By Kevin McCullough
Sunday, July 1, 2007
There seems to be a pattern amongst the left and terrorists. They work together. Whether they do so intentionally or not is irrelevant. The actions of one are given cover by the others and in the end - they are all working for the same team.
Take the attempted terrorist bombings of this past week.
On Friday, due to some very fortunate timing by a police officer and a set of parking garage attendants two massively huge car bombs were dismantled. And while the actions of those people are commendable - let's face it, the main reason that thousands of Brits weren't dead was due to the fact that the cell phone triggers had not worked. The numbers had been dialed twice in an attempt to set them off. It should also be noted that the original positioning of the two Mercedes coupes were set up in perfect Al Qaeda style, one to scare foot traffic down the street in perfectly delayed fashion to arrive near the second car just in time to absorb the blast.
The investigations are on-going but we already have a clear picture of the driver of the first Mercedes and we know he is linked to Al Qaeda. We also know that the original green Mercedes was spotted in Scotland a couple of days before, then in Birmingham (a hotbed of anti-west jihadism) and then pulling up in front of the "Tiger Tiger".
Speaking of Scotland the day following the double car bomb attempt, authorities placed men in custody who appear to be from southeast Asia. Jim Halpert would call them "Pakistinannies." These guys attempted to drive either a Jeep Cherokee or a Land Rover into Glasgow airport. Funny enough - they had propane tanks, and the smell of petrol emanating from their vehicle as well.
Of course none of these Jihdistinannies would be free to be roving the streets of of the U.K. were it not for some oh so brilliant liberal legislation that has identified them as dangerous threats to the welfare of the public but is not able to detain them. The Brits call them a "control order." Its the liberal's way of attempting to slap a terrorist on the wrist and then instructing them to go play nicely. When in reality what it accomplishes is the public release of Islamic terrorists who go right back to the building of bombs.
Each of the bombs over the weekend were estimated to hold 250 gallons of petrol, 8 canisters of propane, and 18-20 cases of carpenter nails. All legally accessible products and when combined could create a fireball that expands to over 400 feet in length in every direction.
So you're average jihadist is able to run around free as a bird, put together these rather conventional style bombs, and what does the left in America say?
Well as of press time for this column, none of the Democratic candidates for President had publicly addressed the matter. Most leftist media also shrugged it off. But their "nutroots" supporters were all over it. Posters at the Huffington Post, The Democratic Underground, and The Daily Kos web sites were already hatching 102 different conspiracy theories about how this was planned by the evil genius George Bush.
What was shocking in many of the posts at all three sites were the confessions by those who posted them, that they were, "just too cynical to believe these reports anymore."
In other words the freaks who live in these internet caves are more willing to trust the intentions of the "control ordered" Islamic killers, than they are of multiple confirmed reports from CNN, the BBC, and of course the major broadcast networks - none of which lean in any imaginary way in support of the War on Islamic Fascism.
The thing is - the killers know this. They know their rights under British law, they can argue their freedoms under the sanction of "control orders." They are attempting to persuade America to move in that direction and to end the detainments of jihadist psychos living in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Unfortunately the Supreme Court has expressed an interest in at least hearing them out.
What the nutroots, and the liberals did not even bother to investigate has to do with the timing of the attempted car bombings. British authorities knew that threats had been made. Previous attacks were carried out on important dates. Friday was the first day on the job for the Brits' new Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Perhaps even more importantly Al Qaeda may have been attempting to send a message to the jurors in the last London bombing case. The jurors were on their first day of deliberating the outcome of the last batch of murderous thugs who had been captured.
Whatever the motivation, one thing is still very clear...
Islamic Jihadistinannies want to kill free people, particularly free people who stand up to them.
Unfortunately liberals and the nutroots who support them are firmly on their side, passing laws to give the terrorists access, and conspiracies to cover their trails.
Ignoring the voice of these three groups is a global security matter. Detaining, monitoring the communications of, and keeping close track of where these dogs lie, and what they are up to is the only way we can insure both safety and freedom in the days to come.
And I would always prefer those odds, as to say, the pure dumb luck of a passing policeman or parking garage attendants!
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Imam Bush strikes again
By Diana West
Friday, June 29, 2007
If anyone wants to know why Muslims the world over tell pollsters the United States is at war with Islam, just read President Bush's speech at the Islamic Center of Washington, especially the part about American-style religious freedom -- in the president's words, "what we wish for the world."
He began this way: "For those who seek a true understanding of our country, they need to look no farther than here."
No -- not the mosque itself, but down the street it occupies. "This Muslim center sits quietly down the road from a synagogue, a Lutheran church, a Catholic parish, a Greek Orthodox chapel, a Buddhist temple -- each with faithful followers who practice their deeply held beliefs and live side by side in peace," the president explained, standing in his Islamically observant stocking feet before a cool Muslim audience. "This is what freedom offers: societies where people can live and worship as they choose without intimidation, without suspicion, without a knock on the door from the secret police."
As one who has attended a bar mitzvah at that synagogue down the road, I have news for the president: Freedom, American-style, has changed. To enter, I passed an armed guard holding an automatic weapon manning the door. Armed guards like him man many such doors in many such cities. In fact, so common is it for religious worship to require armed protection today that we miss the implications: the degree to which freedom to worship without fear in America has been curtailed by the open-ended threat of Buddhist violence.
Whoops, sorry. I mean, curtailed by the open-ended threat of Greek Orthodox violence. Or was that Catholic or Lutheran violence?
No, the peril to the synagogue was and remains Islamic violence. The resulting diminution of freedom is a symptom of advancing dhimmitude -- the diminished cultural condition of non-Muslims living in relation to Islam.
So, freedom of worship ain't what it used to be. But even in its terror-constrained state, the spread of American religious freedom actually threatens religiously unfree Islamic cultures, which, for example, consider "apostasy" -- deciding not to be Muslim -- a capital crime.
But that threat is only on paper. Where Americans actually become involved in the Islamic world, sharia (Islamic law) is protected, as shockingly attested by sharia's primacy in the American-fostered constitutions of Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestinian Authority. The president doesn't seem to understand that. I don't think he even understands sharia, under which the primacy of Islam is absolute, while other religions are "tolerated" at the high cost of dhimmitude.
Nearly six years after 9/11, nearly six years after first visiting the Islamic Center -- and proclaiming "Islam is peace" -- President Bush has learned nothing.
In fact, his peroration on freedom at the Islamic Center mainly underscored "America's respect for the Muslim faith here at home." Abroad, too. Even as he was asking Muslim leaders (again) "to denounce organizations that use the veneer of Islamic belief to support and fund violence," the president announced that the United States would send an envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), a global Islamic support group. "Our special envoy," the president said, "will listen to and learn from representatives from Muslim states and will share with them America's views and values."
What can the Free World learn from the Unfree World? Maybe something about the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam adopted by the foreign ministers of the OIC in 1990. In dire contrast to the United Nation's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Islamic document recognizes only human rights sanctioned by sharia -- which, basically, leaves women and non-Muslims without much in terms of human rights.
Hmm. Might Bush -- or anyone in our leadership, civilian or military -- notice the unbridgeable cultural differences revealed by these disparate notions of human rights? Alas, probably not. Islam's still peace, according to the president. Those pesky "extremists" fighting jihad are not, he said, "the true face of Islam."
There Imam Bush goes again. "I am astonished by President Bush when he claims there is nothing in the Quran that justifies jihad violence in the name of Islam," jailed Islamic scholar Abu Qatada said under similar circumstances almost six years ago. "Is he some kind of Islamic scholar? Has he ever actually read the Quran?"
No. He's just leader of the Free World -- a Free World that has become less free and more dhimmified on his severely myopic watch.
Friday, June 29, 2007
If anyone wants to know why Muslims the world over tell pollsters the United States is at war with Islam, just read President Bush's speech at the Islamic Center of Washington, especially the part about American-style religious freedom -- in the president's words, "what we wish for the world."
He began this way: "For those who seek a true understanding of our country, they need to look no farther than here."
No -- not the mosque itself, but down the street it occupies. "This Muslim center sits quietly down the road from a synagogue, a Lutheran church, a Catholic parish, a Greek Orthodox chapel, a Buddhist temple -- each with faithful followers who practice their deeply held beliefs and live side by side in peace," the president explained, standing in his Islamically observant stocking feet before a cool Muslim audience. "This is what freedom offers: societies where people can live and worship as they choose without intimidation, without suspicion, without a knock on the door from the secret police."
As one who has attended a bar mitzvah at that synagogue down the road, I have news for the president: Freedom, American-style, has changed. To enter, I passed an armed guard holding an automatic weapon manning the door. Armed guards like him man many such doors in many such cities. In fact, so common is it for religious worship to require armed protection today that we miss the implications: the degree to which freedom to worship without fear in America has been curtailed by the open-ended threat of Buddhist violence.
Whoops, sorry. I mean, curtailed by the open-ended threat of Greek Orthodox violence. Or was that Catholic or Lutheran violence?
No, the peril to the synagogue was and remains Islamic violence. The resulting diminution of freedom is a symptom of advancing dhimmitude -- the diminished cultural condition of non-Muslims living in relation to Islam.
So, freedom of worship ain't what it used to be. But even in its terror-constrained state, the spread of American religious freedom actually threatens religiously unfree Islamic cultures, which, for example, consider "apostasy" -- deciding not to be Muslim -- a capital crime.
But that threat is only on paper. Where Americans actually become involved in the Islamic world, sharia (Islamic law) is protected, as shockingly attested by sharia's primacy in the American-fostered constitutions of Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestinian Authority. The president doesn't seem to understand that. I don't think he even understands sharia, under which the primacy of Islam is absolute, while other religions are "tolerated" at the high cost of dhimmitude.
Nearly six years after 9/11, nearly six years after first visiting the Islamic Center -- and proclaiming "Islam is peace" -- President Bush has learned nothing.
In fact, his peroration on freedom at the Islamic Center mainly underscored "America's respect for the Muslim faith here at home." Abroad, too. Even as he was asking Muslim leaders (again) "to denounce organizations that use the veneer of Islamic belief to support and fund violence," the president announced that the United States would send an envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), a global Islamic support group. "Our special envoy," the president said, "will listen to and learn from representatives from Muslim states and will share with them America's views and values."
What can the Free World learn from the Unfree World? Maybe something about the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam adopted by the foreign ministers of the OIC in 1990. In dire contrast to the United Nation's 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Islamic document recognizes only human rights sanctioned by sharia -- which, basically, leaves women and non-Muslims without much in terms of human rights.
Hmm. Might Bush -- or anyone in our leadership, civilian or military -- notice the unbridgeable cultural differences revealed by these disparate notions of human rights? Alas, probably not. Islam's still peace, according to the president. Those pesky "extremists" fighting jihad are not, he said, "the true face of Islam."
There Imam Bush goes again. "I am astonished by President Bush when he claims there is nothing in the Quran that justifies jihad violence in the name of Islam," jailed Islamic scholar Abu Qatada said under similar circumstances almost six years ago. "Is he some kind of Islamic scholar? Has he ever actually read the Quran?"
No. He's just leader of the Free World -- a Free World that has become less free and more dhimmified on his severely myopic watch.
Friday, June 29, 2007
On Letting Go
How we become American.
By Peggy Noonan
Friday, June 29, 2007 12:01 a.m.
Happy Fourth of July. To mark this Wednesday's holiday, I share a small moment that happened a year ago in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. I was at a wake for an old family friend named Anthony Coppola, a retired security guard who'd been my uncle Johnny's best friend from childhood. All the old neighborhood people were there from Clinton Avenue and from other streets in Brooklyn, and Anthony's sisters Tessie and Angie and Gloria invited a priest in to say some prayers. About a hundred of us sat in chairs in a little side chapel in the funeral home.
The priest, a jolly young man with a full face and thick black hair, said he was new in the parish, from South America. He made a humorous, offhand reference to the fact that he was talking to longtime Americans who'd been here for ages. This made the friends and family of Anthony Coppola look at each other and smile. We were Italian, Irish, everything else. Our parents had been the first Americans born here, or our grandparents had. We had all grown up with two things, a burly conviction that we were American and an inner knowledge that we were also something else. I think we experienced this as a plus, a double gift, though I don't remember anyone saying that. When Anthony's mother or her friend, my grandmother, talked about Italy or Ireland, they called it "the old country." Which suggested there was a new one, and that we were new in it.
But this young priest, this new immigrant, he looked at us and thought we were from the Mayflower. As far as he was concerned--as far as he could tell--we were old Yankee stock. We were the establishment. As the pitcher in "Bang the Drum Slowly" says, "This handed me a laugh."
This is the way it goes in America. You start as the Outsider and wind up the Insider, or at least being viewed as such by the newest Outsiders. We are a nation of still-startling social fluidity. Anyone can become "American," but they have to want to first.
It has had me thinking a lot about how people become American.
I don't know that when my grandfather Patrick Byrne and his sisters, Etta and Mary Jane, who had lived on a hardscrabble little farm in Donegal, on the west coast of Ireland, felt about America when they got here. I don't know if they were "loyal to America." I think they were loyal to their decision to come to America. In for a penny, in for a pound. They had made their decision. Now they had to prove to themselves it was the right one. I remember asking Etta what she'd heard about America before she got here. She said, "The streets were paved with gold." All the immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th century used that phrase.
When I was in college in the 1970s, I got a semester abroad my junior year, and I took a boat from England to Ireland and made my way back to Donegal. This was approximately 55 years after my grandfather and his sisters had left. There I met an old man who'd been my grandfather's boyhood friend. He lived by himself in a shack on a hill and was grateful the cousins I'd found had sent me to him. He told me he'd been there the day my grandfather, then a young man, left. He said the lorry came down the lane and stopped for my grandfather, and that his father said goodbye. He said, "Go now, and never come back to hungry Ireland again."
My grandfather had his struggles here but never again went home. He'd cast his lot. That's an important point in the immigrant experience, when you cast your lot, when you make your decision. It makes you let go of something. And it makes you hold on to something. The thing you hold on to is the new country. In succeeding generations of your family the holding on becomes a habit and then a patriotism, a love. You realize America is more than the place where the streets were paved with gold. It has history, meaning, tradition. Suddenly that's what you treasure.
A problem with newer immigrants now is that for some it's no longer necessary to make The Decision. They don't always have to cast their lot. There are so many ways not to let go of the old country now, from choosing to believe that America is only about money, to technology that encourages you to stay in constant touch with the land you left, to TV stations that broadcast in the old language. If you're an immigrant now, you don't have to let go. Which means you don't have to fully join, to enmesh. Your psychic investment in America doesn't have to be full. It can be provisional, temporary. Or underdeveloped, or not developed at all.
And this may have implications down the road, and I suspect people whose families have been here a long time are concerned about it. It's one of the reasons so many Americans want a pause, a stopping of the flow, a time for the new ones to settle down and settle in. It's why they oppose the mischief of the Masters of the Universe, as they're being called, in Washington, who make believe they cannot close our borders while they claim they can competently micromanage all other aspects of immigration.
It happens that I know how my grandfather's sister Mary Jane became an American. She left a paper trail. She kept a common-place book, a sort of diary with clippings and mementos. She kept it throughout the 1920s, when she was still new here. I found it after she'd died. It's a big brown book with cardboard covers and delicate pages. In the front, in the first half, there are newspaper clippings about events in Ireland, and sentimental poems. "I am going back to Glenties . . ."
But about halfway through, the content changes. There is a newspaper clipping about something called "Thanksgiving." There are newspaper photos of parades down Fifth Avenue. And suddenly, near the end, there are patriotic poems. One had this refrain: "So it's home again and home again, America for me./ My heart is turning home again, and there I long to be./ In the land of youth and freedom beyond the ocean bars/ Where the air is full of sunlight, and the flag is full of stars."
Years later, when I worked for Ronald Reagan, those words found their way into one of his speeches, a nod from me to someone who'd made her decision, cast her lot, and changed my life.
I think I remember the last time I told that story. I think it was to a young Mexican-American woman who was a speechwriter for Bill Clinton. I think she completely understood.
God bless our beloved country on the 231st anniversary of its birth.
By Peggy Noonan
Friday, June 29, 2007 12:01 a.m.
Happy Fourth of July. To mark this Wednesday's holiday, I share a small moment that happened a year ago in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. I was at a wake for an old family friend named Anthony Coppola, a retired security guard who'd been my uncle Johnny's best friend from childhood. All the old neighborhood people were there from Clinton Avenue and from other streets in Brooklyn, and Anthony's sisters Tessie and Angie and Gloria invited a priest in to say some prayers. About a hundred of us sat in chairs in a little side chapel in the funeral home.
The priest, a jolly young man with a full face and thick black hair, said he was new in the parish, from South America. He made a humorous, offhand reference to the fact that he was talking to longtime Americans who'd been here for ages. This made the friends and family of Anthony Coppola look at each other and smile. We were Italian, Irish, everything else. Our parents had been the first Americans born here, or our grandparents had. We had all grown up with two things, a burly conviction that we were American and an inner knowledge that we were also something else. I think we experienced this as a plus, a double gift, though I don't remember anyone saying that. When Anthony's mother or her friend, my grandmother, talked about Italy or Ireland, they called it "the old country." Which suggested there was a new one, and that we were new in it.
But this young priest, this new immigrant, he looked at us and thought we were from the Mayflower. As far as he was concerned--as far as he could tell--we were old Yankee stock. We were the establishment. As the pitcher in "Bang the Drum Slowly" says, "This handed me a laugh."
This is the way it goes in America. You start as the Outsider and wind up the Insider, or at least being viewed as such by the newest Outsiders. We are a nation of still-startling social fluidity. Anyone can become "American," but they have to want to first.
It has had me thinking a lot about how people become American.
I don't know that when my grandfather Patrick Byrne and his sisters, Etta and Mary Jane, who had lived on a hardscrabble little farm in Donegal, on the west coast of Ireland, felt about America when they got here. I don't know if they were "loyal to America." I think they were loyal to their decision to come to America. In for a penny, in for a pound. They had made their decision. Now they had to prove to themselves it was the right one. I remember asking Etta what she'd heard about America before she got here. She said, "The streets were paved with gold." All the immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th century used that phrase.
When I was in college in the 1970s, I got a semester abroad my junior year, and I took a boat from England to Ireland and made my way back to Donegal. This was approximately 55 years after my grandfather and his sisters had left. There I met an old man who'd been my grandfather's boyhood friend. He lived by himself in a shack on a hill and was grateful the cousins I'd found had sent me to him. He told me he'd been there the day my grandfather, then a young man, left. He said the lorry came down the lane and stopped for my grandfather, and that his father said goodbye. He said, "Go now, and never come back to hungry Ireland again."
My grandfather had his struggles here but never again went home. He'd cast his lot. That's an important point in the immigrant experience, when you cast your lot, when you make your decision. It makes you let go of something. And it makes you hold on to something. The thing you hold on to is the new country. In succeeding generations of your family the holding on becomes a habit and then a patriotism, a love. You realize America is more than the place where the streets were paved with gold. It has history, meaning, tradition. Suddenly that's what you treasure.
A problem with newer immigrants now is that for some it's no longer necessary to make The Decision. They don't always have to cast their lot. There are so many ways not to let go of the old country now, from choosing to believe that America is only about money, to technology that encourages you to stay in constant touch with the land you left, to TV stations that broadcast in the old language. If you're an immigrant now, you don't have to let go. Which means you don't have to fully join, to enmesh. Your psychic investment in America doesn't have to be full. It can be provisional, temporary. Or underdeveloped, or not developed at all.
And this may have implications down the road, and I suspect people whose families have been here a long time are concerned about it. It's one of the reasons so many Americans want a pause, a stopping of the flow, a time for the new ones to settle down and settle in. It's why they oppose the mischief of the Masters of the Universe, as they're being called, in Washington, who make believe they cannot close our borders while they claim they can competently micromanage all other aspects of immigration.
It happens that I know how my grandfather's sister Mary Jane became an American. She left a paper trail. She kept a common-place book, a sort of diary with clippings and mementos. She kept it throughout the 1920s, when she was still new here. I found it after she'd died. It's a big brown book with cardboard covers and delicate pages. In the front, in the first half, there are newspaper clippings about events in Ireland, and sentimental poems. "I am going back to Glenties . . ."
But about halfway through, the content changes. There is a newspaper clipping about something called "Thanksgiving." There are newspaper photos of parades down Fifth Avenue. And suddenly, near the end, there are patriotic poems. One had this refrain: "So it's home again and home again, America for me./ My heart is turning home again, and there I long to be./ In the land of youth and freedom beyond the ocean bars/ Where the air is full of sunlight, and the flag is full of stars."
Years later, when I worked for Ronald Reagan, those words found their way into one of his speeches, a nod from me to someone who'd made her decision, cast her lot, and changed my life.
I think I remember the last time I told that story. I think it was to a young Mexican-American woman who was a speechwriter for Bill Clinton. I think she completely understood.
God bless our beloved country on the 231st anniversary of its birth.
Who's Really 'Sicko'
In Canada, dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week. Humans can wait two to three years.
By David Gratzer
Thursday, June 28, 2007 12:01 a.m.
TORONTO--"I haven't seen 'Sicko,' " says Avril Allen about the new Michael Moore documentary, which advocates socialized medicine for the United States. The film, which has been widely viewed on the Internet, and which will officially open in the U.S. and Canada on Friday, has been getting rave reviews. But Ms. Allen, a lawyer, has no plans to watch it. She's just too busy preparing to file suit against Ontario's provincial government about its health-care system next month.
Her client, Lindsay McCreith, would have had to wait for four months just to get an MRI, and then months more to see a neurologist for his malignant brain tumor. Instead, frustrated and ill, the retired auto-body shop owner traveled to Buffalo, N.Y., for a lifesaving surgery. Now he's suing for the right to opt out of Canada's government-run health care, which he considers dangerous.
Ms. Allen figures the lawsuit has a fighting chance: In 2005, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that "access to wait lists is not access to health care," striking down key Quebec laws that prohibited private medicine and private health insurance.
In the U.S., 83 House Democrats voted for a bill in 1993 calling for single-payer health care. That idea collapsed with HillaryCare and since then has existed on the fringes of the debate--winning praise from academics and pressure groups, but remaining largely out of the political discussion. Mr. Moore's documentary intends to change that, exposing millions to his argument that American health care is sick and socialized medicine is the cure.
It's not simply that Mr. Moore is wrong. His grand tour of public health care systems misses the big story: While he prescribes socialism, market-oriented reforms are percolating in cities from Stockholm to Saskatoon.
Mr. Moore goes to London, Ontario, where he notes that not a single patient has waited in the hospital emergency room more than 45 minutes. "It's a fabulous system," a woman explains. In Britain, he tours a hospital where patients marvel at their free care. A patient's husband explains: "It's not America." Humorously, Mr. Moore finds a cashier dispensing money to patients (for transportation). In France, a doctor explains the success of the health-care system with the old Marxist axiom: "You pay according to your means, and you receive according to your needs."
It's compelling material--I know because, born and raised in Canada, I used to believe in government-run health care. Then I was mugged by reality.
Consider, for instance, Mr. Moore's claim that ERs don't overcrowd in Canada. A Canadian government study recently found that only about half of patients are treated in a timely manner, as defined by local medical and hospital associations. "The research merely confirms anecdotal reports of interminable waits," reported a national newspaper. While people in rural areas seem to fare better, Toronto patients receive care in four hours on average; one in 10 patients waits more than a dozen hours.
This problem hit close to home last year: A relative, living in Winnipeg, nearly died of a strangulated bowel while lying on a stretcher for five hours, writhing in pain. To get the needed ultrasound, he was sent by ambulance to another hospital.
In Britain, the Department of Health recently acknowledged that one in eight patients wait more than a year for surgery. Around the time Mr. Moore was putting the finishing touches on his documentary, a hospital in Sutton Coldfield announced its new money-saving linen policy: Housekeeping will no longer change the bed sheets between patients, just turn them over. France's system failed so spectacularly in the summer heat of 2003 that 13,000 people died, largely of dehydration. Hospitals stopped answering the phones and ambulance attendants told people to fend for themselves.
With such problems, it's not surprising that people are looking for alternatives. Private clinics--some operating in a "gray zone" of the law--are now opening in Canada at a rate of about one per week.
Canadian doctors, once quiet on the issue of private health care, elected Brian Day as president of their national association. Dr. Day is a leading critic of Canadian medicare; he opened a private surgery hospital and then challenged the government to shut it down. "This is a country," Dr. Day said by way of explanation, "in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years."
Market reforms are catching on in Britain, too. For six decades, its socialist Labour Party scoffed at the very idea of private medicine, dismissing it as "Americanization." Today Labour favors privatization, promising to triple the number of private-sector surgical procedures provided within two years. The Labour government aspires to give patients a choice of four providers for surgeries, at least one of them private, and recently considered the contracting out of some primary-care services--perhaps even to American companies.
Other European countries follow this same path. In Sweden, after the latest privatizations, the government will contract out some 80% of Stockholm's primary care and 40% of total health services, including Stockholm's largest hospital. Beginning before the election of the new conservative chancellor, Germany enhanced insurance competition and turned state enterprises over to the private sector (including the majority of public hospitals). Even in Slovakia, a former Marxist country, privatizations are actively debated.
Under the weight of demographic shifts and strained by the limits of command-and-control economics, government-run health systems have turned out to be less than utopian. The stories are the same: dirty hospitals, poor standards and difficulty accessing modern drugs and tests.
Admittedly, the recent market reforms are gradual and controversial. But facts are facts, the reforms are real, and they represent a major trend in health care. What does Mr. Moore's documentary say about that? Nothing.
By David Gratzer
Thursday, June 28, 2007 12:01 a.m.
TORONTO--"I haven't seen 'Sicko,' " says Avril Allen about the new Michael Moore documentary, which advocates socialized medicine for the United States. The film, which has been widely viewed on the Internet, and which will officially open in the U.S. and Canada on Friday, has been getting rave reviews. But Ms. Allen, a lawyer, has no plans to watch it. She's just too busy preparing to file suit against Ontario's provincial government about its health-care system next month.
Her client, Lindsay McCreith, would have had to wait for four months just to get an MRI, and then months more to see a neurologist for his malignant brain tumor. Instead, frustrated and ill, the retired auto-body shop owner traveled to Buffalo, N.Y., for a lifesaving surgery. Now he's suing for the right to opt out of Canada's government-run health care, which he considers dangerous.
Ms. Allen figures the lawsuit has a fighting chance: In 2005, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that "access to wait lists is not access to health care," striking down key Quebec laws that prohibited private medicine and private health insurance.
In the U.S., 83 House Democrats voted for a bill in 1993 calling for single-payer health care. That idea collapsed with HillaryCare and since then has existed on the fringes of the debate--winning praise from academics and pressure groups, but remaining largely out of the political discussion. Mr. Moore's documentary intends to change that, exposing millions to his argument that American health care is sick and socialized medicine is the cure.
It's not simply that Mr. Moore is wrong. His grand tour of public health care systems misses the big story: While he prescribes socialism, market-oriented reforms are percolating in cities from Stockholm to Saskatoon.
Mr. Moore goes to London, Ontario, where he notes that not a single patient has waited in the hospital emergency room more than 45 minutes. "It's a fabulous system," a woman explains. In Britain, he tours a hospital where patients marvel at their free care. A patient's husband explains: "It's not America." Humorously, Mr. Moore finds a cashier dispensing money to patients (for transportation). In France, a doctor explains the success of the health-care system with the old Marxist axiom: "You pay according to your means, and you receive according to your needs."
It's compelling material--I know because, born and raised in Canada, I used to believe in government-run health care. Then I was mugged by reality.
Consider, for instance, Mr. Moore's claim that ERs don't overcrowd in Canada. A Canadian government study recently found that only about half of patients are treated in a timely manner, as defined by local medical and hospital associations. "The research merely confirms anecdotal reports of interminable waits," reported a national newspaper. While people in rural areas seem to fare better, Toronto patients receive care in four hours on average; one in 10 patients waits more than a dozen hours.
This problem hit close to home last year: A relative, living in Winnipeg, nearly died of a strangulated bowel while lying on a stretcher for five hours, writhing in pain. To get the needed ultrasound, he was sent by ambulance to another hospital.
In Britain, the Department of Health recently acknowledged that one in eight patients wait more than a year for surgery. Around the time Mr. Moore was putting the finishing touches on his documentary, a hospital in Sutton Coldfield announced its new money-saving linen policy: Housekeeping will no longer change the bed sheets between patients, just turn them over. France's system failed so spectacularly in the summer heat of 2003 that 13,000 people died, largely of dehydration. Hospitals stopped answering the phones and ambulance attendants told people to fend for themselves.
With such problems, it's not surprising that people are looking for alternatives. Private clinics--some operating in a "gray zone" of the law--are now opening in Canada at a rate of about one per week.
Canadian doctors, once quiet on the issue of private health care, elected Brian Day as president of their national association. Dr. Day is a leading critic of Canadian medicare; he opened a private surgery hospital and then challenged the government to shut it down. "This is a country," Dr. Day said by way of explanation, "in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years."
Market reforms are catching on in Britain, too. For six decades, its socialist Labour Party scoffed at the very idea of private medicine, dismissing it as "Americanization." Today Labour favors privatization, promising to triple the number of private-sector surgical procedures provided within two years. The Labour government aspires to give patients a choice of four providers for surgeries, at least one of them private, and recently considered the contracting out of some primary-care services--perhaps even to American companies.
Other European countries follow this same path. In Sweden, after the latest privatizations, the government will contract out some 80% of Stockholm's primary care and 40% of total health services, including Stockholm's largest hospital. Beginning before the election of the new conservative chancellor, Germany enhanced insurance competition and turned state enterprises over to the private sector (including the majority of public hospitals). Even in Slovakia, a former Marxist country, privatizations are actively debated.
Under the weight of demographic shifts and strained by the limits of command-and-control economics, government-run health systems have turned out to be less than utopian. The stories are the same: dirty hospitals, poor standards and difficulty accessing modern drugs and tests.
Admittedly, the recent market reforms are gradual and controversial. But facts are facts, the reforms are real, and they represent a major trend in health care. What does Mr. Moore's documentary say about that? Nothing.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
The Real Skinny on Socialized Medicine
By Matt Kibbe
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
“I'm the thinnest f@#king guy in town!"
--Michael Moore (Rolling Stone 9/17/04)
In his new film Sicko, Michael Moore makes it clear that he is a big fan of government-run health care. He may in fact be one of the biggest fans of socialized medicine in America, given his well-documented penchant for donuts and double Quarter-Pounders with cheese.
Moore proposes that the federal government nationalize the provision of health insurance so that everyone is covered. “The government has been quite good and efficient at creating a number of systems,” he tells Time. “Ask anyone on Social Security if their check comes on time every month. Like clockwork. And it comes through the so-called dilapidated U.S. mail.” In his movie, Moore celebrates the socialized health care systems in Cuba, Canada and France as better role models for America. In Canada, says Moore, the main flaw in their program “is that it’s underfunded.”
Of course, the reality is that Canada’s health care professionals are fleeing to America to work, and Canadian patients regularly come here for life-saving care. In fact, the Canadian system Michael Moore is so fond of is one of only three governments that make it illegal to buy private health insurance. The others are Cuba and Kim Jong Il’s North Korea. And here at home, the bankrupt Social Security system and massively inefficient U.S. postal service are not models for anything but government failure.
In a socialized system, every taxpayer pays in to the government pot. But not everyone gets the health care they need, because the demand for free health care will be virtually infinite. But the dollars available to be spent will be limited. Hillary Clinton, when she last tried to impose government-run health care on the American people, euphemistically referred to this as a “global budget” for health care expenditures.
Michael Moore calls it “underfunded.” Call it what you like, but what this really means is that some people get the health care they need and others wait in a line for service. It’s called rationing, and it is really Sicko. As the great Irish philosopher P.J. O’Rourke once observed: “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free."
Michael Moore is too blinded by ideology (or perhaps by a deep fried Twinkie-induced blood sugar rush) to see the real problems with the U.S. health care system: the government is already too involved in the health decisions made by patients and their doctors. This has driven up prices and denied individuals the right to make health care choices for themselves and their families. To truly fix health care, we need to increase choice and competition, as well as reduce the insurance mandates and junk lawsuits that drive up costs.
But why do I keep taking shots at the breath-taking girth of “the famously outsized filmmaker,” as the L.A. Times recently referred to Moore? In America, what he eats is his choice. That is, for now. Fully socializing medicine will bring about a new set of problems that are far more threatening than just “access to health care.” Socialized health insurance concentrates power into the hands of politicians and bureaucrats, and it opens the door to ever more government intrusion into other aspects of our lives.
Michael Moore is grossly overweight. Some experts claim that obesity is an epidemic that is imposing a heavy, and unnecessary, burden on our health care system. According to the Centers for Disease Control, obesity leads to myriad health problems including heart disease, some types of cancer, and stroke. Medical expenses attributed to overweight and obese people, says the CDC, “accounted for 9.1 percent of total U.S. medical expenditures in 1998 and may have reached as high as $78.5 billion ($92.6 billion in 2002 dollars). Approximately half of these costs were paid by [the government-run health insurance programs] Medicaid and Medicare.”
If we are all on the financial hook for Michael’s aggressive eating habits in a socialized health care system, it seems like the rest of us must get a say in what he eats. After all, under a government “global budget” for healthcare spending, every extra cheese pizza Michael Moore downs today may someday result in a denial of care for your truly ill child waiting in line for “free” health care.
I can imagine a new federal agency, perhaps within Homeland Security, assigned the job of enforcing “good” dietary habits on suspicious eaters – like Michael Moore. Maybe Mike’s buddy Fidel Castro knows how to make this work. As far as I can tell, the only fat people in communist Cuba are part of the political class. The rest of the Cuban people are just hungry.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
“I'm the thinnest f@#king guy in town!"
--Michael Moore (Rolling Stone 9/17/04)
In his new film Sicko, Michael Moore makes it clear that he is a big fan of government-run health care. He may in fact be one of the biggest fans of socialized medicine in America, given his well-documented penchant for donuts and double Quarter-Pounders with cheese.
Moore proposes that the federal government nationalize the provision of health insurance so that everyone is covered. “The government has been quite good and efficient at creating a number of systems,” he tells Time. “Ask anyone on Social Security if their check comes on time every month. Like clockwork. And it comes through the so-called dilapidated U.S. mail.” In his movie, Moore celebrates the socialized health care systems in Cuba, Canada and France as better role models for America. In Canada, says Moore, the main flaw in their program “is that it’s underfunded.”
Of course, the reality is that Canada’s health care professionals are fleeing to America to work, and Canadian patients regularly come here for life-saving care. In fact, the Canadian system Michael Moore is so fond of is one of only three governments that make it illegal to buy private health insurance. The others are Cuba and Kim Jong Il’s North Korea. And here at home, the bankrupt Social Security system and massively inefficient U.S. postal service are not models for anything but government failure.
In a socialized system, every taxpayer pays in to the government pot. But not everyone gets the health care they need, because the demand for free health care will be virtually infinite. But the dollars available to be spent will be limited. Hillary Clinton, when she last tried to impose government-run health care on the American people, euphemistically referred to this as a “global budget” for health care expenditures.
Michael Moore calls it “underfunded.” Call it what you like, but what this really means is that some people get the health care they need and others wait in a line for service. It’s called rationing, and it is really Sicko. As the great Irish philosopher P.J. O’Rourke once observed: “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free."
Michael Moore is too blinded by ideology (or perhaps by a deep fried Twinkie-induced blood sugar rush) to see the real problems with the U.S. health care system: the government is already too involved in the health decisions made by patients and their doctors. This has driven up prices and denied individuals the right to make health care choices for themselves and their families. To truly fix health care, we need to increase choice and competition, as well as reduce the insurance mandates and junk lawsuits that drive up costs.
But why do I keep taking shots at the breath-taking girth of “the famously outsized filmmaker,” as the L.A. Times recently referred to Moore? In America, what he eats is his choice. That is, for now. Fully socializing medicine will bring about a new set of problems that are far more threatening than just “access to health care.” Socialized health insurance concentrates power into the hands of politicians and bureaucrats, and it opens the door to ever more government intrusion into other aspects of our lives.
Michael Moore is grossly overweight. Some experts claim that obesity is an epidemic that is imposing a heavy, and unnecessary, burden on our health care system. According to the Centers for Disease Control, obesity leads to myriad health problems including heart disease, some types of cancer, and stroke. Medical expenses attributed to overweight and obese people, says the CDC, “accounted for 9.1 percent of total U.S. medical expenditures in 1998 and may have reached as high as $78.5 billion ($92.6 billion in 2002 dollars). Approximately half of these costs were paid by [the government-run health insurance programs] Medicaid and Medicare.”
If we are all on the financial hook for Michael’s aggressive eating habits in a socialized health care system, it seems like the rest of us must get a say in what he eats. After all, under a government “global budget” for healthcare spending, every extra cheese pizza Michael Moore downs today may someday result in a denial of care for your truly ill child waiting in line for “free” health care.
I can imagine a new federal agency, perhaps within Homeland Security, assigned the job of enforcing “good” dietary habits on suspicious eaters – like Michael Moore. Maybe Mike’s buddy Fidel Castro knows how to make this work. As far as I can tell, the only fat people in communist Cuba are part of the political class. The rest of the Cuban people are just hungry.
Straight Thinking 101
By Walter E. Williams
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Just about the most difficult lesson for first-year economics students, and sometimes graduate students, is that economic theory, and for that matter any scientific theory, is positive or non-normative. You might ask, "What's this business about positive and normative?" It's easy. Positive statements deal with what was, what is or what will be. Normative, or subjective, statements deal with what's good or bad, or what ought to be or should be. Confusing the two leads to considerable mischief.
The statement "Scientists cannot split the atom" is a positive statement. Why? If there's disagreement with the statement, there are facts to which we can appeal to settle the disagreement -- just visit Stanford University's linear accelerator and watch atoms being split. The statement "Scientists shouldn't split the atom" is a normative statement. Why? There are no facts whatsoever to which we can appeal to settle any disagreement. One person's opinion on the matter is just as good as another's.
How about the statement "Gasoline prices are unreasonable"? If some think they're reasonable while others don't, the argument can go on forever without resolution because there are no facts to which we can appeal to settle the disagreement. However, there are facts that tend to back up the statement: Buyers of gasoline prefer lower prices while sellers prefer higher prices.
By the way, years ago, Mrs. Williams would arrive home complaining about unreasonable grocery prices. After airing her complaints, she'd ask me to unload her car full of groceries. Having completed the chore, I'd ask her whether she was unreasonable, suggesting that it was my opinion that only an unreasonable person would pay unreasonable prices. The conversation never went far in a pleasant direction.
Having explained the difference between positive and normative statements, I tell my students that in no way do I propose that they purge their vocabulary of normative statements. Normative statements are excellent tools for tricking others into doing what you want them to do. I simply caution that in the process of tricking others, there's no need to trick oneself into believing that one normative statement is better or more righteous than another.
A related term that doesn't make much economic sense is the term "need." The implication of an absolute, crying, dying or urgent need is that one cannot do without the need in question. Students sometimes say they absolutely need a car or a cell phone. At that point I ask them, how in the world was it that Gen. George Washington could defeat Britain, the mightiest nation on earth, without a cell phone or a car?
The problem with the term "need" is that it suggests there are no substitutes for the item in question. Thus, people will pay any price for it; however, the law of demand says that at some price, people will take less of something, including none of it. In response, a student might say, "Diabetics can't do without insulin" or "People can't do without food." I say, "Yes, they can; diabetics have been doing without insulin for thousands of years." In some poor African countries, people do without food. Of course, the results of doing without insulin or food are indeed unpleasant, but the fact that the results are unpleasant doesn't require us to deny that non-consumption is a substitute for consumption. Again, I tell my students not to purge their vocabulary of crying, dying and urgent needs; just don't trick yourself while you're tricking others.
You say, "Williams, it doesn't sound like economics is a very compassionate science." You're right, but neither is physics, chemistry or biology. However, if we wish to be compassionate with our fellow man, we must learn to engage in dispassionate analysis. In other words, thinking with our hearts, rather than our brains, is a surefire method to hurt those whom we wish to help.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Just about the most difficult lesson for first-year economics students, and sometimes graduate students, is that economic theory, and for that matter any scientific theory, is positive or non-normative. You might ask, "What's this business about positive and normative?" It's easy. Positive statements deal with what was, what is or what will be. Normative, or subjective, statements deal with what's good or bad, or what ought to be or should be. Confusing the two leads to considerable mischief.
The statement "Scientists cannot split the atom" is a positive statement. Why? If there's disagreement with the statement, there are facts to which we can appeal to settle the disagreement -- just visit Stanford University's linear accelerator and watch atoms being split. The statement "Scientists shouldn't split the atom" is a normative statement. Why? There are no facts whatsoever to which we can appeal to settle any disagreement. One person's opinion on the matter is just as good as another's.
How about the statement "Gasoline prices are unreasonable"? If some think they're reasonable while others don't, the argument can go on forever without resolution because there are no facts to which we can appeal to settle the disagreement. However, there are facts that tend to back up the statement: Buyers of gasoline prefer lower prices while sellers prefer higher prices.
By the way, years ago, Mrs. Williams would arrive home complaining about unreasonable grocery prices. After airing her complaints, she'd ask me to unload her car full of groceries. Having completed the chore, I'd ask her whether she was unreasonable, suggesting that it was my opinion that only an unreasonable person would pay unreasonable prices. The conversation never went far in a pleasant direction.
Having explained the difference between positive and normative statements, I tell my students that in no way do I propose that they purge their vocabulary of normative statements. Normative statements are excellent tools for tricking others into doing what you want them to do. I simply caution that in the process of tricking others, there's no need to trick oneself into believing that one normative statement is better or more righteous than another.
A related term that doesn't make much economic sense is the term "need." The implication of an absolute, crying, dying or urgent need is that one cannot do without the need in question. Students sometimes say they absolutely need a car or a cell phone. At that point I ask them, how in the world was it that Gen. George Washington could defeat Britain, the mightiest nation on earth, without a cell phone or a car?
The problem with the term "need" is that it suggests there are no substitutes for the item in question. Thus, people will pay any price for it; however, the law of demand says that at some price, people will take less of something, including none of it. In response, a student might say, "Diabetics can't do without insulin" or "People can't do without food." I say, "Yes, they can; diabetics have been doing without insulin for thousands of years." In some poor African countries, people do without food. Of course, the results of doing without insulin or food are indeed unpleasant, but the fact that the results are unpleasant doesn't require us to deny that non-consumption is a substitute for consumption. Again, I tell my students not to purge their vocabulary of crying, dying and urgent needs; just don't trick yourself while you're tricking others.
You say, "Williams, it doesn't sound like economics is a very compassionate science." You're right, but neither is physics, chemistry or biology. However, if we wish to be compassionate with our fellow man, we must learn to engage in dispassionate analysis. In other words, thinking with our hearts, rather than our brains, is a surefire method to hurt those whom we wish to help.
Sicko Guides Liberals' Health care Agenda
By Ken Blackwell
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
“Once it is fully established, bureaucracy is among those social structures which are the hardest to destroy.”
- -Max Weber
Michael Moore got slammed by Larry King. The outlandish documentarian was bumped from the “The Larry King Show” by none other than an ex-con, Paris Hilton.
Moore’s film “Sicko,” though, is certainly abuzz among liberal pundits. Moore offers a solution to millions of Americans without health insurance — government-run health care, just like Cuba.
Moore correctly identifies health care reform as a pivotal issue for this country, but he dives off the liberal deep-end by claiming the Cuban health care system is somehow superior to ours.
Let’s put it this way. While Major League Baseball scouts may dream of free access to Cuban pitchers, shortstops, and clean-up hitters, few Americans would consider drafting a Cuban doctor for a critical surgery.
It’s easy to discount Moore as just another half-baked Hollywood activist on a misinformed, politically fashionable tirade. That is, until you tune in to what the Democrat presidential candidates are saying. They, like Moore, believe a federal government-run health care system is the solution to our health care challenges.
While they may vary on specifics, all of them call for the federal government to take over medicine, controlling what doctor you can see and for what reason you can see them, and dictating what treatment you’ll receive.
Republicans strongly disagree with this approach. All 11 Republicans running for president, now that we can include Fred Thompson, believe whenever government takes over a program, it gets more expensive, leads to terrible waste, declines in quality of service, and endures countless delays and mistakes.
Think of the hassles you face at the department of motor vehicles. Now picture dealing with those hassles when you take a child to the doctor: Take a number to wait in line for countless hours, or days, for the wrong test, or to correct a prescription for the wrong medicine. Stand in one line for x-rays, then another for medication.
At each stage the person you’re dealing with has to consult thick rulebooks written by bureaucrats hundreds of miles away. As mistakes are inevitably made, the nurse will be unable to get through to someone with the authority to fix the record or authorize the procedure.
Or worse, think of the absolute meltdown after Hurricane Katrina. Then consider dealing with that level of chaos at the hospital during an emergency. Imagine being in a dire condition and having a doctor at your side unable to get through to the right person to authorize what you need done, or finding out that you can only be treated at another hospital on the other side of town.
Government cannot overcome the laws of economics. All resources are limited. Supply and demand set price, quantity, and quality. When you promise something for free, you run out of supply as people consume resources regardless of need.
Also, the smaller an organization is, the better administrators are able to handle unusual or emergency situations. The opposite is true for government because it is immense.
For all these reasons, a national government takeover of medicine, promising unlimited treatment for 300 million people cannot possibly work half as well as the system we have today. We need to improve the system, not make it an endless bureaucracy.
Instead of a big-government takeover, the candidates should support allowing competitive markets to fix health care. Patients need providers and researchers competing against each other to provide better services and medicine. This only occurs when patients have a choice among providers and are free to go elsewhere if dissatisfied.
They must understand the superiority of the free market when it comes to bringing down prices. Government wastes countless of billions of dollars because it does not have to compete, so prices soar and you pay for all of it through higher taxes.
Private sector personnel keep searching for ways to do it faster and cheaper, so that they can offer a lower price to attract business. They work long hours to innovate, improve, eliminate waste, fix problems, develop new products and services, and offer solutions.
When that happens, consumers win. In a medical context, that means more lives are saved and people are healthier.
Finally, all of the candidates must talk about prevention. We can prevent many emergencies that result in hospital stays. Problems like childhood obesity and overuse of alcohol and tobacco result in terrible injuries that are either deadly or force a person into decades of constant discomfort with the need for extremely expensive care.
There will always be those with special needs. Government is needed to help people, but government must be the last resort, not the first. It should be a safety net for those who suddenly fall out of the system, not become the system. If we empower people to take care of themselves, it will free up the government resources necessary to help them.
The Democrats enjoy an advantage in the polls in health policy because they promise everyone will get care for free from an all-knowing, all-powerful government, as if government can ever get it right.
Republicans believe in enhancing a system focused on individuals and families that will keep everyone healthier and save lives. They must make that case to the people.
As the debate over health care reform continues, Americans should remember Dr. Jose Luis Garcia Sabrido. He was the Spanish surgeon flown to Cuba to operate on Fidel Castro. It seemed that Cuban doctors botched the job on el presidente and needed outside help. I wonder if they made Dr. Garcia Sabrido available to other Cubans during his visit? I must have missed that part in “Sicko.”
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
“Once it is fully established, bureaucracy is among those social structures which are the hardest to destroy.”
- -Max Weber
Michael Moore got slammed by Larry King. The outlandish documentarian was bumped from the “The Larry King Show” by none other than an ex-con, Paris Hilton.
Moore’s film “Sicko,” though, is certainly abuzz among liberal pundits. Moore offers a solution to millions of Americans without health insurance — government-run health care, just like Cuba.
Moore correctly identifies health care reform as a pivotal issue for this country, but he dives off the liberal deep-end by claiming the Cuban health care system is somehow superior to ours.
Let’s put it this way. While Major League Baseball scouts may dream of free access to Cuban pitchers, shortstops, and clean-up hitters, few Americans would consider drafting a Cuban doctor for a critical surgery.
It’s easy to discount Moore as just another half-baked Hollywood activist on a misinformed, politically fashionable tirade. That is, until you tune in to what the Democrat presidential candidates are saying. They, like Moore, believe a federal government-run health care system is the solution to our health care challenges.
While they may vary on specifics, all of them call for the federal government to take over medicine, controlling what doctor you can see and for what reason you can see them, and dictating what treatment you’ll receive.
Republicans strongly disagree with this approach. All 11 Republicans running for president, now that we can include Fred Thompson, believe whenever government takes over a program, it gets more expensive, leads to terrible waste, declines in quality of service, and endures countless delays and mistakes.
Think of the hassles you face at the department of motor vehicles. Now picture dealing with those hassles when you take a child to the doctor: Take a number to wait in line for countless hours, or days, for the wrong test, or to correct a prescription for the wrong medicine. Stand in one line for x-rays, then another for medication.
At each stage the person you’re dealing with has to consult thick rulebooks written by bureaucrats hundreds of miles away. As mistakes are inevitably made, the nurse will be unable to get through to someone with the authority to fix the record or authorize the procedure.
Or worse, think of the absolute meltdown after Hurricane Katrina. Then consider dealing with that level of chaos at the hospital during an emergency. Imagine being in a dire condition and having a doctor at your side unable to get through to the right person to authorize what you need done, or finding out that you can only be treated at another hospital on the other side of town.
Government cannot overcome the laws of economics. All resources are limited. Supply and demand set price, quantity, and quality. When you promise something for free, you run out of supply as people consume resources regardless of need.
Also, the smaller an organization is, the better administrators are able to handle unusual or emergency situations. The opposite is true for government because it is immense.
For all these reasons, a national government takeover of medicine, promising unlimited treatment for 300 million people cannot possibly work half as well as the system we have today. We need to improve the system, not make it an endless bureaucracy.
Instead of a big-government takeover, the candidates should support allowing competitive markets to fix health care. Patients need providers and researchers competing against each other to provide better services and medicine. This only occurs when patients have a choice among providers and are free to go elsewhere if dissatisfied.
They must understand the superiority of the free market when it comes to bringing down prices. Government wastes countless of billions of dollars because it does not have to compete, so prices soar and you pay for all of it through higher taxes.
Private sector personnel keep searching for ways to do it faster and cheaper, so that they can offer a lower price to attract business. They work long hours to innovate, improve, eliminate waste, fix problems, develop new products and services, and offer solutions.
When that happens, consumers win. In a medical context, that means more lives are saved and people are healthier.
Finally, all of the candidates must talk about prevention. We can prevent many emergencies that result in hospital stays. Problems like childhood obesity and overuse of alcohol and tobacco result in terrible injuries that are either deadly or force a person into decades of constant discomfort with the need for extremely expensive care.
There will always be those with special needs. Government is needed to help people, but government must be the last resort, not the first. It should be a safety net for those who suddenly fall out of the system, not become the system. If we empower people to take care of themselves, it will free up the government resources necessary to help them.
The Democrats enjoy an advantage in the polls in health policy because they promise everyone will get care for free from an all-knowing, all-powerful government, as if government can ever get it right.
Republicans believe in enhancing a system focused on individuals and families that will keep everyone healthier and save lives. They must make that case to the people.
As the debate over health care reform continues, Americans should remember Dr. Jose Luis Garcia Sabrido. He was the Spanish surgeon flown to Cuba to operate on Fidel Castro. It seemed that Cuban doctors botched the job on el presidente and needed outside help. I wonder if they made Dr. Garcia Sabrido available to other Cubans during his visit? I must have missed that part in “Sicko.”
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Winds of War
Iran is making a mistake that may lead the Middle East into a broader conflict.
By Joshua Muravchik
Monday, June 25, 2007 12:01 a.m.
Several conflicts of various intensities are raging in the Middle East. But a bigger war, involving more states--Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, the Palestinian Authority and perhaps the United States and others--is growing more likely every day, beckoned by the sense that America and Israel are in retreat and that radical Islam is ascending.
Consider the pell-mell events of recent weeks. Iran imprisons four Americans on absurd charges only weeks after seizing 15 British sailors on the high seas. Iran's Revolutionary Guard is caught delivering weapons to the Taliban and explosives to Iraqi terrorists. A car bomb in Lebanon is used to assassinate parliament member Walid Eido, killing nine others and wounding 11 more.
At the same time, Fatah al-Islam, a shady group linked to Syria, launches an attack on the Lebanese army from within a Palestinian refugee area, beheading several soldiers. Tehran trumpets further progress on nuclear enrichment as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeats his call for annihilating Israel, crowing that "the countdown to the destruction of this regime has begun." Hamas seizes control militarily in Gaza. Katyusha rockets are launched from Lebanon into northern Israel for the first time since the end of last summer's Israel-Hezbollah war.
Two important inferences can be distilled from this list. One is that the Tehran regime takes its slogan, "death to America," quite seriously, even if we do not. It is arming the Taliban, with which it was at sword's point when the Taliban were in power. It seems to be supplying explosives not only to Shiite, but also Sunni terrorists in Iraq. It reportedly is sheltering high-level al Qaeda figures despite the Sunni-Shiite divide. All of these surprising actions are for the sake of bleeding the U.S. However hateful this behavior may be to us, it has a certain strategic logic: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
What is even more worrisome about the events enumerated above is that most of them are devoid of any such strategic logic. For example, the Hamas "putsch" in Gaza--as Marwan Barghouti, the hero of the Palestinian intifada, labeled it from his prison cell--was an enormous blunder.
Hamas already mostly controlled Gaza. It is hard to imagine what gains it can reap from its "victory." But it is easy to see the losses. Fatah, and the government of its leader Mahmoud Abbas, will be able to restore their strength in the West Bank with the eager assistance of virtually the whole outside world, while Gaza will be shut off and denied outside aid far more strictly than during the past year. Israel will retaliate against shelling with a freer hand. Egypt will tighten its border. And Hamas has in one swoop negated its own supreme achievement, namely winning a majority in Palestine's 2006 parliamentary elections. Until now, Hamas had a powerful argument: how can the West demand democracy and then boycott the winners? But now it is Hamas itself that has destroyed Palestinian democracy by staging an armed coup. Its democratic credentials have gone up in the smoke of its own arson.
Syria's actions in Lebanon scarcely make more sense. The murder of parliamentarian Eido will solidify and energize the majority that opposes Syria. Some suppose that, having now bumped off two Lebanese MPs (Pierre Gemayel was the other one), Syria plans to shave away the anti-Syrian majority in Lebanon's parliament by committing another five murders. But if so, this is a crazy gambit. Such a campaign would invite international intervention. It might well fracture the pro-Syrian forces: More Shiites will abandon Hezbollah and more Maronites will turn against Hezbollah's cat's-paw, Michel Aoun. And the murders might be for naught anyway: By-elections are already being planned that are likely to replace the martyred legislators with others of the same mind. As for the attack on the Lebanese army, Fatah al-Islam is on the brink of being crushed, leaving behind only more hatred of Syria and a better-armed, more confident Lebanese army.
As for Iran's actions, while arming the Taliban and Iraqi terrorists may make sense, what is the point of seizing British sailors or locking up the four Iranian-Americans, including the beloved 67-year-old scholar, Haleh Esfandieri, none of whom are involved even in political activity, much less in the exercise of hard power?
The apparent meaning of all of this pointless provocation and bullying is that the axis of radicals--Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah--is feeling its oats. In part its aim is to intimidate the rest of us, in part it is merely enjoying flexing its muscles. It believes that its side has defeated America in Iraq, and Israel in Gaza and Lebanon. Mr. Ahmadinejad recently claimed that the West has already begun to "surrender," and he gloated that " final victory . . . is near." It is this bravado that bodes war.
A large portion of modern wars erupted because aggressive tyrannies believed that their democratic opponents were soft and weak. Often democracies have fed such beliefs by their own flaccid behavior. Hitler's contempt for America, stoked by the policy of appeasement, is a familiar story. But there are many others. North Korea invaded South Korea after Secretary of State Dean Acheson declared that Korea lay beyond our "defense perimeter." Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait after our ambassador assured him that America does not intervene in quarrels among Arabs. Imperial Germany launched World War I, encouraged by Great Britain's open reluctance to get involved. Nasser brought on the 1967 Six Day War, thinking that he could extort some concessions from Israel by rattling his sword.
Democracies, it is now well established, do not go to war with each other. But they often get into wars with non-democracies. Overwhelmingly the non-democracy starts the war; nonetheless, in the vast majority of cases, it is the democratic side that wins. In other words, dictators consistently underestimate the strength of democracies, and democracies provoke war through their love of peace, which the dictators mistake for weakness.
Today, this same dynamic is creating a moment of great danger. The radicals are becoming reckless, asserting themselves for little reason beyond the conviction that they can. They are very likely to overreach. It is not hard to imagine scenarios in which a single match--say a terrible terror attack from Gaza--could ignite a chain reaction. Israel could handle Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria, albeit with painful losses all around, but if Iran intervened rather than see its regional assets eliminated, could the U.S. stay out?
With the Bush administration's policies having failed to pacify Iraq, it is natural that the public has lost patience and that the opposition party is hurling brickbats. But the demands of congressional Democrats that we throw in the towel in Iraq, their attempts to constrain the president's freedom to destroy Iran's nuclear weapons program, the proposal of the Baker-Hamilton commission that we appeal to Iran to help extricate us from Iraq--all of these may be read by the radicals as signs of our imminent collapse. In the name of peace, they are hastening the advent of the next war.
By Joshua Muravchik
Monday, June 25, 2007 12:01 a.m.
Several conflicts of various intensities are raging in the Middle East. But a bigger war, involving more states--Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, the Palestinian Authority and perhaps the United States and others--is growing more likely every day, beckoned by the sense that America and Israel are in retreat and that radical Islam is ascending.
Consider the pell-mell events of recent weeks. Iran imprisons four Americans on absurd charges only weeks after seizing 15 British sailors on the high seas. Iran's Revolutionary Guard is caught delivering weapons to the Taliban and explosives to Iraqi terrorists. A car bomb in Lebanon is used to assassinate parliament member Walid Eido, killing nine others and wounding 11 more.
At the same time, Fatah al-Islam, a shady group linked to Syria, launches an attack on the Lebanese army from within a Palestinian refugee area, beheading several soldiers. Tehran trumpets further progress on nuclear enrichment as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad repeats his call for annihilating Israel, crowing that "the countdown to the destruction of this regime has begun." Hamas seizes control militarily in Gaza. Katyusha rockets are launched from Lebanon into northern Israel for the first time since the end of last summer's Israel-Hezbollah war.
Two important inferences can be distilled from this list. One is that the Tehran regime takes its slogan, "death to America," quite seriously, even if we do not. It is arming the Taliban, with which it was at sword's point when the Taliban were in power. It seems to be supplying explosives not only to Shiite, but also Sunni terrorists in Iraq. It reportedly is sheltering high-level al Qaeda figures despite the Sunni-Shiite divide. All of these surprising actions are for the sake of bleeding the U.S. However hateful this behavior may be to us, it has a certain strategic logic: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
What is even more worrisome about the events enumerated above is that most of them are devoid of any such strategic logic. For example, the Hamas "putsch" in Gaza--as Marwan Barghouti, the hero of the Palestinian intifada, labeled it from his prison cell--was an enormous blunder.
Hamas already mostly controlled Gaza. It is hard to imagine what gains it can reap from its "victory." But it is easy to see the losses. Fatah, and the government of its leader Mahmoud Abbas, will be able to restore their strength in the West Bank with the eager assistance of virtually the whole outside world, while Gaza will be shut off and denied outside aid far more strictly than during the past year. Israel will retaliate against shelling with a freer hand. Egypt will tighten its border. And Hamas has in one swoop negated its own supreme achievement, namely winning a majority in Palestine's 2006 parliamentary elections. Until now, Hamas had a powerful argument: how can the West demand democracy and then boycott the winners? But now it is Hamas itself that has destroyed Palestinian democracy by staging an armed coup. Its democratic credentials have gone up in the smoke of its own arson.
Syria's actions in Lebanon scarcely make more sense. The murder of parliamentarian Eido will solidify and energize the majority that opposes Syria. Some suppose that, having now bumped off two Lebanese MPs (Pierre Gemayel was the other one), Syria plans to shave away the anti-Syrian majority in Lebanon's parliament by committing another five murders. But if so, this is a crazy gambit. Such a campaign would invite international intervention. It might well fracture the pro-Syrian forces: More Shiites will abandon Hezbollah and more Maronites will turn against Hezbollah's cat's-paw, Michel Aoun. And the murders might be for naught anyway: By-elections are already being planned that are likely to replace the martyred legislators with others of the same mind. As for the attack on the Lebanese army, Fatah al-Islam is on the brink of being crushed, leaving behind only more hatred of Syria and a better-armed, more confident Lebanese army.
As for Iran's actions, while arming the Taliban and Iraqi terrorists may make sense, what is the point of seizing British sailors or locking up the four Iranian-Americans, including the beloved 67-year-old scholar, Haleh Esfandieri, none of whom are involved even in political activity, much less in the exercise of hard power?
The apparent meaning of all of this pointless provocation and bullying is that the axis of radicals--Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah--is feeling its oats. In part its aim is to intimidate the rest of us, in part it is merely enjoying flexing its muscles. It believes that its side has defeated America in Iraq, and Israel in Gaza and Lebanon. Mr. Ahmadinejad recently claimed that the West has already begun to "surrender," and he gloated that " final victory . . . is near." It is this bravado that bodes war.
A large portion of modern wars erupted because aggressive tyrannies believed that their democratic opponents were soft and weak. Often democracies have fed such beliefs by their own flaccid behavior. Hitler's contempt for America, stoked by the policy of appeasement, is a familiar story. But there are many others. North Korea invaded South Korea after Secretary of State Dean Acheson declared that Korea lay beyond our "defense perimeter." Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait after our ambassador assured him that America does not intervene in quarrels among Arabs. Imperial Germany launched World War I, encouraged by Great Britain's open reluctance to get involved. Nasser brought on the 1967 Six Day War, thinking that he could extort some concessions from Israel by rattling his sword.
Democracies, it is now well established, do not go to war with each other. But they often get into wars with non-democracies. Overwhelmingly the non-democracy starts the war; nonetheless, in the vast majority of cases, it is the democratic side that wins. In other words, dictators consistently underestimate the strength of democracies, and democracies provoke war through their love of peace, which the dictators mistake for weakness.
Today, this same dynamic is creating a moment of great danger. The radicals are becoming reckless, asserting themselves for little reason beyond the conviction that they can. They are very likely to overreach. It is not hard to imagine scenarios in which a single match--say a terrible terror attack from Gaza--could ignite a chain reaction. Israel could handle Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria, albeit with painful losses all around, but if Iran intervened rather than see its regional assets eliminated, could the U.S. stay out?
With the Bush administration's policies having failed to pacify Iraq, it is natural that the public has lost patience and that the opposition party is hurling brickbats. But the demands of congressional Democrats that we throw in the towel in Iraq, their attempts to constrain the president's freedom to destroy Iran's nuclear weapons program, the proposal of the Baker-Hamilton commission that we appeal to Iran to help extricate us from Iraq--all of these may be read by the radicals as signs of our imminent collapse. In the name of peace, they are hastening the advent of the next war.
The Truth About Guantanamo
Proposals to treat detainees as criminal defendants make a mockery of international humanitarian law.
By James Taranto
Tuesday, June 26, 2007 12:01 a.m.
Was it wishful thinking? On Thursday the Associated Press reported that, according to sources it did not name, "the Bush administration is nearing a decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detainee facility and move the terror suspects there to military prisons elsewhere." The White House quickly denied the rumor, and, for good measure, on Friday the Pentagon announced that Guantanamo had admitted its first new detainee in months: Haroon al-Afghani, a commander from the al Qaeda-affiliated terror group Hezb-i-Islami.
The AP's impatience to write the final chapter of the Guantanamo story is of a piece with the way news organizations generally have told the story. Although the Supreme Court has granted some rights to detainees, it has been remarkably restrained in doing so. But journalists have falsely portrayed Guantanamo as an affront to the Constitution and international law.
Perhaps the most striking example was the New York Times's coverage of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which the court decided a year ago this week. "The decision was such a sweeping and categorical defeat for the administration that it left human rights lawyers who have pressed this and other cases on behalf of Guantanamo detainees almost speechless with surprise and delight, using words like 'fantastic,' 'amazing' and 'remarkable,' " correspondent Linda Greenhouse exulted. She opined that there was "no doubt" the ruling represented "a historic event, a defining moment," and likened it to U.S. v. Nixon, the 1974 case in which the court unanimously ordered the president to turn over the Watergate tapes.
Nixon resigned 15 days after that decision. A year after Hamdan, it is safe to say that its impact has been rather less dramatic. While the court, by a vote of 5-3, did hand Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's personal driver and bodyguard, a victory on key points, Ms. Greenhouse's purple prose belied the narrow grounds on which it did so. Less than four months after Hamdan, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, which effectively undid the ruling. Congress had this power because the Supreme Court has not extended a single constitutional right to alien enemy combatants.
Hamdan dealt with two legal questions: whether detainees have the right to challenge their captivity by petitioning a court for a writ of habeas corpus, and whether the military commissions established to try detainees for war crimes passed muster under U.S. and international law.
The court had ruled in Rasul v. Bush (2004) that detainees had the right to file habeas petitions. But it rested that conclusion on statutory, not constitutional, grounds--that is, it found that Congress had conferred this right on the detainees. Congress therefore had the authority to take it away, and it did so by passing the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which stripped federal courts of jurisdiction to hear Guantanamo detainees' habeas petitions.
But in Hamdan, the high court held that the 2005 act did not apply retroactively, so that habeas proceedings already under way could continue. The Military Commissions Act removed this ambiguity and ordered a stop to all habeas petitions. An appellate court upheld this provision in February 2007, and in April the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to that ruling. The Justice Department has petitioned for the dismissal of still-pending habeas claims.
In overturning the administratively created war-crimes commissions, the Supreme Court found that detainees are entitled to some protections under the Geneva Conventions. It did not afford them the privileges enjoyed by legitimate prisoners of war--those who wear uniforms, carry weapons openly and otherwise comply with the rules of war. Instead, it ruled that they have more-limited rights under Geneva's Common Article 3, which applies to conflicts "not of an international character." This originally meant civil wars, but the court imaginatively reasoned that since al Qaeda is not a nation, its war against America is not "international."
Yet the justices granted the detainees only one specific right under Common Article 3: the right to have any criminal charges heard by a "regularly constituted court"--one created by an act of Congress. The high court has not adjudicated the legality of the legislatively created commissions, but it seems unlikely to rule against them. Four justices in the Hamdan majority joined Stephen Breyer's concurrence, which expressly invited Congress to authorize military commissions.
To be sure, legal obstacles remain. Earlier this month two military judges dismissed charges against Hamdan and another detainee, on the pedantic ground that administrative tribunals had designated them enemy combatants, not unlawful enemy combatants--notwithstanding that they clearly meet the Military Commissions Act's definition of unlawful combatants.
Some politicians have also undertaken efforts on behalf of enemy fighters. Senate Democrats, joined by Republican Arlen Specter, have introduced legislation that would restore habeas rights to Guantanamo detainees, although this is unlikely to become law as long as George W. Bush is president.
Colin Powell would go even further. "I would close Guantanamo, not tomorrow, but this afternoon," the former secretary of state told NBC's Tim Russert earlier this month. "I'd get rid of the military commission system and use established procedures in federal law or in the manual for courts-martial."
Mr. Powell claimed that "I would not let any of [the detainees] go," but his proposal would inevitably have that effect. Once inside the criminal justice system, detainees would become defendants with full constitutional rights, including the right to be charged or released, the right to exclude tainted evidence, and the right to be freed unless found guilty of a specific crime beyond a reasonable doubt.
Legitimate prisoners of war enjoy no such rights. The primary purpose of holding enemy combatants during wartime is not punitive but preventive--to keep them off the battlefield. No one disputes that a country at war can hold POWs without charge for the duration of hostilities. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority in Hamdan, reaffirmed the government's authority to do the same with the unlawful combatants at Guantanamo.
By granting constitutional protections to detainees, Mr. Powell's proposal would endanger the lives of American civilians. It would also afford preferential treatment to enemy fighters who defy the rules of war. This would make a mockery of international humanitarian law.
In the long run, it could also imperil the civil liberties of Americans. Leniency toward detainees is on the table today only because al Qaeda has so far failed to strike America since 9/11. If it succeeded again, public pressure for harsher measures would be hard for politicians to resist. And if enemy combatants had been transferred to the criminal justice system, those measures would be much more likely to diminish the rights of citizens who have nothing to do with terrorism.
By keeping terrorists out of America, Guantanamo protects Americans' physical safety. By keeping them out of our justice system, it also protects our freedom.
By James Taranto
Tuesday, June 26, 2007 12:01 a.m.
Was it wishful thinking? On Thursday the Associated Press reported that, according to sources it did not name, "the Bush administration is nearing a decision to close the Guantanamo Bay detainee facility and move the terror suspects there to military prisons elsewhere." The White House quickly denied the rumor, and, for good measure, on Friday the Pentagon announced that Guantanamo had admitted its first new detainee in months: Haroon al-Afghani, a commander from the al Qaeda-affiliated terror group Hezb-i-Islami.
The AP's impatience to write the final chapter of the Guantanamo story is of a piece with the way news organizations generally have told the story. Although the Supreme Court has granted some rights to detainees, it has been remarkably restrained in doing so. But journalists have falsely portrayed Guantanamo as an affront to the Constitution and international law.
Perhaps the most striking example was the New York Times's coverage of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, which the court decided a year ago this week. "The decision was such a sweeping and categorical defeat for the administration that it left human rights lawyers who have pressed this and other cases on behalf of Guantanamo detainees almost speechless with surprise and delight, using words like 'fantastic,' 'amazing' and 'remarkable,' " correspondent Linda Greenhouse exulted. She opined that there was "no doubt" the ruling represented "a historic event, a defining moment," and likened it to U.S. v. Nixon, the 1974 case in which the court unanimously ordered the president to turn over the Watergate tapes.
Nixon resigned 15 days after that decision. A year after Hamdan, it is safe to say that its impact has been rather less dramatic. While the court, by a vote of 5-3, did hand Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's personal driver and bodyguard, a victory on key points, Ms. Greenhouse's purple prose belied the narrow grounds on which it did so. Less than four months after Hamdan, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, which effectively undid the ruling. Congress had this power because the Supreme Court has not extended a single constitutional right to alien enemy combatants.
Hamdan dealt with two legal questions: whether detainees have the right to challenge their captivity by petitioning a court for a writ of habeas corpus, and whether the military commissions established to try detainees for war crimes passed muster under U.S. and international law.
The court had ruled in Rasul v. Bush (2004) that detainees had the right to file habeas petitions. But it rested that conclusion on statutory, not constitutional, grounds--that is, it found that Congress had conferred this right on the detainees. Congress therefore had the authority to take it away, and it did so by passing the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, which stripped federal courts of jurisdiction to hear Guantanamo detainees' habeas petitions.
But in Hamdan, the high court held that the 2005 act did not apply retroactively, so that habeas proceedings already under way could continue. The Military Commissions Act removed this ambiguity and ordered a stop to all habeas petitions. An appellate court upheld this provision in February 2007, and in April the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to that ruling. The Justice Department has petitioned for the dismissal of still-pending habeas claims.
In overturning the administratively created war-crimes commissions, the Supreme Court found that detainees are entitled to some protections under the Geneva Conventions. It did not afford them the privileges enjoyed by legitimate prisoners of war--those who wear uniforms, carry weapons openly and otherwise comply with the rules of war. Instead, it ruled that they have more-limited rights under Geneva's Common Article 3, which applies to conflicts "not of an international character." This originally meant civil wars, but the court imaginatively reasoned that since al Qaeda is not a nation, its war against America is not "international."
Yet the justices granted the detainees only one specific right under Common Article 3: the right to have any criminal charges heard by a "regularly constituted court"--one created by an act of Congress. The high court has not adjudicated the legality of the legislatively created commissions, but it seems unlikely to rule against them. Four justices in the Hamdan majority joined Stephen Breyer's concurrence, which expressly invited Congress to authorize military commissions.
To be sure, legal obstacles remain. Earlier this month two military judges dismissed charges against Hamdan and another detainee, on the pedantic ground that administrative tribunals had designated them enemy combatants, not unlawful enemy combatants--notwithstanding that they clearly meet the Military Commissions Act's definition of unlawful combatants.
Some politicians have also undertaken efforts on behalf of enemy fighters. Senate Democrats, joined by Republican Arlen Specter, have introduced legislation that would restore habeas rights to Guantanamo detainees, although this is unlikely to become law as long as George W. Bush is president.
Colin Powell would go even further. "I would close Guantanamo, not tomorrow, but this afternoon," the former secretary of state told NBC's Tim Russert earlier this month. "I'd get rid of the military commission system and use established procedures in federal law or in the manual for courts-martial."
Mr. Powell claimed that "I would not let any of [the detainees] go," but his proposal would inevitably have that effect. Once inside the criminal justice system, detainees would become defendants with full constitutional rights, including the right to be charged or released, the right to exclude tainted evidence, and the right to be freed unless found guilty of a specific crime beyond a reasonable doubt.
Legitimate prisoners of war enjoy no such rights. The primary purpose of holding enemy combatants during wartime is not punitive but preventive--to keep them off the battlefield. No one disputes that a country at war can hold POWs without charge for the duration of hostilities. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority in Hamdan, reaffirmed the government's authority to do the same with the unlawful combatants at Guantanamo.
By granting constitutional protections to detainees, Mr. Powell's proposal would endanger the lives of American civilians. It would also afford preferential treatment to enemy fighters who defy the rules of war. This would make a mockery of international humanitarian law.
In the long run, it could also imperil the civil liberties of Americans. Leniency toward detainees is on the table today only because al Qaeda has so far failed to strike America since 9/11. If it succeeded again, public pressure for harsher measures would be hard for politicians to resist. And if enemy combatants had been transferred to the criminal justice system, those measures would be much more likely to diminish the rights of citizens who have nothing to do with terrorism.
By keeping terrorists out of America, Guantanamo protects Americans' physical safety. By keeping them out of our justice system, it also protects our freedom.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Michael Moore's latest scam
By Star Parker
Monday, June 25, 2007
What's the difference between art and propaganda? The artist wants to communicate and share and the propagandist wants to manipulate.
Michael Moore is a talented filmmaker, a great marketer, and a superb propagandist. Those skills have now been invested in his latest film venture about health care, "Sicko."
Part of the shtick, of course, is the portrayal that he's a man on a mission. A social crusader -- a kind of Ralph Nader whose medium is film.
"I mean, it is really disgusting," he says, "when a guy in a ball cap with a high school education is the one asking the tough questions....Criticize me? No. Somebody, really should show up and say, 'Thanks.'"
But a lot of people are showing up and saying "thanks." It's why Moore, from what appears to have been pretty humble working class beginnings in Flint, Mich., is now a multi-millionaire and far from being a simple guy in a ball cap. Folks are saying thanks by plunking down fistfuls of dollars to see his films and buy and rent his videos.
Moore's last film, "Fahrenheit 9/11," a broadside attack on the Bush Administration and the war on terror, grossed $220 million worldwide and cost $6 million to produce.
Is he a social commentator? A man who lives to reform?
No, this is an entrepreneur from the far political left with a business model that is serving him very well. The usual left wing Hollywood con artist, who talks socialism and gets rich off capitalism.
Moore's films are to social commentary what pornography is to human relations.
Find vulnerabilities and hot buttons, stimulate, provoke, exploit and sell tickets.
I've had a chance to see "Sicko" because I was on a TV panel that hosted Moore as part of his promotion campaign.
The film, which cost $9 million to produce, and likely will generate nine figure revenues, is out of the usual mold.
It pitches socialized medicine by cherry picking stories that allegedly testify to the success of the government-run systems in Great Britain, France, Canada, and even Cuba, and then finds horror stories to show how bad things are in the U.S.
I shot an e-mail to a friend, an American, now a long time resident of Great Britain, and asked about their National Health Service. Here's the response:
"If you end up with an exotic disease that requires a lot of care, you're screwed. For example, the waiting list for any kind of major surgery is long and for things like knee replacements you can wait for three years. Alzheimer's drugs aren't available on the National Health Service because they're too expensive. More and more people are paying for private health insurance cover, and more and more companies are making it part of the perks package. So, Britain will end up with a two-tier system before too long where the "rich" get good private cover and the poor or uninsured have no alternative to the NHS."
Moore and his rich left wing Hollywood buddies won't have to worry about the inevitable shortages and distortions of socialized medicine. They'll simply be living in their own private care universe.
Cuba? Call any Cuban expatriate here, and I've talked to a few, and they'll tell you that the shoddy local care is never what a foreign visitor would see. What we do know is that Cuba has the highest abortion rates, highest suicide rates, and lowest fertility rates in our hemisphere. And we also know that any Cuban that tries to exercise free speech, like Michael Moore luxuriates in here, would soon become a non-person.
We do need health care reform in the United States. But problems get solved through analysis and integrity and not with sensationalism and exploitation.
We already have massive government involvement in our health care markets and there is good reason to believe that this is at least part of the problem. A third party payer system subsidized by the tax code and a patch work of state regulated programs and, hence, no national market.
Government run Medicare and Medicaid are in fiscal crisis and rote with distortions, waste, fraud, and abuse
Michael Moore thinks health care should be free. Why doesn't he distribute this important work explaining why for free? After all, he's said "...I made this film because I want the world to change."
When word got out the other day that a pirated edition made its way onto the Internet, his friend and distributor, movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, went into high alert taking online countermeasures to prevent distribution.
Moore himself, ever cool, said, "The more people who see it the better, so I am happy this is happening."
So give it away for free, Michael. You'll be ecstatic.
Monday, June 25, 2007
What's the difference between art and propaganda? The artist wants to communicate and share and the propagandist wants to manipulate.
Michael Moore is a talented filmmaker, a great marketer, and a superb propagandist. Those skills have now been invested in his latest film venture about health care, "Sicko."
Part of the shtick, of course, is the portrayal that he's a man on a mission. A social crusader -- a kind of Ralph Nader whose medium is film.
"I mean, it is really disgusting," he says, "when a guy in a ball cap with a high school education is the one asking the tough questions....Criticize me? No. Somebody, really should show up and say, 'Thanks.'"
But a lot of people are showing up and saying "thanks." It's why Moore, from what appears to have been pretty humble working class beginnings in Flint, Mich., is now a multi-millionaire and far from being a simple guy in a ball cap. Folks are saying thanks by plunking down fistfuls of dollars to see his films and buy and rent his videos.
Moore's last film, "Fahrenheit 9/11," a broadside attack on the Bush Administration and the war on terror, grossed $220 million worldwide and cost $6 million to produce.
Is he a social commentator? A man who lives to reform?
No, this is an entrepreneur from the far political left with a business model that is serving him very well. The usual left wing Hollywood con artist, who talks socialism and gets rich off capitalism.
Moore's films are to social commentary what pornography is to human relations.
Find vulnerabilities and hot buttons, stimulate, provoke, exploit and sell tickets.
I've had a chance to see "Sicko" because I was on a TV panel that hosted Moore as part of his promotion campaign.
The film, which cost $9 million to produce, and likely will generate nine figure revenues, is out of the usual mold.
It pitches socialized medicine by cherry picking stories that allegedly testify to the success of the government-run systems in Great Britain, France, Canada, and even Cuba, and then finds horror stories to show how bad things are in the U.S.
I shot an e-mail to a friend, an American, now a long time resident of Great Britain, and asked about their National Health Service. Here's the response:
"If you end up with an exotic disease that requires a lot of care, you're screwed. For example, the waiting list for any kind of major surgery is long and for things like knee replacements you can wait for three years. Alzheimer's drugs aren't available on the National Health Service because they're too expensive. More and more people are paying for private health insurance cover, and more and more companies are making it part of the perks package. So, Britain will end up with a two-tier system before too long where the "rich" get good private cover and the poor or uninsured have no alternative to the NHS."
Moore and his rich left wing Hollywood buddies won't have to worry about the inevitable shortages and distortions of socialized medicine. They'll simply be living in their own private care universe.
Cuba? Call any Cuban expatriate here, and I've talked to a few, and they'll tell you that the shoddy local care is never what a foreign visitor would see. What we do know is that Cuba has the highest abortion rates, highest suicide rates, and lowest fertility rates in our hemisphere. And we also know that any Cuban that tries to exercise free speech, like Michael Moore luxuriates in here, would soon become a non-person.
We do need health care reform in the United States. But problems get solved through analysis and integrity and not with sensationalism and exploitation.
We already have massive government involvement in our health care markets and there is good reason to believe that this is at least part of the problem. A third party payer system subsidized by the tax code and a patch work of state regulated programs and, hence, no national market.
Government run Medicare and Medicaid are in fiscal crisis and rote with distortions, waste, fraud, and abuse
Michael Moore thinks health care should be free. Why doesn't he distribute this important work explaining why for free? After all, he's said "...I made this film because I want the world to change."
When word got out the other day that a pirated edition made its way onto the Internet, his friend and distributor, movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, went into high alert taking online countermeasures to prevent distribution.
Moore himself, ever cool, said, "The more people who see it the better, so I am happy this is happening."
So give it away for free, Michael. You'll be ecstatic.
Could America Become More Like China?
By David Strom
Monday, June 25, 2007
I have always been a big believer that free markets tend to lead to freer political societies.
The logic—and empirical evidence—of economics is pretty clear: free market capitalism works when free people make free decisions in a free society. Such societies are not only the wealthiest and most successful in the world today, but in my view the most morally decent that have ever existed.
Part of the logic I have long accepted, and still doubt hardly at all, is that economic and political freedom are essentially indivisible. In fact, Adam Smith dubbed his Economics “The Theory of Natural Liberty,” a name that I consider entirely appropriate today.
As always, there are those looking for a “third way” in between the top-down social and political orders that always fail and the freewheeling “cowboy capitalism” of America. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were famously “third way” politicians, but any fair examination of either of their Administrations shows that if anything their policies were basically benign or even expansive when it came to liberty. (Yes, I know how much better things should have and could have been).
In other words, the Blair-Clinton “third way” was Reaganomics with a bit of retooling.
Today’s “third way” theorists look more to the economies of East Asia, and especially China, and wonder openly about the development of essentially free economies operating comfortably with highly controlled, elite-driven political systems.
To many in today’s political elite, this is not a theoretical question at all. As the economic expansion of the last 30 years has economically and politically empowered the American middle-class to an extent never imagined before in world history, the political and economic establishment that reigned from the 1930’s through the 1980’s and early 90’s saw its power diminishing toward extinction.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but they don’t want to let that power go. Not without a fight. I think they see the “third way” possibly represented by China and a few of the more politically repressive Asian tigers as a very enticing possibility indeed.
You see elements of that battle raging everywhere you turn today in the United States. And unfortunately, with few exceptions in either political Party, very few politicians are on the true side of the “little guy” versus the “big and powerful.”
Because the only thing good for the “little guy” in the battle against the “big and powerful,” whoever that group is at any one time, is freedom. Freedom to work. Freedom to trade. Freedom to move. And Freedom to speak his or her mind.
And freedom has been on the march—and the advocates of freedom and free markets have been winning battles around the world—largely because of one thing, and one thing only: the huge expansion of communications technology that has broken the “establishment” monopoly on information everywhere it has touched. The explosion of talk radio after the demise of the “fairness doctrine” in the late 1980’s helped break the essential monopoly of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the 3 big Networks on the reporting and discussion of news in this country. The internet is or will soon be the single-most important source of news in the world.
Which gets us back to the “third-way” capitalism I began with. Those who have lived quite comfortably in a world in which they have controlled the news, controlled the political agenda, controlled tone and content of political discussion, and in most cases have controlled the regulatory bodies that set many of the rules by which our economic trade both foreign and domestic take place, are getting mighty tired of watching that power slip away from them.
Mighty tired indeed.
So a movement has sprung up, led by a group called the “Center for American Progress,” which has begun to lobby vigorously for solving the problem of “imbalance” in the availability of liberal versus conservative points of view in commercial talk radio. It turns out, according to a study they just completed, that there is a dangerous “Structural Imbalance” in talk radio that must be addressed. Believe it or not, 91% of talk radio is conservative while only 9% can be considered liberal.
SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!
Of course, first thing to note about this study is how biased it is from the start: it excludes public and listener supported radio stations, which almost by definition have a much more liberal slant than your average commercial AM talker. Maybe your average limousine liberal isn’t just dying to hear Al Franken’s opinions every second of the day, when she has a perfectly good alternative in public radio that also happens to put out an excellent product?
Forget the facts, though, and let’s stick to the point: SOMETHING MUST BE DONE to restore fairness and balance to the mediasphere, and that something is already being talked about regularly on Capitol Hill: restore the fairness doctrine.
Which would essentially kill talk radio as we know it today. Radio stations would essentially be harassed and regulated out of that market, simply because the cost to produce and defend the product would exceed the economic benefit of providing it.
Trent Lott (who opposed eliminating it in the first place) has already been quoted in the New York Times as saying “’Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem.’ At some point, Mr. Lott said, Senate Republican leaders may try to rein in ‘younger guys who are huffing and puffing against the bill.’”
Senator Diane Feinstein admitted on Fox News Sunday that Democrats in the Senate were “looking” at reviving the Fairness Doctrine “because I think there ought to be an opportunity to present the other side. And unfortunately, talk radio is overwhelmingly one way.”
This is an audacious power grab. And not one just being made by a Left which has been losing its ideological war with the Right, but by many in the current political and media elite, whatever their nominal political affiliation.
These politicians are at a loss to stem the tide of history that has taken more and more power away from them and placed it into the hands of average citizens like you and me. That is what is so intriguing to so many of them about the “third way” that Asian capitalist societies appear to represent: a stable political and cultural elite with a seemingly prosperous and compliant working class. Nirvana!
Of course, there is no such thing. The creative destruction that is at the heart of free market economies will never allow such a social arrangement to last for long. China will be faced with decades of social and political upheaval; the Asian tigers are becoming freer, in fits and starts, and the march toward freedom will continue to prevail as long as we can preserve the one essential freedom that is increasingly at risk, with few defenders: the right to free speech and the free flow of information.
Unfortunately, this is a battle we are not currently winning. The internet is censored in much of the world, often with the complicity of our own major corporations. Campaign finance “reforms” have attacked the very foundation of our political system, and now talk of regulating speech on the internet and talk radio is inching toward action.
This is a battle we cannot lose. Each stupid regulation, idiotic social program, ridiculous subsidy, or overtaxed dollar is a frustration to be fought when we can, borne when we must. But the attack on speech is another fight altogether.
If we lose this one, it’s for all the marbles. America could wind up looking a lot more like China, at least politically, than the other way around.
Monday, June 25, 2007
I have always been a big believer that free markets tend to lead to freer political societies.
The logic—and empirical evidence—of economics is pretty clear: free market capitalism works when free people make free decisions in a free society. Such societies are not only the wealthiest and most successful in the world today, but in my view the most morally decent that have ever existed.
Part of the logic I have long accepted, and still doubt hardly at all, is that economic and political freedom are essentially indivisible. In fact, Adam Smith dubbed his Economics “The Theory of Natural Liberty,” a name that I consider entirely appropriate today.
As always, there are those looking for a “third way” in between the top-down social and political orders that always fail and the freewheeling “cowboy capitalism” of America. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were famously “third way” politicians, but any fair examination of either of their Administrations shows that if anything their policies were basically benign or even expansive when it came to liberty. (Yes, I know how much better things should have and could have been).
In other words, the Blair-Clinton “third way” was Reaganomics with a bit of retooling.
Today’s “third way” theorists look more to the economies of East Asia, and especially China, and wonder openly about the development of essentially free economies operating comfortably with highly controlled, elite-driven political systems.
To many in today’s political elite, this is not a theoretical question at all. As the economic expansion of the last 30 years has economically and politically empowered the American middle-class to an extent never imagined before in world history, the political and economic establishment that reigned from the 1930’s through the 1980’s and early 90’s saw its power diminishing toward extinction.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but they don’t want to let that power go. Not without a fight. I think they see the “third way” possibly represented by China and a few of the more politically repressive Asian tigers as a very enticing possibility indeed.
You see elements of that battle raging everywhere you turn today in the United States. And unfortunately, with few exceptions in either political Party, very few politicians are on the true side of the “little guy” versus the “big and powerful.”
Because the only thing good for the “little guy” in the battle against the “big and powerful,” whoever that group is at any one time, is freedom. Freedom to work. Freedom to trade. Freedom to move. And Freedom to speak his or her mind.
And freedom has been on the march—and the advocates of freedom and free markets have been winning battles around the world—largely because of one thing, and one thing only: the huge expansion of communications technology that has broken the “establishment” monopoly on information everywhere it has touched. The explosion of talk radio after the demise of the “fairness doctrine” in the late 1980’s helped break the essential monopoly of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the 3 big Networks on the reporting and discussion of news in this country. The internet is or will soon be the single-most important source of news in the world.
Which gets us back to the “third-way” capitalism I began with. Those who have lived quite comfortably in a world in which they have controlled the news, controlled the political agenda, controlled tone and content of political discussion, and in most cases have controlled the regulatory bodies that set many of the rules by which our economic trade both foreign and domestic take place, are getting mighty tired of watching that power slip away from them.
Mighty tired indeed.
So a movement has sprung up, led by a group called the “Center for American Progress,” which has begun to lobby vigorously for solving the problem of “imbalance” in the availability of liberal versus conservative points of view in commercial talk radio. It turns out, according to a study they just completed, that there is a dangerous “Structural Imbalance” in talk radio that must be addressed. Believe it or not, 91% of talk radio is conservative while only 9% can be considered liberal.
SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!
Of course, first thing to note about this study is how biased it is from the start: it excludes public and listener supported radio stations, which almost by definition have a much more liberal slant than your average commercial AM talker. Maybe your average limousine liberal isn’t just dying to hear Al Franken’s opinions every second of the day, when she has a perfectly good alternative in public radio that also happens to put out an excellent product?
Forget the facts, though, and let’s stick to the point: SOMETHING MUST BE DONE to restore fairness and balance to the mediasphere, and that something is already being talked about regularly on Capitol Hill: restore the fairness doctrine.
Which would essentially kill talk radio as we know it today. Radio stations would essentially be harassed and regulated out of that market, simply because the cost to produce and defend the product would exceed the economic benefit of providing it.
Trent Lott (who opposed eliminating it in the first place) has already been quoted in the New York Times as saying “’Talk radio is running America. We have to deal with that problem.’ At some point, Mr. Lott said, Senate Republican leaders may try to rein in ‘younger guys who are huffing and puffing against the bill.’”
Senator Diane Feinstein admitted on Fox News Sunday that Democrats in the Senate were “looking” at reviving the Fairness Doctrine “because I think there ought to be an opportunity to present the other side. And unfortunately, talk radio is overwhelmingly one way.”
This is an audacious power grab. And not one just being made by a Left which has been losing its ideological war with the Right, but by many in the current political and media elite, whatever their nominal political affiliation.
These politicians are at a loss to stem the tide of history that has taken more and more power away from them and placed it into the hands of average citizens like you and me. That is what is so intriguing to so many of them about the “third way” that Asian capitalist societies appear to represent: a stable political and cultural elite with a seemingly prosperous and compliant working class. Nirvana!
Of course, there is no such thing. The creative destruction that is at the heart of free market economies will never allow such a social arrangement to last for long. China will be faced with decades of social and political upheaval; the Asian tigers are becoming freer, in fits and starts, and the march toward freedom will continue to prevail as long as we can preserve the one essential freedom that is increasingly at risk, with few defenders: the right to free speech and the free flow of information.
Unfortunately, this is a battle we are not currently winning. The internet is censored in much of the world, often with the complicity of our own major corporations. Campaign finance “reforms” have attacked the very foundation of our political system, and now talk of regulating speech on the internet and talk radio is inching toward action.
This is a battle we cannot lose. Each stupid regulation, idiotic social program, ridiculous subsidy, or overtaxed dollar is a frustration to be fought when we can, borne when we must. But the attack on speech is another fight altogether.
If we lose this one, it’s for all the marbles. America could wind up looking a lot more like China, at least politically, than the other way around.
Cultural Heritages
By Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Among the interesting people encountered by my wife and me, during some recent vacation travel, were a small group of adolescent boys from a Navajo reservation. They were being led on a bicycle tour by a couple of white men, one of whom was apparently their teacher on the reservation.
The Navajo youngsters were bright and cheerful lads, so I was surprised when someone asked them in what state Pittsburgh was located and none of them knew. Then they were offered a clue that it was in the same state as Philadelphia but they didn't know where Philadelphia was either.
These Navajo boys seemed too bright not to have learned such things if they had been taught the basics. They also seemed too positive to be the kinds of kids who refused to learn.
The most likely explanation was that they were being taught other things, things considered "relevant" to their life and culture on the reservation.
These youngsters are not just members of the tribe on the reservation. They are also citizens of the United States of America, and have a right to be anywhere in this country, from Florida to Alaska.
Whether they want to stay on the reservation when they are grown or to take advantage of the many opportunities in the wider world beyond the reservation is a decision that should be theirs to make when they reach adulthood.
But those opportunities will be gone, for all practical purposes, if their education does not equip them with the knowledge that is needed to bring their natural abilities to the point where they are capable of doing all sorts of things in all sorts of places.
One of the men who was with these boys expressed great respect for the Navajo culture and there is no reason to doubt that he has good reasons for that conclusion.
But any culture -- whether in or out of the mainstream -- is not just a badge of identity or a museum piece to be admired by others.
A culture is a tool for serving the many practical purposes of life, from making a living to curing diseases. As a tool, it has to change with the ever changing tasks that confront every culture as time goes on.
Although we speak English today, we would have a hard time trying to understand things written in Old English from centuries ago. Languages, like every other aspect of culture, change over time.
Wind-driven sailing ships were a great advance over ships propelled by oars but the sailing ships were in turn superseded by steamships and today we have diesel-powered ships.
No culture can stand still.
Among the Navajo heroes of World War II were men who served in American armed forces in the Pacific and broadcast secret military messages in the Navajo language, which the Japanese were unable to translate.
This required the Navajo code-talkers to come up with new words for things like battleships and airplanes, which had never been part of traditional Navajo culture.
Some of these men were too old to be in the military, or too young, but they volunteered to serve anyway. This was an era when people from every background considered themselves Americans and wanted to help defend this country.
We can only hope that there are many more such people now, ready to serve both their country and their people, and that they will see to it that those promising young Navajo boys end up knowing all they need to know in order to be all that they can be.
Unfortunately, in this age of "multiculturalism," there are too many outsiders who want all sorts of cultures to be frozen where they are, preserved like museum exhibits.
Worse yet, too many multiculturalists want many groups to cling to their historic grievances, if not be defined by them.
But among the many ways that various groups around the world have advanced from poverty to prosperity, nursing historic grievances does not have a promising track record -- except for those who make a career out of keeping grievances alive.
The youngsters we saw deserve better than that.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Among the interesting people encountered by my wife and me, during some recent vacation travel, were a small group of adolescent boys from a Navajo reservation. They were being led on a bicycle tour by a couple of white men, one of whom was apparently their teacher on the reservation.
The Navajo youngsters were bright and cheerful lads, so I was surprised when someone asked them in what state Pittsburgh was located and none of them knew. Then they were offered a clue that it was in the same state as Philadelphia but they didn't know where Philadelphia was either.
These Navajo boys seemed too bright not to have learned such things if they had been taught the basics. They also seemed too positive to be the kinds of kids who refused to learn.
The most likely explanation was that they were being taught other things, things considered "relevant" to their life and culture on the reservation.
These youngsters are not just members of the tribe on the reservation. They are also citizens of the United States of America, and have a right to be anywhere in this country, from Florida to Alaska.
Whether they want to stay on the reservation when they are grown or to take advantage of the many opportunities in the wider world beyond the reservation is a decision that should be theirs to make when they reach adulthood.
But those opportunities will be gone, for all practical purposes, if their education does not equip them with the knowledge that is needed to bring their natural abilities to the point where they are capable of doing all sorts of things in all sorts of places.
One of the men who was with these boys expressed great respect for the Navajo culture and there is no reason to doubt that he has good reasons for that conclusion.
But any culture -- whether in or out of the mainstream -- is not just a badge of identity or a museum piece to be admired by others.
A culture is a tool for serving the many practical purposes of life, from making a living to curing diseases. As a tool, it has to change with the ever changing tasks that confront every culture as time goes on.
Although we speak English today, we would have a hard time trying to understand things written in Old English from centuries ago. Languages, like every other aspect of culture, change over time.
Wind-driven sailing ships were a great advance over ships propelled by oars but the sailing ships were in turn superseded by steamships and today we have diesel-powered ships.
No culture can stand still.
Among the Navajo heroes of World War II were men who served in American armed forces in the Pacific and broadcast secret military messages in the Navajo language, which the Japanese were unable to translate.
This required the Navajo code-talkers to come up with new words for things like battleships and airplanes, which had never been part of traditional Navajo culture.
Some of these men were too old to be in the military, or too young, but they volunteered to serve anyway. This was an era when people from every background considered themselves Americans and wanted to help defend this country.
We can only hope that there are many more such people now, ready to serve both their country and their people, and that they will see to it that those promising young Navajo boys end up knowing all they need to know in order to be all that they can be.
Unfortunately, in this age of "multiculturalism," there are too many outsiders who want all sorts of cultures to be frozen where they are, preserved like museum exhibits.
Worse yet, too many multiculturalists want many groups to cling to their historic grievances, if not be defined by them.
But among the many ways that various groups around the world have advanced from poverty to prosperity, nursing historic grievances does not have a promising track record -- except for those who make a career out of keeping grievances alive.
The youngsters we saw deserve better than that.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Racial Role Reversal
What the Scottsboro Boys and the Duke lacrosse players have in common.
By John Steele Gordon
Wednesday, June 20, 2007 12:01 a.m.
Imagine this: In a Southern town, a woman accuses several men of rape. Despite the woman's limited credibility and ever-shifting story, the community and its legal establishment immediately decide the men are guilty. Their protestations of innocence are dismissed out of hand, exculpatory evidence is ignored.
The Duke rape case, right? No, the Scottsboro case that began in 1931, in the darkest days of the Jim Crow South.
The two cases offer a remarkable insight into how very, very far this country has come in race relations, and alas, in some ways how little. For race is central to why both cases became notorious. In Scottsboro, Ala., of course, the accusers were white and the accused was black. In Durham, N.C., it was the other way around.
On March 25, 1931, a group of nine young black men got into a fight with a group of whites while riding a freight train near Paint Rock, Ala. All but one of the whites were forced to jump off the train. But when it reached Paint Rock, the blacks were arrested. Two white women, dressed in boys clothing, were found on the train as well, Victoria Price, 21, and Ruby Bates, 17. Unemployed mill workers, they both had worked as prostitutes in Huntsville. Apparently to avoid getting into trouble themselves, they told a tale of having been brutally gang raped by the nine blacks.
The blacks were taken to the jail in Scottsboro, the county seat. Because the circumstances of the women's story--black men attacking and raping white women--fit the prevailing racial paradigm of the local white population, guilt was assumed and the governor was forced to call out the National Guard to prevent a lynch mob from hanging the men on the spot. The nine were indicted on March 30 and, by the end of April, all had been tried, convicted and sentenced to death (except for the one who was 13 years old, who was sentenced to life in prison).
A year later, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the convictions of those on death row, except for one who was determined to be a juvenile. By this time, however, the "Scottsboro Boys" had become a national and even international story, with rallies taking place in many cities in the North. Thousands of letters poured into the Alabama courts and the governor's office demanding justice.
The International Labor Defense, the legal arm of the Communist Party USA, provided competent legal help, and the convictions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court because the defendants had not received adequate counsel. Samuel Leibowitz, a highly successful New York trial lawyer (he would later serve on the state's highest court) was hired to defend the accused in a second trial, held in Decatur, Ala. This turned out to be a tactical error, as Leibowitz was perceived by the local jury pool--all of them white, of course--as an outsider, a Jew and a communist (which he was not). Even though Ruby Bates repudiated her earlier testimony and said no rape had taken place, the accused were again convicted, this time the jury believing that Ruby Bates had been bribed to perjure herself.
Again the sentences were overturned, and in 1937--six years after the case began--four of the defendants had the charges dropped. One pleaded guilty to having assaulted the sheriff (and was sentenced to 20 years) and the other four were found guilty, once again, of rape. Eventually, as Jim Crow began to yield to the civil rights movement, they were paroled or pardoned, except for one who had escaped from prison and fled to Michigan. When he was caught in the 1950s, the governor of Michigan refused to allow his extradition to Alabama.
It is now clear to everyone that the nine Scottsboro boys were guilty only of being black.
When the accuser in the Duke case charged rape, the district attorney--in the midst of a tough primary election--saw an opportunity to curry favor with Durham's black community and exploit the town-gown tension found in every college town. He ran with it, inflaming public opinion against the accused at every opportunity.
To be sure, there was no lynch mob, which happily is almost inconceivable today. But many Duke University students and faculty, and many members of the media (Nancy Grace of Court TV comes to mind), simply plugged the alleged circumstances into their racial paradigm--wealthy white college jocks partying and behaving badly with regard to a poor black woman--and pronounced the Duke boys guilty. Wanted posters went up on campus with pictures of the accused; 88 members of the faculty sponsored an ad in the college paper effectively supporting the posters; and the university president suspended two of the accused upon their indictment (the third had already graduated), cancelled the rest of the season for the lacrosse team, and forced the resignation of the team coach.
Here is where the real difference between the Scottsboro boys and the Duke boys kicked in: not race but money. The Scottsboro boys were destitute and spent years in jail, while the Duke boys were all from families who could afford first-class legal talent. Their lawyers quickly began blowing hole after hole in the case and releasing the facts to the media until it was obvious that a miscarriage of justice had occurred. The three Duke boys were guilty only of being white and affluent.
The district attorney won his election. But when the case fell apart and his almost grotesque malfeasance was exposed, he first resigned his office and ultimately was disbarred from the practice of law. Duke University has just settled with the three students it treated so shamefully for an undisclosed, but given the university's legal exposure, undoubtedly substantial sum. Meanwhile, the 88 members of the faculty have yet to apologize for a rush to judgment that was racist at its heart.
The country has come a long, long way in regard to race relations since 1931. But we have not yet reached the promised land where race is irrelevant. Far too many people are still being judged according to the color of their skin, not the content of their character, let alone the evidence.
By John Steele Gordon
Wednesday, June 20, 2007 12:01 a.m.
Imagine this: In a Southern town, a woman accuses several men of rape. Despite the woman's limited credibility and ever-shifting story, the community and its legal establishment immediately decide the men are guilty. Their protestations of innocence are dismissed out of hand, exculpatory evidence is ignored.
The Duke rape case, right? No, the Scottsboro case that began in 1931, in the darkest days of the Jim Crow South.
The two cases offer a remarkable insight into how very, very far this country has come in race relations, and alas, in some ways how little. For race is central to why both cases became notorious. In Scottsboro, Ala., of course, the accusers were white and the accused was black. In Durham, N.C., it was the other way around.
On March 25, 1931, a group of nine young black men got into a fight with a group of whites while riding a freight train near Paint Rock, Ala. All but one of the whites were forced to jump off the train. But when it reached Paint Rock, the blacks were arrested. Two white women, dressed in boys clothing, were found on the train as well, Victoria Price, 21, and Ruby Bates, 17. Unemployed mill workers, they both had worked as prostitutes in Huntsville. Apparently to avoid getting into trouble themselves, they told a tale of having been brutally gang raped by the nine blacks.
The blacks were taken to the jail in Scottsboro, the county seat. Because the circumstances of the women's story--black men attacking and raping white women--fit the prevailing racial paradigm of the local white population, guilt was assumed and the governor was forced to call out the National Guard to prevent a lynch mob from hanging the men on the spot. The nine were indicted on March 30 and, by the end of April, all had been tried, convicted and sentenced to death (except for the one who was 13 years old, who was sentenced to life in prison).
A year later, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the convictions of those on death row, except for one who was determined to be a juvenile. By this time, however, the "Scottsboro Boys" had become a national and even international story, with rallies taking place in many cities in the North. Thousands of letters poured into the Alabama courts and the governor's office demanding justice.
The International Labor Defense, the legal arm of the Communist Party USA, provided competent legal help, and the convictions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court because the defendants had not received adequate counsel. Samuel Leibowitz, a highly successful New York trial lawyer (he would later serve on the state's highest court) was hired to defend the accused in a second trial, held in Decatur, Ala. This turned out to be a tactical error, as Leibowitz was perceived by the local jury pool--all of them white, of course--as an outsider, a Jew and a communist (which he was not). Even though Ruby Bates repudiated her earlier testimony and said no rape had taken place, the accused were again convicted, this time the jury believing that Ruby Bates had been bribed to perjure herself.
Again the sentences were overturned, and in 1937--six years after the case began--four of the defendants had the charges dropped. One pleaded guilty to having assaulted the sheriff (and was sentenced to 20 years) and the other four were found guilty, once again, of rape. Eventually, as Jim Crow began to yield to the civil rights movement, they were paroled or pardoned, except for one who had escaped from prison and fled to Michigan. When he was caught in the 1950s, the governor of Michigan refused to allow his extradition to Alabama.
It is now clear to everyone that the nine Scottsboro boys were guilty only of being black.
When the accuser in the Duke case charged rape, the district attorney--in the midst of a tough primary election--saw an opportunity to curry favor with Durham's black community and exploit the town-gown tension found in every college town. He ran with it, inflaming public opinion against the accused at every opportunity.
To be sure, there was no lynch mob, which happily is almost inconceivable today. But many Duke University students and faculty, and many members of the media (Nancy Grace of Court TV comes to mind), simply plugged the alleged circumstances into their racial paradigm--wealthy white college jocks partying and behaving badly with regard to a poor black woman--and pronounced the Duke boys guilty. Wanted posters went up on campus with pictures of the accused; 88 members of the faculty sponsored an ad in the college paper effectively supporting the posters; and the university president suspended two of the accused upon their indictment (the third had already graduated), cancelled the rest of the season for the lacrosse team, and forced the resignation of the team coach.
Here is where the real difference between the Scottsboro boys and the Duke boys kicked in: not race but money. The Scottsboro boys were destitute and spent years in jail, while the Duke boys were all from families who could afford first-class legal talent. Their lawyers quickly began blowing hole after hole in the case and releasing the facts to the media until it was obvious that a miscarriage of justice had occurred. The three Duke boys were guilty only of being white and affluent.
The district attorney won his election. But when the case fell apart and his almost grotesque malfeasance was exposed, he first resigned his office and ultimately was disbarred from the practice of law. Duke University has just settled with the three students it treated so shamefully for an undisclosed, but given the university's legal exposure, undoubtedly substantial sum. Meanwhile, the 88 members of the faculty have yet to apologize for a rush to judgment that was racist at its heart.
The country has come a long, long way in regard to race relations since 1931. But we have not yet reached the promised land where race is irrelevant. Far too many people are still being judged according to the color of their skin, not the content of their character, let alone the evidence.
Behead All Those Who Insult Islam
By Michelle Malkin
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Jihadi's Guide to Etiquette Rule 11: Never leave home without your matches, effigy-hanging sticks and death threat placards. You never know when they'll come in handy.
In Pakistan, dutiful followers of the jihadi guide have found a new pretext this week for an anti-Western bonfire party: the knighting of author Salman Rushdie in Britain. Muslim groups are burning Queen Elizabeth and Rushdie in effigy. The Union Jack is in flames. The Religion of Perpetual Outrage strikes again.
It's not just some obscure spokesman for a "tiny minority" objecting to Rushdie's knighthood and leading the renewed calls for Rushdie's death and Britain's submission. Pakistan's religious affairs minister, Mohammed ljaz ul-Haq, bellowed: "If someone blows himself up he will consider himself justified. How can we fight terrorism when those who commit blasphemy are rewarded by the West?" He says he was misunderstood, but the message is as loud and clear as the inscriptions on the infamous placards British Muslims waved around during last year's conflagration over the Danish cartoons:
"Behead all those who insult Islam. Slay those who insult Islam. Butcher those who mock Islam."
Pakistan's parliamentarian affairs minister Sher Afgan Khan Niazi piled on: "I demand the British government immediately withdraw the title as it is creating religious hatred." On Monday, Pakistan's Parliament passed a unanimous resolution "deploring the honor as an open insult to the feelings of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims." Mufti Muhammad Basheer-u-Din, Grand Mufti of Kashmir, didn't mince words: "Because of his blasphemy, Salman Rushdie remains an apostate and aggressor on Islam and punishment for such offences is death." Lord Ahmed, the first British Muslim member of the House of Lords, blamed Rushdie for violence past and violence to come:
"This man not only provoked violence around the world because of his writings, but there were many people who were killed around the world. . . . Forgiving and forgetting is one thing, but honouring the man who has blood on his hands, sort of, because of what he did, I think is going a bit too far."
Sort of?!
Yes, you see, it's always the fault of the accused insulter. Never the fault of the sword-wielders, fatwa-issuers, fire-setters and blood-lusters.
It's always the fault of the Western "extremists." Never the fault of the "moderate" followers of jihad.
The deaf and blind will dismiss this latest episode of manufactured Muslim outrage as a marginal outburst. But Rushdie, the target of death threats dating back to 1988 over his book "The Satanic Verses," has seen enough performances of Jihad Theater to take proper precautions. He has requested police protection after an Iranian group put a $150,000 bounty on his head. Forouz Raja'ee-Far, secretary general of the Headquarters for Honoring the Martyrs of Islam World Movement, offered the prize because, after all, "it is an obligation for all Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie even if he repents from the bottom of his heart and becomes the pious man of the time."
What does the Council on American-Islamic Relations have to say? Their website has a special "incitement watch" and "action alerts" section for its (dwindling number of) members -- but as of Tuesday afternoon, not a peep about the incitement of hatred and violence against Rushdie. They'll eventually pay lip service to The Religion of Peace, but do not forget Rule No. 5 in the jihadi's guide to etiquette: "You can lie if you do this for jihad."
Pakistani government officials are bleating about the need for "interfaith understanding" and sensitivity. In Washington for meetings with the Bush administration, Pakistan's foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri cooed: "When we talk of a globalized world, we have to be sensitive to each other's concerns."
As anyone with their eyes open through Rushdie's ordeal, the deadly Mohammed cartoons riots, the calls for beheading the Pope, Oriana Fallaci, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and defiant, ex-Muslim apostates around the world knows: "Sensitivity" in the jihadi world is a one-way, dead-end street.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Jihadi's Guide to Etiquette Rule 11: Never leave home without your matches, effigy-hanging sticks and death threat placards. You never know when they'll come in handy.
In Pakistan, dutiful followers of the jihadi guide have found a new pretext this week for an anti-Western bonfire party: the knighting of author Salman Rushdie in Britain. Muslim groups are burning Queen Elizabeth and Rushdie in effigy. The Union Jack is in flames. The Religion of Perpetual Outrage strikes again.
It's not just some obscure spokesman for a "tiny minority" objecting to Rushdie's knighthood and leading the renewed calls for Rushdie's death and Britain's submission. Pakistan's religious affairs minister, Mohammed ljaz ul-Haq, bellowed: "If someone blows himself up he will consider himself justified. How can we fight terrorism when those who commit blasphemy are rewarded by the West?" He says he was misunderstood, but the message is as loud and clear as the inscriptions on the infamous placards British Muslims waved around during last year's conflagration over the Danish cartoons:
"Behead all those who insult Islam. Slay those who insult Islam. Butcher those who mock Islam."
Pakistan's parliamentarian affairs minister Sher Afgan Khan Niazi piled on: "I demand the British government immediately withdraw the title as it is creating religious hatred." On Monday, Pakistan's Parliament passed a unanimous resolution "deploring the honor as an open insult to the feelings of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims." Mufti Muhammad Basheer-u-Din, Grand Mufti of Kashmir, didn't mince words: "Because of his blasphemy, Salman Rushdie remains an apostate and aggressor on Islam and punishment for such offences is death." Lord Ahmed, the first British Muslim member of the House of Lords, blamed Rushdie for violence past and violence to come:
"This man not only provoked violence around the world because of his writings, but there were many people who were killed around the world. . . . Forgiving and forgetting is one thing, but honouring the man who has blood on his hands, sort of, because of what he did, I think is going a bit too far."
Sort of?!
Yes, you see, it's always the fault of the accused insulter. Never the fault of the sword-wielders, fatwa-issuers, fire-setters and blood-lusters.
It's always the fault of the Western "extremists." Never the fault of the "moderate" followers of jihad.
The deaf and blind will dismiss this latest episode of manufactured Muslim outrage as a marginal outburst. But Rushdie, the target of death threats dating back to 1988 over his book "The Satanic Verses," has seen enough performances of Jihad Theater to take proper precautions. He has requested police protection after an Iranian group put a $150,000 bounty on his head. Forouz Raja'ee-Far, secretary general of the Headquarters for Honoring the Martyrs of Islam World Movement, offered the prize because, after all, "it is an obligation for all Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie even if he repents from the bottom of his heart and becomes the pious man of the time."
What does the Council on American-Islamic Relations have to say? Their website has a special "incitement watch" and "action alerts" section for its (dwindling number of) members -- but as of Tuesday afternoon, not a peep about the incitement of hatred and violence against Rushdie. They'll eventually pay lip service to The Religion of Peace, but do not forget Rule No. 5 in the jihadi's guide to etiquette: "You can lie if you do this for jihad."
Pakistani government officials are bleating about the need for "interfaith understanding" and sensitivity. In Washington for meetings with the Bush administration, Pakistan's foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri cooed: "When we talk of a globalized world, we have to be sensitive to each other's concerns."
As anyone with their eyes open through Rushdie's ordeal, the deadly Mohammed cartoons riots, the calls for beheading the Pope, Oriana Fallaci, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and defiant, ex-Muslim apostates around the world knows: "Sensitivity" in the jihadi world is a one-way, dead-end street.
Western Fictions, Arab Realities
By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
I have been scouring eBay for the last couple of days, hoping to snag a one-of-a-kind item. But, alas, it hasn't turned up yet. I'm looking for the late Yasser Arafat's Nobel Peace Prize. It was looted from Arafat's Gaza compound by the victorious forces of Hamas, a jihadist group backed by Iran and Syria that has routed the once-mighty forces of Fatah from power in Gaza. According to the Jerusalem Post, a Fatah spokesman added: "They stole all the widow's clothes and shoes."
The widow in question would be Suha Arafat, Yasser Arafat's photo-op wife. Who can blame the looters for wanting to grab as much of her swag as possible? First of all, she wasn't using it. Suha hasn't been to Gaza for years. And her favorite shoe designer is Christian Louboutin, whose wares can fetch about $1,000 a pair, which is more than many Palestinians make in a year.
But it's that peace prize, won by Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin for agreeing to the 1993 Oslo accords, that really captures the lunacy of it all. It's the perfect reminder for everyone, myself included, of the Arabs' refusal to yield to idealism, hope or good intentions - and the West's refusal to recognize reality.
"The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them which we are missing," former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser once said. But from the U.S. point of view, the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Maybe they just don't want what we're selling?
For example, in 2005, Israel simply gave Gaza to the Palestinians. According to the international community's land-for-peace mantra, a peaceful society should have sprouted like a stalk from Jack's magic beans. Instead, the Palestinian people voted for a band of Islamic fanatics - even the European Union calls them terrorists, not that it matters much - dedicated to the destruction of Israel. But the diplomacy-uber-alles crowd has long been immune to contrary evidence. Remember when Arafat fanned the second intifada in response to an unprecedented peace offer? Members of the Nobel committee openly talked of revoking the peace prize - from Peres.
Now, President Bush, the leaders of the EU and the editors of the New York Times all say this is the moment for Israel to offer more concessions to Arafat's successor, Mahmoud Abbas. So much for the fresh-from-Iraq cliche that it's pointless to choose sides in a civil war.
Margaret Beckett, the British foreign secretary, lamented, "Once again, extremists carrying guns have prevented progress against the wishes of the majority who seek a peaceful two-state solution." But how do you square this with the fact that Hamas, the party promising the destruction of Israel, won the Palestinian elections in 2005? Meanwhile, the leaders of Fatah - the "moderates" - had not long ago set the standard for Israel-hatred themselves.
The great irony is that Hamas now labels members of Fatah as Jewish "collaborators," a designation that apparently justifies even the execution of wounded Fatah prisoners in hospitals.
The German foreign ministry went so far as to suggest that Hamas' triumph necessitates increasing aid to Gaza because of the hardships Hamas rule will cause. It seems that if you choose terrorism, either at the ballot box or in the streets, the Europeans, like the good hands at Allstate, will be there to pay for the mess.
But there's another, perhaps more important, lesson to be drawn from the Hamas ascendancy. The Bush administration pushed for democracy in the Palestinian territories and got what it wished for - in spades. The assumption behind the push for democracy in Gaza and in Iraq is that Arabs can be trusted to handle political freedom. Even the Democrats demanding an immediate pullout from Iraq hope that with democracy, the Iraqis will be able to sort out their problems themselves via some euphemistic "political solution." That is unless the antiwar Democrats are really advocating turning all of Mesopotamia into one giant Gaza Strip - the far more likely result of U.S. withdrawal.
For many disciples of the "international peace process," it's a matter of faith that the Palestinians just have to want peace, because how else can you have a peace process? For many supporters of the Bush Doctrine, Iraqis have to want democracy, because if they don't, what's the point of having a freedom agenda? But what if these are just beloved Western fictions? We see a well-lighted path to the good life: democracy, tolerance, rule of law, markets. But what if the Arab world just isn't interested in our path? As a believer in the freedom agenda, that's what scares me most.
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
I have been scouring eBay for the last couple of days, hoping to snag a one-of-a-kind item. But, alas, it hasn't turned up yet. I'm looking for the late Yasser Arafat's Nobel Peace Prize. It was looted from Arafat's Gaza compound by the victorious forces of Hamas, a jihadist group backed by Iran and Syria that has routed the once-mighty forces of Fatah from power in Gaza. According to the Jerusalem Post, a Fatah spokesman added: "They stole all the widow's clothes and shoes."
The widow in question would be Suha Arafat, Yasser Arafat's photo-op wife. Who can blame the looters for wanting to grab as much of her swag as possible? First of all, she wasn't using it. Suha hasn't been to Gaza for years. And her favorite shoe designer is Christian Louboutin, whose wares can fetch about $1,000 a pair, which is more than many Palestinians make in a year.
But it's that peace prize, won by Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin for agreeing to the 1993 Oslo accords, that really captures the lunacy of it all. It's the perfect reminder for everyone, myself included, of the Arabs' refusal to yield to idealism, hope or good intentions - and the West's refusal to recognize reality.
"The genius of you Americans is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them which we are missing," former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser once said. But from the U.S. point of view, the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Maybe they just don't want what we're selling?
For example, in 2005, Israel simply gave Gaza to the Palestinians. According to the international community's land-for-peace mantra, a peaceful society should have sprouted like a stalk from Jack's magic beans. Instead, the Palestinian people voted for a band of Islamic fanatics - even the European Union calls them terrorists, not that it matters much - dedicated to the destruction of Israel. But the diplomacy-uber-alles crowd has long been immune to contrary evidence. Remember when Arafat fanned the second intifada in response to an unprecedented peace offer? Members of the Nobel committee openly talked of revoking the peace prize - from Peres.
Now, President Bush, the leaders of the EU and the editors of the New York Times all say this is the moment for Israel to offer more concessions to Arafat's successor, Mahmoud Abbas. So much for the fresh-from-Iraq cliche that it's pointless to choose sides in a civil war.
Margaret Beckett, the British foreign secretary, lamented, "Once again, extremists carrying guns have prevented progress against the wishes of the majority who seek a peaceful two-state solution." But how do you square this with the fact that Hamas, the party promising the destruction of Israel, won the Palestinian elections in 2005? Meanwhile, the leaders of Fatah - the "moderates" - had not long ago set the standard for Israel-hatred themselves.
The great irony is that Hamas now labels members of Fatah as Jewish "collaborators," a designation that apparently justifies even the execution of wounded Fatah prisoners in hospitals.
The German foreign ministry went so far as to suggest that Hamas' triumph necessitates increasing aid to Gaza because of the hardships Hamas rule will cause. It seems that if you choose terrorism, either at the ballot box or in the streets, the Europeans, like the good hands at Allstate, will be there to pay for the mess.
But there's another, perhaps more important, lesson to be drawn from the Hamas ascendancy. The Bush administration pushed for democracy in the Palestinian territories and got what it wished for - in spades. The assumption behind the push for democracy in Gaza and in Iraq is that Arabs can be trusted to handle political freedom. Even the Democrats demanding an immediate pullout from Iraq hope that with democracy, the Iraqis will be able to sort out their problems themselves via some euphemistic "political solution." That is unless the antiwar Democrats are really advocating turning all of Mesopotamia into one giant Gaza Strip - the far more likely result of U.S. withdrawal.
For many disciples of the "international peace process," it's a matter of faith that the Palestinians just have to want peace, because how else can you have a peace process? For many supporters of the Bush Doctrine, Iraqis have to want democracy, because if they don't, what's the point of having a freedom agenda? But what if these are just beloved Western fictions? We see a well-lighted path to the good life: democracy, tolerance, rule of law, markets. But what if the Arab world just isn't interested in our path? As a believer in the freedom agenda, that's what scares me most.
Getting It Right
David Halberstam and the media's ethos of irresponsibility.
By James Bowman
Wednesday, June 20, 2007 12:01 a.m.
"For those who remember journalism back in a 1970s heyday they can't explain to to [sic] the young, [David] Halberstam's death was not just the death of a hero, it was like the death of the great Hollywood stars--Katharine Hepburn, Clark Gable." So wrote Henry Allen in the Washington Post shortly after the car crash which brought about the melancholy event to which he refers. He reminds us of what a paltry thing, in journalism's little kingdom, is "just" the death of a hero--at least in comparison with the apotheosis of a celebrity. Halberstam, Hepburn, Gable. When did this trinity, rather than Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, or Eisenhower, Nimitz, MacArthur, become America's great and paradigmatic figures before the world? The answer is at about the same time, back in the 1960s, when Halberstam was helping to revolutionize journalism. As Richard Holbrooke put it, "He made it not only possible but even romantic to write that your own side was misleading the public about how the war was going."
It would be hard to overstate the many implications and ramifications of that revealing remark, quoted by George Packer in The New Yorker, by someone who is spoken of as a potential secretary of state in a future Democratic administration. To start with: If it's now romantic to expose the falsehoods and hypocrisies of your own side, in what sense is that side any longer your own? Of course, journalistic piety would have it that the reporter doesn't take sides but is just, in Mr. Packer's words, a "fearless truth-teller." Yet in practice we know as well as Richard Holbrooke does that side matters. There are truths and there are truths. No one supposes that Halberstam could have become the equal of Hepburn and Gable by reporting on the misleading statements of the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese--always supposing he could have found any. It was because he was attacking, exposing, shaming what at the time would have been regarded, by the media culture as by everyone else, as his own side that he became famous.
Moreover, the officials he attacked occupied, however unworthily, the place of those old-fashioned, "just" American heroes whom journalists in the past had been wont to treat so deferentially. There was obviously an immense feeling of liberation and empowerment for a young man who had come to feel entitled by his powers of intellect to look down on senior military officers-- a feeling well captured by Ambassador Holbrooke in his account in the Washington Post of a memorable dinner in a Saigon restaurant in 1963 with Halberstam and Neil Sheehan:
There is also a paradox involved in the romance of exposing falsehood, for romance is itself a kind of falsehood. It may be a hopeful and a benign sort of falsehood, but it is still ineluctably false. By its very nature romance amounts to an exaggeration or glorification of what, looked at more closely, is at best mundane and at worst ugly or disreputable. Journalists, like novelists and filmmakers, used to romanticize warfare by closing their eyes to much of the horror of it; now they romanticize the victims of war and so undermine war's foundations by looking at nothing but its horrors. In the media's reporting of war, honor and glory have become at least as invisible as the ghastly flow of blood and viscera once were to their predecessors. Nowadays, any journalist who wants to succeed knows he is in the business not of celebrating honor or trust or heroism but of exposing whatever sordid realities may be found (or invented) beneath the appearances of those things. And if the romantic prize is now awarded to those who tell tales of war's evils, why should we not suppose that the supply of those evils will rise to meet the journalistic demand, just as the supply of heroes rose when the demand was for tales of heroism?
No fearless truth-teller that I know of has ever troubled to ask this question, let alone to answer it, for to do so would be to call into question the one unquestionable article of faith in the journalist's credo, namely his own "objectivity." Never mind the philosophical crudeness of this model of the media as a mirror in which realities are merely reflected. The transparency of the process, the neutrality of the observer in mediating for us the things he has observed must be insisted upon--barring occasional slips like the use of the word "romantic" above--at all costs if the journalist is to retain the authority he needs to be able to say with David Halberstam to the mighty of the earth: "You lie." Without that authority, what hope of joining Halberstam in the Pantheon of celebrity along with Gable and Hepburn? Yet that objectivity and that authority are themselves lies whose foundational nature preserves them from scrutiny even when the part the media play in shaping events--see, for instance, "Biased Sensationalism" in The New Criterion of December 2006--or being manipulated by others to shape events is obvious to anyone without a stake in the pursuit of journalistic glory.
Halberstam's old employer, the New York Times, took the occasion of his death to run a piece by Dexter Filkins, who writes for the paper from Iraq, comparing now with then. "During four years of war in Iraq, American reporters on the ground in Baghdad have often found themselves coming under criticism remarkably similar to that which Mr. Halberstam endured: those journalists in Baghdad, so said the Bush administration and its supporters, only reported the bad news. They were dupes of the insurgents. They were cowardly and unpatriotic." Small wonder then that, before he died, Halberstam himself "did not hesitate to compare America's predicament in Iraq to its defeat in Vietnam. And he was not afraid to admit that his views on Iraq had been influenced by his experience in the earlier war. 'I just never thought it was going to work at all,' Mr. Halberstam said of Iraq during a public appearance in New York in January." Yet neither Halberstam nor Mr. Filkins mentions one crucial difference between Vietnam and Iraq. In Vietnam, the enemy was militarily formidable even without any assistance from the media. In Iraq, the enemy is militarily weak and can hope to win only by exploiting the media's negativity--and the continuing romance of their role in Vietnam--to make the war seem unwinnable. The role of fearless truth-teller is no longer available, if it ever was. Like it or not, the media are already involved in the action and must pick a side.
After noting how, since Halberstam, it has become part of the romance of being a reporter to question the bona fides of America's leaders, Ambassador Holbrooke added: "But everything depended on David getting it right, and he did." This strikes me as being equally revealing. "Getting it right" is of course an admirable ambition for a journalist, but it is an exercise that has little in common with what generals and politicians must do, which is to lead others through situations of mortal peril with appallingly incomplete and inaccurate information to guide them. Getting it wrong is a given. That's what the romance of the Halberstamian example has made journalists--and not only journalists!--forget when they try to apply his lesson from Vietnam to the Iraq war. For the man who must act and not just observe, the only question that matters is how quickly he can recognize and recover from his mistakes and how strong is his will to keep fighting in spite of them and the inevitable setbacks they cause. On the first of these tests, the Bush administration has done rather badly, I think; on the second it has done rather well. But part of the reason for its failures has been that the mind of the media remains obsessed with the question only of its prescience--as if "getting it right" were the only thing that mattered and getting it wrong a fatal disqualification for leadership.
This odd prejudice may be partly owing to the huge social premium we put on intelligence in the era of the cognitive elite. People who have no idea on earth what to do about the war or any of the problems we face as a nation think it is some kind of program to ridicule the intelligence of the President. Even the political opposition has fallen into this trap by making mere perspicacity in the anticipation of evils rather than the determined effort to combat them its test of political success. Thus in Sen. Jim Webb's reply to the president's State of the Union Address in January, he had no alternative to suggest to the measures for dealing with Iraq that had been proposed, but he was full of indignation on the grounds that the mistakes of the administration had been foreseeable. He knew that they were foreseeable because he himself had foreseen them. The implication was that he was much cleverer than President Bush--as if that was all that need be said to the credit of the former and the discredit of the latter.
The fact that the opposition and the media frame the debate in this way means that much of the administration's energies have to be expended in defending itself against endless second-guessing, which in turn means that it is even less inclined to recognize and correct mistakes. This is infantile politics. Meanwhile, on the question of what is now to be done about the mistakes, no one seems to know any better than Sen. Webb, whose policy amounts to saying that we ought not to have made them in the first place. This is also the view of much of the Democratic Party, and almost all of the media, who repeat mechanically that we need a "change of course" in Iraq but never get around to telling us what they would change--short of surrendering, which is now becoming the default option. In April, Sen. Harry Reid finally bowed to the logic of his own position by acknowledging that the war was already lost. At any rate it had better be, if he wants to preserve the reputation for shrewdness and sagacity that he, like so many others, have cultivated by being wise after the event.
Events have a way of exposing bad information in ways that provide their chroniclers with endless temptations to such bogus wisdom. The chief of these is the temptation to say: "I know now, therefore they should have known then." In this respect, Halberstam's legacy to today's Iraq war coverage--which was the subtext of so many of his posthumous tributes--has been not only to make yielding to this temptation OK for journalists--whose business of "getting it right" can always proceed at greater leisure and with fewer consequences for error--but to make it almost the whole business of journalism. This became apparent once again with the release of George Tenet's memoir, "At the Center of the Storm"--a work which will long be remembered for its self-serving chutzpah and its ingratitude in a field that is far from short of examples of these qualities.
True, Mr. Tenet could not quite get away with giving his book what is said to be the unwritten subtitle of all political memoirs--"If only they'd listened to me"--since all his problems had been caused by the fact that they had listened to him. True, too, his attempts to blame others in the Bush administration for an intelligence screw-up that could clearly have been no one's responsibility but his own did not extend to the president himself, who has paid an enormous political price for that screw-up and yet who has refused to kick the responsibility down the road to George Tenet, richly deserved though it is. Instead, this bungler was sent on his way to a prosperous retirement--the advance paid by HarperCollins for "At the Center of the Storm" is said to have been in the neighborhood of $4,000,000, a sum which cannot be unrelated to the prospect of the book's giving yet another black eye to the president--with the Medal of Freedom. Yet what Mr. Tenet does do is to cast away his own best defense--that, as William Goldman once said in another context, nobody really knows anything--in order to play the sterile journalistic game of who knew what, when did they know it, and who should have known it first.
In spite of its special pleading, the book does have at least one serious point to make. Although the former DCI's claim to have been quoted out of context when he said that the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a "slam dunk" is laughable, he has a legitimate grievance when he says that whoever leaked his remark to Bob Woodward behaved very badly. "It's the most despicable thing that ever happened to me," he now says. "You don't do this. You don't throw somebody overboard. Is that honorable? It's not honorable to me." A bit late in the day, some might think, for someone who has spent as much time talking to Bob Woodward as Mr. Tenet has to start complaining about what's honorable and what isn't when it comes to feeding the media's scandal machine. Yet there should be more joy in heaven over the one sinner that repenteth than the ninety and nine (if you can find that many) who never strayed. Now we should all recognize, along with the Mr. Tenet who found it out the hard way, that the media pursue their own interests in deciding what to report and how to report it and that, therefore, the picture we get from them is not a mere reflection of reality but something which, like David Halberstam's reporting from Vietnam, helps to shape it, often in ways that are disastrous for everyone but the media--and, of course, America's enemies.
My favorite recent example, which also went largely unnoticed as such, was the massive coverage the media afforded a murderous rampage by a mentally unbalanced youth at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, which now prefers to be known as "Virginia Tech." The killer, whom I forbear to name for reasons that will soon become obvious, took a higher toll--32--than others of his kind, but he had in common with them the fact that he was a fantasist with a grandiose self-image founded on an obsessive interest in movie fantasy and an inexhaustible sense of grievance against the world. It seems to me at least arguable--to put it no higher--that such a person would not have done what he did without some idea that doing it would allow him to advertise his grievances while portraying his own death as some sort of glorious martyrdom.
What responsibility for the murders, therefore, and for more murders to come, lies with NBC, to whom the killer sent written and videotaped public statements about his rampage which NBC obligingly broadcast? "It was a tough call" for NBC, according to Bob Schieffer of CBS in a radio interview I chanced to listen to. Really? Funny, then, isn't it, that it always gets called the same way--that is, for making such demented ramblings public instead of consigning them, unopened, unviewed and unread, to the incinerator. We have to try to understand why these things happen, the media cry. No, we don't! In fact, it's the trying to understand that makes them happen. By telling a potential killer that he's eligible for understanding, you confirm him in the belief that there are reasons for him to kill and therefore, to that extent, that it is all right to kill. The therapeutic approach, which the media find it convenient to adopt in these cases, essentially concedes the killer's case that he is a martyr to whatever wrongs, imaginary or real, he sees himself as avenging. And, of course, his efforts at self-glorification depend on the media and their ability both to elicit such a response to his actions and, by doing so, to make him famous.
The importance of prospective fame as a motivator for those whose grievances against the world so often include their own obscurity and loneliness can hardly be overstated. It has been investigated by Albert Borowitz in "Terrorism for Self-Glorification: The Herostratos Syndrome" (Kent State University Press, 2005), which I have had occasion to mention before in this space (see "Honor Enduring" in The New Criterion of January 2005). But the media's effort to understand such killers as the Virginia Tech shooter must always stop short of understanding this. Writing in the British satirical magazine Private Eye, someone identified only as "Remote Controller" thought that "the thrill of getting ahead of the other networks on the biggest story of the year will have been undercut by a very mild unease that a guy who wished to be on TV after killing thirty-two people immediately identified NBC as a sort of al-Jazeera for psychopaths." I wish I could believe this--that NBC suffered from even a mild sense of unease about its complicity in promoting a monster as a martyr. But I doubt it. The media's treatment of the Iraq war suggests that the myth of the journalist's independence from and lack of any responsibility for the events he reports on is now so firmly entrenched as to be quite immovable. For that we have to thank, at least partly, the romance of David Halberstam's--and the media's--Vietnam.
By James Bowman
Wednesday, June 20, 2007 12:01 a.m.
"For those who remember journalism back in a 1970s heyday they can't explain to to [sic] the young, [David] Halberstam's death was not just the death of a hero, it was like the death of the great Hollywood stars--Katharine Hepburn, Clark Gable." So wrote Henry Allen in the Washington Post shortly after the car crash which brought about the melancholy event to which he refers. He reminds us of what a paltry thing, in journalism's little kingdom, is "just" the death of a hero--at least in comparison with the apotheosis of a celebrity. Halberstam, Hepburn, Gable. When did this trinity, rather than Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, or Eisenhower, Nimitz, MacArthur, become America's great and paradigmatic figures before the world? The answer is at about the same time, back in the 1960s, when Halberstam was helping to revolutionize journalism. As Richard Holbrooke put it, "He made it not only possible but even romantic to write that your own side was misleading the public about how the war was going."
It would be hard to overstate the many implications and ramifications of that revealing remark, quoted by George Packer in The New Yorker, by someone who is spoken of as a potential secretary of state in a future Democratic administration. To start with: If it's now romantic to expose the falsehoods and hypocrisies of your own side, in what sense is that side any longer your own? Of course, journalistic piety would have it that the reporter doesn't take sides but is just, in Mr. Packer's words, a "fearless truth-teller." Yet in practice we know as well as Richard Holbrooke does that side matters. There are truths and there are truths. No one supposes that Halberstam could have become the equal of Hepburn and Gable by reporting on the misleading statements of the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese--always supposing he could have found any. It was because he was attacking, exposing, shaming what at the time would have been regarded, by the media culture as by everyone else, as his own side that he became famous.
Moreover, the officials he attacked occupied, however unworthily, the place of those old-fashioned, "just" American heroes whom journalists in the past had been wont to treat so deferentially. There was obviously an immense feeling of liberation and empowerment for a young man who had come to feel entitled by his powers of intellect to look down on senior military officers-- a feeling well captured by Ambassador Holbrooke in his account in the Washington Post of a memorable dinner in a Saigon restaurant in 1963 with Halberstam and Neil Sheehan:
They especially despised the senior commander, World War II veteran Paul D. Harkins, and after giving me some advice ("Don't trust anything those bastards tell you"), David and Neil spent most of the evening denouncing Harkins. After some wine, they conducted a mock trial of the four-star general for incompetence and dereliction of duty. In his rumbling, powerful voice, David pronounced Harkins "guilty" of each charge, after which Neil loudly carried out the "sentence": execution by imaginary firing squad against the back wall of the restaurant.Such revolutionary high-spiritedness does not immediately suggest fearless truth-telling so much as it does the anarchic exuberance of youth presented with an opportunity for rebellion against what, at about the same time, we were learning to call "the Establishment." That's what made Halberstam a romantic figure at the time and since. He was a David who, looked at in the right light, had brought down the Goliath of the American military and political establishment with a well-aimed pebble. Thus it seems a bit disingenuous of Richard Holbrooke to celebrate the romance of his hero's triumph while at the same time describing as "nonsense" the view that his reporting contributed to America's humiliation in Vietnam by undermining support for the war at home. By calling him "romantic," isn't he implicitly giving him credit for just that?
There is also a paradox involved in the romance of exposing falsehood, for romance is itself a kind of falsehood. It may be a hopeful and a benign sort of falsehood, but it is still ineluctably false. By its very nature romance amounts to an exaggeration or glorification of what, looked at more closely, is at best mundane and at worst ugly or disreputable. Journalists, like novelists and filmmakers, used to romanticize warfare by closing their eyes to much of the horror of it; now they romanticize the victims of war and so undermine war's foundations by looking at nothing but its horrors. In the media's reporting of war, honor and glory have become at least as invisible as the ghastly flow of blood and viscera once were to their predecessors. Nowadays, any journalist who wants to succeed knows he is in the business not of celebrating honor or trust or heroism but of exposing whatever sordid realities may be found (or invented) beneath the appearances of those things. And if the romantic prize is now awarded to those who tell tales of war's evils, why should we not suppose that the supply of those evils will rise to meet the journalistic demand, just as the supply of heroes rose when the demand was for tales of heroism?
No fearless truth-teller that I know of has ever troubled to ask this question, let alone to answer it, for to do so would be to call into question the one unquestionable article of faith in the journalist's credo, namely his own "objectivity." Never mind the philosophical crudeness of this model of the media as a mirror in which realities are merely reflected. The transparency of the process, the neutrality of the observer in mediating for us the things he has observed must be insisted upon--barring occasional slips like the use of the word "romantic" above--at all costs if the journalist is to retain the authority he needs to be able to say with David Halberstam to the mighty of the earth: "You lie." Without that authority, what hope of joining Halberstam in the Pantheon of celebrity along with Gable and Hepburn? Yet that objectivity and that authority are themselves lies whose foundational nature preserves them from scrutiny even when the part the media play in shaping events--see, for instance, "Biased Sensationalism" in The New Criterion of December 2006--or being manipulated by others to shape events is obvious to anyone without a stake in the pursuit of journalistic glory.
Halberstam's old employer, the New York Times, took the occasion of his death to run a piece by Dexter Filkins, who writes for the paper from Iraq, comparing now with then. "During four years of war in Iraq, American reporters on the ground in Baghdad have often found themselves coming under criticism remarkably similar to that which Mr. Halberstam endured: those journalists in Baghdad, so said the Bush administration and its supporters, only reported the bad news. They were dupes of the insurgents. They were cowardly and unpatriotic." Small wonder then that, before he died, Halberstam himself "did not hesitate to compare America's predicament in Iraq to its defeat in Vietnam. And he was not afraid to admit that his views on Iraq had been influenced by his experience in the earlier war. 'I just never thought it was going to work at all,' Mr. Halberstam said of Iraq during a public appearance in New York in January." Yet neither Halberstam nor Mr. Filkins mentions one crucial difference between Vietnam and Iraq. In Vietnam, the enemy was militarily formidable even without any assistance from the media. In Iraq, the enemy is militarily weak and can hope to win only by exploiting the media's negativity--and the continuing romance of their role in Vietnam--to make the war seem unwinnable. The role of fearless truth-teller is no longer available, if it ever was. Like it or not, the media are already involved in the action and must pick a side.
After noting how, since Halberstam, it has become part of the romance of being a reporter to question the bona fides of America's leaders, Ambassador Holbrooke added: "But everything depended on David getting it right, and he did." This strikes me as being equally revealing. "Getting it right" is of course an admirable ambition for a journalist, but it is an exercise that has little in common with what generals and politicians must do, which is to lead others through situations of mortal peril with appallingly incomplete and inaccurate information to guide them. Getting it wrong is a given. That's what the romance of the Halberstamian example has made journalists--and not only journalists!--forget when they try to apply his lesson from Vietnam to the Iraq war. For the man who must act and not just observe, the only question that matters is how quickly he can recognize and recover from his mistakes and how strong is his will to keep fighting in spite of them and the inevitable setbacks they cause. On the first of these tests, the Bush administration has done rather badly, I think; on the second it has done rather well. But part of the reason for its failures has been that the mind of the media remains obsessed with the question only of its prescience--as if "getting it right" were the only thing that mattered and getting it wrong a fatal disqualification for leadership.
This odd prejudice may be partly owing to the huge social premium we put on intelligence in the era of the cognitive elite. People who have no idea on earth what to do about the war or any of the problems we face as a nation think it is some kind of program to ridicule the intelligence of the President. Even the political opposition has fallen into this trap by making mere perspicacity in the anticipation of evils rather than the determined effort to combat them its test of political success. Thus in Sen. Jim Webb's reply to the president's State of the Union Address in January, he had no alternative to suggest to the measures for dealing with Iraq that had been proposed, but he was full of indignation on the grounds that the mistakes of the administration had been foreseeable. He knew that they were foreseeable because he himself had foreseen them. The implication was that he was much cleverer than President Bush--as if that was all that need be said to the credit of the former and the discredit of the latter.
The fact that the opposition and the media frame the debate in this way means that much of the administration's energies have to be expended in defending itself against endless second-guessing, which in turn means that it is even less inclined to recognize and correct mistakes. This is infantile politics. Meanwhile, on the question of what is now to be done about the mistakes, no one seems to know any better than Sen. Webb, whose policy amounts to saying that we ought not to have made them in the first place. This is also the view of much of the Democratic Party, and almost all of the media, who repeat mechanically that we need a "change of course" in Iraq but never get around to telling us what they would change--short of surrendering, which is now becoming the default option. In April, Sen. Harry Reid finally bowed to the logic of his own position by acknowledging that the war was already lost. At any rate it had better be, if he wants to preserve the reputation for shrewdness and sagacity that he, like so many others, have cultivated by being wise after the event.
Events have a way of exposing bad information in ways that provide their chroniclers with endless temptations to such bogus wisdom. The chief of these is the temptation to say: "I know now, therefore they should have known then." In this respect, Halberstam's legacy to today's Iraq war coverage--which was the subtext of so many of his posthumous tributes--has been not only to make yielding to this temptation OK for journalists--whose business of "getting it right" can always proceed at greater leisure and with fewer consequences for error--but to make it almost the whole business of journalism. This became apparent once again with the release of George Tenet's memoir, "At the Center of the Storm"--a work which will long be remembered for its self-serving chutzpah and its ingratitude in a field that is far from short of examples of these qualities.
True, Mr. Tenet could not quite get away with giving his book what is said to be the unwritten subtitle of all political memoirs--"If only they'd listened to me"--since all his problems had been caused by the fact that they had listened to him. True, too, his attempts to blame others in the Bush administration for an intelligence screw-up that could clearly have been no one's responsibility but his own did not extend to the president himself, who has paid an enormous political price for that screw-up and yet who has refused to kick the responsibility down the road to George Tenet, richly deserved though it is. Instead, this bungler was sent on his way to a prosperous retirement--the advance paid by HarperCollins for "At the Center of the Storm" is said to have been in the neighborhood of $4,000,000, a sum which cannot be unrelated to the prospect of the book's giving yet another black eye to the president--with the Medal of Freedom. Yet what Mr. Tenet does do is to cast away his own best defense--that, as William Goldman once said in another context, nobody really knows anything--in order to play the sterile journalistic game of who knew what, when did they know it, and who should have known it first.
In spite of its special pleading, the book does have at least one serious point to make. Although the former DCI's claim to have been quoted out of context when he said that the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a "slam dunk" is laughable, he has a legitimate grievance when he says that whoever leaked his remark to Bob Woodward behaved very badly. "It's the most despicable thing that ever happened to me," he now says. "You don't do this. You don't throw somebody overboard. Is that honorable? It's not honorable to me." A bit late in the day, some might think, for someone who has spent as much time talking to Bob Woodward as Mr. Tenet has to start complaining about what's honorable and what isn't when it comes to feeding the media's scandal machine. Yet there should be more joy in heaven over the one sinner that repenteth than the ninety and nine (if you can find that many) who never strayed. Now we should all recognize, along with the Mr. Tenet who found it out the hard way, that the media pursue their own interests in deciding what to report and how to report it and that, therefore, the picture we get from them is not a mere reflection of reality but something which, like David Halberstam's reporting from Vietnam, helps to shape it, often in ways that are disastrous for everyone but the media--and, of course, America's enemies.
My favorite recent example, which also went largely unnoticed as such, was the massive coverage the media afforded a murderous rampage by a mentally unbalanced youth at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, which now prefers to be known as "Virginia Tech." The killer, whom I forbear to name for reasons that will soon become obvious, took a higher toll--32--than others of his kind, but he had in common with them the fact that he was a fantasist with a grandiose self-image founded on an obsessive interest in movie fantasy and an inexhaustible sense of grievance against the world. It seems to me at least arguable--to put it no higher--that such a person would not have done what he did without some idea that doing it would allow him to advertise his grievances while portraying his own death as some sort of glorious martyrdom.
What responsibility for the murders, therefore, and for more murders to come, lies with NBC, to whom the killer sent written and videotaped public statements about his rampage which NBC obligingly broadcast? "It was a tough call" for NBC, according to Bob Schieffer of CBS in a radio interview I chanced to listen to. Really? Funny, then, isn't it, that it always gets called the same way--that is, for making such demented ramblings public instead of consigning them, unopened, unviewed and unread, to the incinerator. We have to try to understand why these things happen, the media cry. No, we don't! In fact, it's the trying to understand that makes them happen. By telling a potential killer that he's eligible for understanding, you confirm him in the belief that there are reasons for him to kill and therefore, to that extent, that it is all right to kill. The therapeutic approach, which the media find it convenient to adopt in these cases, essentially concedes the killer's case that he is a martyr to whatever wrongs, imaginary or real, he sees himself as avenging. And, of course, his efforts at self-glorification depend on the media and their ability both to elicit such a response to his actions and, by doing so, to make him famous.
The importance of prospective fame as a motivator for those whose grievances against the world so often include their own obscurity and loneliness can hardly be overstated. It has been investigated by Albert Borowitz in "Terrorism for Self-Glorification: The Herostratos Syndrome" (Kent State University Press, 2005), which I have had occasion to mention before in this space (see "Honor Enduring" in The New Criterion of January 2005). But the media's effort to understand such killers as the Virginia Tech shooter must always stop short of understanding this. Writing in the British satirical magazine Private Eye, someone identified only as "Remote Controller" thought that "the thrill of getting ahead of the other networks on the biggest story of the year will have been undercut by a very mild unease that a guy who wished to be on TV after killing thirty-two people immediately identified NBC as a sort of al-Jazeera for psychopaths." I wish I could believe this--that NBC suffered from even a mild sense of unease about its complicity in promoting a monster as a martyr. But I doubt it. The media's treatment of the Iraq war suggests that the myth of the journalist's independence from and lack of any responsibility for the events he reports on is now so firmly entrenched as to be quite immovable. For that we have to thank, at least partly, the romance of David Halberstam's--and the media's--Vietnam.
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