21 November 2004 @ 8:01PM >> Although part of me has been relishing the crack-up of the political left, in the long-run, the American eagle can’t fly straight with one ideological wing so badly damaged. A viable opposition is a necessary check against the excesses of the majority.

During the many decades when the Democratic Party controlled the House of Representatives, the party apparatus became increasingly corrupt and out-of-touch with the electorate. Their power was solidified by gerrymandering, a practice that is no less abhorrent now that the Republicans are the ones doing it.

Ultimately, Democratic control of the House was done in by scandals like trading stamps for money at the House Post Office or floating bad checks at the House Bank. Having unchallenged power leads people to do stupid things, and those stupid things led to the sweeping Republican tide in the 1994 elections, a rout so bad that the Speaker of the House couldn’t even win re-election in his home district.

It’s been ten years since the Democrats lost control of the House, and the Republicans should remember what put them in power in the first place. In the New York Post, John Podhoretz raps the Republican leaders in the House and warns them of the dangers of their own arrogance; they would be wise to heed his message.

19 November 2004 @ 4:37PM >> With the world’s media poised to hype every American battlefield misstep at Abu Ghraib proportions, I was relieved to read this rather sensible piece at Slate, which isn’t exactly thought of as a bastion of neoconservatism. It discusses the recent killing—caught on camera—of a wounded insurgent who was playing dead inside a mosque.

Iraqis wearing National Guard uniforms had ambushed [the U.S. Marines], killing one of their own. Another Marine had been killed when an explosive detonated under an insurgent corpse. Several insurgents had continued desperate fights notwithstanding gruesome wounds. Others tried to exploit the civil-military moral gap, acting as soldiers at 500 meters and as civilians when the Marines closed in. The Iraqis in the mosque may have been immobile, but to the Marines, they posed a threat.

Further, the Marines were fighting in an enemy city with little uncontested territory. There were no “friendly lines” behind which they could rest. The Marine in question had been wounded already. He was no doubt exhausted by five days of continuous fighting by the time he risked his life and burst into the mosque on Saturday. A well-rested man would have faced a dilemma inside, filled with shades of gray. A sleep-deprived man weary from days of combat saw only a binary choice: shoot or don’t shoot, life or death.

[...]

So context is crucial when judging actions under fire. The very job of a rifleman is to close with and destroy his enemy—in essence, to kill the bad guy before he can kill you. But what separates the Marines from the rabble is their professional discipline—what a Harvard political scientist called the “management of violence” in describing the U.S. military. And so, this incident stands out for two reasons. First, it shows a breach of discipline, albeit under very stressful circumstances. But it also shows the extent to which the U.S. military will throw the book at one of its own. Already, the entire 1st Marine Division staff is involved with the case, and the top U.S. commander in Iraq said Tuesday that “[I]t’s being investigated, and justice will be done.”

On the same day as this story, the tragic news broke that CARE International worker Margaret Hassan had been executed by her captors in Iraq. Already, there have been cries of moral equivalence. One Iraqi told the Los Angeles Times: “It goes to show that [Marines] are not any better than the so-called terrorists.” Al Jazeera fanned these flames of anti-American sentiment by broadcasting the shooting incident in full while censoring Hassan’s execution snuff tape. (U.S. networks refused to air actual footage of both killings.) There is a simplistic appeal to such arguments because both events involve the killing of a human being and, more specifically, the apparent execution of a noncombatant in the context of war.

[...]

By contrast, the Marines entered a building in Fallujah and found several men who, until moments before, had been enemy insurgents engaged in mortal combat. A hidden grenade would have changed everything, and the Marine would have been lauded. As it turned out, the Iraqi was entitled to mercy, but Hassan was truly innocent. There is no legitimate moral equivalence between a soldier asking for quarter and a noncombatant like Hassan.

There is another key difference that reveals a great moral divide between the Marines and insurgents they fought this week in Fallujah. The insurgents choose the killing of innocents as their modus operandi and glorify these killings with videos distributed via the Internet and Al Jazeera. They recognize no civilized norms of conduct, let alone the rules of warfare. The Marines, on the other hand, distinguish themselves by killing innocents so rarely and only by exception or mistake.

If people can’t recognize the difference between us and the Islamo-fascists who take perverse pleasure in severing the heads of live humans, then we might as well just lay down our arms now, hand over the reins of our government to al Qaeda, and throw open our borders the way Europe has. If it’s all the same, then why bother fighting at all? Why should we defend Western society against those who’d like to destroy it altogether? There’s no difference, right?

18 November 2004 @ 10:24PM >> I will be on the Michael Medved radio show tomorrow afternoon (Friday, 19 November) at between 4PM and 5PM eastern time. We will be discussing Brainwashing 101 and political correctness in higher education.

Although the show is carried from coast to coast, Michael Medved’s website unfortunately does not list the affiliates. I do not know which stations carry the show, but you can listen in online, via KRLA in Los Angeles.

12 November 2004 @ 3:55PM >> Every so often, I receive the following e-mail, which explains quite vividly the mechanics of tax cuts. Class warriors often complain that across-the-board tax cuts benefit the wealthy disproportionately, but the complainers obviously don’t understand how percentages work:

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for dinner. The bill for all ten comes to $100. If they pay their bill the way we currently pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

• The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
• The fifth would pay $1.
• The sixth would pay $3.
• The seventh: $7.
• The eighth: $12.
• The ninth: $18.
• The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do. The ten men ate dinner in the restaurant every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. “Since you are all such good customers,” he said, “I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily meal by $20.”

So, now dinner for ten only cost $80. The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we currently pay our taxes.

So, the first four men were unaffected. They would still eat for free. But what about the other six, the paying customers? How could they divvy up the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his “fair share”?

The six men realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to eat their meal.

So, the restaurant owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay. And so:

• The fifth man, like the first four now paid nothing (100% savings).
• The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33% savings).
• The seventh now paid $5 instead of $7 (28% savings).
• The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
• The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
• The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to eat for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

“I only got a dollar out of the $20,” declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man, “but he got $10!”

“Yeah, that’s right,” exclaimed the fifth man. “I only saved a dollar, too. It’s unfair that he got ten times more than me!”

“That’s true!” shouted the seventh man. “Why should he get $10 back when I got only $2? The wealthy get all the breaks!”

“Wait a minute,” yelled the first four men in unison. “We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!”

The nine surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for dinner, so the nine sat down and ate without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works.

10 November 2004 @ 6:44PM >> A debate is raging in the conservative community about Arlen Specter, the liberal Republican senator from Pennsylvania who is slated by seniority rules to become the next Senate Judiciary Chairman.

Some people worry that Senator Specter would block President Bush’s court nominees that take a strict constructionist view of the Constitution. If that’s the case, then having Specter be the committee’s gatekeeper would be little better than having a liberal Democrat. Recently, I received this e-mail from Douglas Urbanski, who told of a meeting he once had with the senator:

Arlen Specter personally told me that the number one thing he regretted was his questioning of Anita Hill and his vigorous support of Clarence Thomas. Let me repeat: Specter made it clear that he did not think much of Thomas, and, in our chat Specter did his best to distance himself from these events. For what it is worth, Specter also elaborated that he thought President Reagan was too fanatically conservative and regretted much of his support for President Reagan.

Specter thinks Ronald Reagan is a fanatical conservative? Draw your own conclusions.

10 November 2004 @ 3:39PM >> This video is sure to make some people mad. Others, it will make laugh. Which category will you fall into?

7 November 2004 @ 10:10PM >> Despite the wake-up call of September 11th, there are many Americans and Europeans who delude themselves into believing that the threat posed by radical Islam is fleeting, and that normalcy is just around the corner. If we can only sit down with terrorists, the placaters believe, they will see that we are good people and they will leave us alone. How many more wake-up calls does the West need?

The Dutch government yesterday vowed tough measures against what a leading politician called “the arrival of jihad in the Netherlands” after a death threat to a Dutch lawmaker was found spiked with a knife to the body of a slain filmmaker by his radical Muslim attacker.

6 November 2004 >>

1. Not understanding the significance of September 11th.
2. Parading around like unhinged lunatics doesn’t exactly attract people to your cause.
3. “But when Kerry surrounded himself with Whoopi Goldberg and Barbra Streisand and Bruce Springsteen and Michael Moore, many voters concluded ‘well, this guy must be a real liberal.‘”

5 November 2004 @ 9:58PM >> This post previously reported a 5% difference between President Bush and John Kerry in the popular vote totals. That was when 91% of the voting precincts were in.

Now, Yahoo has updated its totals to reflect 99% of the precincts, and the margin has returned to 51% versus 48%.

Meanwhile, New Mexico and Iowa have finally been called for Bush; the ending electoral vote count is 286 to 252.

5 November 2004 @ 7:37PM >> This is the eventual result of weakness in the face of a relentless enemy:

Two leading Dutch politicians known for their critical views of Islam have been taken to safe houses by police after death threats were made against them following the murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh.

Van Gogh, the great-great grandnephew of Vincent van Gogh, was shot and stabbed in a “ritual killing” in broad daylight in an Amsterdam street on Tuesday, with his throat slit with a butchers knife, and a five-page letter stabbed to his chest with another knife.

It was the second murder of a public figure critical of Islam in the Netherlands, two-years after the anti-immigration populist Pym Fortuyn was shot by a left-wing activist.

We have a choice: we can continue our own assault against radical Islam, or we can bow down before the public opinion of certain European nations. If we ever choose the latter, our weakness will be seized upon as an opportunity by those who wish to exploit it.

America chose wisely in this election. Let’s hope we continue to do so in the future.

4 November 2004 @ 2:46PM >> For a real eye-opener about the political makeup of the United States, check out this county-by-county vote map published by USA Today.

Although a few counties remain to be counted (only those counties where 100% of the precincts have reported totals were included in the map), counties won by President Bush currently comprise 3.28 million square miles of land. Kerry’s counties constitute 741,000 square miles.

In other words, measuring by land, President Bush carried 82% of the country, while John Kerry took 18%.

4 November 2004 >> Now that it’s clear President Bush will serve another four years, I hope he can manage to do something that eluded President Reagan. I’m looking for real, systemic tax reform: something along the lines of a flat tax, a national sales tax, or a VAT tax to replace the current income tax. If President Bush fails to significantly overhaul the existing tax code—including abolishing the Internal Revenue Service—it will represent one of the greatest missed opportunities of his presidency. Reagan had an unsympathetic legislature; Bush does not. I hope he won’t be afraid to be bold on taxes. Let’s get the discussion started.

3 November 2004 >> Blogging from the CN8 Green Room in Philadelphia: it looks like I’ll be on a panel sometime around 9:45PM and then once more before 11:00PM. There are a lot of panelists, so I don’t think any one of us will get much airtime. Still quite fun, though, to be sitting around with so many other political junkies in the studio.

2 November 2004 @ 3:40PM >> While I was waiting on line to vote this morning, there was a great commotion, and I turned around to notice dozens of news cameras, several police, and a horde of people surrounding a man wearing sunglasses. It turns out that P. Diddy a.k.a. Puff Daddy a.k.a. Sean “Puffy” Combs votes at the same polling place that I do.

2 November 2004 >> If you have Comcast cable and you live in the northeast, you’ll be able to see me on CN8 (Comcast News, Channel 8) tomorrow night as one of analysts discussing the election.

To clarify my earlier post, Lynn Doyle will be hosting the election coverage, but the show It’s Your Call with Lynn Doyle will be pre-empted by that coverage.

I’ll be on an in-studio panel, and there will also be a number of reporters in the field and in other studios contributing from around the country. My panel will cut in periodically; our first appearance will occur sometime after 8PM, and possibly not until around 9:30PM. I’m not exactly sure how late our panel will be there, but—regardless of the results—I think we will be done by 11PM, midnight at the latest.

28 October 2004 @ 8:37PM >> To all the Red Sox fans, congratulations. I remember how good the Yankees victory felt in 1996 after being deprived since I started watching religiously in 1981. I can only imagine this is even sweeter for you given the history of the Sox. Enjoy.

(Although, as a Yanks fan, I’m not so sure how I feel about the Red Sox winning the World Series on my birthday. I’ll try not to take it personally.)

28 October 2004 >> The choice we have on election day is between the worldview of September 10th—embodied by John Kerry—and President Bush’s September 12th worldview. More >>

26 October 2004 @ 3:26PM >> On election night, I will be appearing as a panelist on “It’s Your Call with Lynn Doyle,” a political talk show carried on all Comcast cable networks throughout the northeast. The show runs on Comcast’s CN8 network (Channel 8), available on the East Coast from Maine to Maryland.

I’ve appeared on the show twice before (to discuss Bill Clinton’s book and Fahrenheit 9/11) and it was a lot of fun both times. Here’s hoping the news on Election Night leaves me in a jovial mood for my third appearance.

22 October 2004 >> As a Yankees fan, few things provide greater satisfaction than beating the Boston Red Sox in the playoffs. There is simply no greater rivalry in sports, period. And when the Yanks won the first three games against the Red Sox, another trip to the World Series seemed inevitable. Never in the history of baseball had a team bounced back from a 3-0 deficit in the playoffs. The Red Sox making a comeback like that—especially against the Yankees—is precisely the sort of thing that the Curse of the Bambino is meant to prevent.

The last time the Boston Red Sox won the World Series was 1918. Back then, the Yankees hadn’t even won one. The Red Sox were the Yankees of that era... until, that is, they traded Babe Ruth—the Bambino—to New York. This set up the fabled Curse, and during the 86 years since the last Red Sox championship, the Yankees have won 26.

If you know any Red Sox fans, you probably recognize that their whole identity stems from the continual pain and misfortune of their chosen team. It’s what binds them together. It’s the source of their pride as a beaten-down people who never give up hope. Bad luck has plagued them on the brink of victory so many times that it seems cliche to recount them: Bucky Dent’s home run in 1978; Bill Buckner’s biffed ball in 1986; Aaron Boone’s game-ending home run last year.

All these incidents prove The Curse: the Boston Red Sox are not meant to win the World Series.

But this year, maybe The Curse is dead. All the momentum is with the Red Sox. Anything less than a World Series victory—after such a stunning comeback—would be a great disappointment. But what if the Sox win? What if the constant denial of their ultimate victory—the very thing that gives those fans their exalted status as a persecuted minority—suddenly wasn’t there? What if, five years from now, the Red Sox were just another team that recently won a World Series, like the Florida Marlins or the Arizona Diamondbacks?

There would be nothing that makes the Sox special anymore. Might as well tear down Fenway Park, move to the ‘burbs and play in some modern megadome stadium with astroturf.

The Curse may still play itself out. Historically, the Gods of Baseball seem intent on slapping down the Red Sox only after their hopes have been raised to the highest possible level. But if there’s any year that the Sox will win the World Series, this is it. And if they do, Boston fans will have earned their party. But when they wake up, and the hangovers loosen their grip, will Red Sox fans rub their eyes and realize the mystique that’s defined them for nearly a century is gone? Will victory eventually leave them feeling emptier than defeat?

Maybe they finally did reverse the curse. Then again, shattering the identity of Red Sox fans everywhere might be a curse of its own.

21 October 2004 @ 11:09PM >> Think Saddam Hussein had no connections to terror? Think again. Syndicated columnist Deroy Murdock created the website HusseinAndTerror.com as a one-stop shop for evidence of Saddam’s support for terrorists.

It’s required reading for anyone who finds themselves arguing with members of the Bush lied crowd.

20 October 2004 @ 5:20PM >> The Club for Growth released a hilarious new ad directed by David Zucker, the director of comedies like Airplane! and the Police Squad / Naked Gun series.

Zucker is a former Democrat who considers himself a “September 12th Republican.” (That’s how he characterized himself in a discussion panel at the Liberty Film Festival earlier this month.)

After watching his ad, I’m damn glad he’s on my side.

(Note: The ad is currently posted on the front page of the site, but for posterity the ad—entitled Indecision—can also be found here. The title of the ad is not yet listed on that page, however.)

20 October 2004 @ 4:58PM >> From London’s Sunday Times: “Sarah Baxter is a life-long Labour voter in Britain and a registered Democrat in the United States. So how come she wants George W Bush to remain president?”

The answer is quite illuminating and well argued.

19 October 2004 @ 10:10PM >> The latest issue of The Weekly Standard has an article from columnist Andrew Leigh covering the recent Liberty Film Festival in Los Angeles.

The article included some nice words from Hollywood producer Douglas Urbanski—Michael Moore’s former agent (Douglas fired Moore as a client in 2000; Moore was apparently too difficult to work with)—and radio talk show host (and movie maven) Michael Medved:

Both Urbanski and Medved singled out videographer Evan Maloney as one who displayed real potential. For more than a year, Maloney has been posting his popular digital-video shorts on his website Brain-Terminal.com. He specializes in exposing the inanities of the antiwar left, especially at “peace” rallies. The results are alternately hilarious and frightening. Maloney is presently making Brainwashing 101, a feature-length documentary about political correctness and speech codes at college campuses around the country. He previewed the half-completed work-in-progress at the festival, and even in this rough state it proved compelling.

In addition to being available online, the article appears in the October 25th issue of The Weekly Standard.

19 October 2004 @ 2:55PM >> No vote fraud to complain about? Complain anyway! That’s the strategy outlined by a recently discovered memo issued by Democrats to local party operatives. Rather than criticizing their opponents, Democrats are now seeking to undermine confidence in our democratic processes. That way, if they don’t like the outcome of an election, they can repeat the 2000 playbook and drag the election into the courts.

Sad to say, but this may be the future of our nation: the ritual of voting won’t bring an end to the campaign season, it’ll just kick off the next phase, where lawyers and judges decide who represents us.

19 October 2004 >> It’s a damn shame that private citizens need to buy ads on TV to tell a side of the story that the traditional media is ignoring in its news coverage. But that’s exactly what the folks at TheTruthAboutIraq.org are doing, only because the media seems uninterested in reporting the full story about Iraq.

You only see Iraq in the news when a bomb goes off or a soldier is killed. You probably haven’t heard much about our military successes, such as our recent one in Samarra, for example. You probably never hear about the rebuilding of Iraq or the routine discovery of yet another one of Saddam’s mass graves. If you want a full picture of what’s happening in Iraq, you’re not going to get it from the traditional press.

Several months ago, I remember listening to a radio show when a serviceman who spent some time in Iraq called in to chastise the press. He said—and I’m paraprasing—that “the media only wants to talk about soldiers when we die. But you never hear what we’re doing every day of our lives. You get the impression that we’re not worth talking about unless we’re dead.”

Unfortunately, that’s exactly how the news media is covering Iraq. Maybe TheTruthAboutIraq.org will help bring some attention to the things that are getting ignored.

14 October 2004 >> I won’t be scoring this debate on the merits of the points made by each candidate, because in both cases, their message was reflected in—and sometimes hindered by—their presentation. Because there was nothing terribly new or controversial said, people will mostly remember their visceral reactions to each candidate’s style.

How you felt about tonight’s debate probably depends on how much of it you watched. The earlier you turned it off, the more likely you are to feel that Kerry won.

Although President Bush had some good moments in the first half of the debate, his disjointed diction sometimes made him seem distracted. Kerry seemed more morbid than usual, and I’m not sure if that had to do with his appearance or his delivery; both conspired against him. But Kerry seemed confident in the first half of the debate, and there were times that it contrasted favorably with the answers where Bush fumbled verbally. Still, Kerry’s dour pessimism drips from his face as he rattles off everything wrong with the world today and how it’s all President Bush’s fault. I think that works against him. I’d score the first half of the debate a small Kerry win.

Somewhere right around the 45 minute mark, the momentum shifted. Bush seemed more comfortable. He got engaged, he got fired up, and all of a sudden there was a stark contrast with Kerry. As the debate wore on, Kerry’s dry delivery of complaint-laden answers that invariably ended with focus-grouped, committee-written soundbites just seemed phony. He didn’t sound genuine. President Bush did.

President Bush’s statements were backed by passion. Kerry seemed like he treats every moment in life with the same amount of energy as when reading a budget reconciliation memorandum. When you’re a politician who’s viewed by many to be a flip-flopping political opportunist, you damn well better be able to muster up a little passion to spackle over it. President Clinton could do it. Senator Kerry, you’re no Bill Clinton.

So, if you tuned out at the halfway point, you might say Kerry prevailed. But when President Bush came on strong, Kerry seemed to lose confidence. The longer you watched, the worse Kerry looked by comparison. Maybe if Kerry had the stage to himself, his performance would have been fine. But he sounded like a prototypical political issuing slogans and he shared the stage with a man who said what he believed and spoke from the heart. (The best example of this contrast was the last question of the night.) President Bush sounded genuine. That contrast was not helpful to Senator Kerry.

12 October 2004 @ 4:34PM >> ...I thought Iraq had no nuclear program?

12 October 2004 >> A new video is making the rounds that gives a rather exhaustive account of President Clinton’s statements on Saddam Hussein’s WMD program and the threat posed by Iraq. Check out The Terror War: Chapter 3, especially if you’re one of the Bush Lied!!! folks.

It remains to be seen whether our intelligence was faulty, as it now appears. Then again, given September 11th, nobody should have been under the impression that our intelligence operation was perfect. The fact remains that every major intelligence service in the world—including those of France, Germany and Russia—believed Saddam Hussein had WMD. Saddam’s own military believed they had WMD.

So when you hear Clinton sounding like George W. Bush, it’s hard to take seriously the conspiracy theorists who talk of oil, Halliburton or “the president’s daddy”. Not that it was easy to take them seriously before.

12 October 2004 >> I’ve heard what was billed as “the ultimate John Kerry ad” on the radio several times. I just found out it is now available in easy-to-swallow Web form.

Kind of takes the wind out of the sails of John Kerry’s claim that he’s had “one consistent position” on Iraq.

Credit for this piece goes to Mark Simone, a local radio show host on WABC 770AM here in New York City.

9 October 2004 @ 3:22PM >> Last night, President Bush displayed the plain-spoken resolve reminiscent of the days after September 11th. He was able to forcefully defend his decision to invade Iraq, and he tied that decision to the bigger picture of the post-September 11th world. He also explained that he’s not afraid to make such decisions even though it might not win him any popularity contests in the halls of European capitols. Sometimes doing the right thing is neither popular nor easy, but leadership isn’t defined by how many people love you after you take action.

John Kerry, on the other hand, seemed a little distracted, shaken almost, perhaps by witnessing President Bush’s performance. Kerry moved around the stage like a robot with a dying battery, and he ended every statement with phony sounding slogans that reeked of politician. Every single Kerry answer seemed to be a litany of criticisms of the president followed by a list of people who agree with Kerry. By the end of the debate, I wished someone had asked Kerry if there was one thing he could name about President Bush that wasn’t a complete disaster.

For all of Kerry’s much-vaunted intellect, I can’t understand how he doesn’t see that we’re living in a different world than the Cold War. All of Kerry’s foreign policy vision is predicated on the institutions and doctrines of the past. But the way you defeat an enemy state in a decades-long standoff where mutually assured destruction brings its own form of stability is not the same way you defeat terrorists who pledge no allegiance to any particular nation and who aren’t afraid to die.

I’ve always thought that if Kerry’s reflexive opposition to everything Bush were demonstrated to the voters, they’d reject him. A presidential candidate needs to stand for something more than merely the opposite of whatever the other guy says. But last night, there seemed to be nothing to John Kerry’s message beyond what a lousy president he thinks Bush is.

Bush won because his passion came across. You may not always like it, but you always know where the guy stands. I think that’s remarkably reassuring in a dangerous, uncertain world. Kerry looked like a petty politician pre-programmed to fire off a few slogans and important-sounding names. But in the end, I think voters want more from a president than lists of things he dislikes about his opponent and names of people who support him. People want to see vision. That’s where Bush shined, and that’s were Kerry lost this debate.