Please view this Penn and Teller show calling bullshit on environmental alarmism:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/30767_Penn_and_Teller_Take_on_Environmental_Hysteria
Thursday, July 31, 2008
I am a Presumed Racist
Presumed Racist [Peter Kirsanow]
Obama's statement yesterday about Republican scare tactics is merely the latest in a string of statements in which he suggests that certain Americans are intrinsically racist, and those Americans aren't just confined to political opponents. His declaration that his grandmother was a "typical white person," was, at the time, derided primarily because it was seen as Obama "throwing her under the bus" for political expediency. But the statement's premise — that the "typical" white person is a reflexive racist — is at least as offensive.
Similarly, the commentary surrounding Obama's statement to San Francisco elites about bitter, working class voters focused largely on the condescension in his claim that such folks "cling to guns or religion." Somewhat ignored was the clause "...or antipathy to people who aren't like them..." Again, Obama is branding a huge swath of the American populace in unsavory terms.
During the primaries his campaign lept upon any statement that was even remotely related to color as evidence of racist intent. This is, to say the least, peculiar for someone whose campaign was based in part on racial transcendence. Even more so for someone who doesn't seem to have encountered any pernicious racism or racial barriers in his personal life. His profligate insinuations of racism now are far beyond unseemly. As the possible next President of the United States, he needs to be called on it
Obama's statement yesterday about Republican scare tactics is merely the latest in a string of statements in which he suggests that certain Americans are intrinsically racist, and those Americans aren't just confined to political opponents. His declaration that his grandmother was a "typical white person," was, at the time, derided primarily because it was seen as Obama "throwing her under the bus" for political expediency. But the statement's premise — that the "typical" white person is a reflexive racist — is at least as offensive.
Similarly, the commentary surrounding Obama's statement to San Francisco elites about bitter, working class voters focused largely on the condescension in his claim that such folks "cling to guns or religion." Somewhat ignored was the clause "...or antipathy to people who aren't like them..." Again, Obama is branding a huge swath of the American populace in unsavory terms.
During the primaries his campaign lept upon any statement that was even remotely related to color as evidence of racist intent. This is, to say the least, peculiar for someone whose campaign was based in part on racial transcendence. Even more so for someone who doesn't seem to have encountered any pernicious racism or racial barriers in his personal life. His profligate insinuations of racism now are far beyond unseemly. As the possible next President of the United States, he needs to be called on it
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
From Gitmo to Miranda, With Love
From Gitmo to Miranda, With Love
By DEBRA BURLINGAMEJ
uly 30, 2008; Page A15
Captive Miranda, Lord knows I have not given a thought to the paperwork you sent me.
Let me tell you, Captive, that our release is not in the hands of the lawyers or the hands of America. Our release is in the hands of He who created us.
The poem, "To My Captive Lawyer, Miranda," was written by Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi while he was a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. No doubt, it would have given the former detainee, who was released in 2005, immense satisfaction to know that his last earthly deed was referenced in Justice Antonin Scalia's dissenting opinion in Boumediene v. Bush. That's the recent Supreme Court decision that gave Guantanamo detainees the constitutional right to challenge, in habeas corpus proceedings, whether they were properly classified by the military as enemy combatants.
Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi, on the left, in a martyrdom video posted on an al Qaeda Web site.
Al-Ajmi, a 29-year-old Kuwaiti, blew himself up in one of several coordinated suicide attacks on Iraqi security forces in Mosul this year. Originally reported to have participated in an April attack that killed six Iraqi policemen, a recent martyrdom video published on a password-protected al Qaeda Web site indicates that Al-Ajmi carried out the March 23 attack on an Iraqi army compound in Mosul. In that attack, an armored truck loaded with an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 pounds of explosives rammed through a fortified gate, overturned vehicles in its path and exploded in the center of the compound. The huge blast ripped the façade off three apartment buildings being used as barracks, killing 13 soldiers from the 2nd Iraqi Army division and seriously wounding 42 others.
Using the name "Abu Juheiman al-Kuwaiti," Al-Ajmi is seen on the video brandishing an automatic rifle, singing militant songs and exhorting his fellow Muslims to pledge their allegiance to the "Commander of the Faithful" in Iraq. Later, Al-Ajmi's face is superimposed over the army compound, followed by footage of the massive explosion and still shots of several dead bodies lying next to the 25-foot crater left by the blast.
Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi killed 13 people in this March 23 truck bombing in Mosul, Iraq—after he was released from U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay.
In 2006, Al-Ajmi's "Miranda" poem was included in a recitation of detainee poetry at a "Guantanamo teach-in" sponsored by Seton Hall Law School. The all-day event was Webcast live to 400 colleges and law schools across the country and abroad. Some of the lead attorneys pushing for detainee rights participated in the event, which began with organizers boasting about the diversity of the event's participating schools as exemplified by the American University of Paris, the American University in Cairo, the U.N. University for Peace in Costa Rica, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Parsons School of Design in New York City. One of Al-Ajmi's lawyers gave a presentation about detainee treatment entitled, "Insults to Religion."
Marc Falkoff, a former Covington & Burling attorney-turned-law-professor who represents several detainees, read the poems and later published a selection of them in a book ("Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak," Iowa University Press, 2007.) In his introductory remarks to the students, Mr. Falkoff described Al-Ajmi and the other detainee poets as "gentle, thoughtful young men" who, though frustrated and disillusioned, expressed an abiding hope in the future. "One thing you won't hear is hatred," he said, "and the reason you won't hear it is not because I edited it out, it's because it's not there in the poetry." Then how to explain the fact that -- on the advice of Al-Ajmi's attorneys -- "To My Captive Lawyer, Miranda," was excluded from the published collection last year? Mr. Falkoff, who also has a Ph.D. in literature, refused to explain further, though he insists on describing Al-Ajmi's verse as a "love poem to his lawyer."
Miranda, antelope, I am madly in love with captive Roman gazelles.
I pledge that if I ever see you outside this jail, I shall capture you and take you in a starry night.
In light of Al-Ajmi's deadly suicide attack, his poem seems less, as Mr. Falkoff insisted in a recent interview, "a trope about being a prisoner of love," and more about taunting his lawyers and mocking the American legal system. As any devotee of the successful "Law & Order" television franchise knows, "Miranda" is more than a fanciful female name. It is also the name of another infamous prisoner -- Ernesto Miranda, the career criminal and itinerant sex offender whose 1966 landmark legal case resulted in the "Miranda rule," requiring law enforcement officers to inform criminal suspects in custody of their right to remain silent and their right to an attorney during questioning.
It is easy to imagine the detainees' attorneys, upon first arriving at Guantanamo in 2004, earnestly explaining to their incredulous clients how the Miranda warning works. Incredulous, because detainees would certainly grasp that extending the full array of Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights to unlawful enemy combatants would have a devastating effect on vital intelligence-gathering efforts. Indeed, lawyers have already become part of the al Qaeda tool kit. When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was apprehended in Pakistan in 2003 and handed over to the U.S., he reportedly told his initial interrogators, "I'll talk to you guys when you take me to New York and I can see my lawyer."
After the Boumediene decision, that is no longer an empty threat. While Justice Anthony Kennedy stated in his 5-4 majority opinion that detainees are entitled to habeas review in the federal courts, he failed to expressly outline what legal standards the government would have to meet for detainee cases to pass constitutional muster. Many legal experts contend that if the habeas lawyers succeed in attaining for detainees the same degree of procedural rights as those extended to ordinary criminal defendants in domestic cases, "lawyering up" would mean the end of terrorist questioning, not the beginning.
If this is what "Miranda" represents, no wonder an Islamist suicide bomber would love her.
Miranda, what can I say? The heart is incarcerated in prisons of injustice, tortured and deprived, targeted with sharp, poisoned arrows by the hands of oppressors who have no mercy. Tell the mothers about their sons, the prisoners, brothers in bondage . . . they shall walk home.
But many in the detainees' home countries aren't welcoming them with open arms. The bombings carried out by Al-Ajmi and two other Kuwaiti nationals have stirred a public outcry from their fellow citizens. Al-Ajmi's own father has reportedly threatened to sue the government of Kuwait for issuing his son a passport and failing to live up to the terms set forth in the transfer agreement with U.S. State Department as a condition of his release. Kuwait's negligence and the State Department's failure to follow up have resulted in calls from the public for the detainees to stay right where they are and for Guantanamo to stay in operation.
"I believe the U.S. State Department knows the prisoners well, their way of thinking, and their plans after being released from prison," wrote Ali Ahmad Al-Baghli, Kuwait's former Minister of Oil, in the Arab Times after news of Al-Ajmi's suicide attack broke. He specifically criticized the outspoken leader of the Kuwaiti detainee families committee, Khalid Al-Odah, (interestingly, he is one of the "translators" Mr. Falkoff acknowledges in his poetry book), whose son remains at Guantanamo. Al-Odah hired a Washington, D.C., public-relations firm to "humanize" the detainees with sympathetic press.
"We cannot romanticize them into fallen heroes of Western neo-imperialism," wrote Shamael Al-Sharikh, a columnist for the Kuwaiti Times, in an article advocating that Guantanamo stay open, "because we are as much potential victims of terrorist attacks as [Americans] are."
As an example of where we might be headed after Boumediene, consider the situation in Britain. In June, Abu Qatada, a radical imam wanted in connection with bombing conspiracies in several countries, was released from jail after seven years of fighting his deportation. Qatada, whose recorded sermons were found in the Hamburg apartment of the 9/11 hijackers, was described by an immigration appeals commission as a "truly dangerous individual" who was "heavily involved, indeed at the center of terrorist activities associated with al-Qa'eda."
But judges in Britain will not extradite him to Jordan, where he was convicted in absentia, because his lawyers allege that the evidence against him might have been obtained by torture. Sending him packing under these circumstances, the court ruled, would violate the European Convention on Human Rights.
The result is a perverse situation in which, to protect the human rights of the man who issued a fatwa to kill the wives and children of Egyptian police and army officers, the British public pays a yearly tab of $1.1 million to cover Qatada's round-the-clock police surveillance, housing and welfare assistance for him, his wife and five children.
For those who scoff at the idea that U.S. judges would release a dangerous terrorist here, think again. As Attorney General Michael Mukasey pointed out in a speech earlier this month at the American Enterprise Institute, the Boumediene decision was vague on every detail but one. The ruling said that for habeas review to mean anything, the court must have the power to release. What do we do with a graduate of al Qaeda training camps who hasn't yet committed an act of violence? What do we do if no country will take him? If Congress doesn't intervene, the most difficult detainee cases may end up being administered by federal judges who are dismissive of concerns about enemy combatants returning to the battlefield.
"Courts guarantee an independent process, not an outcome," wrote John Coughenour, the federal judge who presided over the trial of "millennium bomber" Ahmad Ressam in a Washington Post op-ed just this Sunday. Yes, and that is precisely why Congress has an obligation to formulate the substance and parameters of that process. Judges do not make law or policy. The scope of their review is limited to the immediate case before them.
Unless Congress weighs in, judges -- unaccountable to the body politic -- will decide what standards of proof and rules of evidence will apply to these detainees, resulting in an ad hoc, case-by-case body of law which focuses on the rights of the detainees, not on the consequences for our war fighters who risk their lives to capture them. Since when do we leave it to judges to decide when and to what degree our troops are required to engage in police duties in the heat of battle?
Further, judges only rule on the applications made by the lawyers who come before them. Despite their rhetoric about "rule of law," attorneys are not charged with acting in furtherance of the national security interests of the public. Their obligation is to their clients alone, the detainees. Hence, we have witnessed the six-year campaign by Gitmo lawyers to pressure the U.S. government into releasing dangerous men before their cases come before a military tribunal or are heard in the federal courts.
David Cynamon, a senior attorney at Pillsbury Winthrop Putnam Shaw, is one of the lead lawyers negotiating the repatriation of the Kuwaiti detainees. In an email last fall to Pentagon officials, Mr. Cynamon expressed frustration with what he perceived as foot-dragging in the release of the last four Kuwaitis still held at Gitmo. He attached an exhibit which compared the unclassified information on all original 12 Kuwaiti detainees who were captured in Afghanistan. "I find it impossible to deduce from this chart," he wrote, "that the four who remain are any more (or less) [sic] dangerous than the ones who were returned." After Al-Ajmi's devastating suicide attack in Mosul, one hopes the Pentagon is giving his chart a second look.
Meanwhile, the habeas attorneys' effort to smear the United States and paint their clients as innocent victims continues. "Poems from Guantanamo" was taught this spring in an undergraduate course called "Writers in Exile" at City University of New York in Queens, a short distance from Ground Zero. The book's introduction states that the detainee poets "follow in the footsteps of prisoners who wrote in the Gulag, the Nazi concentration camps, and, closer to home, Japanese-American internment camps." One of the students, posting on the class blog, wrote of the detainees' plight, "Wow, I had no idea. For the first time in my life, I am ashamed to be seen as an American."
Your whole being and your heart will be captivated by this night, who drove the Romans to madness. You will forget everything about Rome and will live the life of faith in Islam.
Abdullah Salem Al-Ajmi, the detainee who wrote of turning the tables on his lawyer, Miranda, should haunt the dreams of every member of Congress.
Ms. Burlingame, a former attorney and a director of the National September 11 Memorial Foundation, is the sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
By DEBRA BURLINGAMEJ
uly 30, 2008; Page A15
Captive Miranda, Lord knows I have not given a thought to the paperwork you sent me.
Let me tell you, Captive, that our release is not in the hands of the lawyers or the hands of America. Our release is in the hands of He who created us.
The poem, "To My Captive Lawyer, Miranda," was written by Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi while he was a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. No doubt, it would have given the former detainee, who was released in 2005, immense satisfaction to know that his last earthly deed was referenced in Justice Antonin Scalia's dissenting opinion in Boumediene v. Bush. That's the recent Supreme Court decision that gave Guantanamo detainees the constitutional right to challenge, in habeas corpus proceedings, whether they were properly classified by the military as enemy combatants.
Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi, on the left, in a martyrdom video posted on an al Qaeda Web site.
Al-Ajmi, a 29-year-old Kuwaiti, blew himself up in one of several coordinated suicide attacks on Iraqi security forces in Mosul this year. Originally reported to have participated in an April attack that killed six Iraqi policemen, a recent martyrdom video published on a password-protected al Qaeda Web site indicates that Al-Ajmi carried out the March 23 attack on an Iraqi army compound in Mosul. In that attack, an armored truck loaded with an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 pounds of explosives rammed through a fortified gate, overturned vehicles in its path and exploded in the center of the compound. The huge blast ripped the façade off three apartment buildings being used as barracks, killing 13 soldiers from the 2nd Iraqi Army division and seriously wounding 42 others.
Using the name "Abu Juheiman al-Kuwaiti," Al-Ajmi is seen on the video brandishing an automatic rifle, singing militant songs and exhorting his fellow Muslims to pledge their allegiance to the "Commander of the Faithful" in Iraq. Later, Al-Ajmi's face is superimposed over the army compound, followed by footage of the massive explosion and still shots of several dead bodies lying next to the 25-foot crater left by the blast.
Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi killed 13 people in this March 23 truck bombing in Mosul, Iraq—after he was released from U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay.
In 2006, Al-Ajmi's "Miranda" poem was included in a recitation of detainee poetry at a "Guantanamo teach-in" sponsored by Seton Hall Law School. The all-day event was Webcast live to 400 colleges and law schools across the country and abroad. Some of the lead attorneys pushing for detainee rights participated in the event, which began with organizers boasting about the diversity of the event's participating schools as exemplified by the American University of Paris, the American University in Cairo, the U.N. University for Peace in Costa Rica, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Parsons School of Design in New York City. One of Al-Ajmi's lawyers gave a presentation about detainee treatment entitled, "Insults to Religion."
Marc Falkoff, a former Covington & Burling attorney-turned-law-professor who represents several detainees, read the poems and later published a selection of them in a book ("Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak," Iowa University Press, 2007.) In his introductory remarks to the students, Mr. Falkoff described Al-Ajmi and the other detainee poets as "gentle, thoughtful young men" who, though frustrated and disillusioned, expressed an abiding hope in the future. "One thing you won't hear is hatred," he said, "and the reason you won't hear it is not because I edited it out, it's because it's not there in the poetry." Then how to explain the fact that -- on the advice of Al-Ajmi's attorneys -- "To My Captive Lawyer, Miranda," was excluded from the published collection last year? Mr. Falkoff, who also has a Ph.D. in literature, refused to explain further, though he insists on describing Al-Ajmi's verse as a "love poem to his lawyer."
Miranda, antelope, I am madly in love with captive Roman gazelles.
I pledge that if I ever see you outside this jail, I shall capture you and take you in a starry night.
In light of Al-Ajmi's deadly suicide attack, his poem seems less, as Mr. Falkoff insisted in a recent interview, "a trope about being a prisoner of love," and more about taunting his lawyers and mocking the American legal system. As any devotee of the successful "Law & Order" television franchise knows, "Miranda" is more than a fanciful female name. It is also the name of another infamous prisoner -- Ernesto Miranda, the career criminal and itinerant sex offender whose 1966 landmark legal case resulted in the "Miranda rule," requiring law enforcement officers to inform criminal suspects in custody of their right to remain silent and their right to an attorney during questioning.
It is easy to imagine the detainees' attorneys, upon first arriving at Guantanamo in 2004, earnestly explaining to their incredulous clients how the Miranda warning works. Incredulous, because detainees would certainly grasp that extending the full array of Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights to unlawful enemy combatants would have a devastating effect on vital intelligence-gathering efforts. Indeed, lawyers have already become part of the al Qaeda tool kit. When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was apprehended in Pakistan in 2003 and handed over to the U.S., he reportedly told his initial interrogators, "I'll talk to you guys when you take me to New York and I can see my lawyer."
After the Boumediene decision, that is no longer an empty threat. While Justice Anthony Kennedy stated in his 5-4 majority opinion that detainees are entitled to habeas review in the federal courts, he failed to expressly outline what legal standards the government would have to meet for detainee cases to pass constitutional muster. Many legal experts contend that if the habeas lawyers succeed in attaining for detainees the same degree of procedural rights as those extended to ordinary criminal defendants in domestic cases, "lawyering up" would mean the end of terrorist questioning, not the beginning.
If this is what "Miranda" represents, no wonder an Islamist suicide bomber would love her.
Miranda, what can I say? The heart is incarcerated in prisons of injustice, tortured and deprived, targeted with sharp, poisoned arrows by the hands of oppressors who have no mercy. Tell the mothers about their sons, the prisoners, brothers in bondage . . . they shall walk home.
But many in the detainees' home countries aren't welcoming them with open arms. The bombings carried out by Al-Ajmi and two other Kuwaiti nationals have stirred a public outcry from their fellow citizens. Al-Ajmi's own father has reportedly threatened to sue the government of Kuwait for issuing his son a passport and failing to live up to the terms set forth in the transfer agreement with U.S. State Department as a condition of his release. Kuwait's negligence and the State Department's failure to follow up have resulted in calls from the public for the detainees to stay right where they are and for Guantanamo to stay in operation.
"I believe the U.S. State Department knows the prisoners well, their way of thinking, and their plans after being released from prison," wrote Ali Ahmad Al-Baghli, Kuwait's former Minister of Oil, in the Arab Times after news of Al-Ajmi's suicide attack broke. He specifically criticized the outspoken leader of the Kuwaiti detainee families committee, Khalid Al-Odah, (interestingly, he is one of the "translators" Mr. Falkoff acknowledges in his poetry book), whose son remains at Guantanamo. Al-Odah hired a Washington, D.C., public-relations firm to "humanize" the detainees with sympathetic press.
"We cannot romanticize them into fallen heroes of Western neo-imperialism," wrote Shamael Al-Sharikh, a columnist for the Kuwaiti Times, in an article advocating that Guantanamo stay open, "because we are as much potential victims of terrorist attacks as [Americans] are."
As an example of where we might be headed after Boumediene, consider the situation in Britain. In June, Abu Qatada, a radical imam wanted in connection with bombing conspiracies in several countries, was released from jail after seven years of fighting his deportation. Qatada, whose recorded sermons were found in the Hamburg apartment of the 9/11 hijackers, was described by an immigration appeals commission as a "truly dangerous individual" who was "heavily involved, indeed at the center of terrorist activities associated with al-Qa'eda."
But judges in Britain will not extradite him to Jordan, where he was convicted in absentia, because his lawyers allege that the evidence against him might have been obtained by torture. Sending him packing under these circumstances, the court ruled, would violate the European Convention on Human Rights.
The result is a perverse situation in which, to protect the human rights of the man who issued a fatwa to kill the wives and children of Egyptian police and army officers, the British public pays a yearly tab of $1.1 million to cover Qatada's round-the-clock police surveillance, housing and welfare assistance for him, his wife and five children.
For those who scoff at the idea that U.S. judges would release a dangerous terrorist here, think again. As Attorney General Michael Mukasey pointed out in a speech earlier this month at the American Enterprise Institute, the Boumediene decision was vague on every detail but one. The ruling said that for habeas review to mean anything, the court must have the power to release. What do we do with a graduate of al Qaeda training camps who hasn't yet committed an act of violence? What do we do if no country will take him? If Congress doesn't intervene, the most difficult detainee cases may end up being administered by federal judges who are dismissive of concerns about enemy combatants returning to the battlefield.
"Courts guarantee an independent process, not an outcome," wrote John Coughenour, the federal judge who presided over the trial of "millennium bomber" Ahmad Ressam in a Washington Post op-ed just this Sunday. Yes, and that is precisely why Congress has an obligation to formulate the substance and parameters of that process. Judges do not make law or policy. The scope of their review is limited to the immediate case before them.
Unless Congress weighs in, judges -- unaccountable to the body politic -- will decide what standards of proof and rules of evidence will apply to these detainees, resulting in an ad hoc, case-by-case body of law which focuses on the rights of the detainees, not on the consequences for our war fighters who risk their lives to capture them. Since when do we leave it to judges to decide when and to what degree our troops are required to engage in police duties in the heat of battle?
Further, judges only rule on the applications made by the lawyers who come before them. Despite their rhetoric about "rule of law," attorneys are not charged with acting in furtherance of the national security interests of the public. Their obligation is to their clients alone, the detainees. Hence, we have witnessed the six-year campaign by Gitmo lawyers to pressure the U.S. government into releasing dangerous men before their cases come before a military tribunal or are heard in the federal courts.
David Cynamon, a senior attorney at Pillsbury Winthrop Putnam Shaw, is one of the lead lawyers negotiating the repatriation of the Kuwaiti detainees. In an email last fall to Pentagon officials, Mr. Cynamon expressed frustration with what he perceived as foot-dragging in the release of the last four Kuwaitis still held at Gitmo. He attached an exhibit which compared the unclassified information on all original 12 Kuwaiti detainees who were captured in Afghanistan. "I find it impossible to deduce from this chart," he wrote, "that the four who remain are any more (or less) [sic] dangerous than the ones who were returned." After Al-Ajmi's devastating suicide attack in Mosul, one hopes the Pentagon is giving his chart a second look.
Meanwhile, the habeas attorneys' effort to smear the United States and paint their clients as innocent victims continues. "Poems from Guantanamo" was taught this spring in an undergraduate course called "Writers in Exile" at City University of New York in Queens, a short distance from Ground Zero. The book's introduction states that the detainee poets "follow in the footsteps of prisoners who wrote in the Gulag, the Nazi concentration camps, and, closer to home, Japanese-American internment camps." One of the students, posting on the class blog, wrote of the detainees' plight, "Wow, I had no idea. For the first time in my life, I am ashamed to be seen as an American."
Your whole being and your heart will be captivated by this night, who drove the Romans to madness. You will forget everything about Rome and will live the life of faith in Islam.
Abdullah Salem Al-Ajmi, the detainee who wrote of turning the tables on his lawyer, Miranda, should haunt the dreams of every member of Congress.
Ms. Burlingame, a former attorney and a director of the National September 11 Memorial Foundation, is the sister of Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Math Is Harder for Girls. . . and also, it seems, for the New York Times.
Math Is Harder for Girls. . . and also, it seems, for the New York Times.
28 July 2008
The New York Times is determined to show that women are discriminated against in the sciences; too bad the facts say otherwise. A new study has “found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests,” claims a July 25 article by Tamar Lewin—thus, the underrepresentation of women on science faculties must result from bias. Actually, the study, summarized in the July 25 issue of Science, shows something quite different: while boys’ and girls’ average scores are similar, boys outnumber girls among students in both the highest and the lowest score ranges. Either the Times is deliberately concealing the results of the study or its reporter cannot understand the most basic science reporting.
Lewin begins her piece with the mandatory mocking reference to former Harvard president Lawrence Summers’ suicidal speculations about why women are underrepresented on science and math faculties. She also manages to squeeze in a classic feminist trope for how our sexist society destroys girls’ innate abilities, invoking the infamous “talking Barbie doll [who] proclaimed that ‘math class is tough.’” Lewin implies that the new study blows Summers’ wide-ranging speculations on gender and math out of the water; all that holds women back from equal representation in MIT’s theoretical physics labs, it seems, is Mattel and other patriarchal marketers of gender myths.
On the contrary, Science’s analysis of math test scores only confirms the hypothesis that cost Summers his Harvard post: that boys are found more often than girls at the outer reaches of the bell curve of abstract reasoning ability. If you’re hoping to land a job in Harvard’s math department, you’d better not show up with average math scores; in fact, you’d better present scores at the absolute top of the range. And as studies have shown for decades, there are many more boys than girls in that empyrean realm. Unless science and math faculties start practicing the most grotesque and counterproductive gender discrimination, a skew in the sex of their professors will be inevitable, given the distribution of top-level cognitive skills. Likewise, boys will be and are overrepresented among math dunces—though the feminists never complain about the male math failure rate.
Lewin claims that the “researchers looked at the average of the test scores of all students, the performance of the most gifted children and the ability to solve complex math problems. They found, in every category, that girls did as well as boys.” This statement is simply wrong. Among white 11th-graders, there were twice as many boys as girls above the 99th percentile—that is, at the very top of the curve. (Asians, however, showed a very slight skew toward females above the 99th percentile, while there were too few Hispanics and blacks scoring above even the 95th percentile to compute their gender ratios.)
The Science researchers themselves try to downplay the significance of the two-to-one ratio for whites—the vast majority of students—on the grounds that it should produce a 67 percent to 33 percent disparity in male-to-female representation in math-dependent fields. Yet Ph.D. programs for engineering, they say, contain only about 15 percent women. Therefore, the authors conclude, “gender differences in math performance, even among high scorers, are insufficient to explain lopsided gender patterns in participation in some [science and math] fields.”
This reasoning is flawed, however, because the tests used in their study are pathetically easy compared with what would be required of engineering or other rigorous math-based Ph.D.s. The researchers got their data from math tests devised by individual states to fulfill their annual testing obligations under the federal No Child Left Behind act. NCLB has produced a mad rush to the bottom, as many states crafted easier and easier reading and math tests to show their federal overseers how well their schools are doing. The Science researchers analyzed the difficulty of those tests and found that virtually none required remotely complicated problem-solving abilities. That a gender difference at the highest percentiles shows up on tests pitched to such an elementary level of knowledge and skill suggests that on truly challenging tests, the gender difference at the top end of the distribution will be even greater. Indeed, between five and ten times as many boys as girls have been found to receive near-perfect scores on the math SATs among mathematically gifted adolescents, for example. Far from raising the presumption of gender bias among schools and colleges, the Science study strengthens a competing hypothesis: that the main drivers of success in scientific fields are aptitude and knowledge, in conjunction with personal choices about career and family that feminists refuse to acknowledge.
The same reality-denying feminists are itching to subject college science and math departments to gender quotas. They have already persuaded Congress to require university scientists to perform Title IX compliance reviews—a nightmare of bean-counting paperwork—covering everything from faculty composition to lab space. Misleading reporting like Lewin’s will only strengthen the movement to select cancer researchers and atomic engineers on the basis of their sex, not their abilities.
The Wall Street Journal, it should be noted, had no difficulty grasping the two main findings of the Science study: that “girls and boys have roughly the same average scores on state math tests,” as Keith J. Winstein reported on July 25, but that “boys more often excelled or failed.”
That the New York Times, in an article over twice as long as the Journal’s, couldn’t manage to squeeze in a reference to the fact that boys outperformed girls at the top end of the curve should put its readers on notice: trust nothing you read here.
Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Her latest book, coauthored with Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Malanga, is The Immigration Solution.
28 July 2008
The New York Times is determined to show that women are discriminated against in the sciences; too bad the facts say otherwise. A new study has “found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests,” claims a July 25 article by Tamar Lewin—thus, the underrepresentation of women on science faculties must result from bias. Actually, the study, summarized in the July 25 issue of Science, shows something quite different: while boys’ and girls’ average scores are similar, boys outnumber girls among students in both the highest and the lowest score ranges. Either the Times is deliberately concealing the results of the study or its reporter cannot understand the most basic science reporting.
Lewin begins her piece with the mandatory mocking reference to former Harvard president Lawrence Summers’ suicidal speculations about why women are underrepresented on science and math faculties. She also manages to squeeze in a classic feminist trope for how our sexist society destroys girls’ innate abilities, invoking the infamous “talking Barbie doll [who] proclaimed that ‘math class is tough.’” Lewin implies that the new study blows Summers’ wide-ranging speculations on gender and math out of the water; all that holds women back from equal representation in MIT’s theoretical physics labs, it seems, is Mattel and other patriarchal marketers of gender myths.
On the contrary, Science’s analysis of math test scores only confirms the hypothesis that cost Summers his Harvard post: that boys are found more often than girls at the outer reaches of the bell curve of abstract reasoning ability. If you’re hoping to land a job in Harvard’s math department, you’d better not show up with average math scores; in fact, you’d better present scores at the absolute top of the range. And as studies have shown for decades, there are many more boys than girls in that empyrean realm. Unless science and math faculties start practicing the most grotesque and counterproductive gender discrimination, a skew in the sex of their professors will be inevitable, given the distribution of top-level cognitive skills. Likewise, boys will be and are overrepresented among math dunces—though the feminists never complain about the male math failure rate.
Lewin claims that the “researchers looked at the average of the test scores of all students, the performance of the most gifted children and the ability to solve complex math problems. They found, in every category, that girls did as well as boys.” This statement is simply wrong. Among white 11th-graders, there were twice as many boys as girls above the 99th percentile—that is, at the very top of the curve. (Asians, however, showed a very slight skew toward females above the 99th percentile, while there were too few Hispanics and blacks scoring above even the 95th percentile to compute their gender ratios.)
The Science researchers themselves try to downplay the significance of the two-to-one ratio for whites—the vast majority of students—on the grounds that it should produce a 67 percent to 33 percent disparity in male-to-female representation in math-dependent fields. Yet Ph.D. programs for engineering, they say, contain only about 15 percent women. Therefore, the authors conclude, “gender differences in math performance, even among high scorers, are insufficient to explain lopsided gender patterns in participation in some [science and math] fields.”
This reasoning is flawed, however, because the tests used in their study are pathetically easy compared with what would be required of engineering or other rigorous math-based Ph.D.s. The researchers got their data from math tests devised by individual states to fulfill their annual testing obligations under the federal No Child Left Behind act. NCLB has produced a mad rush to the bottom, as many states crafted easier and easier reading and math tests to show their federal overseers how well their schools are doing. The Science researchers analyzed the difficulty of those tests and found that virtually none required remotely complicated problem-solving abilities. That a gender difference at the highest percentiles shows up on tests pitched to such an elementary level of knowledge and skill suggests that on truly challenging tests, the gender difference at the top end of the distribution will be even greater. Indeed, between five and ten times as many boys as girls have been found to receive near-perfect scores on the math SATs among mathematically gifted adolescents, for example. Far from raising the presumption of gender bias among schools and colleges, the Science study strengthens a competing hypothesis: that the main drivers of success in scientific fields are aptitude and knowledge, in conjunction with personal choices about career and family that feminists refuse to acknowledge.
The same reality-denying feminists are itching to subject college science and math departments to gender quotas. They have already persuaded Congress to require university scientists to perform Title IX compliance reviews—a nightmare of bean-counting paperwork—covering everything from faculty composition to lab space. Misleading reporting like Lewin’s will only strengthen the movement to select cancer researchers and atomic engineers on the basis of their sex, not their abilities.
The Wall Street Journal, it should be noted, had no difficulty grasping the two main findings of the Science study: that “girls and boys have roughly the same average scores on state math tests,” as Keith J. Winstein reported on July 25, but that “boys more often excelled or failed.”
That the New York Times, in an article over twice as long as the Journal’s, couldn’t manage to squeeze in a reference to the fact that boys outperformed girls at the top end of the curve should put its readers on notice: trust nothing you read here.
Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Her latest book, coauthored with Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Malanga, is The Immigration Solution.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
In the minds of the terrorists
I ran across this and thought it was interesting.
What [people] don’t understand is that terrorism, whether in Tel Aviv, NYC, or Madrid, doesn’t stem primarily from Muslim poverty, US foreign policy, or Israeli settlements. In the minds of the terrorists Islam requires jihad, the murder of unbelievers, and the terrorists are not distorting the Islamic holy writings.
Prophet Mohammad and Osama bin Laden both said: “I was ordered to fight all men until they say—There is no God but Allah.”
Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheik who ordered the first bombing of the WTC: And the Quran makes it among the means to perform jihad for the sake of Allah, which is to terrorize the enemies of God and our enemies too….Then we must be terrorists and we must terrorize the enemies of Islam and frighten them and disturb them and shake the earth under their feet.From Willful Blindness by Andrew C. McCarthy, p. 188.
What [people] don’t understand is that terrorism, whether in Tel Aviv, NYC, or Madrid, doesn’t stem primarily from Muslim poverty, US foreign policy, or Israeli settlements. In the minds of the terrorists Islam requires jihad, the murder of unbelievers, and the terrorists are not distorting the Islamic holy writings.
Prophet Mohammad and Osama bin Laden both said: “I was ordered to fight all men until they say—There is no God but Allah.”
Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheik who ordered the first bombing of the WTC: And the Quran makes it among the means to perform jihad for the sake of Allah, which is to terrorize the enemies of God and our enemies too….Then we must be terrorists and we must terrorize the enemies of Islam and frighten them and disturb them and shake the earth under their feet.From Willful Blindness by Andrew C. McCarthy, p. 188.
Ahhhh, the Times...
Nicholas Kristof’s Moral Tourism
Noah Pollak - 07.25.2008 - 8:16 AM
It might be time to officially designate Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, as an Israel-obsessed know-nothing. He is an illustration of the adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing; he recently visited Hebron, and since then has assumed the role of ignorant hysteric in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yesterday’s column is a marvel of the genre.
Kristof wants the United States to get tough on Israel. He describes one way to do this:
Particularly at a time when Israel seems to be contemplating military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, the United States would be a better friend if it said: “That’s crazy”
For a humanitarian as great as Kristof imagines himself to be, this is staggeringly callous. Let me tell you: every member of the Israeli political and defense establishment genuinely believes that the Iranian nuclear program is a grave and existential threat. The Iranian regime has promised that its nuclear program will be a grave and existential threat. The IDF is not inventing a crisis, as if it needed more problems to deal with than Hamas and Hezbollah. Kristof may think that Israel is crazy, but then it’s always easy to be glib and condescending about nuclear weapons when someone else is their target.
It gets dumber. Kristof rejects the argument that Palestinian violence is worse than Israeli violence by offering the following:
B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, reports that a total of 123 Israeli minors have been killed by Palestinians since the second intifada began in 2000, compared with 951 Palestinian minors killed by Israeli security forces.
A few questions for the moral conscience of the Times‘ op-ed page: 1) how many of those “Palestinian minors” were implicated in terrorism? Kristof appears unaware that Hamas and Islamic Jihad do not forbid underage martyrdom. 2) Does it matter to Kristof that those 123 Israeli minors were murdered intentionally, whereas the Palestinian minors (at least those not involved in terrorism) were killed accidentally, in the course of Israeli self-defense that would not have been necessary in the first place if not for the Palestinian terror war? 3) Is Kristof aware that Palestinian terror groups employ tactics intentionally designed to raise the Palestinian death toll, precisely so that useful idiots like Kristof will then cite Palestinian civilian deaths as an example of Israeli barbarism?
At the moment, though, Israel has its most reasonable partner ever — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas — and it is undermining him with its checkpoints and new settlement construction.
The problem with Mahmoud Abbas is that even on his best days, his authority perhaps extends to the falafel stand outside his office in Ramallah. Kristof is inventing a leader who doesn’t exist so that he can lay Palestinian failure on Israel’s unwillingness to take Palestinian governance seriously. Marty Peretz said recently that “Kristof never writes an analysis. He dishes out schwarmerei.” This time he tried to do an analysis, and it’s a train wreck of false premises. I wish he’d just stick to the schwarmerei.
Noah Pollak - 07.25.2008 - 8:16 AM
It might be time to officially designate Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, as an Israel-obsessed know-nothing. He is an illustration of the adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing; he recently visited Hebron, and since then has assumed the role of ignorant hysteric in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yesterday’s column is a marvel of the genre.
Kristof wants the United States to get tough on Israel. He describes one way to do this:
Particularly at a time when Israel seems to be contemplating military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, the United States would be a better friend if it said: “That’s crazy”
For a humanitarian as great as Kristof imagines himself to be, this is staggeringly callous. Let me tell you: every member of the Israeli political and defense establishment genuinely believes that the Iranian nuclear program is a grave and existential threat. The Iranian regime has promised that its nuclear program will be a grave and existential threat. The IDF is not inventing a crisis, as if it needed more problems to deal with than Hamas and Hezbollah. Kristof may think that Israel is crazy, but then it’s always easy to be glib and condescending about nuclear weapons when someone else is their target.
It gets dumber. Kristof rejects the argument that Palestinian violence is worse than Israeli violence by offering the following:
B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, reports that a total of 123 Israeli minors have been killed by Palestinians since the second intifada began in 2000, compared with 951 Palestinian minors killed by Israeli security forces.
A few questions for the moral conscience of the Times‘ op-ed page: 1) how many of those “Palestinian minors” were implicated in terrorism? Kristof appears unaware that Hamas and Islamic Jihad do not forbid underage martyrdom. 2) Does it matter to Kristof that those 123 Israeli minors were murdered intentionally, whereas the Palestinian minors (at least those not involved in terrorism) were killed accidentally, in the course of Israeli self-defense that would not have been necessary in the first place if not for the Palestinian terror war? 3) Is Kristof aware that Palestinian terror groups employ tactics intentionally designed to raise the Palestinian death toll, precisely so that useful idiots like Kristof will then cite Palestinian civilian deaths as an example of Israeli barbarism?
At the moment, though, Israel has its most reasonable partner ever — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas — and it is undermining him with its checkpoints and new settlement construction.
The problem with Mahmoud Abbas is that even on his best days, his authority perhaps extends to the falafel stand outside his office in Ramallah. Kristof is inventing a leader who doesn’t exist so that he can lay Palestinian failure on Israel’s unwillingness to take Palestinian governance seriously. Marty Peretz said recently that “Kristof never writes an analysis. He dishes out schwarmerei.” This time he tried to do an analysis, and it’s a train wreck of false premises. I wish he’d just stick to the schwarmerei.
A Step Back From Enviro Lunacy
July 26, 2008
A Step Back From Enviro Lunacy
By Michael Barone
Sometimes public opinion doesn't flow smoothly; it shifts sharply when a tipping point is reached. Case in point: gas prices. $3 a gallon gas didn't change anybody's mind about energy issues. $4 a gallon gas did. Evidently, the experience of paying more than $50 for a tankful gets people thinking we should stop worrying so much about global warming and the environmental dangers of oil wells on the outer continental shelf and in Alaska. Drill now! Nuke the caribou!
Our system of divided government and litigation-friendly regulation makes it hard for our society to do things and easy for adroit lobbyists and lawyers to stop them. Nations with more centralized power and less democratic accountability find it easier: France and Japan generate most of their electricity by nuclear power and Chicago, where authority is more centralized and accountability less robust than in most of the country, depends more on nuclear power than almost all the rest of the nation.
In contrast, lobbyists and litigators for environmental restriction groups have produced energy policies that I suspect future generations will regard as lunatic. We haven't built a new nuclear plant for some 30 years, since a Jane Fonda movie exaggerated their dangers. We have allowed states to ban oil drilling on the outer continental shelf, prompted by the failure of 40- or 50-year-old technology in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1969, though current technology is much better, as shown by the lack of oil spills in the waters off Louisiana and Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina.
We have banned oil drilling on a very small portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that is godforsaken tundra (I have been to the North Slope oil fields, similar terrain -- I know) for fear of disturbing a herd of caribou -- a species of hoofed animals that is in no way endangered or scarce.
The ANWR ban is the work of environmental restriction groups that depend on direct-mail fundraising to pay their bills and keep their jobs. That means they must always claim the sky is falling. They can't get people to send a check or mouse-click a donation because they did a good job, the restrictions they imposed on the Alaska pipeline in the 1970s have done a good job in preserving the environment or because clean air acts of the past have vastly reduced air pollution.
ANWR is a precious cause for them because it can be portrayed (dishonestly) as a national treasure and because the pressure for drilling there has been unrelenting. Democrats have enlisted solidly in their army, and they have also been able to recruit Republicans who wanted to get good environmental scorecards to impress enviro-conscious voters in states like Florida, New Jersey and Minnesota.
Now all that is in danger, because the pain of paying $60 for a tank of gas has convinced most Americans to worry less about the caribou or the recurrence of an oil spill that happened 39 years ago. Democratic leaders are preventing Congress from voting on continental shelf and ANWR drilling or oil shale development because they fear their side would lose and are making the transparently absurd claim that drilling won't lower the price of oil. They're scampering to say that they would allow drilling somewhere -- mostly in places where the oil companies haven't found any oil.
In a country with less in the way of checks and balances, which can be gamed by adroit lobbyists and litigators, we would be building more nuclear plants, and would be drilling offshore and in ANWR. We would be phasing out the corn ethanol subsidies that are enriching Iowa farmers and impoverishing Mexican tortilla eaters, and we would be repealing the 54-cent tariff on Brazilian sugar ethanol (the sugar for which would be produced not in defoliated Amazon rainforests but in the desolate and currently unused certao).
On balance, of course, I prefer our system over the more centralized, less accountable systems of France and Japan (and Barack Obama's Chicago). But it sure does have its costs.
But it also has its benefits: Public opinion, when it has changed as it has with $4 gas, has an effect. Environmental restrictionists like Al Gore have been selling a form of secular religion: We have sinned against Mother Earth, we must atone and suffer, there can be no argument, but we must have faith.
That was an appealing argument to many, perhaps most, Americans when gas was selling for $1.40. It has a much more limited appeal now that gas is selling for $4.10. The time may be coming when our lunatic environmental policies are swept away by a rising tide of common sense.
Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/a_step_back_from_enviro_lunacy.html at July 26, 2008 - 05:10:40 PM CDT
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A Step Back From Enviro Lunacy
By Michael Barone
Sometimes public opinion doesn't flow smoothly; it shifts sharply when a tipping point is reached. Case in point: gas prices. $3 a gallon gas didn't change anybody's mind about energy issues. $4 a gallon gas did. Evidently, the experience of paying more than $50 for a tankful gets people thinking we should stop worrying so much about global warming and the environmental dangers of oil wells on the outer continental shelf and in Alaska. Drill now! Nuke the caribou!
Our system of divided government and litigation-friendly regulation makes it hard for our society to do things and easy for adroit lobbyists and lawyers to stop them. Nations with more centralized power and less democratic accountability find it easier: France and Japan generate most of their electricity by nuclear power and Chicago, where authority is more centralized and accountability less robust than in most of the country, depends more on nuclear power than almost all the rest of the nation.
In contrast, lobbyists and litigators for environmental restriction groups have produced energy policies that I suspect future generations will regard as lunatic. We haven't built a new nuclear plant for some 30 years, since a Jane Fonda movie exaggerated their dangers. We have allowed states to ban oil drilling on the outer continental shelf, prompted by the failure of 40- or 50-year-old technology in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1969, though current technology is much better, as shown by the lack of oil spills in the waters off Louisiana and Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina.
We have banned oil drilling on a very small portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that is godforsaken tundra (I have been to the North Slope oil fields, similar terrain -- I know) for fear of disturbing a herd of caribou -- a species of hoofed animals that is in no way endangered or scarce.
The ANWR ban is the work of environmental restriction groups that depend on direct-mail fundraising to pay their bills and keep their jobs. That means they must always claim the sky is falling. They can't get people to send a check or mouse-click a donation because they did a good job, the restrictions they imposed on the Alaska pipeline in the 1970s have done a good job in preserving the environment or because clean air acts of the past have vastly reduced air pollution.
ANWR is a precious cause for them because it can be portrayed (dishonestly) as a national treasure and because the pressure for drilling there has been unrelenting. Democrats have enlisted solidly in their army, and they have also been able to recruit Republicans who wanted to get good environmental scorecards to impress enviro-conscious voters in states like Florida, New Jersey and Minnesota.
Now all that is in danger, because the pain of paying $60 for a tank of gas has convinced most Americans to worry less about the caribou or the recurrence of an oil spill that happened 39 years ago. Democratic leaders are preventing Congress from voting on continental shelf and ANWR drilling or oil shale development because they fear their side would lose and are making the transparently absurd claim that drilling won't lower the price of oil. They're scampering to say that they would allow drilling somewhere -- mostly in places where the oil companies haven't found any oil.
In a country with less in the way of checks and balances, which can be gamed by adroit lobbyists and litigators, we would be building more nuclear plants, and would be drilling offshore and in ANWR. We would be phasing out the corn ethanol subsidies that are enriching Iowa farmers and impoverishing Mexican tortilla eaters, and we would be repealing the 54-cent tariff on Brazilian sugar ethanol (the sugar for which would be produced not in defoliated Amazon rainforests but in the desolate and currently unused certao).
On balance, of course, I prefer our system over the more centralized, less accountable systems of France and Japan (and Barack Obama's Chicago). But it sure does have its costs.
But it also has its benefits: Public opinion, when it has changed as it has with $4 gas, has an effect. Environmental restrictionists like Al Gore have been selling a form of secular religion: We have sinned against Mother Earth, we must atone and suffer, there can be no argument, but we must have faith.
That was an appealing argument to many, perhaps most, Americans when gas was selling for $1.40. It has a much more limited appeal now that gas is selling for $4.10. The time may be coming when our lunatic environmental policies are swept away by a rising tide of common sense.
Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/a_step_back_from_enviro_lunacy.html at July 26, 2008 - 05:10:40 PM CDT
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urchinTracker();
Arrogance Won't Win the Election
Arrogance Won't Win the Election
By Susan Estrich
Now that Barack Obama has completed his beyond much-publicized overseas trip, it's hard to argue that the trip wasn't everything his strategists hoped for.
Could the speech have been better? I'm not sure how. Could the crowds have been bigger? They were plenty big. Could the coverage have been more exhaustive? The Beatles come to America! Barack Obama goes abroad!
True, each of the three network anchors, especially Katie Couric, who got savaged on the blogs the most harshly for it, managed to actually sound like reporters asking real questions, but who was listening? (Literally, in one of the few press availabilities, even if you were listening, you could only hear Obama, since he was the only one with a microphone). People watched, and the pictures couldn't have been better.
But, will it make any difference in terms of who is going to win this election? I'm not sure.
The point of the trip, of course, was to give Obama gravitas on foreign policy issues, to help voters forget that he is only six years removed from the Illinois State Senate and only eight years from having his credit card declined when he tried to rent a car at the 2000 Los Angeles convention (a story he used to tell on himself). So there he was, looking, acting, being treated, like he is already president, walking in the footsteps of John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan in Berlin, even borrowing their words. Every Obama supporter I know was in heaven.
Problem is, there aren't enough Obama supporters yet to carry the election. It's the folks in the middle, the folks who haven't deecided, the folks who need convincing or are inclined not to like him, or are still smarting from the defeat of Hillary Clinton, who will decide this election. Did the foreign trip move them?
In the prayer he left at the Western Wall, Senator Obama asked the Lord to protect him from pride and despair. Maybe he should have added something about protecting his campaign from the related danger of arrogance. It might be the biggest threat to Obama's success.
"They think they can't lose," one of the smartest people I know said to me this week, describing the attitude he sees on display in the Obama campaign. He isn't the first one to say it.
There was a crop of stories, as the trip was ending, suggesting that the Obama campaign, which used to pride itself on its openess and transparency as compared to the Clinton machine, has now abandoned openess and transparency in favor of tight controls, attacks on reporters who write less-than flattering pieces, and a particularly unattractive form of hardball that people who think they are on the way to the White House, or already there, often adopt. It will not serve him well.
There is no reason for arrogance. Yes, the economy stinks. Yes, people are sick of the war in Iraq. Yes, they think the country is headed in the wrong direction, that the Bush years have cost us dearly, that we need change. The generic Democrat beats the generic Republican. John McCain is old and has, since winning the nomination, run a pretty uninspired campaign. He's on a tightrope between now and the convention, rightly concerned that he not offend the right in a way that leads to a repeat of the disastrous 1992 Republican Convention, where conservatives were determined to dominate even at the expense of their candidate, and did, to his great detriment.
But even with all this, even with the press cooing, the Republican stumbling, his message muddled and his base shaky, the polls are showing the race neck-and-neck, Obama within the margin of error, behind in the key state of Ohio. And this without even factoring in, or trying to, just how many people are giving the politically correct answer to pollsters, saying they're for Obama when they aren't. This is, my solid blue friends, no time for arrogance.
Once he gets past the convention, McCain will run a better campaign. He will run as an insurgent, an independent, a man who defies labels, the guy who championed immigration reform and stood up to his colleagues on the left and right (remember the Gang of Fourteen that broke the logjam on judges), the guy who is tough enough and experienced enough to be president. If he's within a few points now, he will be stronger then. The Republicans will unite because they might not love McCain, but they love the White House and control even more.
I'm not saying McCain will win. Maybe the pollsters are all wrong in their predictions of what the electorate will look like this time. Maybe so many more blacks and 18-29 year olds will be moved to vote that it won't matter that seniors, who always vote, don't think McCain is too old. Maybe McCain the independent will lead at least some of the conservative Christians who helped put Bush in office, twice, to stay home, or not make their phone calls. I just wouldn't count on it. Obama could win, but he also could lose. If his campaign doesn't understand that now, they will pay for it in November.
Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/arrogance_wont_win_the_electio.html
By Susan Estrich
Now that Barack Obama has completed his beyond much-publicized overseas trip, it's hard to argue that the trip wasn't everything his strategists hoped for.
Could the speech have been better? I'm not sure how. Could the crowds have been bigger? They were plenty big. Could the coverage have been more exhaustive? The Beatles come to America! Barack Obama goes abroad!
True, each of the three network anchors, especially Katie Couric, who got savaged on the blogs the most harshly for it, managed to actually sound like reporters asking real questions, but who was listening? (Literally, in one of the few press availabilities, even if you were listening, you could only hear Obama, since he was the only one with a microphone). People watched, and the pictures couldn't have been better.
But, will it make any difference in terms of who is going to win this election? I'm not sure.
The point of the trip, of course, was to give Obama gravitas on foreign policy issues, to help voters forget that he is only six years removed from the Illinois State Senate and only eight years from having his credit card declined when he tried to rent a car at the 2000 Los Angeles convention (a story he used to tell on himself). So there he was, looking, acting, being treated, like he is already president, walking in the footsteps of John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan in Berlin, even borrowing their words. Every Obama supporter I know was in heaven.
Problem is, there aren't enough Obama supporters yet to carry the election. It's the folks in the middle, the folks who haven't deecided, the folks who need convincing or are inclined not to like him, or are still smarting from the defeat of Hillary Clinton, who will decide this election. Did the foreign trip move them?
In the prayer he left at the Western Wall, Senator Obama asked the Lord to protect him from pride and despair. Maybe he should have added something about protecting his campaign from the related danger of arrogance. It might be the biggest threat to Obama's success.
"They think they can't lose," one of the smartest people I know said to me this week, describing the attitude he sees on display in the Obama campaign. He isn't the first one to say it.
There was a crop of stories, as the trip was ending, suggesting that the Obama campaign, which used to pride itself on its openess and transparency as compared to the Clinton machine, has now abandoned openess and transparency in favor of tight controls, attacks on reporters who write less-than flattering pieces, and a particularly unattractive form of hardball that people who think they are on the way to the White House, or already there, often adopt. It will not serve him well.
There is no reason for arrogance. Yes, the economy stinks. Yes, people are sick of the war in Iraq. Yes, they think the country is headed in the wrong direction, that the Bush years have cost us dearly, that we need change. The generic Democrat beats the generic Republican. John McCain is old and has, since winning the nomination, run a pretty uninspired campaign. He's on a tightrope between now and the convention, rightly concerned that he not offend the right in a way that leads to a repeat of the disastrous 1992 Republican Convention, where conservatives were determined to dominate even at the expense of their candidate, and did, to his great detriment.
But even with all this, even with the press cooing, the Republican stumbling, his message muddled and his base shaky, the polls are showing the race neck-and-neck, Obama within the margin of error, behind in the key state of Ohio. And this without even factoring in, or trying to, just how many people are giving the politically correct answer to pollsters, saying they're for Obama when they aren't. This is, my solid blue friends, no time for arrogance.
Once he gets past the convention, McCain will run a better campaign. He will run as an insurgent, an independent, a man who defies labels, the guy who championed immigration reform and stood up to his colleagues on the left and right (remember the Gang of Fourteen that broke the logjam on judges), the guy who is tough enough and experienced enough to be president. If he's within a few points now, he will be stronger then. The Republicans will unite because they might not love McCain, but they love the White House and control even more.
I'm not saying McCain will win. Maybe the pollsters are all wrong in their predictions of what the electorate will look like this time. Maybe so many more blacks and 18-29 year olds will be moved to vote that it won't matter that seniors, who always vote, don't think McCain is too old. Maybe McCain the independent will lead at least some of the conservative Christians who helped put Bush in office, twice, to stay home, or not make their phone calls. I just wouldn't count on it. Obama could win, but he also could lose. If his campaign doesn't understand that now, they will pay for it in November.
Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/arrogance_wont_win_the_electio.html
Obama's on a different planet
One world? Obama's on a different planet
The senator's Berlin speech was radical and naive.
By John R. Bolton
July 26, 2008
SEN. BARACK OBAMA said in an interview the day after his Berlin speech that it "allowed me to send a message to the American people that the judgments I have made and the judgments I will make are ones that are going to result in them being safer."
If that is what the senator thought he was doing, he still has a lot to learn about both foreign policy and the views of the American people. Although well received in the Tiergarten, the Obama speech actually reveals an even more naive view of the world than we had previously been treated to in the United States. In addition, although most of the speech was substantively as content-free as his other campaign pronouncements, when substance did slip in, it was truly radical, from an American perspective.
These troubling comments were not widely reported in the generally adulatory media coverage given the speech, but they nonetheless deserve intense scrutiny. It remains to be seen whether these glimpses into Obama's thinking will have any impact on the presidential campaign, but clearly they were not casual remarks. This speech, intended to generate the enormous publicity it in fact received, reflects his campaign's carefully calibrated political thinking. Accordingly, there should be no evading the implications of his statements. Consider just the following two examples.
First, urging greater U.S.-European cooperation, Obama said, "The burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together." Having earlier proclaimed himself "a fellow citizen of the world" with his German hosts, Obama explained that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Europe proved "that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one."
Perhaps Obama needs a remedial course in Cold War history, but the Berlin Wall most certainly did not come down because "the world stood as one." The wall fell because of a decades-long, existential struggle against one of the greatest totalitarian ideologies mankind has ever faced. It was a struggle in which strong and determined U.S. leadership was constantly questioned, both in Europe and by substantial segments of the senator's own Democratic Party. In Germany in the later years of the Cold War, Ostpolitik -- "eastern politics," a policy of rapprochement rather than resistance -- continuously risked a split in the Western alliance and might have allowed communism to survive. The U.S. president who made the final successful assault on communism, Ronald Reagan, was derided by many in Europe as not very bright, too unilateralist and too provocative.
But there are larger implications to Obama's rediscovery of the "one world" concept, first announced in the U.S. by Wendell Willkie, the failed Republican 1940 presidential nominee, and subsequently buried by the Cold War's realities.
The successes Obama refers to in his speech -- the defeat of Nazism, the Berlin airlift and the collapse of communism -- were all gained by strong alliances defeating determined opponents of freedom, not by "one-worldism." Although the senator was trying to distinguish himself from perceptions of Bush administration policy within the Atlantic Alliance, he was in fact sketching out a post-alliance policy, perhaps one that would unfold in global organizations such as the United Nations. This is far-reaching indeed.
Second, Obama used the Berlin Wall metaphor to describe his foreign policy priorities as president: "The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down."
This is a confused, nearly incoherent compilation, to say the least, amalgamating tensions in the Atlantic Alliance with ancient historical conflicts. One hopes even Obama, inexperienced as he is, doesn't see all these "walls" as essentially the same in size and scope. But beyond the incoherence, there is a deeper problem, namely that "walls" exist not simply because of a lack of understanding about who is on the other side but because there are true differences in values and interests that lead to human conflict. The Berlin Wall itself was not built because of a failure of communication but because of the implacable hostility of communism toward freedom. The wall was a reflection of that reality, not an unfortunate mistake.
Tearing down the Berlin Wall was possible because one side -- our side -- defeated the other. Differences in levels of economic development, or the treatment of racial, immigration or religious questions, are not susceptible to the same analysis or solution. Even more basically, challenges to our very civilization, as the Cold War surely was, are not overcome by naively "tearing down walls" with our adversaries.
Throughout the Berlin speech, there were numerous policy pronouncements, all of them hazy and nonspecific, none of them new or different than what Obama has already said during the long American campaign. But the Berlin framework in which he wrapped these ideas for the first time is truly radical for a prospective American president. That he picked a foreign audience is perhaps not surprising, because they could be expected to welcome a less-assertive American view of its role in the world, at least at first glance. Even anti-American Europeans, however, are likely to regret a United States that sees itself as just one more nation in a "united" world.
The best we can hope for is that Obama's rhetoric was simply that, pandering to the audience before him, as politicians so often do. We shall see if this rhetoric follows him back to America, either because he continues to use it or because Sen. John McCain asks voters if this is really what they want from their next president.
John R. Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option."
The senator's Berlin speech was radical and naive.
By John R. Bolton
July 26, 2008
SEN. BARACK OBAMA said in an interview the day after his Berlin speech that it "allowed me to send a message to the American people that the judgments I have made and the judgments I will make are ones that are going to result in them being safer."
If that is what the senator thought he was doing, he still has a lot to learn about both foreign policy and the views of the American people. Although well received in the Tiergarten, the Obama speech actually reveals an even more naive view of the world than we had previously been treated to in the United States. In addition, although most of the speech was substantively as content-free as his other campaign pronouncements, when substance did slip in, it was truly radical, from an American perspective.
These troubling comments were not widely reported in the generally adulatory media coverage given the speech, but they nonetheless deserve intense scrutiny. It remains to be seen whether these glimpses into Obama's thinking will have any impact on the presidential campaign, but clearly they were not casual remarks. This speech, intended to generate the enormous publicity it in fact received, reflects his campaign's carefully calibrated political thinking. Accordingly, there should be no evading the implications of his statements. Consider just the following two examples.
First, urging greater U.S.-European cooperation, Obama said, "The burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together." Having earlier proclaimed himself "a fellow citizen of the world" with his German hosts, Obama explained that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Europe proved "that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one."
Perhaps Obama needs a remedial course in Cold War history, but the Berlin Wall most certainly did not come down because "the world stood as one." The wall fell because of a decades-long, existential struggle against one of the greatest totalitarian ideologies mankind has ever faced. It was a struggle in which strong and determined U.S. leadership was constantly questioned, both in Europe and by substantial segments of the senator's own Democratic Party. In Germany in the later years of the Cold War, Ostpolitik -- "eastern politics," a policy of rapprochement rather than resistance -- continuously risked a split in the Western alliance and might have allowed communism to survive. The U.S. president who made the final successful assault on communism, Ronald Reagan, was derided by many in Europe as not very bright, too unilateralist and too provocative.
But there are larger implications to Obama's rediscovery of the "one world" concept, first announced in the U.S. by Wendell Willkie, the failed Republican 1940 presidential nominee, and subsequently buried by the Cold War's realities.
The successes Obama refers to in his speech -- the defeat of Nazism, the Berlin airlift and the collapse of communism -- were all gained by strong alliances defeating determined opponents of freedom, not by "one-worldism." Although the senator was trying to distinguish himself from perceptions of Bush administration policy within the Atlantic Alliance, he was in fact sketching out a post-alliance policy, perhaps one that would unfold in global organizations such as the United Nations. This is far-reaching indeed.
Second, Obama used the Berlin Wall metaphor to describe his foreign policy priorities as president: "The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down."
This is a confused, nearly incoherent compilation, to say the least, amalgamating tensions in the Atlantic Alliance with ancient historical conflicts. One hopes even Obama, inexperienced as he is, doesn't see all these "walls" as essentially the same in size and scope. But beyond the incoherence, there is a deeper problem, namely that "walls" exist not simply because of a lack of understanding about who is on the other side but because there are true differences in values and interests that lead to human conflict. The Berlin Wall itself was not built because of a failure of communication but because of the implacable hostility of communism toward freedom. The wall was a reflection of that reality, not an unfortunate mistake.
Tearing down the Berlin Wall was possible because one side -- our side -- defeated the other. Differences in levels of economic development, or the treatment of racial, immigration or religious questions, are not susceptible to the same analysis or solution. Even more basically, challenges to our very civilization, as the Cold War surely was, are not overcome by naively "tearing down walls" with our adversaries.
Throughout the Berlin speech, there were numerous policy pronouncements, all of them hazy and nonspecific, none of them new or different than what Obama has already said during the long American campaign. But the Berlin framework in which he wrapped these ideas for the first time is truly radical for a prospective American president. That he picked a foreign audience is perhaps not surprising, because they could be expected to welcome a less-assertive American view of its role in the world, at least at first glance. Even anti-American Europeans, however, are likely to regret a United States that sees itself as just one more nation in a "united" world.
The best we can hope for is that Obama's rhetoric was simply that, pandering to the audience before him, as politicians so often do. We shall see if this rhetoric follows him back to America, either because he continues to use it or because Sen. John McCain asks voters if this is really what they want from their next president.
John R. Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option."
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Media Love of Obama Doesn't Equal Victory
July 24, 2008
Media Love of Obama Doesn't Equal Victory
By Susan Estrich
Some years ago, a friend of mine who was then District Attorney of Los Angeles held a press conference on the beach with a couple of high-powered celebrities to trumpet efforts to use the criminal law to crack down on polluters. The press covering the event included representatives of the courthouse/political press corps and the entertainment/celebrity media. The difference was so stark that it made for a great story, which my friend told with relish. The political reporters were their usual selves: yelling questions, demanding answers, cynical, skeptical, giving nothing and showing no respect. Another day at the beach. The entertainment/celebrity reporters groveled, fawning and apologizing, grateful for the opportunity to be in the presence of the stars, eager not to offend, showing more courtesy than my political pal got from his own staff. The celebs themselves were appalled by how crudely and rudely behaved the political reporters were; my friend the politician couldn't believe that the members of the entertainment press actually considered themselves to be "reporters."
I can't help but think of that story as I watch some of our nation's finest -- or at least our most famous -- political reporters fawning all over Barack Obama like entertainment reporters covering a movie star. Is this good for them? Or for him, for that matter?
I certainly understand exactly why it is happening. Right now, Obama is bigger than any rock star. Right now, every reporter wants to be close to him, on his good side, at the front of the bus, or at least the front of the line for an interview. They are reporting what they are getting, which in many cases means what they are given, not exactly reporting by any definition. But who's to complain? No one wants to offend a guy who just might be President. No one wants to be on the "bad" list, the list of the last to know, of people who don't get the invites or the leaks or the tidbits that their editors and bosses back home are reading in somebody else's blog or watching on someone else's broadcast.
No one, or almost no one, attacks the press for tossing softballs. Oh, John McCain can complain about the coverage, but complaining makes him look smaller, not bigger; he gets attacked for whining, which may be one reason he has backed off from any such complaints and is now going out of his way to say that he is not making an issue of the press love-in with Obama. Andrea Mitchell made the point that the press is running video and pictures they are being given with no idea of what's been edited in or out, but that certainly hasn't stopped her own network from doing so. Katie Couric, in the nicest possible way (the old, "not that I'm criticizing you but people are scratching their heads trying to understand approach") tried to pin Obama down on whether he now sees the surge as a success, whether he would still be against it if he knew then what he does now (sort of like, Hillary -- was your vote for the war a mistake?), and what are people saying all over the Internet? Bad Katie. How dare she do that? How dare she push that way? How dare she do her job? Next thing you know, CBS will be joining FOX News on the "no interview" list.
The problem with all this fawning is threefold. First of all, the fact that the press doesn't push doesn't mean that, sooner or later, the Republicans won't. They will. Every question the press doesn't ask and Obama doesn't have to answer will be the subject of a speech at the Republican convention, an ad down the road, a tirade by somebody that will ring truer than it should precisely because it hasn't been addressed before. Do you really think McCain and his friends won't push hard for Obama to admit he was "wrong" about the surge? Of course they will; every bit as hard as Obama pressed Hillary on her war vote. Better to deal with it in questions from Katie, get an answer down that puts the question to rest rather than leaving her hypothetical viewer scratching his head than waiting for it to come back in a debate. Attacking Katie is not the answer -- Katie isn't running for President.
Second, being the favorite of the press doesn't necessarily win you votes. Most people don't actually like the press. The friend of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Being liked by the boys and girls on the bus doesn't necessarily earn you the respect of the people back home. Standing up to them, giving as good as you get, all that helps. But if being loved by the press were a sure route to success, Hillary Clinton would never have carried all those big states after March 1. Ronald Reagan would never have gotten elected President. George Bush would have lost, twice.
Third, and perhaps most important, the American press corps is the most fickle lover you could ever have. They make my worst ex-boyfriend look like a paragon of loyalty and devotion, giving new meaning to the old expression, "love 'em and leave 'em." Except the press doesn't just leave, they destroy. The better the coverage at the outset, the worse it will almost certainly be later on. I can't begin to count how many times I have warned politicians and candidates to worry as much about the good coverage as the bad, because the more air they put in your balloon, the bigger the target when they start shooting.
Maybe the media will remain as firmly in Obama's camp as they seem to be right now, fighting for seats on the plane, celebrating his every move. But if so, he will really be a first. And it won't necessarily help him win.
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Media Love of Obama Doesn't Equal Victory
By Susan Estrich
Some years ago, a friend of mine who was then District Attorney of Los Angeles held a press conference on the beach with a couple of high-powered celebrities to trumpet efforts to use the criminal law to crack down on polluters. The press covering the event included representatives of the courthouse/political press corps and the entertainment/celebrity media. The difference was so stark that it made for a great story, which my friend told with relish. The political reporters were their usual selves: yelling questions, demanding answers, cynical, skeptical, giving nothing and showing no respect. Another day at the beach. The entertainment/celebrity reporters groveled, fawning and apologizing, grateful for the opportunity to be in the presence of the stars, eager not to offend, showing more courtesy than my political pal got from his own staff. The celebs themselves were appalled by how crudely and rudely behaved the political reporters were; my friend the politician couldn't believe that the members of the entertainment press actually considered themselves to be "reporters."
I can't help but think of that story as I watch some of our nation's finest -- or at least our most famous -- political reporters fawning all over Barack Obama like entertainment reporters covering a movie star. Is this good for them? Or for him, for that matter?
I certainly understand exactly why it is happening. Right now, Obama is bigger than any rock star. Right now, every reporter wants to be close to him, on his good side, at the front of the bus, or at least the front of the line for an interview. They are reporting what they are getting, which in many cases means what they are given, not exactly reporting by any definition. But who's to complain? No one wants to offend a guy who just might be President. No one wants to be on the "bad" list, the list of the last to know, of people who don't get the invites or the leaks or the tidbits that their editors and bosses back home are reading in somebody else's blog or watching on someone else's broadcast.
No one, or almost no one, attacks the press for tossing softballs. Oh, John McCain can complain about the coverage, but complaining makes him look smaller, not bigger; he gets attacked for whining, which may be one reason he has backed off from any such complaints and is now going out of his way to say that he is not making an issue of the press love-in with Obama. Andrea Mitchell made the point that the press is running video and pictures they are being given with no idea of what's been edited in or out, but that certainly hasn't stopped her own network from doing so. Katie Couric, in the nicest possible way (the old, "not that I'm criticizing you but people are scratching their heads trying to understand approach") tried to pin Obama down on whether he now sees the surge as a success, whether he would still be against it if he knew then what he does now (sort of like, Hillary -- was your vote for the war a mistake?), and what are people saying all over the Internet? Bad Katie. How dare she do that? How dare she push that way? How dare she do her job? Next thing you know, CBS will be joining FOX News on the "no interview" list.
The problem with all this fawning is threefold. First of all, the fact that the press doesn't push doesn't mean that, sooner or later, the Republicans won't. They will. Every question the press doesn't ask and Obama doesn't have to answer will be the subject of a speech at the Republican convention, an ad down the road, a tirade by somebody that will ring truer than it should precisely because it hasn't been addressed before. Do you really think McCain and his friends won't push hard for Obama to admit he was "wrong" about the surge? Of course they will; every bit as hard as Obama pressed Hillary on her war vote. Better to deal with it in questions from Katie, get an answer down that puts the question to rest rather than leaving her hypothetical viewer scratching his head than waiting for it to come back in a debate. Attacking Katie is not the answer -- Katie isn't running for President.
Second, being the favorite of the press doesn't necessarily win you votes. Most people don't actually like the press. The friend of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Being liked by the boys and girls on the bus doesn't necessarily earn you the respect of the people back home. Standing up to them, giving as good as you get, all that helps. But if being loved by the press were a sure route to success, Hillary Clinton would never have carried all those big states after March 1. Ronald Reagan would never have gotten elected President. George Bush would have lost, twice.
Third, and perhaps most important, the American press corps is the most fickle lover you could ever have. They make my worst ex-boyfriend look like a paragon of loyalty and devotion, giving new meaning to the old expression, "love 'em and leave 'em." Except the press doesn't just leave, they destroy. The better the coverage at the outset, the worse it will almost certainly be later on. I can't begin to count how many times I have warned politicians and candidates to worry as much about the good coverage as the bad, because the more air they put in your balloon, the bigger the target when they start shooting.
Maybe the media will remain as firmly in Obama's camp as they seem to be right now, fighting for seats on the plane, celebrating his every move. But if so, he will really be a first. And it won't necessarily help him win.
Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/media_love_of_obama_doesnt_equ.html at July 24, 2008 - 02:34:57 PM PDT
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The Grand Exaggerator
The Grand Exaggerator
[Patrick J. Michaels]
What is it with Al Gore? Why is he compelled to exaggerate climate change (excuse me, “the climate crisis”), and then to propose impossible policy responses? It’s like he’s inventing the Internet all over again!
OK, it’s pretty much standard rhetoric in Washington to say that if you don’t do as I say, there will be massive consequences. But to say, as Gore recently did: “The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk;” and: “The future of human civilization is at stake” — that’s a bit much, even for the most faded and jaded political junkie.
Here’s how Gore works. He’ll cite one scientific finding that shows what he wants, and then ignore other work that provides important context. Here’s a list of his climate exaggerations from his well-publicized July 17 rant, along with a few sobering facts.
Gore: “Scientists . . . have warned that there is now a 75 percent chance that within five years the entire [North Polar] ice cap will completely disappear during the summer months.”
Fact: The Arctic Ocean was much warmer than it is now for several millennia after the end of the last ice age. We know this because there are trees buried in the tundra along what is now the arctic shore. Those trees can be dated using standard analytical techniques that have been around for decades. According to Glen MacDonald of UCLA, the trees show that July temperatures could have been 5-13°F warmer from 9,000 to about 3,000 years ago than they were in the mid-20th century. The arctic ice cap had to have disappeared in most summers, and yet the polar bear survived!
Gore: “Our weather sure is getting strange, isn’t it? There seem to be more tornadoes than in living memory. . . .”
Fact: The reason there “seems” to be more tornadoes is because of national coverage by Doppler radar, which can detect storms that were previously missed (not to mention that every backyard tornado winds up on YouTube nowadays). Naturally, the additions are weak ones that might, if lucky, tip over a cow. If there were a true increase in tornadoes, then we would see a definite upswing in severe ones, too. If anything, the historical record indicates a slight negative trend in the frequency of major tornadoes, based upon death statistics.
Gore: “ . . . longer droughts . . . ”
Hogwash. The U.S. drought history, given by the Palmer Drought Severity Index, is readily available and extends back to 1895. There’s not a shred of evidence for “longer droughts” in recent decades. The longest ones were in the 1930s and 1950s, decades before “global warming” became “the climate crisis.”
Gore: “ . . . bigger downpours and record floods . . . ”
It’s true, U.S. annual rainfall has increased about 10 percent (three inches) in the last 100 years. But it’s equally true that this is a net benefit. Temperatures haven’t warmed nearly enough to increase the annual surface evaporation by the same amount, so what has resulted is a wetter country during the growing season. Farmers love this, because most of the nation runs a moisture deficit during the hot summer growing season. Increasing rain cuts that deficit.
Gore: “The leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis.”
This is likely James Hansen of NASA, Gore’s climate guru. He has written and given sworn testimony that six feet of sea-level rise, caused by the rapid shedding of Greenland’s ice, could happen by 2100. Why didn’t Gore defer instead to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an organization with at least a few hundred bona fide climate scientists? Its 2007 compendium estimates that the contribution of Greenland’s ice to sea level during this century will be around two inches.
Gore also forgot the embarrassing truth that there has been no net change in the planetary surface temperature, as measured both by thermometers and satellites, for the last ten years.
It would be easy to go on, particularly about the preposterousness of Gore’s “solution,” which is to produce all of our electricity from solar, wind and geothermal sources within ten years. I’ll leave that for the energy economists to tear apart.
— Patrick J. Michaels is a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and an active member of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
[Patrick J. Michaels]
What is it with Al Gore? Why is he compelled to exaggerate climate change (excuse me, “the climate crisis”), and then to propose impossible policy responses? It’s like he’s inventing the Internet all over again!
OK, it’s pretty much standard rhetoric in Washington to say that if you don’t do as I say, there will be massive consequences. But to say, as Gore recently did: “The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk;” and: “The future of human civilization is at stake” — that’s a bit much, even for the most faded and jaded political junkie.
Here’s how Gore works. He’ll cite one scientific finding that shows what he wants, and then ignore other work that provides important context. Here’s a list of his climate exaggerations from his well-publicized July 17 rant, along with a few sobering facts.
Gore: “Scientists . . . have warned that there is now a 75 percent chance that within five years the entire [North Polar] ice cap will completely disappear during the summer months.”
Fact: The Arctic Ocean was much warmer than it is now for several millennia after the end of the last ice age. We know this because there are trees buried in the tundra along what is now the arctic shore. Those trees can be dated using standard analytical techniques that have been around for decades. According to Glen MacDonald of UCLA, the trees show that July temperatures could have been 5-13°F warmer from 9,000 to about 3,000 years ago than they were in the mid-20th century. The arctic ice cap had to have disappeared in most summers, and yet the polar bear survived!
Gore: “Our weather sure is getting strange, isn’t it? There seem to be more tornadoes than in living memory. . . .”
Fact: The reason there “seems” to be more tornadoes is because of national coverage by Doppler radar, which can detect storms that were previously missed (not to mention that every backyard tornado winds up on YouTube nowadays). Naturally, the additions are weak ones that might, if lucky, tip over a cow. If there were a true increase in tornadoes, then we would see a definite upswing in severe ones, too. If anything, the historical record indicates a slight negative trend in the frequency of major tornadoes, based upon death statistics.
Gore: “ . . . longer droughts . . . ”
Hogwash. The U.S. drought history, given by the Palmer Drought Severity Index, is readily available and extends back to 1895. There’s not a shred of evidence for “longer droughts” in recent decades. The longest ones were in the 1930s and 1950s, decades before “global warming” became “the climate crisis.”
Gore: “ . . . bigger downpours and record floods . . . ”
It’s true, U.S. annual rainfall has increased about 10 percent (three inches) in the last 100 years. But it’s equally true that this is a net benefit. Temperatures haven’t warmed nearly enough to increase the annual surface evaporation by the same amount, so what has resulted is a wetter country during the growing season. Farmers love this, because most of the nation runs a moisture deficit during the hot summer growing season. Increasing rain cuts that deficit.
Gore: “The leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis.”
This is likely James Hansen of NASA, Gore’s climate guru. He has written and given sworn testimony that six feet of sea-level rise, caused by the rapid shedding of Greenland’s ice, could happen by 2100. Why didn’t Gore defer instead to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an organization with at least a few hundred bona fide climate scientists? Its 2007 compendium estimates that the contribution of Greenland’s ice to sea level during this century will be around two inches.
Gore also forgot the embarrassing truth that there has been no net change in the planetary surface temperature, as measured both by thermometers and satellites, for the last ten years.
It would be easy to go on, particularly about the preposterousness of Gore’s “solution,” which is to produce all of our electricity from solar, wind and geothermal sources within ten years. I’ll leave that for the energy economists to tear apart.
— Patrick J. Michaels is a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and an active member of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
A Tale of Two Flip-Floppers
A Tale of Two Flip-Floppers
By KARL ROVE
July 24, 2008
John McCain and Barack Obama have both changed positions in this campaign. That's OK. Voters understand that politicians can and, sometimes, should change their views. After all, voters do. Witness the wide swings in their answers to opinion polls.
But before accepting the changes, voters typically ask themselves three questions: Does the candidate admit he's shifting? What's the new information that altered his thinking? Does the change seem reasonable and not calculating?
Sen. McCain has changed his position on drilling for oil on the outer continental shelf. But because he explained this change by saying that $4-a-gallon gasoline caused him to re-evaluate his position, voters are likely to accept it. Of course, Mr. McCain doesn't explain why prices at the pump haven't also forced him to re-evaluate his opposition to drilling on 2000 acres in the 19.2-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But, then, what politician is always consistent?
Mr. McCain flip-flopped on the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. He'd voted against them at the time, saying in 2001 that he'd "like to see more of this tax cut shared by working Americans." Now he supports their continuation because, he says, letting them expire would increase taxes and he opposes tax hikes. Besides, he recognizes that the tax cuts have helped the economy.
At least Mr. McCain fesses up to and explains his changes. Sen. Obama has shifted recently on public financing, free trade, Nafta, welfare reform, the D.C. gun ban, whether the Iranian Quds Force is a terrorist group, immunity for telecom companies participating in the Terrorist Surveillance Program, the status of Jerusalem, flag lapel pins, and disavowing Rev. Jeremiah Wright. And not only does he refuse to explain these flip-flops, he acts as if they never occurred.
Then there is Iraq. Throughout 2006 and early 2007, Mr. Obama pledged to remove all U.S. troops, even voting to immediately cut off funds for the troops while they were in combat. Then, in July 2007, he started talking about leaving a residual U.S. force, in Kuwait and elsewhere in the region, able to go back into Iraq if needed.
By October, he shifted again, pledging to station the residual U.S. troops inside Iraq with two "limited missions of protecting our diplomats and carrying out targeted strikes on al Qaeda."
Last week, writing in the New York Times, Mr. Obama changed again. He increased the missions his residual force would perform to three: "going after any remnants of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces." That's not all that different from what U.S. troops are doing now.
And just how many U.S. troops would Mr. Obama leave in Iraq? Colin Kahl, an Obama adviser on Iraq, has said the senator wants to have "perhaps 60,000-80,000 forces" in Iraq by December 2010. So much for withdrawing all combat troops.
It's dizzying. Yet, Mr. Obama acts as if he is a paradigm of consistency. He told a Georgia rally this month that "the people who say [I've been changing] apparently haven't been listening to me." In a PBS interview last week he said, "this notion that somehow we've had wild shifts in my positions is simply inaccurate."
Compounding all this is Mr. Obama's stubborn refusal to admit the surge was right and that he was wrong to oppose it. On MSNBC in January 2007, he said more U.S. troops would not "solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse." Later that month he said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that the new strategy would "not prove to be one that changes the dynamics significantly." In fact, the surge has done far more than its advocates hoped in a much shorter period.
Yet Mr. Obama told ABC's Terry Moran this week that even in retrospect, he would oppose the surge. He also told CBS's Katie Couric that he had "no idea what would have happened" without the new strategy. And he still declares, in the New York Times last week, "The same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true." Given all that has happened, it's hard to understand how Mr. Obama can say, as he did Tuesday in a story on NBC Nightly News, that "I don't have doubts about my ability to apply sound judgment to the major national security problems that we face."
Americans have seen both candidates flip-flop. Mr. McCain at least has a record of being a gutsy leader willing to take unpopular stands who admits his shifts and explains the new information that caused them.
Mr. Obama has detached himself from past positions at record speed. And in doing so he runs the risk of being seen as a cynical politician, not an inspiring leader. If this happens, voters in large numbers may ask -- despite his rhetorical acrobatics -- if he is the change they've been waiting for.
Mr. Rove is a former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
By KARL ROVE
July 24, 2008
John McCain and Barack Obama have both changed positions in this campaign. That's OK. Voters understand that politicians can and, sometimes, should change their views. After all, voters do. Witness the wide swings in their answers to opinion polls.
But before accepting the changes, voters typically ask themselves three questions: Does the candidate admit he's shifting? What's the new information that altered his thinking? Does the change seem reasonable and not calculating?
Sen. McCain has changed his position on drilling for oil on the outer continental shelf. But because he explained this change by saying that $4-a-gallon gasoline caused him to re-evaluate his position, voters are likely to accept it. Of course, Mr. McCain doesn't explain why prices at the pump haven't also forced him to re-evaluate his opposition to drilling on 2000 acres in the 19.2-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But, then, what politician is always consistent?
Mr. McCain flip-flopped on the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. He'd voted against them at the time, saying in 2001 that he'd "like to see more of this tax cut shared by working Americans." Now he supports their continuation because, he says, letting them expire would increase taxes and he opposes tax hikes. Besides, he recognizes that the tax cuts have helped the economy.
At least Mr. McCain fesses up to and explains his changes. Sen. Obama has shifted recently on public financing, free trade, Nafta, welfare reform, the D.C. gun ban, whether the Iranian Quds Force is a terrorist group, immunity for telecom companies participating in the Terrorist Surveillance Program, the status of Jerusalem, flag lapel pins, and disavowing Rev. Jeremiah Wright. And not only does he refuse to explain these flip-flops, he acts as if they never occurred.
Then there is Iraq. Throughout 2006 and early 2007, Mr. Obama pledged to remove all U.S. troops, even voting to immediately cut off funds for the troops while they were in combat. Then, in July 2007, he started talking about leaving a residual U.S. force, in Kuwait and elsewhere in the region, able to go back into Iraq if needed.
By October, he shifted again, pledging to station the residual U.S. troops inside Iraq with two "limited missions of protecting our diplomats and carrying out targeted strikes on al Qaeda."
Last week, writing in the New York Times, Mr. Obama changed again. He increased the missions his residual force would perform to three: "going after any remnants of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces." That's not all that different from what U.S. troops are doing now.
And just how many U.S. troops would Mr. Obama leave in Iraq? Colin Kahl, an Obama adviser on Iraq, has said the senator wants to have "perhaps 60,000-80,000 forces" in Iraq by December 2010. So much for withdrawing all combat troops.
It's dizzying. Yet, Mr. Obama acts as if he is a paradigm of consistency. He told a Georgia rally this month that "the people who say [I've been changing] apparently haven't been listening to me." In a PBS interview last week he said, "this notion that somehow we've had wild shifts in my positions is simply inaccurate."
Compounding all this is Mr. Obama's stubborn refusal to admit the surge was right and that he was wrong to oppose it. On MSNBC in January 2007, he said more U.S. troops would not "solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse." Later that month he said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing that the new strategy would "not prove to be one that changes the dynamics significantly." In fact, the surge has done far more than its advocates hoped in a much shorter period.
Yet Mr. Obama told ABC's Terry Moran this week that even in retrospect, he would oppose the surge. He also told CBS's Katie Couric that he had "no idea what would have happened" without the new strategy. And he still declares, in the New York Times last week, "The same factors that led me to oppose the surge still hold true." Given all that has happened, it's hard to understand how Mr. Obama can say, as he did Tuesday in a story on NBC Nightly News, that "I don't have doubts about my ability to apply sound judgment to the major national security problems that we face."
Americans have seen both candidates flip-flop. Mr. McCain at least has a record of being a gutsy leader willing to take unpopular stands who admits his shifts and explains the new information that caused them.
Mr. Obama has detached himself from past positions at record speed. And in doing so he runs the risk of being seen as a cynical politician, not an inspiring leader. If this happens, voters in large numbers may ask -- despite his rhetorical acrobatics -- if he is the change they've been waiting for.
Mr. Rove is a former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush.
The Soldier Voting Scandal
July 24, 2008
The Soldier Voting Scandal
By Robert Novak
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Rep. Roy Blunt, the House Republican whip, on July 8 introduced a resolution demanding that the Defense Department better enable U.S. military personnel overseas to vote in the November elections. That act was followed by silence. Democrats normally leap on an opportunity to find fault with the Bush Pentagon. But not a single Democrat joined Blunt as a co-sponsor, and an all-Republican proposal cannot pass in the Democratic-controlled House.
Analysis by the federal Election Assistance Commission, rejecting inflated Defense Department voting claims, estimated overseas and absentee military voting for the 2006 midterm elections at a disgracefully low 5.5 percent. The quality of voting statistics is so poor that there is no way to tell how many of the slightly over 330,000 votes actually were sent in by the absentee military voters and their dependents and how many by civilian Americans living abroad -- 6 million all total.
Nobody who has studied the question objectively sees any improvement since 2006, and that is a scandal. Retired U.S. Marine Corps Capt. Charles Henry wrote in the July issue of the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings: "While virtually everyone involved ... seems to agree that military people deserve at least equal opportunity when it comes to having their votes counted, indications are that in November 2008, many thousands of service members who try to vote will do so in vain."
Henry, now an independent broadcast journalist, has personal experience with this enduring scandal. While serving as a Marine at sea off Iran, he received his 1980 presidential ballot too late to count. President Harry Truman said of troops fighting in Korea, "The least we at home can do is to make sure that they are able to enjoy the rights they are being asked to fight to preserve." But the U.S. military that has so perfected the art of war over the past half-century is at a loss to enable soldiers to vote.
A combat officer has enough to do without handling the votes of troopers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. A Defense Department Inspector General's report in March last year recommended "appointment of civilian personnel" as "voting assistance officers." The Pentagon brass rejected the idea.
I reported four years ago that the problems of 2000 overseas military voting had not been corrected for the 2004 presidential election. At that time, Under Secretary of Defense David Chu was put in charge of the problem. During massive turnover at the Pentagon, Chu remains in place -- best known among critics of the military vote problem for his chronic failure to return telephone calls.
Congressional attention to the problem has been scattered and limited mostly to Republicans such as Sen. John Cornyn, who earlier this year decried "a lack of will" at the Pentagon to solve the voting problem. Democratic interest about tackling the problem might be tempered by apprehension that soldiers will cast too many Republican votes.
Nevertheless, at least one prominent Democrat -- House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer -- described himself to me as eager to deal with this problem. (Hoyer's home state of Maryland is one of the worst offenders, with ballots of only 4.1 percent of overseas voters counted in 2006.) Hoyer and Blunt, who have become friendly adversaries in a bitterly partisan Congress, conferred several weeks ago and agreed in principle on co-sponsoring a resolution aimed at getting the Defense Department moving.
Hoyer wanted the resolution to cover expatriate Americans as well as the military, and Blunt did not object. They turned the issue over to their staffers and went about the business of major legislation. Blunt had instructed his staff to seek agreement with Democrats but, if not, to introduce a resolution applying only to the military, which was the outcome.
One presidential staffer who is familiar with the situation privately dismisses the Pentagon bureaucrats as "hopeless." In a lame-duck administration counting the days before a troubled eight years finally end, American fighting men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan deprived of their right to vote constitute the least of White House worries.
Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/the_soldier_voting_scandal.html at July 23, 2008 - 08:45:40 PM PDT
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urchinTracker();
The Soldier Voting Scandal
By Robert Novak
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Rep. Roy Blunt, the House Republican whip, on July 8 introduced a resolution demanding that the Defense Department better enable U.S. military personnel overseas to vote in the November elections. That act was followed by silence. Democrats normally leap on an opportunity to find fault with the Bush Pentagon. But not a single Democrat joined Blunt as a co-sponsor, and an all-Republican proposal cannot pass in the Democratic-controlled House.
Analysis by the federal Election Assistance Commission, rejecting inflated Defense Department voting claims, estimated overseas and absentee military voting for the 2006 midterm elections at a disgracefully low 5.5 percent. The quality of voting statistics is so poor that there is no way to tell how many of the slightly over 330,000 votes actually were sent in by the absentee military voters and their dependents and how many by civilian Americans living abroad -- 6 million all total.
Nobody who has studied the question objectively sees any improvement since 2006, and that is a scandal. Retired U.S. Marine Corps Capt. Charles Henry wrote in the July issue of the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings: "While virtually everyone involved ... seems to agree that military people deserve at least equal opportunity when it comes to having their votes counted, indications are that in November 2008, many thousands of service members who try to vote will do so in vain."
Henry, now an independent broadcast journalist, has personal experience with this enduring scandal. While serving as a Marine at sea off Iran, he received his 1980 presidential ballot too late to count. President Harry Truman said of troops fighting in Korea, "The least we at home can do is to make sure that they are able to enjoy the rights they are being asked to fight to preserve." But the U.S. military that has so perfected the art of war over the past half-century is at a loss to enable soldiers to vote.
A combat officer has enough to do without handling the votes of troopers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. A Defense Department Inspector General's report in March last year recommended "appointment of civilian personnel" as "voting assistance officers." The Pentagon brass rejected the idea.
I reported four years ago that the problems of 2000 overseas military voting had not been corrected for the 2004 presidential election. At that time, Under Secretary of Defense David Chu was put in charge of the problem. During massive turnover at the Pentagon, Chu remains in place -- best known among critics of the military vote problem for his chronic failure to return telephone calls.
Congressional attention to the problem has been scattered and limited mostly to Republicans such as Sen. John Cornyn, who earlier this year decried "a lack of will" at the Pentagon to solve the voting problem. Democratic interest about tackling the problem might be tempered by apprehension that soldiers will cast too many Republican votes.
Nevertheless, at least one prominent Democrat -- House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer -- described himself to me as eager to deal with this problem. (Hoyer's home state of Maryland is one of the worst offenders, with ballots of only 4.1 percent of overseas voters counted in 2006.) Hoyer and Blunt, who have become friendly adversaries in a bitterly partisan Congress, conferred several weeks ago and agreed in principle on co-sponsoring a resolution aimed at getting the Defense Department moving.
Hoyer wanted the resolution to cover expatriate Americans as well as the military, and Blunt did not object. They turned the issue over to their staffers and went about the business of major legislation. Blunt had instructed his staff to seek agreement with Democrats but, if not, to introduce a resolution applying only to the military, which was the outcome.
One presidential staffer who is familiar with the situation privately dismisses the Pentagon bureaucrats as "hopeless." In a lame-duck administration counting the days before a troubled eight years finally end, American fighting men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan deprived of their right to vote constitute the least of White House worries.
Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/the_soldier_voting_scandal.html at July 23, 2008 - 08:45:40 PM PDT
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urchinTracker();
Is Obama a Buckeye? :-)
Hey, Buckeyes: Why should Palmer apologize?
July 22nd, 2008, 4:55 pm · 4 Comments · posted by JEFF MILLER, OCREGISTER.COM
So Carson Palmer had to apologize — through a team spokesman, no less — and for what, exactly?
Suggesting Ohio State football fans are passionate, confident and convinced the Buckeye program is one of the best in the country?
Folks, this isn’t a crime. It’s the truth.
Who would be upset because a fan of one team openly rooted for that team to “pound” another team? I believe in most cultures this is known as cheering for your side.
But in our culture, our Internet-driven, dumbed-down, hypersensitive culture that grows more hollow by the day, this is behavior deserving of reprimand.
Ridiculous, just not as ridiculous as those Jim Tressel sweater vests.
July 22nd, 2008, 4:55 pm · 4 Comments · posted by JEFF MILLER, OCREGISTER.COM
So Carson Palmer had to apologize — through a team spokesman, no less — and for what, exactly?
Suggesting Ohio State football fans are passionate, confident and convinced the Buckeye program is one of the best in the country?
Folks, this isn’t a crime. It’s the truth.
Who would be upset because a fan of one team openly rooted for that team to “pound” another team? I believe in most cultures this is known as cheering for your side.
But in our culture, our Internet-driven, dumbed-down, hypersensitive culture that grows more hollow by the day, this is behavior deserving of reprimand.
Ridiculous, just not as ridiculous as those Jim Tressel sweater vests.
AN AMERICAN 'HONOR KILLING'
July 23, 2008 --
ON July 6, police say, a Pakistani named Chaudhry Rashid strangled his 25-year-old daughter San- deela Kanwal with a Bungee cord in her bedroom because she wanted to end her arranged marriage. This "honor killing" came not in Pakistan, but in Jonesboro, Ga. - a suburb 16 miles outside Atlanta.
At his arraignment, Rashid said through an Urdu interpreter that he was "not in the state of mind to talk because of the death of his daughter," but stated "I have done nothing wrong."
This is not the same as declaring innocence. His attorney, Tammy Long, explained, "My client is going through a difficult time. As you can imagine, he is distraught." Apparently, it takes a stronger man to murder his daughter without sentiment.
The national media has paid little attention to the story of Kanwal's murder, though most outlets found plenty of time to debate the cover of The New Yorker.
When a blonde girl goes missing, cable networks stop in their tracks - but when a Muslim woman is murdered by her father, there's not a ripple of sustained interest. Where's the outrage?
Maybe it's muted because we've grown reluctant to pass judgment on other culture's customs - but multiculturalism hits a crossroads when honor killings come to America.
The United Nations estimates that the world sees 5,000 honor killings a year - overwhelmingly in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa, but increasingly among Muslim immigrant communities in Europe.
The United States has avoided this bloodstained trend until recently. Some consider Kanwal's death the first documented honor killing here. Others point to the murder of sisters Amina and Sarah Said in Irving, Texas, on New Years' 2007. (Their MySpace page remains up. Featuring assimilated teen culture and American music, it is haunting.) Their father remains on the run from police.
Few doubt that other honor killings have occurred behind closed doors. In upstate Monroe County just a few days ago, a girl was stabbed by her brother for wearing immodest western clothing and wanting to move to New York City. According to court documents, Waheed Allah Mohammad explained the stabbing by saying his sister was a "bad Muslim girl."
"Honor killing is a misnomer," author and exile Ayaan Hirsi Ali told me. "The killing occurs because these girls have allegedly brought shame on their family. The paradox is that these are individuals who have emancipated themselves.
"These girls embody the American dream. They want to become self-reliant - deciding who they marry, when they marry and how many children they will have."
On the surface, this sounds like a classic case for the left - outrages well worth protesting. Honor killings and other tribal customs like female genital mutilation represent a far greater threat to human rights than comparatively benign examples of Western sexism, like unrealistic measurements on a Barbie doll.
But this would require recognizing that the greatest danger to civil liberties in the world today comes not from the United States, but from a medieval tribalism that's still murdering people around the world under the guise of enforcing piousness.
"America is an assimilating nation," affirms Ayaan, "and so when immigrant Muslim men assimilate into American society they are applauded for it. But when some immigrant Muslim women assimilate into American society, they find themselves ostracized - beaten and even killed by their own families. And the American public ignores their plight to protect the immigrant Muslim community from stigma."
There should be wall-to-wall coverage when Rashid's pretrail hearings begin tomorrow in Atlanta. By any standards, this is a sensational crime.
Instead, the trial may well get dismissed as old news or swept under the rug as just another domestic-violence case. These rationalizations cover up a discomfort with wading into cultural judgment - and a desire to avoid the risk of violence that always comes with criticizing radical Islam.
There's a cost to such squeamishness. In England, Lord Chief Justice Phillips, the country's top judge, has said that sharia law should be incorporated into British law, while the Archbishop of Canterbury described such incorporation as "inevitable."
This slippery slope threatens to undermine liberal democracy and even the concept of civilized norms. America must make a stand, because many Europeans either can't or won't.
As Ayaan says: "As an immigrant Muslim woman running for your life, from your own family, I think America is a better place for us, because we know that Americans are individualist enough that they will ultimately chose to protect us - while Europeans choose to stick their heads in the sand and pretend nothing is going on."
Our ultimate victory in the War on Terror will be to encourage a Muslim reformation by offering examples of successful Muslim-American citizens - especially women - who thrive within the equal rights and open opportunities of American society. For Muslim women who want to live in freedom, America is the last best hope on earth - and we must remain nothing less.
John P. Avlon is the author of "Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics."
NEW YORK POST is a registered trademark of NYP Holdings, Inc. NYPOST.COM, NYPOSTONLINE.COM, and NEWYORKPOST.COMare trademarks of NYP Holdings, Inc. Copyright 2008 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.
ON July 6, police say, a Pakistani named Chaudhry Rashid strangled his 25-year-old daughter San- deela Kanwal with a Bungee cord in her bedroom because she wanted to end her arranged marriage. This "honor killing" came not in Pakistan, but in Jonesboro, Ga. - a suburb 16 miles outside Atlanta.
At his arraignment, Rashid said through an Urdu interpreter that he was "not in the state of mind to talk because of the death of his daughter," but stated "I have done nothing wrong."
This is not the same as declaring innocence. His attorney, Tammy Long, explained, "My client is going through a difficult time. As you can imagine, he is distraught." Apparently, it takes a stronger man to murder his daughter without sentiment.
The national media has paid little attention to the story of Kanwal's murder, though most outlets found plenty of time to debate the cover of The New Yorker.
When a blonde girl goes missing, cable networks stop in their tracks - but when a Muslim woman is murdered by her father, there's not a ripple of sustained interest. Where's the outrage?
Maybe it's muted because we've grown reluctant to pass judgment on other culture's customs - but multiculturalism hits a crossroads when honor killings come to America.
The United Nations estimates that the world sees 5,000 honor killings a year - overwhelmingly in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa, but increasingly among Muslim immigrant communities in Europe.
The United States has avoided this bloodstained trend until recently. Some consider Kanwal's death the first documented honor killing here. Others point to the murder of sisters Amina and Sarah Said in Irving, Texas, on New Years' 2007. (Their MySpace page remains up. Featuring assimilated teen culture and American music, it is haunting.) Their father remains on the run from police.
Few doubt that other honor killings have occurred behind closed doors. In upstate Monroe County just a few days ago, a girl was stabbed by her brother for wearing immodest western clothing and wanting to move to New York City. According to court documents, Waheed Allah Mohammad explained the stabbing by saying his sister was a "bad Muslim girl."
"Honor killing is a misnomer," author and exile Ayaan Hirsi Ali told me. "The killing occurs because these girls have allegedly brought shame on their family. The paradox is that these are individuals who have emancipated themselves.
"These girls embody the American dream. They want to become self-reliant - deciding who they marry, when they marry and how many children they will have."
On the surface, this sounds like a classic case for the left - outrages well worth protesting. Honor killings and other tribal customs like female genital mutilation represent a far greater threat to human rights than comparatively benign examples of Western sexism, like unrealistic measurements on a Barbie doll.
But this would require recognizing that the greatest danger to civil liberties in the world today comes not from the United States, but from a medieval tribalism that's still murdering people around the world under the guise of enforcing piousness.
"America is an assimilating nation," affirms Ayaan, "and so when immigrant Muslim men assimilate into American society they are applauded for it. But when some immigrant Muslim women assimilate into American society, they find themselves ostracized - beaten and even killed by their own families. And the American public ignores their plight to protect the immigrant Muslim community from stigma."
There should be wall-to-wall coverage when Rashid's pretrail hearings begin tomorrow in Atlanta. By any standards, this is a sensational crime.
Instead, the trial may well get dismissed as old news or swept under the rug as just another domestic-violence case. These rationalizations cover up a discomfort with wading into cultural judgment - and a desire to avoid the risk of violence that always comes with criticizing radical Islam.
There's a cost to such squeamishness. In England, Lord Chief Justice Phillips, the country's top judge, has said that sharia law should be incorporated into British law, while the Archbishop of Canterbury described such incorporation as "inevitable."
This slippery slope threatens to undermine liberal democracy and even the concept of civilized norms. America must make a stand, because many Europeans either can't or won't.
As Ayaan says: "As an immigrant Muslim woman running for your life, from your own family, I think America is a better place for us, because we know that Americans are individualist enough that they will ultimately chose to protect us - while Europeans choose to stick their heads in the sand and pretend nothing is going on."
Our ultimate victory in the War on Terror will be to encourage a Muslim reformation by offering examples of successful Muslim-American citizens - especially women - who thrive within the equal rights and open opportunities of American society. For Muslim women who want to live in freedom, America is the last best hope on earth - and we must remain nothing less.
John P. Avlon is the author of "Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics."
NEW YORK POST is a registered trademark of NYP Holdings, Inc. NYPOST.COM, NYPOSTONLINE.COM, and NEWYORKPOST.COMare trademarks of NYP Holdings, Inc. Copyright 2008 NYP Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Filipino war's lessons for Iraq
Filipino war's lessons for Iraq
A century ago, success seemed unlikely in an unpopular war — that is, until the tide turned. Can the shift in the Philippines show the way forward today?
By Michael Medved
The handsome young Democratic nominee is the most spellbinding orator of his generation, promising dramatic change to correct economic injustice and bring an end to a bloody, unpopular war. Republicans deride him as a showboating demagogue with scant governmental experience and place their faith in a gruff, battle-tested veteran who asks for public patience to fight the war till victory. Meanwhile, halfway around the world, anti-American insurgents have recently lost thousands of fighters to desertion and improved U.S. tactics, but they believe they can exploit their enemy's war weariness. The guerrilla fighters, therefore, intensify their gruesome attacks as part of a conscious effort to influence the November election on behalf of the Democratic "peace" candidate.
Though contemporary Americans will assume the above description applies to Iraq and the 2008 campaign, it's also an accurate summary of the situation leading up to the fateful election of 1900 and the darkest days of our four-year war against insurrectionists in the Philippines. This nearly forgotten conflict deserves renewed attention today since the parallels with our present predicament count as both eerie and illuminating.
Heavy casualty toll
For one thing, the United States lost 4,234 troops on Filipino battlefields — a close match to the raw number killed in Iraq. But with a national population less than one-fourth what it is today, the war in the Philippines took a far greater toll on the nation: the equivalent of some 17,000 battlefield deaths today. Moreover, the struggle 100 years ago claimed the lives of at least 200,000 Filipino civilians in a nation of just 7 million, for a relative impact vastly more devastating than even the darkest casualty estimates of Iraqis. Initially, the military achieved an almost effortless, "mission accomplished" takeover of the Philippines (as part of our Spanish American War) but policymakers found no good alternatives for the Asian archipelago and stumbled into a violent occupation for which they had never properly prepared. From 1898 to 1902, 126,468 U.S. troops served in the jungle struggle, but commanders always seemed short of men.
In 1900, the inexperienced but charismatic "anti-imperialist" Democrat who challenged the war was 40-year-old William Jennings Bryan, "Boy Orator of the Platte." He had emerged from obscurity (and only two brief terms in Congress) through a single electrifying speech at the Democratic convention, four years before. The tough, fight-it-out Republican was William McKinley, a hero in his youth (three decades earlier) in the Civil War.
Like 2008, the nation's leading celebrities decried the "senseless" bloodletting and focused on alleged U.S. atrocities. Mark Twain expressed disgust at tales of massacres and torture (including the infamous "water cure"), suggesting a redesign of the Stars and Stripes "with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and crossbones." He shared anti-war sentiments with former president Grover Cleveland, reformer Jane Addams, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, labor leader Samuel Gompers and others.
For the most part, America's volunteer troops maintained high morale, resenting anti-war activists back home because they understood this agitation encouraged the enemy. Maj. Gen. Henry Lawton, a Medal of Honor winner for bravery in the Civil War, grumbled that "if I am shot by a Filipino bullet, it might as well be from one of my own men … because … the continuance of fighting is chiefly due to reports that are sent out from America." Lawton received just such a fatal bullet a few weeks later when he was picked off by an insurgent sharpshooter while leading his men in the Battle of Paye.
Anti-war fever ebbs
Nevertheless, voters ultimately turned against anti-war politicians and gave the GOP ticket of McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt a resounding victory. Less than seven years later, with the insurrection crushed and the archipelago pacified, Filipinos convened an elected legislature, the first such body in Asia. In 1946, after many Filipinos fought the Japanese alongside American troops, the islands achieved final independence.
The U.S. succeeded through generous policies during the occupation as much as through courage on the battlefield. Max Boot described U.S. efforts in his superb book The Savage Wars of Peace: "Soldiers built schools, ran sanitation campaigns, vaccinated people, collected customs duties, set up courts run by natives, supervised municipal elections, and generally administered governmental functions efficiently and honestly. A thousand idealistic young American civilians even journeyed to the Philippines to teach school in a precursor of the Peace Corps."
Manuel Quezon, first president of the Philippines' "autonomous commonwealth" in 1935, once served as a major in the insurgent army and lamented the American kindness that undermined the insurrection: "Damn the Americans! Why don't they tyrannize us more?" Our failure to "tyrannize" our Iraqi allies could similarly destroy the chances of the Islamist terrorists who oppose us.
The outcome in today's Middle East remains uncertain, but our painful Philippine experience a century ago suggests that a positive result is still possible through a combination of public patience, battlefield brilliance and compassionate determination to provide better lives and freedom to the far-away people who became the war's chief victims.
Nationally syndicated radio talk host Michael Medved is the author of the upcoming book The 10 Big Lies About America. He is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.
A century ago, success seemed unlikely in an unpopular war — that is, until the tide turned. Can the shift in the Philippines show the way forward today?
By Michael Medved
The handsome young Democratic nominee is the most spellbinding orator of his generation, promising dramatic change to correct economic injustice and bring an end to a bloody, unpopular war. Republicans deride him as a showboating demagogue with scant governmental experience and place their faith in a gruff, battle-tested veteran who asks for public patience to fight the war till victory. Meanwhile, halfway around the world, anti-American insurgents have recently lost thousands of fighters to desertion and improved U.S. tactics, but they believe they can exploit their enemy's war weariness. The guerrilla fighters, therefore, intensify their gruesome attacks as part of a conscious effort to influence the November election on behalf of the Democratic "peace" candidate.
Though contemporary Americans will assume the above description applies to Iraq and the 2008 campaign, it's also an accurate summary of the situation leading up to the fateful election of 1900 and the darkest days of our four-year war against insurrectionists in the Philippines. This nearly forgotten conflict deserves renewed attention today since the parallels with our present predicament count as both eerie and illuminating.
Heavy casualty toll
For one thing, the United States lost 4,234 troops on Filipino battlefields — a close match to the raw number killed in Iraq. But with a national population less than one-fourth what it is today, the war in the Philippines took a far greater toll on the nation: the equivalent of some 17,000 battlefield deaths today. Moreover, the struggle 100 years ago claimed the lives of at least 200,000 Filipino civilians in a nation of just 7 million, for a relative impact vastly more devastating than even the darkest casualty estimates of Iraqis. Initially, the military achieved an almost effortless, "mission accomplished" takeover of the Philippines (as part of our Spanish American War) but policymakers found no good alternatives for the Asian archipelago and stumbled into a violent occupation for which they had never properly prepared. From 1898 to 1902, 126,468 U.S. troops served in the jungle struggle, but commanders always seemed short of men.
In 1900, the inexperienced but charismatic "anti-imperialist" Democrat who challenged the war was 40-year-old William Jennings Bryan, "Boy Orator of the Platte." He had emerged from obscurity (and only two brief terms in Congress) through a single electrifying speech at the Democratic convention, four years before. The tough, fight-it-out Republican was William McKinley, a hero in his youth (three decades earlier) in the Civil War.
Like 2008, the nation's leading celebrities decried the "senseless" bloodletting and focused on alleged U.S. atrocities. Mark Twain expressed disgust at tales of massacres and torture (including the infamous "water cure"), suggesting a redesign of the Stars and Stripes "with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and crossbones." He shared anti-war sentiments with former president Grover Cleveland, reformer Jane Addams, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, labor leader Samuel Gompers and others.
For the most part, America's volunteer troops maintained high morale, resenting anti-war activists back home because they understood this agitation encouraged the enemy. Maj. Gen. Henry Lawton, a Medal of Honor winner for bravery in the Civil War, grumbled that "if I am shot by a Filipino bullet, it might as well be from one of my own men … because … the continuance of fighting is chiefly due to reports that are sent out from America." Lawton received just such a fatal bullet a few weeks later when he was picked off by an insurgent sharpshooter while leading his men in the Battle of Paye.
Anti-war fever ebbs
Nevertheless, voters ultimately turned against anti-war politicians and gave the GOP ticket of McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt a resounding victory. Less than seven years later, with the insurrection crushed and the archipelago pacified, Filipinos convened an elected legislature, the first such body in Asia. In 1946, after many Filipinos fought the Japanese alongside American troops, the islands achieved final independence.
The U.S. succeeded through generous policies during the occupation as much as through courage on the battlefield. Max Boot described U.S. efforts in his superb book The Savage Wars of Peace: "Soldiers built schools, ran sanitation campaigns, vaccinated people, collected customs duties, set up courts run by natives, supervised municipal elections, and generally administered governmental functions efficiently and honestly. A thousand idealistic young American civilians even journeyed to the Philippines to teach school in a precursor of the Peace Corps."
Manuel Quezon, first president of the Philippines' "autonomous commonwealth" in 1935, once served as a major in the insurgent army and lamented the American kindness that undermined the insurrection: "Damn the Americans! Why don't they tyrannize us more?" Our failure to "tyrannize" our Iraqi allies could similarly destroy the chances of the Islamist terrorists who oppose us.
The outcome in today's Middle East remains uncertain, but our painful Philippine experience a century ago suggests that a positive result is still possible through a combination of public patience, battlefield brilliance and compassionate determination to provide better lives and freedom to the far-away people who became the war's chief victims.
Nationally syndicated radio talk host Michael Medved is the author of the upcoming book The 10 Big Lies About America. He is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Do as Al says, not as Al does
Do as Al says, not as Al does
Lorne Gunter, National Post Published: Monday, July 21, 2008
On Thursday, former U. S. vice-president Al Gore delivered a major address calling on his country to abandon all fossil fuels within 10 years. By 2018, U. S. electricity and fuel should come entirely from "renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources," he said. Tickets to the event encouraged attendees to "please use public transit, bicycling or other climate-friendly means" to reach the lecture hall.
So how did Mr. Gore and his retinue arrive? In two Lincoln Town Cars and a full-sized SUV that sat idling with the air conditioners blasting while the Gore party was inside.
It was 34 C in Washington. Al Gore can't be expected to get into an overheated vehicle after he's worked up a sweat telling others how to save the planet.
Remember, too, the Nobel prizewinning environmentalist lives in a Tennessee mansion that produces a carbon footprint 20 times that of the average American home. A sizeable chunk of his personal fortune comes from royalties on a zinc mine which had to be temporarily closed five years ago in part because the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency ruled it one of the worst-polluting mine sites in America. Illegal toxins were frequently discharged into nearby rivers.
Mr. Gore's Live Earth benefit concert last summer flew scores of rock bands to stages around the world in carbon-spewing private jets. To cover the emissions from his own frequent use of private jets, Mr. Gore set up a company that buys carbon offsets, so that in effect he is paying himself for his carbon indulgences, writing off the expense on one hand, while pocketing the proceeds on the other.
Apparently if the world is ever to reach the carbon-free future Mr. Gore dreams of, it will have to get there without Al's help.
But take heart, there is increasing evidence that man-made carbon dioxide may not be causing global warming. Indeed, there is increasing debate in the scientific community whether there is even any warming occurring at all. Mr. Gore might just be able to keep going from jet to limo to estate guilt-free (if not carbon-free) for as long as he wishes.
On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that seven mountain glaciers in northern California were advancing. They joined glaciers in southern Norway, Sweden, the New Zealand Alps and the Hindu Kush mountains of Pakistan. Indeed, worldwide, there are nearly half as many glaciers advancing as retreating.
How did the AP explain this? Well, all the shrinking glaciers it mentioned in its story were melting due to global warming, while the growing ones were "benefitting from changing weather patterns." Glacier melt is proof of a climate crisis, while--on the same planet, under the same global conditions --glacier melt is chalked up as a mere natural phenomenon.
Facts that don't fit the global-warming dogma -- call them inconvenient truths -- are to be dismissed as unimportant. Only those that feed the environmental hysteria are proof of something ominous.
So I'm sure they're entirely inconsequential, but here, anyway, are some anecdotes that cast doubt on the notion that emissions from our SUVs and power plants are dangerously harming the climate.
Greenland isn't melting. And while Arctic sea ice may have thinned in the past three decades by about 3% per decade, according to the U. S. National Snow and Ice Date Center, Antarctic ice (which is about 20 times as voluminous as the Arctic kind) has grown by 1% per decade,
Also, after last summer's record melt in the Arctic, this summer's melt in Antarctica was the smallest on record. And NASA satellites have found that Arctic Sea ice coverage this year is more than one million square kilo-metres greater than last year's, greater than the average of the last three years and 10-20 centmetres thicker than in 2007. According to observations by the Danish Meteorological Institute, we "have to go back 15 years to find ice expansion so far south."
Snow coverage in North America this winter was greater than at any time in recorded history. China had its worst winter in a century, and the southern hemisphere its worst in the past 50 years.
And while global temperatures increased slightly in June, through the end of May, the nine-month decline in temperatures beginning in September was greater (0.8C) than all the warming of the 20th century (0.6C).
All of this may prove nothing (although if these signals pointed toward warming, you can bet they'd be billed as proof a coming climate catastrophe). But they should at least give Mr. Gore comfort that he need not sacrifice his high-carbon lifestyle just to prove he can walk the walk.
lgunter@shaw.ca
Lorne Gunter, National Post Published: Monday, July 21, 2008
On Thursday, former U. S. vice-president Al Gore delivered a major address calling on his country to abandon all fossil fuels within 10 years. By 2018, U. S. electricity and fuel should come entirely from "renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources," he said. Tickets to the event encouraged attendees to "please use public transit, bicycling or other climate-friendly means" to reach the lecture hall.
So how did Mr. Gore and his retinue arrive? In two Lincoln Town Cars and a full-sized SUV that sat idling with the air conditioners blasting while the Gore party was inside.
It was 34 C in Washington. Al Gore can't be expected to get into an overheated vehicle after he's worked up a sweat telling others how to save the planet.
Remember, too, the Nobel prizewinning environmentalist lives in a Tennessee mansion that produces a carbon footprint 20 times that of the average American home. A sizeable chunk of his personal fortune comes from royalties on a zinc mine which had to be temporarily closed five years ago in part because the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency ruled it one of the worst-polluting mine sites in America. Illegal toxins were frequently discharged into nearby rivers.
Mr. Gore's Live Earth benefit concert last summer flew scores of rock bands to stages around the world in carbon-spewing private jets. To cover the emissions from his own frequent use of private jets, Mr. Gore set up a company that buys carbon offsets, so that in effect he is paying himself for his carbon indulgences, writing off the expense on one hand, while pocketing the proceeds on the other.
Apparently if the world is ever to reach the carbon-free future Mr. Gore dreams of, it will have to get there without Al's help.
But take heart, there is increasing evidence that man-made carbon dioxide may not be causing global warming. Indeed, there is increasing debate in the scientific community whether there is even any warming occurring at all. Mr. Gore might just be able to keep going from jet to limo to estate guilt-free (if not carbon-free) for as long as he wishes.
On Tuesday, the Associated Press reported that seven mountain glaciers in northern California were advancing. They joined glaciers in southern Norway, Sweden, the New Zealand Alps and the Hindu Kush mountains of Pakistan. Indeed, worldwide, there are nearly half as many glaciers advancing as retreating.
How did the AP explain this? Well, all the shrinking glaciers it mentioned in its story were melting due to global warming, while the growing ones were "benefitting from changing weather patterns." Glacier melt is proof of a climate crisis, while--on the same planet, under the same global conditions --glacier melt is chalked up as a mere natural phenomenon.
Facts that don't fit the global-warming dogma -- call them inconvenient truths -- are to be dismissed as unimportant. Only those that feed the environmental hysteria are proof of something ominous.
So I'm sure they're entirely inconsequential, but here, anyway, are some anecdotes that cast doubt on the notion that emissions from our SUVs and power plants are dangerously harming the climate.
Greenland isn't melting. And while Arctic sea ice may have thinned in the past three decades by about 3% per decade, according to the U. S. National Snow and Ice Date Center, Antarctic ice (which is about 20 times as voluminous as the Arctic kind) has grown by 1% per decade,
Also, after last summer's record melt in the Arctic, this summer's melt in Antarctica was the smallest on record. And NASA satellites have found that Arctic Sea ice coverage this year is more than one million square kilo-metres greater than last year's, greater than the average of the last three years and 10-20 centmetres thicker than in 2007. According to observations by the Danish Meteorological Institute, we "have to go back 15 years to find ice expansion so far south."
Snow coverage in North America this winter was greater than at any time in recorded history. China had its worst winter in a century, and the southern hemisphere its worst in the past 50 years.
And while global temperatures increased slightly in June, through the end of May, the nine-month decline in temperatures beginning in September was greater (0.8C) than all the warming of the 20th century (0.6C).
All of this may prove nothing (although if these signals pointed toward warming, you can bet they'd be billed as proof a coming climate catastrophe). But they should at least give Mr. Gore comfort that he need not sacrifice his high-carbon lifestyle just to prove he can walk the walk.
lgunter@shaw.ca
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Obama's Pompous Clichés
July 20, 2008
Obama Wraps Up the Bush Status Quo in Pompous Clichés
By Robert Tracinski
I am quickly coming to the conclusion that all there has ever been to Barack Obama is symbolism and grandiloquent speeches. There is the symbolism of him as the (potential) first black president. And there is his ability to give portentous speeches in high-flown Harvard rhetoric, perfectly pitched to sound thoughtful to college-educated liberals--without actually saying anything.
And here we go again, with another one of Obama's patented Big Speeches, this time on Iraq. It is pitched to sound sincere and intellectual, and to sell us on his allegedly superior foreign-policy judgment--so long as we drift through it and don't start asking any questions.
The speech has two purposes. One is to artfully evade Obama's massive misjudgment of the "surge," which he unequivocally opposed. Thus, while he half-acknowledges the enormous turnaround in Iraq, here is how he describes its cause:
As I have said many times, our troops have performed brilliantly in lowering the level of violence. General Petraeus has used new tactics to protect the Iraqi population. We have talked directly to Sunni tribes that used to be hostile to America, and supported their fight against al Qaeda. Shiite militias have generally respected a cease-fire. Those are the facts, and all Americans welcome them.
Here's a tip. When Obama begins a sentence with "As I have said many times," this means that he is about to announce a totally new position that contradicts everything he has said before. For a little reminder of what Obama has actually said about the surge "many times," check out this video clip helpfully posted to YouTube by the Republican National Committee.
The rest of that passage shows a total, willful ignorance about what the surge actually consisted of and what it has done. He says that we "talked directly to Sunni tribes that used to be hostile to America." Well, we did a little more than talk. We backed up the Sunni "Awakening" movement with some serious military action--which is precisely what the extra "surge" troops were needed for.
But the most ridiculous line is that "Shiite militias have generally respected a cease-fire." This Spring saw pitched fighting between Iraqi troops and the Iranian-backed Mahdi Army militia--fighting that ended because the Mahdi Army lost. Does Obama not even watch the news?
But that is not what is most interesting about the speech. What is most interesting is its main purpose, which is to make it sound as if Obama is offering a whole new strategic direction for the War on Terrorism--while he declares that he would implement precisely the policies that are already being followed by the Bush administration.
He says that "True success" in Iraq--note that he has even borrowed Bush's habit of saying "success" in place of "victory"--"will take place when we leave Iraq to a government that is taking responsibility for its future--a government that prevents sectarian conflict, and ensures that the al Qaeda threat which has been beaten back by our troops does not reemerge." But that is precisely what is already happening. Sectarian killings in Iraq, for example, have dropped to zero for about ten weeks running.
And how does Obama propose to ensure that we keep on enjoying this "true success" in Iraq? "We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010--one year after Iraqi Security Forces will be prepared to stand up; two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, we'll keep a residual force to perform specific missions in Iraq: targeting any remnants of al Qaeda; protecting our service members and diplomats; and training and supporting Iraq's Security Forces."
Note the part about the "residual" combat force, whose size Obama never specifies, which will target the remnants of al Qaeda and train and support Iraqi forces--which is precisely the end result envisioned by the Bush administration if the current progress in Iraq continues.
But maybe the big difference is that Obama will stick to his 16-month timetable no matter what, while Bush and McCain want to make withdrawal dependent on conditions on the ground. Well no, Obama would "make tactical adjustments" after consulting with "commanders on the ground and the Iraqi government."
That final flip-flop that the left has been dreading, when Obama throws out his commitment to a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq? It just happened. I wonder how long it will take them to notice.
Obama's policies for Afghanistan and Pakistan also read like a giant "me-too" to the current administration. His "new strategy" is to do more of what we're already doing: increase troops, increase economic aid, and try jawboning the Pakistani government into fighting the militants.
But the biggest piece of misdirection in the whole speech is about Iran. One of the centerpieces of Obama's strategy is a plan to "secur[e] all nuclear weapons and materials from terrorists and rogue states." So that means shutting down Iran's nuclear weapons program. How does he propose to do that?
Preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons is a vital national security interest of the United States.... I commend the work of our European allies on this important matter, and we should be full partners in that effort.... We will...present a clear choice. If you abandon your nuclear program, support for terror, and threats to Israel, there will be meaningful incentives. If you refuse, then we will ratchet up the pressure, with stronger unilateral sanctions; stronger multilateral sanctions in the Security Council, and sustained action outside the UN to isolate the Iranian regime. That's the diplomacy we need
So he'll cooperate closely with our European allies to offer the Iranians incentives to stop their nuclear program and threaten them with sanctions and diplomatic "isolation" if they refuse. In other words: precisely the policy the Bush administration has followed for the past six years, and especially since the summer of 2006--all with no results.
So on these issues, there is nothing to Obama's speech. It is a whole bunch of pompous clichés--stuff like "it falls to us to act with the same sense of purpose and pragmatism as an earlier generation, to join with friends and partners to lead the world anew"--wrapped around the conventional wisdom.
And that's all there ever has been to Barack Obama: symbolism and grandiloquent speeches.
Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of The Intellectual Activist and TIADaily.com.
Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/obama_wraps_up_the_bush_status.html at July 20, 2008 - 05:06:28 PM PDT
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Obama Wraps Up the Bush Status Quo in Pompous Clichés
By Robert Tracinski
I am quickly coming to the conclusion that all there has ever been to Barack Obama is symbolism and grandiloquent speeches. There is the symbolism of him as the (potential) first black president. And there is his ability to give portentous speeches in high-flown Harvard rhetoric, perfectly pitched to sound thoughtful to college-educated liberals--without actually saying anything.
And here we go again, with another one of Obama's patented Big Speeches, this time on Iraq. It is pitched to sound sincere and intellectual, and to sell us on his allegedly superior foreign-policy judgment--so long as we drift through it and don't start asking any questions.
The speech has two purposes. One is to artfully evade Obama's massive misjudgment of the "surge," which he unequivocally opposed. Thus, while he half-acknowledges the enormous turnaround in Iraq, here is how he describes its cause:
As I have said many times, our troops have performed brilliantly in lowering the level of violence. General Petraeus has used new tactics to protect the Iraqi population. We have talked directly to Sunni tribes that used to be hostile to America, and supported their fight against al Qaeda. Shiite militias have generally respected a cease-fire. Those are the facts, and all Americans welcome them.
Here's a tip. When Obama begins a sentence with "As I have said many times," this means that he is about to announce a totally new position that contradicts everything he has said before. For a little reminder of what Obama has actually said about the surge "many times," check out this video clip helpfully posted to YouTube by the Republican National Committee.
The rest of that passage shows a total, willful ignorance about what the surge actually consisted of and what it has done. He says that we "talked directly to Sunni tribes that used to be hostile to America." Well, we did a little more than talk. We backed up the Sunni "Awakening" movement with some serious military action--which is precisely what the extra "surge" troops were needed for.
But the most ridiculous line is that "Shiite militias have generally respected a cease-fire." This Spring saw pitched fighting between Iraqi troops and the Iranian-backed Mahdi Army militia--fighting that ended because the Mahdi Army lost. Does Obama not even watch the news?
But that is not what is most interesting about the speech. What is most interesting is its main purpose, which is to make it sound as if Obama is offering a whole new strategic direction for the War on Terrorism--while he declares that he would implement precisely the policies that are already being followed by the Bush administration.
He says that "True success" in Iraq--note that he has even borrowed Bush's habit of saying "success" in place of "victory"--"will take place when we leave Iraq to a government that is taking responsibility for its future--a government that prevents sectarian conflict, and ensures that the al Qaeda threat which has been beaten back by our troops does not reemerge." But that is precisely what is already happening. Sectarian killings in Iraq, for example, have dropped to zero for about ten weeks running.
And how does Obama propose to ensure that we keep on enjoying this "true success" in Iraq? "We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010--one year after Iraqi Security Forces will be prepared to stand up; two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, we'll keep a residual force to perform specific missions in Iraq: targeting any remnants of al Qaeda; protecting our service members and diplomats; and training and supporting Iraq's Security Forces."
Note the part about the "residual" combat force, whose size Obama never specifies, which will target the remnants of al Qaeda and train and support Iraqi forces--which is precisely the end result envisioned by the Bush administration if the current progress in Iraq continues.
But maybe the big difference is that Obama will stick to his 16-month timetable no matter what, while Bush and McCain want to make withdrawal dependent on conditions on the ground. Well no, Obama would "make tactical adjustments" after consulting with "commanders on the ground and the Iraqi government."
That final flip-flop that the left has been dreading, when Obama throws out his commitment to a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq? It just happened. I wonder how long it will take them to notice.
Obama's policies for Afghanistan and Pakistan also read like a giant "me-too" to the current administration. His "new strategy" is to do more of what we're already doing: increase troops, increase economic aid, and try jawboning the Pakistani government into fighting the militants.
But the biggest piece of misdirection in the whole speech is about Iran. One of the centerpieces of Obama's strategy is a plan to "secur[e] all nuclear weapons and materials from terrorists and rogue states." So that means shutting down Iran's nuclear weapons program. How does he propose to do that?
Preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons is a vital national security interest of the United States.... I commend the work of our European allies on this important matter, and we should be full partners in that effort.... We will...present a clear choice. If you abandon your nuclear program, support for terror, and threats to Israel, there will be meaningful incentives. If you refuse, then we will ratchet up the pressure, with stronger unilateral sanctions; stronger multilateral sanctions in the Security Council, and sustained action outside the UN to isolate the Iranian regime. That's the diplomacy we need
So he'll cooperate closely with our European allies to offer the Iranians incentives to stop their nuclear program and threaten them with sanctions and diplomatic "isolation" if they refuse. In other words: precisely the policy the Bush administration has followed for the past six years, and especially since the summer of 2006--all with no results.
So on these issues, there is nothing to Obama's speech. It is a whole bunch of pompous clichés--stuff like "it falls to us to act with the same sense of purpose and pragmatism as an earlier generation, to join with friends and partners to lead the world anew"--wrapped around the conventional wisdom.
And that's all there ever has been to Barack Obama: symbolism and grandiloquent speeches.
Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of The Intellectual Activist and TIADaily.com.
Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/obama_wraps_up_the_bush_status.html at July 20, 2008 - 05:06:28 PM PDT
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Thursday, July 17, 2008
Is Obama for real?
July 18, 2008
Obama's Greatest Admirer
By Charles Krauthammer
WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama wants to speak at the Brandenburg Gate.
He figures it would be a nice backdrop. The supporting cast -- a cheering audience and a few fainting frauleins -- would be a picturesque way to bolster his foreign policy credentials.
What Obama does not seem to understand is that the Brandenburg Gate is something you earn. President Reagan earned the right to speak there because his relentless pressure had brought the Soviet empire to its knees and he was demanding its final "tear down this wall" liquidation. When President Kennedy visited the Brandenburg Gate on the day of his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, he was representing a country that was prepared to go to the brink of nuclear war to defend West Berlin.
Who is Obama representing? And what exactly has he done in his lifetime to merit appropriating the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign prop? What was his role in the fight against communism, the liberation of Eastern Europe, the creation of what George Bush 41 -- who presided over the fall of the Berlin Wall but modestly declined to go there for a victory lap -- called "a Europe whole and free"?
Does Obama not see the incongruity? It's as if a German pol took a campaign trip to America and demanded the Statue of Liberty as a venue for a campaign speech. (The Germans have now gently nudged Obama into looking at other venues.)
Americans are beginning to notice Obama's elevated opinion of himself.
There's nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?
Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted "present" nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.
It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history -- "generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment" -- when, among other wonders, "the rise of the oceans began to slow." As economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, "Moses made the waters recede, but he had help." Obama apparently works alone.
Obama may think he's King Canute, but the good king ordered the tides to halt precisely to refute sycophantic aides who suggested that he had such power. Obama has no such modesty.
After all, in the words of his own slogan, "we are the ones we've been waiting for," which, translating the royal "we," means: "I am the one we've been waiting for." Amazingly, he had a quasi-presidential seal with its own Latin inscription affixed to his podium, until general ridicule -- it was pointed out that he was not yet president -- induced him to take it down
He lectures us that instead of worrying about immigrants learning English, "you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish" -- a language Obama does not speak. He further admonishes us on how "embarrassing" it is that Europeans are multilingual but "we go over to Europe, and all we can say is, 'merci beaucoup.'" Obama speaks no French.
His fluent English does, however, feature many such admonitions, instructions and improvements. His wife assures us that President Obama will be a stern taskmaster: "Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism ... that you come out of your isolation. ... Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."
For the first few months of the campaign, the question about Obama was: Who is he? The question now is: Who does he think he is?
We are getting to know. Redeemer of our uninvolved, uninformed lives. Lord of the seas. And more. As he said on victory night, his rise marks the moment when "our planet began to heal." As I recall -- I'm no expert on this -- Jesus practiced his healing just on the sick. Obama operates on a larger canvas.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
Copyright 2008, Washington Post Writers GroupPage Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/obamas_egoaccomplishment_gap.html at July 17, 2008 - 09:38:29 PM PDT
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Obama's Greatest Admirer
By Charles Krauthammer
WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama wants to speak at the Brandenburg Gate.
He figures it would be a nice backdrop. The supporting cast -- a cheering audience and a few fainting frauleins -- would be a picturesque way to bolster his foreign policy credentials.
What Obama does not seem to understand is that the Brandenburg Gate is something you earn. President Reagan earned the right to speak there because his relentless pressure had brought the Soviet empire to its knees and he was demanding its final "tear down this wall" liquidation. When President Kennedy visited the Brandenburg Gate on the day of his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, he was representing a country that was prepared to go to the brink of nuclear war to defend West Berlin.
Who is Obama representing? And what exactly has he done in his lifetime to merit appropriating the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign prop? What was his role in the fight against communism, the liberation of Eastern Europe, the creation of what George Bush 41 -- who presided over the fall of the Berlin Wall but modestly declined to go there for a victory lap -- called "a Europe whole and free"?
Does Obama not see the incongruity? It's as if a German pol took a campaign trip to America and demanded the Statue of Liberty as a venue for a campaign speech. (The Germans have now gently nudged Obama into looking at other venues.)
Americans are beginning to notice Obama's elevated opinion of himself.
There's nothing new about narcissism in politics. Every senator looks in the mirror and sees a president. Nonetheless, has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?
Obama is a three-year senator without a single important legislative achievement to his name, a former Illinois state senator who voted "present" nearly 130 times. As president of the Harvard Law Review, as law professor and as legislator, has he ever produced a single notable piece of scholarship? Written a single memorable article? His most memorable work is a biography of his favorite subject: himself.
It is a subject upon which he can dilate effortlessly. In his victory speech upon winning the nomination, Obama declared it a great turning point in history -- "generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment" -- when, among other wonders, "the rise of the oceans began to slow." As economist Irwin Stelzer noted in his London Daily Telegraph column, "Moses made the waters recede, but he had help." Obama apparently works alone.
Obama may think he's King Canute, but the good king ordered the tides to halt precisely to refute sycophantic aides who suggested that he had such power. Obama has no such modesty.
After all, in the words of his own slogan, "we are the ones we've been waiting for," which, translating the royal "we," means: "I am the one we've been waiting for." Amazingly, he had a quasi-presidential seal with its own Latin inscription affixed to his podium, until general ridicule -- it was pointed out that he was not yet president -- induced him to take it down
He lectures us that instead of worrying about immigrants learning English, "you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish" -- a language Obama does not speak. He further admonishes us on how "embarrassing" it is that Europeans are multilingual but "we go over to Europe, and all we can say is, 'merci beaucoup.'" Obama speaks no French.
His fluent English does, however, feature many such admonitions, instructions and improvements. His wife assures us that President Obama will be a stern taskmaster: "Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism ... that you come out of your isolation. ... Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."
For the first few months of the campaign, the question about Obama was: Who is he? The question now is: Who does he think he is?
We are getting to know. Redeemer of our uninvolved, uninformed lives. Lord of the seas. And more. As he said on victory night, his rise marks the moment when "our planet began to heal." As I recall -- I'm no expert on this -- Jesus practiced his healing just on the sick. Obama operates on a larger canvas.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com
Copyright 2008, Washington Post Writers GroupPage Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/obamas_egoaccomplishment_gap.html at July 17, 2008 - 09:38:29 PM PDT
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Monday, July 14, 2008
For Obama, Facts are Obsolete
July 15, 2008
Are Facts Obsolete?
By Thomas Sowell
In an election campaign in which not only young liberals, but also some people who are neither young nor liberals, seem absolutely mesmerized by the skilled rhetoric of Barack Obama, facts have receded even further into the background than usual.
As the hypnotic mantra of "change" is repeated endlessly, few people even raise the question of whether what few specifics we hear represent any real change, much less a change for the better.
Raising taxes, increasing government spending and demonizing business? That is straight out of the New Deal of the 1930s.
The New Deal was new then but it is not new now. Moreover, increasing numbers of economists and historians have concluded that New Deal policies are what prolonged the Great Depression.
Putting new restrictions of international trade, in order to save American jobs? That was done by Herbert Hoover, when he signed the Hawley-Smoot tariff when the unemployment rate was 9 percent. The next year the unemployment rate was 16 percent and, before the Great Depression was over, unemployment hit 25 percent.
One of the most naive notions is that politicians are trying to solve the country's problems, just because they say so-- or say so loudly or inspiringly.
Politicians' top priority is to solve their own problem, which is how to get elected and then re-elected. Barack Obama is a politician through and through, even though pretending that he is not is his special strategy to get elected.
Some of his more trusting followers are belatedly discovering that, as he "refines" his position on various issues, now that he has gotten their votes in the Democratic primaries and needs the votes of others in the coming general election.
Perhaps a defining moment in showing Senator Obama's priorities was his declaring, in answer to a question from Charles Gibson, that he was for raising the capital gains tax rate. When Gibson reminded him of the well-documented fact that lower tax rates on capital gains had produced more actual revenue collected from that tax than the higher tax rates had, Obama was unmoved.
The question of how to raise more revenue may be the economic issue but the political issue is whether socking it to "the rich" in the name of "fairness" gains more votes.
Since about half the people in the United States own stocks-- either directly or because their pension funds buy stocks-- socking it to people who earn capital gains is by no means socking it just to "the rich." But, again, that is one of the many facts that don't matter politically.
What matters politically is the image of coming out on the side of "the people" against "the privileged."
If you are a nurse or mechanic who will be depending on your pension to take care of you when you retire-- as Social Security is unlikely to do-- you may not think of yourself as one of the privileged. But unless you connect the dots between capital gains tax rates and your retirement income, you may fall under the spell of the well-honed Obama rhetoric.
Obama is for higher minimum wage rates. Does anyone care what actually happens in countries with higher minimum wage rates? Of course not.
Economists may point to studies done in countries around the world, showing that higher minimum wage rates usually mean higher unemployment rates among lower skilled and less experienced workers.
That's their problem. A politician's problem is how to look like he is for "the poor" and against those who are "exploiting" them. The facts are irrelevant to maintaining that political image.
Nowhere do facts matter less than in foreign policy issues. Nothing is more popular than the notion that you can deal with dangers from other nations by talking with their leaders.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain became enormously popular in the 1930s by sitting down and talking with Hitler, and announcing that their agreement had produced "peace in our time"-- just one year before the most catastrophic war in history began.
Senator Obama may gain similar popularity by advocating similar policies today-- and his political popularity is what it's all about. The consequences for the country come later.
Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/are_facts_obsolete.html at July 14, 2008 - 08:52:30 PM PDT
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Are Facts Obsolete?
By Thomas Sowell
In an election campaign in which not only young liberals, but also some people who are neither young nor liberals, seem absolutely mesmerized by the skilled rhetoric of Barack Obama, facts have receded even further into the background than usual.
As the hypnotic mantra of "change" is repeated endlessly, few people even raise the question of whether what few specifics we hear represent any real change, much less a change for the better.
Raising taxes, increasing government spending and demonizing business? That is straight out of the New Deal of the 1930s.
The New Deal was new then but it is not new now. Moreover, increasing numbers of economists and historians have concluded that New Deal policies are what prolonged the Great Depression.
Putting new restrictions of international trade, in order to save American jobs? That was done by Herbert Hoover, when he signed the Hawley-Smoot tariff when the unemployment rate was 9 percent. The next year the unemployment rate was 16 percent and, before the Great Depression was over, unemployment hit 25 percent.
One of the most naive notions is that politicians are trying to solve the country's problems, just because they say so-- or say so loudly or inspiringly.
Politicians' top priority is to solve their own problem, which is how to get elected and then re-elected. Barack Obama is a politician through and through, even though pretending that he is not is his special strategy to get elected.
Some of his more trusting followers are belatedly discovering that, as he "refines" his position on various issues, now that he has gotten their votes in the Democratic primaries and needs the votes of others in the coming general election.
Perhaps a defining moment in showing Senator Obama's priorities was his declaring, in answer to a question from Charles Gibson, that he was for raising the capital gains tax rate. When Gibson reminded him of the well-documented fact that lower tax rates on capital gains had produced more actual revenue collected from that tax than the higher tax rates had, Obama was unmoved.
The question of how to raise more revenue may be the economic issue but the political issue is whether socking it to "the rich" in the name of "fairness" gains more votes.
Since about half the people in the United States own stocks-- either directly or because their pension funds buy stocks-- socking it to people who earn capital gains is by no means socking it just to "the rich." But, again, that is one of the many facts that don't matter politically.
What matters politically is the image of coming out on the side of "the people" against "the privileged."
If you are a nurse or mechanic who will be depending on your pension to take care of you when you retire-- as Social Security is unlikely to do-- you may not think of yourself as one of the privileged. But unless you connect the dots between capital gains tax rates and your retirement income, you may fall under the spell of the well-honed Obama rhetoric.
Obama is for higher minimum wage rates. Does anyone care what actually happens in countries with higher minimum wage rates? Of course not.
Economists may point to studies done in countries around the world, showing that higher minimum wage rates usually mean higher unemployment rates among lower skilled and less experienced workers.
That's their problem. A politician's problem is how to look like he is for "the poor" and against those who are "exploiting" them. The facts are irrelevant to maintaining that political image.
Nowhere do facts matter less than in foreign policy issues. Nothing is more popular than the notion that you can deal with dangers from other nations by talking with their leaders.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain became enormously popular in the 1930s by sitting down and talking with Hitler, and announcing that their agreement had produced "peace in our time"-- just one year before the most catastrophic war in history began.
Senator Obama may gain similar popularity by advocating similar policies today-- and his political popularity is what it's all about. The consequences for the country come later.
Copyright 2008, Creators Syndicate Inc.Page Printed from: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/07/are_facts_obsolete.html at July 14, 2008 - 08:52:30 PM PDT
_uacct = "UA-31527-1";
urchinTracker();
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