing story."
Lt. Col. Smith commanded the 11th Engineer Battalion, 3rd Infantry Division, during the American attack on Iraq, which began March 20, 2003. On the morning of April 4, the engineers found themselves manning a roadblock not far from Baghdad International Airport.
A call went out for a place to put some Iraqi prisoners.
Sgt. Smith volunteered to create a holding pen inside a walled courtyard. Soon, Iraqi soldiers, numbering perhaps 100, opened fire on Smith's position. Smith was accompanied by 16 men.
Smith called for a Bradley, a tank-like vehicle with a rapid fire cannon. It arrived and opened up on the Iraqis. The enemy could not advance so long as the Bradley was in position. But then, in a move that baffled and angered Smith's men, the Bradley left.
Smith's men, some of whom were wounded, were suddenly vulnerable.
Smith could have justifiably ordered his men to withdraw. Lt. Col. Smith believes Sgt. Smith rejected that option, thinking that abandoning the courtyard would jeopardize about 100 GIs outside - including medics at an aid station.
Sgt. Smith manned a 50-caliber machine gun atop an abandoned armored personnel carrier and fought off the Iraqis, going through several boxes of ammunition fed to him by 21-year-old Pvt. Michael Seaman. As the battle wound down, Smith was hit in the head. He died before he could be evacuated from the scene. He was 33.
The Times published a lengthy account of the battle, and Smith's life in January 2004. It can be seen at www.sptimes.com/paulsmith
Sgt. Matthew Keller was one of the men who fought with Smith in the courtyard. "He put himself in front of his soldiers that day and we survived because of his actions," Keller said Tuesday from Fort Stewart in Georgia. "He was thinking my men are in trouble and I'm going to do what is necessary to help them. He didn't care about his own safety."
Some of the men who fought alongside Smith were sent back to Iraq last month. Keller, 26, is scheduled to return Feb. 15, but was scrambling Tuesday to delay his deployment to attend the medal ceremony in Washington.
"I want to be there to support the family and show thanks for what Sgt. Smith did," Keller said.
Mrs. Smith moved to Holiday after her husband's death, to be near his parents. Her daughter, Jessica, recently moved out on her own and is thinking about going to college. Son David is a fifth-grader at Sunray Elementary School in Holiday.
"From the beginning (David) didn't show much feelings, keeping to himself," Mrs. Smith said. "He thinks if he brings it up it will make me sad. He's trying to be the strong one. The day Paul left for Iraq he told David, "You're the man in the house now.'
"Paul is not forgotten," she said. "He's part of history now. It makes me feel proud, so honored that I was allowed to be part of Paul's life. Even today he's probably laughing at all of us, saying "You're making way too big a deal out of me.'
"He did what he had to do to protect his men, not to get a medal."THE LAST FULL MEASURE OF DEVOTION
For a multimedia report on the story of Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith, published as a special section in the Times last year, go to www.sptimes com/paulsmith.
Iraq hero joins hallowed group
President Bush will present America's top award for bravery to the family of the sergeant who died defending his soldiers.
By ALEX LEARY, Times Staff Writer
Published February 2, 2005
THE LAST FULL MEASURE OF DEVOTION
For a multimedia report on the story of Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith, published as a special section in the Times last year, click here.
Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith, who spent his boyhood in Tampa, became a man in the Army and died outside Baghdad defending his outnumbered soldiers from an Iraqi attack, will receive America's highest award for bravery.
President Bush will present the Medal of Honor to Smith's wife, Birgit, and their children Jessica, 18, and David, 10, at a ceremony at the White House, possibly in March.
The official announcement will come soon, but the Pentagon called Mrs. Smith with the news Tuesday afternoon.
"We had faith he was going to get it," Mrs. Smith said from her home in Holiday, "but the phone call was shocking. It was overwhelming. My heart was racing, and I got sweaty hands. I yelled, "Oh, yes!' ... I'm still all shaky.
"People know what's he's done ... people know that to get a Medal of Honor you have to be a special person or do something really great."
What Paul Smith did on April 4, 2003, was climb aboard an armored vehicle and, manning a heavy machine gun, take it upon himself to cover the withdrawal of his men from a suddenly vulnerable position. Smith was fatally wounded by Iraqi fire, the only American to die in the engagement.
"I'm in bittersweet tears," said Smith's mother, Janice Pvirre. "The medal isn't going to bring him back. ... It makes me sad that all these other soldiers have died. They are all heroes."
With the medal, Smith joins a most hallowed society.
Since the Civil War, just 3,439 men (and one woman) have received the Medal of Honor. It recognizes only the most extreme examples of bravery - those "above and beyond the call of duty."
That oft-heard phrase has a specific meaning: The medal cannot be given to those who act under orders, no matter how heroic their actions. Indeed, according to Library of Congress defense expert David F. Burrelli, it must be "the type of deed which, if he had not done it, would not subject him to any justified criticism."
From World War II on, most of the men who received the medal died in the action that led to their nomination. There are but 129 living recipients.
Smith is the first soldier from the Iraq war to receive the medal, which had not previously been awarded since 1993. In that year, two Army Special Services sergeants were killed in Somalia in an action described in the bestselling book Black Hawk Down.
The officer who called Birgit Smith on Tuesday nominated her husband for the medal.
Lt. Col. Thomas Smith (no relation) sent in his recommendation in May 2003, beginning a process that involved reviews at 12 levels of the military chain of command before reaching the White House. On Tuesday, Lt. Col. Smith expressed satisfaction that the wait was over, and great admiration for his former subordinate.
In the Army, he said, you hear about men who won the Medal of Honor. "You think they are myths when you read about them. It's almost movielike. You just don't think you'd ever meet someone like that."
Paul Smith, he said, was not a "soft soldier" who suddenly got tough under fire. "This was a guy whose whole life experience seemed building toward putting him in the position where he could do something like this. He was demanding on his soldiers all the time and was a stickler for all the things we try to enforce. It's just an amazing story."
Lt. Col. Smith commanded the 11th Engineer Battalion, 3rd Infantry Division, during the American attack on Iraq, which began March 20, 2003. On the morning of April 4, the engineers found themselves manning a roadblock not far from Baghdad International Airport.
A call went out for a place to put some Iraqi prisoners.
Sgt. Smith volunteered to create a holding pen inside a walled courtyard. Soon, Iraqi soldiers, numbering perhaps 100, opened fire on Smith's position. Smith was accompanied by 16 men.
Smith called for a Bradley, a tank-like vehicle with a rapid fire cannon. It arrived and opened up on the Iraqis. The enemy could not advance so long as the Bradley was in position. But then, in a move that baffled and angered Smith's men, the Bradley left.
Smith's men, some of whom were wounded, were suddenly vulnerable.
Smith could have justifiably ordered his men to withdraw. Lt. Col. Smith believes Sgt. Smith rejected that option, thinking that abandoning the courtyard would jeopardize about 100 GIs outside - including medics at an aid station.
Sgt. Smith manned a 50-caliber machine gun atop an abandoned armored personnel carrier and fought off the Iraqis, going through several boxes of ammunition fed to him by 21-year-old Pvt. Michael Seaman. As the battle wound down, Smith was hit in the head. He died before he could be evacuated from the scene. He was 33.
The Times published a lengthy account of the battle, and Smith's life in January 2004. It can be seen at www.sptimes.com/paulsmith
Sgt. Matthew Keller was one of the men who fought with Smith in the courtyard. "He put himself in front of his soldiers that day and we survived because of his actions," Keller said Tuesday from Fort Stewart in Georgia. "He was thinking my men are in trouble and I'm going to do what is necessary to help them. He didn't care about his own safety."
Some of the men who fought alongside Smith were sent back to Iraq last month. Keller, 26, is scheduled to return Feb. 15, but was scrambling Tuesday to delay his deployment to attend the medal ceremony in Washington.
"I want to be there to support the family and show thanks for what Sgt. Smith did," Keller said.
Mrs. Smith moved to Holiday after her husband's death, to be near his parents. Her daughter, Jessica, recently moved out on her own and is thinking about going to college. Son David is a fifth-grader at Sunray Elementary School in Holiday.
"From the beginning (David) didn't show much feelings, keeping to himself," Mrs. Smith said. "He thinks if he brings it up it will make me sad. He's trying to be the strong one. The day Paul left for Iraq he told David, "You're the man in the house now.'
"Paul is not forgotten," she said. "He's part of history now. It makes me feel proud, so honored that I was allowed to be part of Paul's life. Even today he's probably laughing at all of us, saying "You're making way too big a deal out of me.'
"He did what he had to do to protect his men, not to get a medal."THE LAST FULL MEASURE OF DEVOTION
For a multimedia report on the story of Army Sgt. 1st Class Paul R. Smith, published as a special section in the Times last year, go to www.sptimes com/paulsmith.
A New Vietnam For The Left? - Warning Humor And Opinion Ahead.
Sometimes a humorous, considered opinion is a worthwhile read. Especially if it is based on current events. Humor goes a long way as well to tell the story and illustrate the point. Some will view this as 'spin". I don't as it is advertised as "Opinion" not "news". Read on. If you want to see the entire article, click on the title.
The Quagmire on Slothnor
The Left and Vietnam.
Jonah Goldberg - NRO Online
February 2, 2005
The year is 2456. The human colonies on Mars have been invaded by giant, laser-visioned tree sloths bent on crushing humanity and forcing the survivors to work as slaves in the massive dung mines of the planet Slothnor. In a last-ditch effort to save our species from extinction, the brave humans launch a counterattack on the Sloths' home world. Le New York Times (headquartered in Paris since 2018) blares in a bold holo-headline "Disturbing Echoes of Vietnam Conjured by Earth Aggression."
O.K., I'm kidding. It would probably take a few weeks before the Times actually invoked Vietnam. Perhaps they'd wait until we got bogged down in the actual marshes of Slothnor to start bleating about "quagmire." Who knows?
All I can say for certain is that I am no longer capable of being shocked by the Left's and the mainstream media's capacity to shove pegs of any shape into the round hole of Vietnam. A recent New York Times headline blared, "Flashback to the '60s: A Sinking Sensation of Parallels Between Iraq and Vietnam." A cursory search of the Nexis-Lexis database shows that the words Iraq and Vietnam have appeared together nearly 800 articles in the last year — and that's just in the New York Times. The Washington Post: 764. The LA Times: 683. The Chicago Tribune: 526. Time magazine, a weekly publication, ran more articles mentioning Vietnam and Iraq (70) than it put out issues in the last year, and that doesn't even include letters to the editor.
Now, granted, some — even many — of those articles didn't rehearse the media's usual mode of Vietnam fixation. Some were merely about the campaign of John Kerry, who boasted incessantly that his service in Vietnam made him more qualified to be commander in chief.
Even so, Kerry's Vietnam fixation shares this in common with the media's Vietnam obsession: They have more to do with liberal baby-boomer myopia than with a war that ended 30 years ago (and that bears almost no resemblance to the conflict in Iraq).
Indeed, you can tell this fixation has little to do with Iraq because the war in Afghanistan prompted hundreds of comparisons to Vietnam as well. Between October 1, 2001, and October 1, 2002, the Times ran nearly 300 articles with the words Vietnam and Afghanistan in them. On day 24 of the Afghan campaign, Times's muckety-muck R. W. Apple revived the Q-word — which to liberals can only mean Vietnam — in a thumb-sucker titled "A Military Quagmire Remembered: Afghanistan as Vietnam."
The Quagmire on Slothnor
The Left and Vietnam.
Jonah Goldberg - NRO Online
February 2, 2005
The year is 2456. The human colonies on Mars have been invaded by giant, laser-visioned tree sloths bent on crushing humanity and forcing the survivors to work as slaves in the massive dung mines of the planet Slothnor. In a last-ditch effort to save our species from extinction, the brave humans launch a counterattack on the Sloths' home world. Le New York Times (headquartered in Paris since 2018) blares in a bold holo-headline "Disturbing Echoes of Vietnam Conjured by Earth Aggression."
O.K., I'm kidding. It would probably take a few weeks before the Times actually invoked Vietnam. Perhaps they'd wait until we got bogged down in the actual marshes of Slothnor to start bleating about "quagmire." Who knows?
All I can say for certain is that I am no longer capable of being shocked by the Left's and the mainstream media's capacity to shove pegs of any shape into the round hole of Vietnam. A recent New York Times headline blared, "Flashback to the '60s: A Sinking Sensation of Parallels Between Iraq and Vietnam." A cursory search of the Nexis-Lexis database shows that the words Iraq and Vietnam have appeared together nearly 800 articles in the last year — and that's just in the New York Times. The Washington Post: 764. The LA Times: 683. The Chicago Tribune: 526. Time magazine, a weekly publication, ran more articles mentioning Vietnam and Iraq (70) than it put out issues in the last year, and that doesn't even include letters to the editor.
Now, granted, some — even many — of those articles didn't rehearse the media's usual mode of Vietnam fixation. Some were merely about the campaign of John Kerry, who boasted incessantly that his service in Vietnam made him more qualified to be commander in chief.
Even so, Kerry's Vietnam fixation shares this in common with the media's Vietnam obsession: They have more to do with liberal baby-boomer myopia than with a war that ended 30 years ago (and that bears almost no resemblance to the conflict in Iraq).
Indeed, you can tell this fixation has little to do with Iraq because the war in Afghanistan prompted hundreds of comparisons to Vietnam as well. Between October 1, 2001, and October 1, 2002, the Times ran nearly 300 articles with the words Vietnam and Afghanistan in them. On day 24 of the Afghan campaign, Times's muckety-muck R. W. Apple revived the Q-word — which to liberals can only mean Vietnam — in a thumb-sucker titled "A Military Quagmire Remembered: Afghanistan as Vietnam."
Arianna Is A Partisan Airhead.
Arianna is definitely out to lunch on this issue. She conviently ignores the worldwide astonishment of the naysayers and the Hate America crowd. Nothing they predicted would happen during the Iraq voting actually occurred. But little miss stupid toes can't deal with that. She would rather whine about the inconsequential and minimize the most significant political event of the 21st century because of partisan obstinance. Read on. To see the entire article click on the title.
Post-Election Buzzkill: Why Iraq Is Still A Debacle
February 02, 2005
Quick, before the conventional wisdom hardens, it needs to be said: The Iraqi elections were not the second coming of the Constitutional Convention.The media have made it sound like last Sunday was a combination of 1776, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Prague Spring, the Ukraine's Orange Revolution, Filipino "People Power," Tiananmen Square and Super Bowl Sunday, all rolled into one.
But it was all of that and more. Notice how the terrorist would disagree with you, idiot. And you're in denial over it. So do us all a big favor and just shut the hell up and swallow it. I suggest therapy. Maybe Dean's therapist might help.
Post-Election Buzzkill: Why Iraq Is Still A Debacle
February 02, 2005
Quick, before the conventional wisdom hardens, it needs to be said: The Iraqi elections were not the second coming of the Constitutional Convention.The media have made it sound like last Sunday was a combination of 1776, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Prague Spring, the Ukraine's Orange Revolution, Filipino "People Power," Tiananmen Square and Super Bowl Sunday, all rolled into one.
But it was all of that and more. Notice how the terrorist would disagree with you, idiot. And you're in denial over it. So do us all a big favor and just shut the hell up and swallow it. I suggest therapy. Maybe Dean's therapist might help.
The War On Drugs Is A Greater Threat To Your Rights Than The Patriot Act
The loss of rights to the average American is far greater when the War on Drugs is involved. This is by far a more serious problem than anyone can imagine. It pervades all of our lives in insidious ways and cost the taxpayers Billions of dollars to enforce, prosecute and incarcerate Drug offenders using the current Federal and State laws. Now the Feds want to circumvent your 4th Amendment rights as well. Read on. To see the entire article, Click on the title.
Drug War Shrinking Bill of Rights
Thursday, January 27, 2005
By Radley Balko
Fox News
This week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that if you're pulled over by the police for speeding or, say, not wearing your seatbelt, they may bring out drug-sniffing dogs to investigate your car without violating the Fourth Amendment.
On the Volokh Conspiracy blog, Orin Kerr observes that Justice John Paul Stevens (search), writing for the majority, indicated that the Fourth Amendment protects not against violations of privacy or invasiveness, but against violation of property rights. Since one can't have property rights for illicit drugs, a search can't violate the Fourth Amendment.
It's a troubling precedent. It's hard to see how any police search would violate any rights under Justice Stevens' ruling, so long as the search turned up something illegal. That sort of undermines what the Fourth Amendment (search) is all about.
That case is just the latest in a number of court rulings and pieces of legislation that have been chipping away at the criminal justice rights of substance-abuse suspects. Ours is quickly becoming a two-tiered criminal justice system, one in which there are one set of criminal protections for drug and alcohol defendants, and a broader set of protections for everyone else.
Last month in Virginia, pain physician Dr. William Hurwitz (search) was convicted on dozens of counts of drug distribution. Prosecutors and the foreman of the jury that convicted him conceded that Hurwitz didn't knowingly participate in a drug trade, but because the pain medication he prescribed made it to the black market, he was nevertheless found guilty. He faces life in prison. Proving intent — as is required to secure a conviction in nearly every other crime — apparently wasn't necessary.
Drug War Shrinking Bill of Rights
Thursday, January 27, 2005
By Radley Balko
Fox News
This week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that if you're pulled over by the police for speeding or, say, not wearing your seatbelt, they may bring out drug-sniffing dogs to investigate your car without violating the Fourth Amendment.
On the Volokh Conspiracy blog, Orin Kerr observes that Justice John Paul Stevens (search), writing for the majority, indicated that the Fourth Amendment protects not against violations of privacy or invasiveness, but against violation of property rights. Since one can't have property rights for illicit drugs, a search can't violate the Fourth Amendment.
It's a troubling precedent. It's hard to see how any police search would violate any rights under Justice Stevens' ruling, so long as the search turned up something illegal. That sort of undermines what the Fourth Amendment (search) is all about.
That case is just the latest in a number of court rulings and pieces of legislation that have been chipping away at the criminal justice rights of substance-abuse suspects. Ours is quickly becoming a two-tiered criminal justice system, one in which there are one set of criminal protections for drug and alcohol defendants, and a broader set of protections for everyone else.
Last month in Virginia, pain physician Dr. William Hurwitz (search) was convicted on dozens of counts of drug distribution. Prosecutors and the foreman of the jury that convicted him conceded that Hurwitz didn't knowingly participate in a drug trade, but because the pain medication he prescribed made it to the black market, he was nevertheless found guilty. He faces life in prison. Proving intent — as is required to secure a conviction in nearly every other crime — apparently wasn't necessary.
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