18 January 2009 >> With George W. Bush’s presidency down to its final hours, we’re now being told that he is not the second coming of Hitler.

First, he gets a compliment from the Dalai Lama:

The head of the Tibetan government-in-exile left the audience stunned when he said “I love President George W Bush.” He went on to add how he and the US President instantly struck a chord in their first meeting unlike politicians who take a while to develop close ties.

And then, a little respect from the New Messiah:

I think personally he is a good man who loves his family and loves his country. And I think he made the best decisions that he could at times under some very difficult circumstances.

Finally, in the Washington Post, Peter Beinart urges his fellow Democrats to acknowledge that—gasp!—President Bush may have been correct about at least one thing:

It’s no longer a close call: President Bush was right about the surge.

[...]

[President Bush’s] decision to increase America’s troop presence in late 2006 now looks like his finest hour. Given the mood in Washington and the country as a whole, it would have been far easier to do the opposite. Politically, Bush took the path of most resistance. He endured an avalanche of scorn, and now he has been vindicated. He was not only right; he was courageous.

It’s time for Democrats to say so.

21 May 2008 @ 8:17AM >> In a White House letter to the president of NBC News, presidential advisor Ed Gillespie has some questions for the network that I’d love to see answered:

[P]lease allow me to take this opportunity to ask if your network has reconsidered its position that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war, especially in light of the fact that the unity government in Baghdad recently rooted out illegal, extremist groups in Basra and reclaimed the port there for the people of Iraq, among other significant signs of progress.

On November 27, 2006, NBC News made a decision to no longer just cover the news in Iraq, but to make an analytical and editorial judgment that Iraq was in a civil war. As you know, both the United States government and the Government of Iraq disputed your account at that time. As Matt Lauer said that morning on The Today Show: “We should mention, we didn’t just wake up on a Monday morning and say, ‘Let’s call this a civil war.’ This took careful deliberation.’”

I noticed that around September of 2007, your network quietly stopped referring to conditions in Iraq as a “civil war.” Is it still NBC News’s carefully deliberated opinion that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war? If not, will the network publicly declare that the civil war has ended, or that it was wrong to declare it in the first place?

And if NBC News no longer believes there’s a civil war in Iraq, given all the fanfare over the network’s initial announcement, why didn’t NBC ever publicly admit to undeclaring civil war?

31 January 2007 >> “[A]t least a dozen Democratic senators who in the past have called for more troops in Iraq,” the Washington Times reports, “now support a resolution condemning President Bush’s plan to do just that.”

If the Democrats win the White House in 2008, what will the party’s foreign policy be? Without President Bush to reflexively oppose, I don’t think they’ll have any way to figure it out.

11 January 2007 >> There’s something about our psyche which seems to make self-criticism the new national pastime. Naturally, our political leaders know this. They know that when hundreds of newspapers and television stations align in a daily tearing-down of the war effort, the American people will eventually lose their nerve and want to give up. Others know this, too, which is why al Qaeda distributed copies of Black Hawk Down as a means to understand how the media can be used to amplify a relatively minor military failure and drive the United States from the field of battle. If terrorists provide enough negative footage to our media, they know we’ll turn and run. But if we fight too vigorously, that will be held up by our own media as evidence of our inherent evilness. More >>

2 November 2006 @ 10:07AM >>

Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.John Kerry

Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, the Democrats’ choice for president last time around, is the subject of bi-partisan criticism for what sounded like a slap at American troops serving in Iraq. Kerry claimed his statement was a “botched joke,” and his first reaction was to attack anyone who criticized him for it.

A statement on his website attributed criticism to “assorted right wing nut-jobs” and “Republican hacks”:

If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they’re crazy. This is the classic G.O.P. playbook. I’m sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did.

In Kerry-land, that’s apparently what passes for an apology. Meanwhile, the “assorted right-wing nut jobs” who asked criticized Kerry included such notable Republican hacks as Hillary Clinton and a number of other prominent Democratic office-seekers.

Kerry complains that the issue is a distration from an administration that “sent our brave troops to war without body armor,” forgetting that he voted for the war and then voted against a package funding the war. (As he infamously said in 2004, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”)

Kerry also criticizes “Republicans [who] want to debate straw men because they’re afraid to debate real men,” although it seems like—as in 2004—Kerry still wants to debate Kerry. James Taranto noticed this little contradiction in Kerry’s appearance on the Don Imus radio show yesterday:

KERRY: The people who owe an apology are people like Donald Rumsfeld, who didn’t send enough troops, who didn’t listen to the generals, who has made every mistake in the book.

[...]

IMUS: What do you think—I understand about the Bush folks. But Senator John McCain, he seems to think—he seems to agree with the Bush administration about your comments. And you know him, obviously, better than I do, but I know him pretty well. And he probably knows what you meant, too.

KERRY: I’m sorry that John McCain has said what he said. John McCain’s been a friend for a long time. But I have to tell you, I think John McCain is wrong about this.

John McCain has been a cheerleader for a policy that is incorrect. John McCain says we ought to send another 100,000 troops over there. First of all, we don’t have another 100,000 troops. Secondly, if you send them over there, it’s going to do exactly what’s already happened, which is attract more terrorists and more jihadists. Our own generals are telling us that it’s the numbers of troops that are the problem.

There you have it. John Kerry, the man who the Democrats hoped would become president in 2004, articulates his party’s position on the war perfectly. He criticizes the president for not sending enough troops in the exact same exchange that he criticizes a proposal to send more troops. When it comes to the War on Terror, the Democrats seem to stand for nothing besides “no.”

It kind of makes you wonder what the Democrats will do if they ever take the White House. Without someone like President Bush to reflexively oppose, how will they know what positions to take?

In the meantime, for the next two years, President Bush should announce his foreign policy positions to be the exact opposite of whatever he truly believes. Maybe he can trick the Democrats into unwittingly supporting what he really wants.

5 October 2006 >> In response to my piece on Bob Woodward’s admission that higher-ups at the Washington Post claimed an “obligation” to publish State of Denial before the election, reader Matt S. e-mails:

I’m a regular reader and fan, but yesterday’s post titled “A Question for the Washington Post” was, in my opinion, far below your standard.

Setting aside Woodward’s politics, biases, and agendas, it seems perfectly compatible with standards of professional journalism that a journalist would aim to publish a story before an election if that story contained information relevant to the election.

Citizens are supposed to make informed decisions on Election day; it’s the role of a free press to help citizens become informed. I think it follows that citizens should be informed prior to making such consequential decisions.

I’m perfectly happy to read arguments that question the accuracy, veracity, or objectivity of Woodward’s reporting - I think there are legitimate questions there - but to suggest that there’s something wrong with publishing a relevant story before an election is silly.

Matt,

Of course a more informed electorate is preferable. But the subject of Woodward’s book is not on the ballot in this election, which is why I find it curious.

The book discusses the Bush Administration and reportedly casts the president in a harsh light. If President Bush were up for election, I would understand the civic obligation felt by journalists to get the facts out—however they perceive them—so that voters could make up their minds. But since the voters will not get to pull the lever for or against the president, I’d figure the folks at the Post would be relatively neutral about whether the book launched in the home stretch of a midterm election that, unlike most, has the potential for both houses of Congress to switch party control.

Instead, there was a sense of importance placed on the timing. Woodward, the Post people felt, had a “real obligation” to make sure the book dropped before a specific date. Woodward acknowledged that he and the Post sat on these stories. He said he didn’t want “to make a splash” by reporting individual stories when they happened, but instead he wanted “to assemble the whole story,” which required waiting until the assembly was done. A fair argument, but usually, newspapers are in the business of telling us things when they happen, not months later when the political timing is right. Besides, isn’t waiting until six weeks before an election going to cause much more of a political splash than a story reported in, say, the spring of 2005?

I can’t claim to know Woodward’s motivation or that of the folks at the Post. But I do suspect that if he were given a chance rephrase his statement, he wouldn’t pass it up. I think it was an admission he didn’t intend to make.

Thanks for writing,
Evan

30 June 2006 >> If you as a private citizen came into the exact same information that the Times eventually published, but instead of publishing it, you passed it along to an al Qaeda operative in a dark alley somewhere, you would be guilty of treason and could be executed. Yet, Bill Keller seems to think that “freedom of the press” amounts to one huge legal exemption—the espionage laws do not apply to him!—and by being chosen by a handful of old-money New Yorkers to edit a newspaper, he is somehow in better position to decide what is in the public interest than the government officials that we the people elected to act on our behalf. More >>

14 March 2006 @ 10:29AM >> The Washington Times reports that Saddam Hussein sure talked a lot about a weapons program he supposedly didn’t have:

Audiotapes of Saddam Hussein and his aides underscore the Bush administration’s argument that Baghdad was determined to rebuild its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction once the international community had tired of inspections and left the Iraqi dictator alone.

In addition to the captured tapes, U.S. officials are analyzing thousands of pages of newly translated Iraqi documents that tell of Saddam seeking uranium from Africa in the mid-1990s.

The documents also speak of burying prohibited missiles, according to a government official familiar with the declassification process.

[...]

“The tapes show that Saddam rebuilt his program and successfully prevented the U.N. from finding out about it,” he said.

There also exists a quote from the dictator himself, who ordered the tapings to keep a record of his inner-sanctum discussions, that Mr. Tierney thinks shows Saddam planned to use a proxy to attack the United States.

“Terrorism is coming ... with the Americans,” Saddam said. “With the Americans, two years ago, not a long while ago, with the English I believe, there was a campaign ... with one of them, that in the future there would be terrorism with weapons of mass destruction.”

[...]

So far, the tapes do not shed light on what ultimately happened to Saddam’s large stocks of weapons of mass destruction. None were found by the ISG, whose director, Charles Duelfer, filed a final report in 2004.

Some pundits and recently retired military officers are convinced that Saddam moved his remaining weapons to Syria. They cite satellite photos of lines of trucks heading into the neighboring country before the invasion and the fact Saddam positioned his trusted Iraqi Intelligence Service agents at border crossings.

This news reminds me of a little-noticed Chicago Tribune analysis released at the end of last year:

After reassessing the administration’s nine arguments for war, we do not see the conspiracy to mislead that many critics allege. Example: The accusation that Bush lied about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs overlooks years of global intelligence warnings that, by February 2003, had convinced even French President Jacques Chirac of “the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq.” We also know that, as early as 1997, U.S. intel agencies began repeatedly warning the Clinton White House that Iraq, with fissile material from a foreign source, could have a crude nuclear bomb within a year.

22 February 2006 >> Looks like the Bush Administration has another security-related scandal to worry about:

Government documents declassified today reveal that President Bush was briefed last summer of “a substantial risk” that Vice President Dick Cheney would shoot an elderly male in the face sometime in the next several months.

[...]

In a Presidential Daily Briefing given to Bush in August 2005, the CIA warned that the vice president was a potent threat to the senior population at large, and in particular “possessed the capabilities and intentions to spray a senior citizen with projectiles fired from a shotgun or other weapon.” A second brief identified the population at risk as those “between 70 and 80 years of age,” and warned that the vice president posed the greatest threat to “seniors in close proximity to the vice president when he is armed.”

The brief, which urged the White House to take “the most thorough possible precautions to disable this threat to the faces, necks, and chests of the nation’s elderly,” was issued a full six months before the events of Feb. 11.

[...]

“To learn that the president’s own people advised him in advance of the strong likelihood that Cheney might spray a helpless geriatric victim with bird shot, and still he did nothing, brings to light very serious concerns about this administration’s Cheney-containment policies,” said Victor Steinberg, director of the Froman Institute, a D.C.-based organization that monitors vice-presidential violence.

18 February 2006 @ 12:20PM >> This seems reasonable to me:

Two U.S. Democratic senators said on Friday they would introduce legislation aimed at blocking Dubai Ports World from buying a company that operates several U.S. shipping ports because of security concerns.

Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Hillary Clinton of New York said they would offer a measure to ban companies owned or controlled by foreign governments from acquiring U.S. port operations.

“We wouldn’t turn the border patrol or the customs service over to a foreign government, and we can’t afford to turn our ports over to one either,” Menendez said in a statement. The Senate Banking Committee also plans to hold a hearing on the issue later this month.

P&O, the company Dubai Ports World plans to buy for $6.8 billion, is already foreign-owned, by the British, but the concern is that the purchaser is backed by the United Arab Emirates government.

The UAE company would gain control over the management of major U.S. ports in New York and New Jersey, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Miami and that has sparked national security concerns among lawmakers.

29 October 2005 @ 4:17PM >> Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the Chief of Staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, has been indicted for making false statements to authorities investigating the Valerie Plame leak. That’s a serious charge, and if true, Libby deserves to face the consequences. He has already resigned.

While this is serious news for Libby, the investigation has yet to yield the political bonanza that opponents of the Bush Administration had hoped. The Plank, an interesting new blog from the center-left magazine The New Republic, summarizes:

[T]he way Democrats were talking about this case leading up to the indictment, this has to come as a letdown. After all, liberals believed that Patrick Fitzgerald was going to cripple the Bush administration and reveal the lies and deceptions behind the Iraq war. There was speculation that Fitzgerald would shine a bright, unflattering light onto the inner workings of the White House Iraq Group. There was talk that he was going to name a “Constitutional officer”—namely Cheney—as an unindicted co-conspirator. And there were rumors that he was seeking to empanel a second grand jury to investigate who ginned up the fake “Niger documents.”

Maybe Fitzgerald just has a very impressive poker face, but it sure seemed from his press conference that none of those things is now going to happen. Even the talk, earlier in the day, that Rove was now in an excruciating legal limbo seems like it was overblown. The five indictments against Libby appear to be the only indictments Fitzgerald is going to bring. It seems there’s a good chance Rove is off the hook and an even better chance that everyone else is, as well.

We’ll see. I’ve refrained from speculating much on this case because it seems like a good way to guarantee that I’ll be proven wrong in the future.

It is interesting to note that nobody has (yet) been indicted in the original leak. We still don’t know who told columnist Robert Novak that CIA operative Valerie Plame was Joe Wilson’s wife. If the investigation concludes with no indictments for the leak itself, Libby would find himself facing prison for covering up something that wasn’t a crime in the first place.

27 October 2005 @ 9:31AM >> Victory. I suspect President Bush’s next nominee will be far more palatable to the people who voted for him. At least now there’s that possibility.

20 October 2005 @ 8:06AM >> Did President Bush pick Harriet Miers for all the wrong reasons? The White House has been quietly touting Miers’s religious background for the apparent purpose of signaling her position on the abortion debate. But if that’s the sole reason she was chosen, then her Supreme Court nomination might be even worse than I originally feared.

Abortion-rights advocates argue in favor of Roe v. Wade, not because it was based on sound judicial reasoning, but because it resulted in an outcome they favor. If Miers would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade because of personal beliefs—as opposed to reasons of law—then she might be casting a sensible legal vote, but she would be doing so for all the wrong reasons.

Conservatives tend to favor justices whose philosophy is to interpret the Constitution as written, not as they would like it to be personally or as Europeans might want. Conservatives recognize that this philosophy would restrict the unlimited growth of government and would preserve individual rights in the way that the Founders intended. In my mind, having the correct judicial philosophy is far more important than casting one or two votes any particular direction, especially when those votes are cast for political reasons.

Despite what the abortion debaters say, overturning Roe v. Wade would have a relatively limited effect. In many states, abortion would still be legal, in some, it would be more restricted, and in a few, it could be outlawed. Sure, a post-Roe world would be different, but it wouldn’t be so vastly different that anti-abortion conservatives should sell out all their other beliefs to secure it.

I’ve got a bad feeling about Miers. If she gets on the court, she could be issuing decisions decades from now that would make Constitutional conservatives cringle. Long after George W. Bush has left the White House, conservatives could be cursing his name. Is President Bush willing to risk leaving that legacy by putting Miers on the Supreme Court? We already know the answer, and this is one of those instances where the president’s legendary steadfastness runs the risk of driving a permanent wedge between himself and many of the people who voted for him. Luckily for President Bush, he doesn’t have to run again.

8 October 2005 @ 5:25PM >> Is the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court the biggest political misstep of the Bush presidency? After assessing the mood of the guests at the White House’s dinner for the 50th Anniversary of National Review magazine, James Taranto believes he sees “a political disaster in the making.”

We talked to quite a few people, and we heard not a single kind word about the nomination from anyone who wasn’t on the White House staff. A couple of our soundings led us to think that such support as it has received has been more sycophantic than sincere. One putative proponent privately distanced himself from his public praise of Miers. Another person, whose employer has strongly backed the Miers nomination, told us, “Of course, I disagree wholeheartedly.”

[...]

Conventional wisdom still has it that Miers is a shoo-in for confirmation. We’re not so sure. From what we saw last night, the right is furious at President Bush for appointing someone they see as manifestly underqualified and for ducking a fight with the Democratic left—a fight that, in their view (and ours), would be good for the country, the conservative cause and the Republican Party.

Charles Krauthammer zeroes in on the problem:

When in 1962 Edward Moore Kennedy ran for his brother’s seat in the Senate, his opponent famously said that if Kennedy’s name had been Edward Moore, his candidacy would have been a joke. If Harriet Miers were not a crony of the president of the United States, her nomination to the Supreme Court would be a joke, as it would have occurred to no one else to nominate her.

[N]ominating a constitutional tabula rasa to sit on what is America’s constitutional court is an exercise of regal authority with the arbitrariness of a king giving his favorite general a particularly plush dukedom. [...]

It is particularly dismaying that this act should have been perpetrated by the conservative party. For half a century, liberals have corrupted the courts by turning them into an instrument of radical social change on questions — school prayer, abortion, busing, the death penalty — that properly belong to the elected branches of government. Conservatives have opposed this arrogation of the legislative role and called for restoration of the purely interpretive role of the court. To nominate someone whose adult life reveals no record of even participation in debates about constitutional interpretation is an insult to the institution and to that vision of the institution.

Absolutely. The best conservative argument for the philosophy of the court is that the Constitution should be interpreted as written, not through some sort of deconstructionist psychic reading of what the Founders might or might not want if they were alive today and informed by supposedly enlightened European jurisprudence. If there is no public record whatsoever of where Miers stands on this debate, I wonder whether she has any underlying philosophy at all. Maybe I just naturally recoil when a President Bush puts forth an unknown quantity for the Supreme Court. The Harriet Miers nomination was a disaster the first time when it went by the name David Souter.

“A disaster on every level” is also what Robert Bork—nominated for the Supreme Court by President Reagan in 1987—said of the Miers nomination. He added:

It’s a little late to develop a constitutional philosophy or begin to work it out when you’re on the court already. It’s kind of a slap in the face to the conservatives who’ve been building up a conservative legal movement for the last 20 years.

Just as there’s a reason the judiciary shouldn’t assume the role of the legislature, there’s also a reason the judicial branch is supposed to be separate from the executive. When President Bush tries to put someone on the court whose only real qualification seems to be her proximity to him, he is neglecting the core principle that defines conservative court philosophy, and he is sinking to the very sort of behavior that conservatives have been decrying for years: using the court as a political tool. By putting forth Harriet Miers, President Bush is almost daring principled conservatives to oppose her, because if we didn’t, we’d be hypocrites.

President Bush places a high value on personal loyalty, and for that reason, he’s unlikely to withdraw the nomination of Harriet Miers. Well, I pledge my loyalty not to a particular leader or party, but to a set of ideas. And those ideas require me to oppose Harriet Miers because she is simply too close to the president and because there don’t seem to be any other arguments in her favor.

I hope there are still enough principled leaders in the Senate to give this nomination the kind of scrutiny it deserves. As Democrats are often fond of reminding Republican presidents, the Senate is under no obligation to rubber-stamp any of the president’s judicial nominations. Republican Senators should remember that as well.

14 July 2005 @ 9:39AM >> If you’ve been relying on the establishment press for news on Karl Rove’s apparent involvement the Valerie Plame controversy, you might be missing a few very important details that PowerLine and The Wall Street Journal have outlined.

I haven’t had much to say on this affair because almost all of the reporting is based on speculation about secret grand jury testimony. There aren’t many real details known except that Karl Rove spoke to a few reporters, a fact that the entire media establishment is now spinning into scandal. Okay, fine, if Karl Rove broke the law, President Bush should get rid of him, but there’s absolutely no evidence of that; there are just the expressed wishes of a few Democrats and their media mouthpieces.

Something about the way the media is acting makes me think they’re going to end up with egg on their faces yet again. That’s just a gut feeling, perhaps fed by my own biases—in this case, my hyper-skepticism about the press—so I reserve the right to be wrong.

Judith Miller, a New York Times reporter, sits in jail right now for refusing to testify for the grand jury. She claims she’s protecting a source, but she also admits that the source granted her permission to talk. In her judgment, the source’s permission was granted under duress and therefore wasn’t truly voluntary, so she’s sticking with her commitment to hide her source even though she’s been released from that commitment. Would a New York Times reporter really go to jail to protect Karl Rove?

Miller believes that her source was essentially coerced to release her from the confidentiality agreement. President Bush is only person who could conceivably exert pressure on Rove to release Miller from the confidentiality agreement. So we’re expected to believe that Miller sits in jail even though Rove and (presumably) President Bush authorized her testimony. Sorry, that doesn’t seem plausible to me. My suspicion is that Miller’s source—and perhaps the source of other reporters—is not Karl Rove. Perhaps the source is actually someone who will embarrass the Times instead of the Bush Administration. That would explain the tight lips over at the Times.

Judith Miller is now being cast as a noble journalist who’s willing to go to jail to stand by her principles. Is she protecting a source, or is she really just protecting the name of the Times from further self-inflicted sullying?

The only people who know for sure are the source and a few people at The New York Times. But the Times isn’t talking. So much for the public’s right to know!

26 June 2005 @ 1:34PM >> The post-Ashcroft Justice Department appears to be a little less modest than its predecessor.

8 March 2005 >> How many times can Walter Cronkite gleefully fork the corpse of Dan Rather in a single interview? Find out.

Meanwhile:

It is barely six weeks since the U.S. President delivered his second inaugural address, a paean to liberty and democracy that espoused the goal of “ending tyranny in our world”. Reactions around the world ranged from alarm to amused scorn, from fears of a new round of “regime changes” imposed by an all-powerful American military, to suspicions in the salons of Europe that this time Mr Bush, never celebrated for his grasp of world affairs, had finally lost it. No one imagined that events would so soon cause the President’s opponents around the world to question whether he had got it right.

That debate is now happening, in America and beyond, as the first waves of reform lap at the Arab world. Post-Saddam Iraq has held its first proper election. In their own elections, Palestinians have overwhelmingly chosen a moderate leader. Hosni Mubarak, who for 24 years has permitted no challenge to his rule in Egypt, has announced a multi-candidate presidential election this year. Even Saudi Arabia is not immune, having just held its first municipal elections. Next time around, Saudi spokesmen promise, women too will be permitted to vote.

Not gonna gloat. Wouldn’t be prudent. Not at this juncture.

26 January 2005 >> President Bush’s re-election left some Americans distraught and depressed. And with Inauguration Day set to rub salt in those still-healing wounds, I decided to act in the interest of national unity and extend an olive branch across the great Red/Blue divide. Would my overtures of peace be rebuffed? Video >>

13 December 2004 @ 4:47PM >> According to Newsweek, Bernard Kerik’s withdrawal may have had reasons beyond a “Nannygate” problem.

And a report in the New York Daily News suggests that Kerik may have had many demands on his time.

11 December 2004 >> Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik withdrew himself from consideration to head the Department of Homeland Security. In his surprise announcement, Kerik said:

I uncovered information that now leads me to question the immigration status of a person who had been in my employ as a housekeeper and nanny. It has also been brought to my attention that for a period of time during such employment required tax payments and related filings had not been made.

How many times is this going to happen with candidates for high positions in government? There have been at least a half-dozen prominent cases in recent memory. Does this signal that there are a lot of crooks out there? Or does it show that our laws are so convoluted and poorly-enforced that they turn otherwise honest people into criminals?

Because the federal government refuses to secure our borders or enforce the immigration laws that are already on the books, there are millions of illegal immigrants in this country. Given that the government won’t kick them out, what are they supposed to do? Not work and starve? Of course not, so they get jobs that are, by definition, illegal. And because they’re illegal, nobody pays taxes on them. Paying taxes would call attention to the illegal immigrant and the fact that the employer is committing a crime as well. So the taxes don’t get paid.

Should individuals really be required to pay taxes on babysitters and nannies? If you just need someone to look after your kid, should you be treated as a large employer and subjected to pages of tax paperwork?

The tax code in its current form requires citizens to retain the services of accountants, attorneys and financial advisors to ensure full compliance with the law. That’s just not realistic. If people were really forced to comply with the employment tax laws, they just wouldn’t hire sitters. But instead, most people ignore the law with a wink and a nod, and they’re held accountable only if they’re busted or nominated for some lofty office.

When the law places an unreasonable burden on citizens, they often break it. Are the “citizen criminals” entirely to blame? Or is this a creation of out-of-touch lawmakers and bureaucrats to whom paperwork and legal minutiae are a necessary part of everyday life?

Out here in the real world, successfully navigating through life is hard enough. To the greatest extent possible, government should just get out of the way.

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 >>

3 May 2004 @ 11:34PM >> In an editorial, The Wall Street Journal calls attention to some interesting tidbits from Bob Woodward’s latest book, Plan of Attack:

The President continued, “I’ve been told all this intelligence about having WMD and this is the best we’ve got?” At which point Mr. Tenet is said to have thrown his hands in the air and remarked, “It’s a slam-dunk case!” Mr. Bush pressed again, “George, how confident are you?” Mr. Tenet: “Don’t worry, it’s a slam dunk!”

It isn’t a shock, of course, that the CIA believed Iraq possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. The Clinton Administration bombed Iraq for four days in December 1998 based on that assessment. Every other major intelligence agency in the world believed the same. What is new in the Woodward account is the extent to which Mr. Bush appears to have been a thoughtful and critical consumer of such intelligence. The President reportedly told Mr. Tenet several times, “Make sure no one stretches to make our case.”

These revelations, of course, haven’t been widely discussed. Doing so would debunk many of the media-propelled myths intended to damage President Bush.

It does make one wonder about Tenet, though. If I were as conspiratorially-minded as many on the left, I’d think that Tenet, a Clinton hold-over, was trying to sabotage the Bush presidency. I don’t think that. I just think intelligence gathering and analysis is a tough business, and that our systems need serious work.

8 April 2004 >> Condoleezza Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission made for riveting listening. The political fireworks were on full display when the Democrats on the panel pressed Rice, asking why President Bush had not developed a pre-September 11th plan to preemptively attack Afghanistan and disrupt al Qaeda. These questions, of course, come from the same folks who criticize Bush administration for acting preemptively against Iraq.

The inconsistencies of the Democratic arguments against the Bush Administration make it impossible for them to put forth any alternate vision, because anything they propose will conflict with some of their previous criticisms. Even that they’ll deny, though; they’ll sweeten their waffles with the syrup of nuance, the word they use to cover up the fact that they’re holding several completely contradictory stances simultaneously.

According to principles of quantum mechanics, it is possible for a subatomic particle to occupy multiple positions at the same time. Perhaps the Democrats hope to become the quantum party. If so, it explains why John Kerry, the consummate Quantum Candidate, is the perfect person to head the Democratic ticket this fall. More >>

24 March 2004 >> Some people would like you to think President Bush lied when he talked about Saddam Hussein’s weapons. The funny thing is, many of the president’s current critics are politicians who made strikingly similar claims about Iraq in the not-too-distant past. To find out if the current spin was sticking, I impersonated a game show host and quizzed a few protesters about some particularly hawkish quotes from notable Democrats. Video >>

19 January 2004 >> On January 15th, New Yorkers awoke to single-digit temperatures and a few inches of new snowfall. In what has since become known as “the Gore effect,” former Vice President Al Gore chose that day to give a speech on global warming. The speech was sponsored by MoveOn.org, a website-turned-political-action-committee that recently gained notoriety by hosting two political ads equating President Bush with Adolf Hitler. Although such comparisons were common at anti-war rallies, I still wasn’t sure whether this mindset was now infecting the Democratic base—the sort of folks who’d brave the cold to hear Al Gore speak. To find out, I spent a few shivering hours outside the Beacon. Video >>

8 December 2003 >> When President Bush tried to help American companies by imposing surcharges on imported steel, some Democrats—as you might expect—criticized him. After all, the steel industry is not only business, it is big, as in big belching smokestacks spewing cancerous clouds that eventually end up absorbed in the lungs of small children and cute, furry animals. From the perspective of his opponents, this one move could be used to symbolize the entire Bush presidency: they could accuse him of helping his corporate fat-cat buddies get rich by polluting while giving the unilateral finger to Europe, whose steel suppliers were put at a disadvantage. More >>

15 August 2003 >> A reader asks: “I was just wondering if there was anything about Bush you don’t like?” More >>

12 August 2003 >> Is the Bush Doctrine dead if it can’t be applied to North Korea? More >>

7 August 2003 >> A reader writes in to claim that “most of the world considers [the United States] the greatest threat to peace” and goes on to say: “If I do not wait until the physical threat has manifested itself, then I am the aggressor, not him, and I lose the moral high ground, and the status of victim. I am the criminal.” More >>

25 July 2003 >> Some in this country still want our intelligence analysts to err on the side of caution, because doing so could thwart future attacks and would therefore save lives. Others believe that no action should ever be taken unless every scrap of intelligence data is unimpeachable and unambiguous. But if you complain that the administration wasn’t vigilant enough in interpreting pre-September 11th intelligence, you can’t credibly claim that the administration was too vigilant in interpreting the data pertaining to Iraq. More >>