Krauthammer is always a must read.
September 28, 2007
France Flips While Congress ShiftsBy Charles Krauthammer
WASHINGTON -- Ahmadinejad at Columbia provided the entertainment, but Sarkozy at the U.N. provided the substance. On the largest possible stage -- the U.N. General Assembly -- President Nicolas Sarkozy put Iran on notice. His predecessor, Jacques Chirac, had said that France could live with an Iranian nuclear bomb. Sarkozy said that France cannot. He declared Iran's nuclear ambitions "an unacceptable risk to stability in the region and in the world."
His foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, had earlier said that the world faces two choices -- successful diplomacy to stop Iran's nuclear program or war. And Sarkozy himself has no great hopes for the Security Council, where China and Russia are blocking any effective action against Iran. He does hope to get the European Union to join the U.S. in imposing serious sanctions.
"Weakness and renunciation do not lead to peace," he warned. "They lead to war." This warning about appeasement was intended particularly for Germany, which for commercial reasons has been resisting U.S. pressure to support effective sanctions.
Sarkozy is no American lapdog. Like every Fifth Republic president, he begins with the notion of French exceptionalism. But whereas traditional Gaullism tended to define French grandeur as establishing a counterweight to American power, Sarkozy is not adverse to seeing French assertiveness exercised in conjunction with the United States. As Kouchner put it, "permanent anti-Americanism" is "a tradition we are working to overcome."
This French about-face creates a crucial shift in the balance of forces within Europe. The East Europeans are naturally pro-American for reasons of history (fresh memories of America's role in defeating their Soviet occupiers) and geography (physical proximity to a newly revived and aggressive Russia). Western Europe is intrinsically wary of American power and culturally anti-American by reflex. France's change from Chirac to Sarkozy, from Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin (who actively lobbied Third World countries to oppose America on Iraq) to Kouchner (who supported the U.S. invasion on humanitarian grounds) represents an enormous shift in Old Europe's relationship to the U.S.
Britain is a natural ally. Germany, given its history, is more follower than leader. France can define European policy, and Sarkozy intends to.
The French flip is only one part of the changing landscape that has given new life to Bush's Iran and Iraq policies in the waning months of his administration. The mood in Congress also has significantly shifted.
Just this week, the House overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling for very strong sanctions on Iran and urging the administration to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guards a terrorist entity. A similar measure passed the Senate Wednesday by 76-22, declaring that it is "a critical national interest of the United States" to prevent Iran from using Shiite militias inside Iraq to subvert the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad.
A few months ago, the question was: Will the Democratic Congress force a withdrawal from Iraq? Today the question in Congress is: What can be done to achieve success in Iraq -- most specifically, by countering Iran, which is intent on seeing us fail?
This change in mood and subject is entirely the result of changes on the ground. It takes time for reality to seep into a Washington debate. But after the Petraeus-Crocker testimony, the reality of the relative success of our new counterinsurgency strategy -- and the renewed possibility of ultimate success in Iraq -- became no longer deniable.
And that reality is reflected even in the rhetoric of Hillary Clinton, the most politically sophisticated of the Democratic presidential candidates. She does vote against war funding in order to alter the president's policy (and to appease the left), but that is as a senator. When asked what she would do as president, she carefully hedges. She says that it would depend on the situation on the ground at the time. For example, whether our alliance with the Sunni tribes will have succeeded in defeating al-Qaeda in Iraq. But when asked by ABC News if she would bring U.S. troops home by January 2013, she refused to "get into hypotheticals and make pledges."
Bush's presidency -- and foreign policy -- were pronounced dead on the morning after the 2006 election. Not so. France is going to join us in a last-ditch effort to find a nonmilitary solution to the Iranian issue. And on Iraq, the relative success of the surge has won President Bush the leeway to continue the Petraeus counterinsurgency strategy to the end of his term. Congress, and realistic Democrats, are finally beginning to think seriously about making that strategy succeed and planning for what comes after.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
(c) 2007, The Washington Post Writers GroupPage Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/09/sarkozy_puts_iran_on_notice.html at September 28, 2007 - 07:37:12 PM CDT
_uacct = "UA-31527-1";
urchinTracker();
Friday, September 28, 2007
At least Duke University has basketball
From http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2007/09/018598.php
September 28, 2007
A perfect storm of disgrace
Yesterday, Stuart Taylor spoke to the Washington, D.C. chapter of the Federalist Society about the Duke lacrosse "rape" case. In my view, Taylor is probably the pre-eminent reporter of legal/political matters, an enterprise to which he brings to bear great intelligence, strong knowledge of the law, and stubborn fair-mindedness.
Along with K.C. Johnson, he has written Until Proven Innocent, Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case. Today, he provided an overview of this wretched affair which, in essence, was the product of three rotten forces -- a corrupt prosecutor, a rotten academic institution, and the liberal MSM.
The prosecutor, Mike Nifong, brought charges after a woman who was about to be committed to a mental institution claimed she had been raped. In the hours immediately after making this claim, she changed her story often enough that the police officer in attendance was certain no charges would be brought. Nor would they have been, but for the fact that Nifong was facing an election he was almost certain to lose to an opponent he had once fired and who probably would have fired him, thus costing him his pension. Nifong brought the charges because he believed that pursuing a rape case, however baseless, involving a black woman and white defendants would enable him to win enough black votes in Durham to maintain office. As the accuser's story unraveled, Nifong persisted, suppressing evidence and launching an all-out media assault on the wrongfully accused Duke student-athletes. The suppression kept the case alive; the media assault furthered Nifong's political aims.
The academic institution, Duke University, contains two sets of villains -- (1) the 88 faculty members (about one-fourth of the arts and sciences faculty) who, without regard to the evidence, publicly adjudged as guilty the three accused Duke students, the entire Duke lacrosse team, and white America in general and (2) university president Richard Brodhead, who "enabled" this rabid portion of the faculty and did nothing to defend Duke's students even as their innocence became clear.
The execrable behavior of the professors is exemplified by one Houston Baker (now at Vanderbilt). The demagogic Baker excoriated the lacrosse team for their "silent whiteness" and their "white, male, athletic privilege." He called for the "immediate dismissals" by Duke of "the team itself and its players," to combat the "abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed amongst us." After the innocence of the accused players had become clear, Baker received an email from the mother of a member of the lacrosse team (who hadn't been accused) asking if he would reconsider his earlier statements. Baker responded, by typing "LIES" and indicating that his correspondent was the mother of a "farm animal." Eventually Baker, a post-modernist if nothing else, fell back to arguing that it didn't matter whether the rape allegations were true.
But Brodhead's villainy (the below account of which goes beyond what Taylor said yesterday) arguably exceeds that of Houston Baker and the rest of the gang of 88. While, the faculty members were blinded by hatred and a dopey ideology, Brodhead saw things clearly. His actions, like Nifong's, were the result of cynicism and opportunism.
At the outset of his tenure as president of Duke, Brodhead had given Duke's basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski a new multi-million dollar deal. Brodhead thus incurred the ire of many faculty members who were jealous of Coach K's deal and the status of athletics on campus that it represented. When the rape charges arose, Brodhead's options were to appease Duke's leftist faculty or to grant Duke students the presumption of innocence. The faculty made it clear to Brodhead that he could not do both. At an emergency meeting of the Academic Council on March 30, 2006, Brodhead urged caution and asked faculty to wait for the facts to come out. But the assembled professors, around 10 percent of the arts and sciences faculty, responded with vitriolic attacks against the team.
Knowing that Harvard president Larry Summers had recently lost a faculty no-confidence vote at Harvard, Brodhead made his choice. Shortly after the March 30 meeting with the faculty "lynch mob," Brodhead cancelled the lacrosse season and appointed a “Campus Culture Initiative” to explore issues raised by the case. Three of the four subcommittees were chaired by gang of 88 members. And one of the four student members had sent a nasty and arguably threatening email to the Duke lacrosse coach, a fact known to Brodhead. Thus, Brodhead "got out of jail" with his faculty by, in effect, throwing overboard three student athletes who faced the possibility of 30 years in jail, along with the rest of the lacrosse team and its coach.
The third key player in this scandal is the liberal MSM. Like the gang of 88, it viewed the case through a far leftist ideological prism and refused to let the facts stand in the way. It thereby played into the hands of the dishonest opportunist Nifong and the cynical enabler Brodhead.
Initially, the MSM arguably had an excuse. One doesn't expect a prosecutor to come on this strong with a bogus case, or a college president to throw students to the wolves. The MSMs real sins occurred after its members learned, as they quickly did, that this was just what the prosecutor and college president had done.
The New York Times, for which Stuart Taylor once worked, was (along with the Durham Herald Sun) probably the chief culprit. The Times sent sports reporter Joe Drape to investigate. Drape quickly learned facts that strongly tended to exonerate the accused players, but the Times refused to print his material. Soon, Drape was back covering horse races, replaced by Duff Wilson who took a pro-prosecution slant, thereby enabling the Times to peddle its preferred narrative of white privilege and racial oppression.
In addition, to Nifong, Duke, and the MSM, black civil rights leaders also merit dishonorable mention. Al Sharpton and company quickly piled on the innocent students, playing the race card for all it wasn't worth. That's why it's almost comical to hear Sharpton railing against prosecutorial abuse in the Jena case. Sharpton wouldn't grant the presumption of innocence to innocent white students victimized by a rogue prosecutor, yet thinks its the scandal of the century that thuggish black students were overcharged in Jena. As Taylor said yesterday, prosecutorial abuse looks like it may be a major problem in this country, so it's too bad that Sharpton and his ilk forfeited an opportunity to form a coalition with moderates and conservatives to combat it.
Out-of-control political correctness in academia and the desire to placate rabid campus race-baiters like Duke's gang of 88 has also become a serious problem. Although this story occurred at Duke, how confident can we be that the administration at Columbia (led by Lee Bollinger), at Harvard (now that the leftist faculty has ousted Larry Summers), or at other similar institutions would act differently under similar circumstances? Taylor didn't seem very confident, and I'm not confident at all.
UPDATE: A friend who has read Until Proven Innocent, and who raves about it, writes:
It seems to me that the NAACP's corrupt conduct in this case might be worthy of a blog post, as well as that of Jesse Jackson, Nancy Grace, and Wendy Murphy. Murphy and Grace came up with the ludicrous theory that the absence of DNA was inculpatory because the defendants must've conspired to withhold their DNA from the "victim" -- this despite the fact that none of the the alleged victim's multiple versions of events ever asserted that the defendants used condoms and that all her versions made much more graphic claims that would result in a positive DNA result.
This was an example of Jesse Jackson's contribution.
September 28, 2007
A perfect storm of disgrace
Yesterday, Stuart Taylor spoke to the Washington, D.C. chapter of the Federalist Society about the Duke lacrosse "rape" case. In my view, Taylor is probably the pre-eminent reporter of legal/political matters, an enterprise to which he brings to bear great intelligence, strong knowledge of the law, and stubborn fair-mindedness.
Along with K.C. Johnson, he has written Until Proven Innocent, Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case. Today, he provided an overview of this wretched affair which, in essence, was the product of three rotten forces -- a corrupt prosecutor, a rotten academic institution, and the liberal MSM.
The prosecutor, Mike Nifong, brought charges after a woman who was about to be committed to a mental institution claimed she had been raped. In the hours immediately after making this claim, she changed her story often enough that the police officer in attendance was certain no charges would be brought. Nor would they have been, but for the fact that Nifong was facing an election he was almost certain to lose to an opponent he had once fired and who probably would have fired him, thus costing him his pension. Nifong brought the charges because he believed that pursuing a rape case, however baseless, involving a black woman and white defendants would enable him to win enough black votes in Durham to maintain office. As the accuser's story unraveled, Nifong persisted, suppressing evidence and launching an all-out media assault on the wrongfully accused Duke student-athletes. The suppression kept the case alive; the media assault furthered Nifong's political aims.
The academic institution, Duke University, contains two sets of villains -- (1) the 88 faculty members (about one-fourth of the arts and sciences faculty) who, without regard to the evidence, publicly adjudged as guilty the three accused Duke students, the entire Duke lacrosse team, and white America in general and (2) university president Richard Brodhead, who "enabled" this rabid portion of the faculty and did nothing to defend Duke's students even as their innocence became clear.
The execrable behavior of the professors is exemplified by one Houston Baker (now at Vanderbilt). The demagogic Baker excoriated the lacrosse team for their "silent whiteness" and their "white, male, athletic privilege." He called for the "immediate dismissals" by Duke of "the team itself and its players," to combat the "abhorrent sexual assault, verbal racial violence, and drunken white male privilege loosed amongst us." After the innocence of the accused players had become clear, Baker received an email from the mother of a member of the lacrosse team (who hadn't been accused) asking if he would reconsider his earlier statements. Baker responded, by typing "LIES" and indicating that his correspondent was the mother of a "farm animal." Eventually Baker, a post-modernist if nothing else, fell back to arguing that it didn't matter whether the rape allegations were true.
But Brodhead's villainy (the below account of which goes beyond what Taylor said yesterday) arguably exceeds that of Houston Baker and the rest of the gang of 88. While, the faculty members were blinded by hatred and a dopey ideology, Brodhead saw things clearly. His actions, like Nifong's, were the result of cynicism and opportunism.
At the outset of his tenure as president of Duke, Brodhead had given Duke's basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski a new multi-million dollar deal. Brodhead thus incurred the ire of many faculty members who were jealous of Coach K's deal and the status of athletics on campus that it represented. When the rape charges arose, Brodhead's options were to appease Duke's leftist faculty or to grant Duke students the presumption of innocence. The faculty made it clear to Brodhead that he could not do both. At an emergency meeting of the Academic Council on March 30, 2006, Brodhead urged caution and asked faculty to wait for the facts to come out. But the assembled professors, around 10 percent of the arts and sciences faculty, responded with vitriolic attacks against the team.
Knowing that Harvard president Larry Summers had recently lost a faculty no-confidence vote at Harvard, Brodhead made his choice. Shortly after the March 30 meeting with the faculty "lynch mob," Brodhead cancelled the lacrosse season and appointed a “Campus Culture Initiative” to explore issues raised by the case. Three of the four subcommittees were chaired by gang of 88 members. And one of the four student members had sent a nasty and arguably threatening email to the Duke lacrosse coach, a fact known to Brodhead. Thus, Brodhead "got out of jail" with his faculty by, in effect, throwing overboard three student athletes who faced the possibility of 30 years in jail, along with the rest of the lacrosse team and its coach.
The third key player in this scandal is the liberal MSM. Like the gang of 88, it viewed the case through a far leftist ideological prism and refused to let the facts stand in the way. It thereby played into the hands of the dishonest opportunist Nifong and the cynical enabler Brodhead.
Initially, the MSM arguably had an excuse. One doesn't expect a prosecutor to come on this strong with a bogus case, or a college president to throw students to the wolves. The MSMs real sins occurred after its members learned, as they quickly did, that this was just what the prosecutor and college president had done.
The New York Times, for which Stuart Taylor once worked, was (along with the Durham Herald Sun) probably the chief culprit. The Times sent sports reporter Joe Drape to investigate. Drape quickly learned facts that strongly tended to exonerate the accused players, but the Times refused to print his material. Soon, Drape was back covering horse races, replaced by Duff Wilson who took a pro-prosecution slant, thereby enabling the Times to peddle its preferred narrative of white privilege and racial oppression.
In addition, to Nifong, Duke, and the MSM, black civil rights leaders also merit dishonorable mention. Al Sharpton and company quickly piled on the innocent students, playing the race card for all it wasn't worth. That's why it's almost comical to hear Sharpton railing against prosecutorial abuse in the Jena case. Sharpton wouldn't grant the presumption of innocence to innocent white students victimized by a rogue prosecutor, yet thinks its the scandal of the century that thuggish black students were overcharged in Jena. As Taylor said yesterday, prosecutorial abuse looks like it may be a major problem in this country, so it's too bad that Sharpton and his ilk forfeited an opportunity to form a coalition with moderates and conservatives to combat it.
Out-of-control political correctness in academia and the desire to placate rabid campus race-baiters like Duke's gang of 88 has also become a serious problem. Although this story occurred at Duke, how confident can we be that the administration at Columbia (led by Lee Bollinger), at Harvard (now that the leftist faculty has ousted Larry Summers), or at other similar institutions would act differently under similar circumstances? Taylor didn't seem very confident, and I'm not confident at all.
UPDATE: A friend who has read Until Proven Innocent, and who raves about it, writes:
It seems to me that the NAACP's corrupt conduct in this case might be worthy of a blog post, as well as that of Jesse Jackson, Nancy Grace, and Wendy Murphy. Murphy and Grace came up with the ludicrous theory that the absence of DNA was inculpatory because the defendants must've conspired to withhold their DNA from the "victim" -- this despite the fact that none of the the alleged victim's multiple versions of events ever asserted that the defendants used condoms and that all her versions made much more graphic claims that would result in a positive DNA result.
This was an example of Jesse Jackson's contribution.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Ohhhhh Caaaaaanadaaaaaa! Cough cough!
September 19, 2007
Nationalized Health Care is BrokenBy John Stossel
Last week I pointed out that Michael Moore, maker of the documentary "Sicko," portrayed the Cuban health-care system as though it were utopia -- until I hit him with some inconvenient facts. So he backed off and said, "Let's stick to Canada and Britain because I think these are legitimate arguments that are made against the film and against the so-called idea of socialized medicine. And I think you should challenge me on these things."
OK, here we go.
One basic problem with nationalized health care is that it makes medical services seem free. That pushes demand beyond supply. Governments deal with that by limiting what's available.
That's why the British National Health Service recently made the pathetic promise to reduce wait times for hospital care to four months.
The wait to see dentists is so long that some Brits pull their own teeth. Dental tools: pliers and vodka.
One hospital tried to save money by not changing bed sheets every day. British papers report that instead of washing them, nurses were encouraged to just turn them over.
Government rationing of health care in Canada is why when Karen Jepp was about to give birth to quadruplets last month, she was told that all the neonatal units she could go to in Canada were too crowded. She flew to Montana to have the babies.
"People line up for care; some of them die. That's what happens," Canadian doctor David Gratzer, author of The Cure, told "20/20". Gratzer thought the Canadian system was great until he started treating patients.
"The more time I spent in the Canadian system, the more I came across people waiting. ... You want to see your neurologist because of your stress headache? No problem! You just have to wait six months. You want an MRI? No problem! Free as the air! You just gotta wait six months."
Michael Moore retorts that Canadians live longer than Americans.
But Canadians' longer lives are unrelated to heath care. Canadians are less likely to get into accidents or be murdered. Take those factors into account, not to mention obesity, and Americans live longer.
Most Canadians like their free health care, but Canadian doctors tell us the system is cracking. More than a million Canadians cannot find a regular family doctor. One town holds a lottery. Once a week the town clerk gets a box out of the closet. Everyone who wants to have a family doctor puts his or her name in it. The clerk pulls out one slip to determine the winner. Others in town have to wait.
It's driven some Canadians to private for-profit clinics. A new one opens somewhere in Canada almost every week. Although it's not clear that such private clinics are legal, one is run by the president of the Canadian Medical Association, Dr. Brian Day, because under government care, he says, "We found ourselves in a situation where we were seeing sick patients and weren't being allowed to treat them. That was something that we couldn't tolerate."
Canadians stuck on waiting lists often pay "medical travel agents" to get to America for treatment. Shirley Healey had a blocked artery that kept her from digesting food. So she hired a middleman to help her get to a hospital in Washington state.
"The doctor said that I would have only had a very few weeks to live," Healey said.
Yet the Canadian government calls her surgery "elective."
"The only thing elective about this surgery was I elected to live," she said.
Not all Canadian health care is long lines and lack of innovation. We found one place where providers offer easy access to cutting-edge life-saving technology, such as CT scans. And patients rarely wait.
But they have to bark or meow to get access to this technology. Vet clinics say they can get a dog or a cat in the next day. People have to wait a month.
Copyright 2007 Creators Syndicate Inc.Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/09/socialized_medicine_is_broken.html at September 19, 2007 - 07:34:22 PM CDT
_uacct = "UA-31527-1";
urchinTracker();
Nationalized Health Care is BrokenBy John Stossel
Last week I pointed out that Michael Moore, maker of the documentary "Sicko," portrayed the Cuban health-care system as though it were utopia -- until I hit him with some inconvenient facts. So he backed off and said, "Let's stick to Canada and Britain because I think these are legitimate arguments that are made against the film and against the so-called idea of socialized medicine. And I think you should challenge me on these things."
OK, here we go.
One basic problem with nationalized health care is that it makes medical services seem free. That pushes demand beyond supply. Governments deal with that by limiting what's available.
That's why the British National Health Service recently made the pathetic promise to reduce wait times for hospital care to four months.
The wait to see dentists is so long that some Brits pull their own teeth. Dental tools: pliers and vodka.
One hospital tried to save money by not changing bed sheets every day. British papers report that instead of washing them, nurses were encouraged to just turn them over.
Government rationing of health care in Canada is why when Karen Jepp was about to give birth to quadruplets last month, she was told that all the neonatal units she could go to in Canada were too crowded. She flew to Montana to have the babies.
"People line up for care; some of them die. That's what happens," Canadian doctor David Gratzer, author of The Cure, told "20/20". Gratzer thought the Canadian system was great until he started treating patients.
"The more time I spent in the Canadian system, the more I came across people waiting. ... You want to see your neurologist because of your stress headache? No problem! You just have to wait six months. You want an MRI? No problem! Free as the air! You just gotta wait six months."
Michael Moore retorts that Canadians live longer than Americans.
But Canadians' longer lives are unrelated to heath care. Canadians are less likely to get into accidents or be murdered. Take those factors into account, not to mention obesity, and Americans live longer.
Most Canadians like their free health care, but Canadian doctors tell us the system is cracking. More than a million Canadians cannot find a regular family doctor. One town holds a lottery. Once a week the town clerk gets a box out of the closet. Everyone who wants to have a family doctor puts his or her name in it. The clerk pulls out one slip to determine the winner. Others in town have to wait.
It's driven some Canadians to private for-profit clinics. A new one opens somewhere in Canada almost every week. Although it's not clear that such private clinics are legal, one is run by the president of the Canadian Medical Association, Dr. Brian Day, because under government care, he says, "We found ourselves in a situation where we were seeing sick patients and weren't being allowed to treat them. That was something that we couldn't tolerate."
Canadians stuck on waiting lists often pay "medical travel agents" to get to America for treatment. Shirley Healey had a blocked artery that kept her from digesting food. So she hired a middleman to help her get to a hospital in Washington state.
"The doctor said that I would have only had a very few weeks to live," Healey said.
Yet the Canadian government calls her surgery "elective."
"The only thing elective about this surgery was I elected to live," she said.
Not all Canadian health care is long lines and lack of innovation. We found one place where providers offer easy access to cutting-edge life-saving technology, such as CT scans. And patients rarely wait.
But they have to bark or meow to get access to this technology. Vet clinics say they can get a dog or a cat in the next day. People have to wait a month.
Copyright 2007 Creators Syndicate Inc.Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/09/socialized_medicine_is_broken.html at September 19, 2007 - 07:34:22 PM CDT
_uacct = "UA-31527-1";
urchinTracker();
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)