By Terence Jeffrey
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
The terrorists swept into Cananea in a convoy of 15 vehicles. They were on a brazen, murderous mission.
They kidnapped seven policemen and two civilians. Outside town, they shot and killed four of the policemen and dumped their bodies in a park.
Local police who had not been kidnapped deserted their posts to a man. "When the state police arrived, there was not a single municipal police officer," the local governor later told The Associated Press. "We had to take over the command. There wasn't anyone there. They had all left."
Government forces tracked the terrorists into the nearby mountains. A pitched battle ensued. Fifteen terrorists were reported killed. Others got away, melting into the local population or deeper into the hills.
So went another sad episode in a region of the world where anarchy reigns. Assessing the day's carnage, the mayor of the targeted village spoke with bitter candor. "Our municipality has become the victim of the violence that pervades this entire country," he said in a statement. "The events of this morning are beyond shocking."
Where is this placed called Cananea? Is it in Iraq? Afghanistan?
No. It is almost in Arizona. Specifically, it is about 20 miles south of the U.S. border in the Mexican state of Sonora. Pull it up on Google Earth, as I did this week, and you will see that the nearest town of any size is Nogales, Ariz. The nearest big city is Tucson.
Cananea is in the war zone next door. It is a place where Mexican criminal syndicates, bolstered by Mexican army deserters, fight one another for control of the best smuggling routes into the United States.
The terrorist raid on Cananea, which took place on May 16, points to a monstrous strategic blunder by our government.
More than six years have transpired since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In the quest to make our nation safer, we have sent armies halfway around the world to occupy and attempt to create democracies in both Afghanistan and Iraq. But our government still has not secured our own border.
The Government Accountability Office last week presented testimony to the House Foreign Relations Committee that demonstrated just how porous our southern frontier remains.
"Mexico," said the GAO, "is the conduit for most of the cocaine reaching the United States, the source for much of the heroin consumed in the United States, and the largest foreign supplier of marijuana and methamphetamine to the U.S. market."
In the years since 9-11, the drug cartels that trade in South American cocaine have found Mexico to be a more -- not less -- attractive route for smuggling their product into American cities and towns to sell to American kids.
Citing an annual U.S. government analysis called the Interagency Assessment of Cocaine Movement (IACM), the GAO said: "From 2000 to 2006, the IACM reported an increase in the estimated amount of cocaine flowing through Mexico to the United States -- from 66 percent in 2000 to 77 percent in 2003 to 90 in 2006."
"Despite the apparent increases in cocaine arriving in Mexico, the amount of cocaine reported seized in Mexico and along the U.S.-Mexico border for 2000-2006 did not increase proportionately," said GAO. On average during this period, GAO said, only about 13 percent of this cocaine was seized.
The record was worse for heroin. "Reported heroin seizures in Mexico and along the U.S.-Mexico border averaged less than 1 metric ton or less than 5 percent a year of the estimated export quality heroin produced in Mexico between 2000 and 2005," said GAO.
Americans have and will pay many prices for the failure of our president and Congress to secure our border. In 2005 alone, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, people using cocaine visited emergency rooms 448,481 times, while people using heroin visited emergency rooms 164,572 times. The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates that in 2002 Americans paid $180.9 billion to cover the negative consequences of drug use, which includes health costs, criminal justice costs, disability and death-related costs, and the cost of lost productivity.
Then, of course, there are the criminals that cross our borders to conduct business here for the cartels. Mexican drug trafficking organizations, GAO said in an August report, have "regional managers throughout the country and rely on Mexican street gangs to distribute illicit drugs at the retail level."
If, one day, the powder that comes across our border is not heroin or cocaine but something even deadlier, and the thugs who bring it through are not drug dealers but al-Qaida terrorists, the current president and Congress will not be able to say: No one saw it coming.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
George W. Bush's Greatest Triumph?
By Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
On Monday, the U.S. military turned over the war-torn Karbala province to Iraqi security forces. The assumption of control by Iraqi security forces marked the eighth such handover by the U.S. military since the start of the Iraq war. Of the 18 Iraqi provinces, 10 remain under U.S. military control.
Cautious optimism is beginning to bloom in the desert. Though the Iraqi government itself has acknowledged its foot-dragging with regard to assuming responsibility over security -- "Allow me to say that we are late, very late, to reconstruct, to rebuild our forces for reasons that I do not want to mention here," said Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- the situation in Iraq is steadily growing less tenuous. According to iCasualties.org, fatalities from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have decreased dramatically and consistently since May 2007, from 90 in May to 16 in October. Iraqi forces are either in control of or leading operations in broad swaths of 16 out of 18 provinces.
The troop surge in Iraq has produced real results on the ground. And as security improves, the movement to take back Iraq from warring factions will snowball.
Momentum is the key to continuing improvement in Iraq. "The reconstruction of Iraq does not hinge on security alone," says Maliki, "but security is the key to everything." And security continues to improve. According to the Department of Defense, over 67,000 Iraqis have volunteered to help coalition and Iraqi forces secure neighborhoods. Says one lieutenant stationed south of the Baghdad International Airport in the American-controlled Baghdad province, "The violence and IEDs in the [area of operations] seem to have slowed down considerably a couple months before we arrived. It was definitely due to Iraqi local nationals setting up their own checkpoints or ISVs (Iraqi Security Volunteers). They police their own roads and areas to keep [al-Qaeda] insurgents and any other bad guys out. They have done this with great success."
The potential for success in Iraq creates an interesting political situation domestically. While those on the right have maintained strong support for the war -- leaving aside the small minority of conservatives who back Chuck Hagel and Ron Paul -- those on the left have clamored for immediate withdrawal. That extremism has cost the left dearly. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, perhaps the most popular politician in America only a few months ago, has seen her fortunes tumble: Her favorability rating, which stood at 53 percent in April 2007, now stands at 29 percent. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has seen a similar drop in popularity: In May, Reid's favorability rating was 46 percent. It is now 19 percent.
The only hope for the left is the Machiavellian Senator Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. Among the leading Democratic presidential candidates, only Clinton has embraced moderate rhetoric about the future of Iraq. Her far-left base continues to fume, but Hillary's bet hedging will likely win her the Democratic nomination for president -- even Democrats recognize that snatching defeat from the jaws of victory isn't a winning 2008 campaign strategy.
Meanwhile, the Republican star rises with the burgeoning Iraqi stabilization. The media exaggerated the pronouncement of imminent Republican death -- a Rudy Giuliani nomination could spell renewed electoral success in 2008. In the face of a hostile media establishment and an unhappy American public, George W. Bush may have pulled off the greatest success of his presidency: winning democracy in Iraq and, in doing so, keeping a party of defeatists out of power.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
On Monday, the U.S. military turned over the war-torn Karbala province to Iraqi security forces. The assumption of control by Iraqi security forces marked the eighth such handover by the U.S. military since the start of the Iraq war. Of the 18 Iraqi provinces, 10 remain under U.S. military control.
Cautious optimism is beginning to bloom in the desert. Though the Iraqi government itself has acknowledged its foot-dragging with regard to assuming responsibility over security -- "Allow me to say that we are late, very late, to reconstruct, to rebuild our forces for reasons that I do not want to mention here," said Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki -- the situation in Iraq is steadily growing less tenuous. According to iCasualties.org, fatalities from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have decreased dramatically and consistently since May 2007, from 90 in May to 16 in October. Iraqi forces are either in control of or leading operations in broad swaths of 16 out of 18 provinces.
The troop surge in Iraq has produced real results on the ground. And as security improves, the movement to take back Iraq from warring factions will snowball.
Momentum is the key to continuing improvement in Iraq. "The reconstruction of Iraq does not hinge on security alone," says Maliki, "but security is the key to everything." And security continues to improve. According to the Department of Defense, over 67,000 Iraqis have volunteered to help coalition and Iraqi forces secure neighborhoods. Says one lieutenant stationed south of the Baghdad International Airport in the American-controlled Baghdad province, "The violence and IEDs in the [area of operations] seem to have slowed down considerably a couple months before we arrived. It was definitely due to Iraqi local nationals setting up their own checkpoints or ISVs (Iraqi Security Volunteers). They police their own roads and areas to keep [al-Qaeda] insurgents and any other bad guys out. They have done this with great success."
The potential for success in Iraq creates an interesting political situation domestically. While those on the right have maintained strong support for the war -- leaving aside the small minority of conservatives who back Chuck Hagel and Ron Paul -- those on the left have clamored for immediate withdrawal. That extremism has cost the left dearly. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, perhaps the most popular politician in America only a few months ago, has seen her fortunes tumble: Her favorability rating, which stood at 53 percent in April 2007, now stands at 29 percent. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has seen a similar drop in popularity: In May, Reid's favorability rating was 46 percent. It is now 19 percent.
The only hope for the left is the Machiavellian Senator Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. Among the leading Democratic presidential candidates, only Clinton has embraced moderate rhetoric about the future of Iraq. Her far-left base continues to fume, but Hillary's bet hedging will likely win her the Democratic nomination for president -- even Democrats recognize that snatching defeat from the jaws of victory isn't a winning 2008 campaign strategy.
Meanwhile, the Republican star rises with the burgeoning Iraqi stabilization. The media exaggerated the pronouncement of imminent Republican death -- a Rudy Giuliani nomination could spell renewed electoral success in 2008. In the face of a hostile media establishment and an unhappy American public, George W. Bush may have pulled off the greatest success of his presidency: winning democracy in Iraq and, in doing so, keeping a party of defeatists out of power.
"Peace" Movement Passe?
By Brent Bozell III
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
If the "peace" movement holds a protest and no one in the press covers it, does it still exist? If Americans are sick of the war, they're also sick of the "antiwar." Even the media have grown antiwar-weary. Rallies on Oct. 27 drew only perfunctory news mentions.
The peaceniks have become a bipartisan political problem, now that the Democrats who control Congress haven't dared to placate the radicals by cutting off money for the troops. Cindy Sheehan is threatening to run against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But suddenly -- surprise, surprise -- the media aren't interested in Sheehan's new crusade. Crusades only have a point when it's an anti-Republican point. Camping out against Bush during his Texas vacation was news, fun news, important news. But running against Pelosi is not news. It's a sign your 15 minutes of fame are all used up.
So they're getting desperate. The radical group named "Code Pink" drew some ink by getting right in the secretary of state's face during a congressional hearing. The ugly Pink lady charged forward with blood on her hands to accuse Condi Rice of being responsible for mass killing. NBC's Matt Lauer tried to prod Rice into condemning this crude publicity stunt. To her credit, Rice simply rolled her eyes at the pink protester.
Others continue to jumpstart the '60s. A "peace" concert at the Episcopalian National Cathedral in Washington starring some retirement-age hippies, David Crosby and Graham Nash, was followed by a sympathetic tour through the liberal 24-hour news networks. These aren't Code Pink crazies, but in their own way they're equally out of sync.
On MSNBC's "Hardball," Crosby lamented how our soldiers are -- to borrow an old phrase -- poor, uneducated and easy to command types. "You know, on the one hand you've got a young kid who is patriotic, who loves his country, believes in it, and he's being told, 'Yeah this is the truth, and we've gotta go in there to protect your mother and your sister.' And he goes over, and he finds out the job is killing somebody else's mother and sister."
"Where have all the flowers gone ... ?"
Our commanders are urging the troops to fire on innocent Iraqi women and children? Chris Matthews should have been outraged. Instead, he could only manage to say, supportively, "Yeah, yeah." Crosby, perhaps hearing himself trashing the troops, tried to reel it back in: "We can't be wasting some of the best young people we have sending them over there to be killed and then killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis at the same time." They're the "best young people we have," but they slaughter innocent women and children at the drop of an officer's hat.
MSNBC is at best a wobbly-kneed "news" network when hackneyed left-wing rock stars unspool crazy talk against our troops. Here's what Matthews should have said: "Boys and girls, this is your brain on drugs." If he wasn't going to demand an apology, at least he could warn children of the danger of pharmaceuticals.
Over on CNN, reporter Carol Costello said Crosby and Nash were complaining the power of protest was ebbing because of Bush's "brainwashing." Out came the Bush the Dictator lines. Nash: "It's the administration controlling the populace." Crosby: "You can watch all of these same moves out of any other dictatorship or junta." To which Nash blurted out, "Emperor."
After hearing all this loony banter about the Bush Reich, it's amazing these men are still thrilling tie-dyed audiences with the song "Teach Your Children Well." Their political theories prove they haven't learned anything since the acid trips of the late '60s. Even these factually challenged "news" segments feel like the networks are going through the motions. Not even they are buying it.
The "peace" protesters face a real crisis here. Under the loaded rules of protest media coverage, the cameras are almost required to show up whenever 150, or 50, or four people gather on behalf of a "progressive" cause. (By contrast, conservatives can turn out 80,000 at pro-life marches and their coverage is zilch.) Leftist protests never seem like a "pseudo-event" -- an event staged solely for the cameras -- when the reporters arrive to sell breathlessly the continental shift of the American people that the protesters allegedly represent.
But the people today are sour. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have lower approval ratings than President Bush. Right now, the "peace" movement looks passe. They have no energy, and nothing original to say, and with the change in Congress, they have no more public-relations magic. They better not stand in front of a banner reading, "Mission Accomplished."
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
If the "peace" movement holds a protest and no one in the press covers it, does it still exist? If Americans are sick of the war, they're also sick of the "antiwar." Even the media have grown antiwar-weary. Rallies on Oct. 27 drew only perfunctory news mentions.
The peaceniks have become a bipartisan political problem, now that the Democrats who control Congress haven't dared to placate the radicals by cutting off money for the troops. Cindy Sheehan is threatening to run against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But suddenly -- surprise, surprise -- the media aren't interested in Sheehan's new crusade. Crusades only have a point when it's an anti-Republican point. Camping out against Bush during his Texas vacation was news, fun news, important news. But running against Pelosi is not news. It's a sign your 15 minutes of fame are all used up.
So they're getting desperate. The radical group named "Code Pink" drew some ink by getting right in the secretary of state's face during a congressional hearing. The ugly Pink lady charged forward with blood on her hands to accuse Condi Rice of being responsible for mass killing. NBC's Matt Lauer tried to prod Rice into condemning this crude publicity stunt. To her credit, Rice simply rolled her eyes at the pink protester.
Others continue to jumpstart the '60s. A "peace" concert at the Episcopalian National Cathedral in Washington starring some retirement-age hippies, David Crosby and Graham Nash, was followed by a sympathetic tour through the liberal 24-hour news networks. These aren't Code Pink crazies, but in their own way they're equally out of sync.
On MSNBC's "Hardball," Crosby lamented how our soldiers are -- to borrow an old phrase -- poor, uneducated and easy to command types. "You know, on the one hand you've got a young kid who is patriotic, who loves his country, believes in it, and he's being told, 'Yeah this is the truth, and we've gotta go in there to protect your mother and your sister.' And he goes over, and he finds out the job is killing somebody else's mother and sister."
"Where have all the flowers gone ... ?"
Our commanders are urging the troops to fire on innocent Iraqi women and children? Chris Matthews should have been outraged. Instead, he could only manage to say, supportively, "Yeah, yeah." Crosby, perhaps hearing himself trashing the troops, tried to reel it back in: "We can't be wasting some of the best young people we have sending them over there to be killed and then killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis at the same time." They're the "best young people we have," but they slaughter innocent women and children at the drop of an officer's hat.
MSNBC is at best a wobbly-kneed "news" network when hackneyed left-wing rock stars unspool crazy talk against our troops. Here's what Matthews should have said: "Boys and girls, this is your brain on drugs." If he wasn't going to demand an apology, at least he could warn children of the danger of pharmaceuticals.
Over on CNN, reporter Carol Costello said Crosby and Nash were complaining the power of protest was ebbing because of Bush's "brainwashing." Out came the Bush the Dictator lines. Nash: "It's the administration controlling the populace." Crosby: "You can watch all of these same moves out of any other dictatorship or junta." To which Nash blurted out, "Emperor."
After hearing all this loony banter about the Bush Reich, it's amazing these men are still thrilling tie-dyed audiences with the song "Teach Your Children Well." Their political theories prove they haven't learned anything since the acid trips of the late '60s. Even these factually challenged "news" segments feel like the networks are going through the motions. Not even they are buying it.
The "peace" protesters face a real crisis here. Under the loaded rules of protest media coverage, the cameras are almost required to show up whenever 150, or 50, or four people gather on behalf of a "progressive" cause. (By contrast, conservatives can turn out 80,000 at pro-life marches and their coverage is zilch.) Leftist protests never seem like a "pseudo-event" -- an event staged solely for the cameras -- when the reporters arrive to sell breathlessly the continental shift of the American people that the protesters allegedly represent.
But the people today are sour. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have lower approval ratings than President Bush. Right now, the "peace" movement looks passe. They have no energy, and nothing original to say, and with the change in Congress, they have no more public-relations magic. They better not stand in front of a banner reading, "Mission Accomplished."
Are the Poor Getting Poorer?
By Walter E. Williams
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
People who want more government income redistribution programs often sell their agenda with the lament, "The poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer," but how about some evidence and you decide? I think the rich are getting richer, and so are the poor.
According to the most recent census, about 35 million Americans live in poverty. Heritage Foundation scholar Robert Rector, using several government reports, gives us some insights about these people in his paper: "Understanding Poverty and Economic Inequality in the United States".
In 1971, only about 32 percent of all Americans enjoyed air conditioning in their homes. By 2001, 76 percent of poor people had air conditioning. In 1971, only 43 percent of Americans owned a color television; in 2001, 97 percent of poor people owned at least one. In 1971, 1 percent of American homes had a microwave oven; in 2001, 73 percent of poor people had one. Forty-six percent of poor households own their homes. Only about 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded. The average poor American has more living space than the average non-poor individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other European cities.
Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 30 percent own two or more cars. Seventy-eight percent of the poor have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception; and one-third have an automatic dishwasher.
For the most part, long-term poverty today is self-inflicted. To see this, let's examine some numbers from the Census Bureau's 2004 Current Population Survey. There's one segment of the black population that suffers only a 9.9 percent poverty rate, and only 13.7 percent of their under-5-year-olds are poor. There's another segment of the black population that suffers a 39.5 percent poverty rate, and 58.1 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor.
Among whites, one population segment suffers a 6 percent poverty rate, and only 9.9 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor. Another segment of the white population suffers a 26.4 percent poverty rate, and 52 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor.
What do you think distinguishes the high and low poverty populations? The only statistical distinction between both the black and white populations is marriage. There is far less poverty in married-couple families, where presumably at least one of the spouses is employed. Fully 85 percent of black children living in poverty reside in a female-headed household.
Poverty is not static for people willing to work. A University of Michigan study shows that only 5 percent of those in the bottom fifth of the income distribution in 1975 remained there in 1991. What happened to them? They moved up to the top three-fifths of the income distribution -- middle class or higher. Moreover, three out of 10 of the lowest income earners in 1975 moved all the way into the top fifth of income earners by 1991. Those who were poor in 1975 had an inflation-adjusted average income gain of $27,745 by 1991. Those workers who were in the top fifth of income earners in 1975 were better off in 1991 by an average of only $4,354. The bottom line is, the richer are getting richer and the poor are getting richer.
Poverty in the United States, in an absolute sense, has virtually disappeared. Today, there's nothing remotely resembling poverty of yesteryear. However, if poverty is defined in the relative sense, the lowest fifth of income-earners, "poverty" will always be with us. No matter how poverty is defined, if I were an unborn spirit, condemned to a life of poverty, but God allowed me to choose which nation I wanted to be poor in, I'd choose the United States. Our poor must be the envy of the world's poor.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
People who want more government income redistribution programs often sell their agenda with the lament, "The poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer," but how about some evidence and you decide? I think the rich are getting richer, and so are the poor.
According to the most recent census, about 35 million Americans live in poverty. Heritage Foundation scholar Robert Rector, using several government reports, gives us some insights about these people in his paper: "Understanding Poverty and Economic Inequality in the United States".
In 1971, only about 32 percent of all Americans enjoyed air conditioning in their homes. By 2001, 76 percent of poor people had air conditioning. In 1971, only 43 percent of Americans owned a color television; in 2001, 97 percent of poor people owned at least one. In 1971, 1 percent of American homes had a microwave oven; in 2001, 73 percent of poor people had one. Forty-six percent of poor households own their homes. Only about 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded. The average poor American has more living space than the average non-poor individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other European cities.
Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 30 percent own two or more cars. Seventy-eight percent of the poor have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception; and one-third have an automatic dishwasher.
For the most part, long-term poverty today is self-inflicted. To see this, let's examine some numbers from the Census Bureau's 2004 Current Population Survey. There's one segment of the black population that suffers only a 9.9 percent poverty rate, and only 13.7 percent of their under-5-year-olds are poor. There's another segment of the black population that suffers a 39.5 percent poverty rate, and 58.1 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor.
Among whites, one population segment suffers a 6 percent poverty rate, and only 9.9 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor. Another segment of the white population suffers a 26.4 percent poverty rate, and 52 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor.
What do you think distinguishes the high and low poverty populations? The only statistical distinction between both the black and white populations is marriage. There is far less poverty in married-couple families, where presumably at least one of the spouses is employed. Fully 85 percent of black children living in poverty reside in a female-headed household.
Poverty is not static for people willing to work. A University of Michigan study shows that only 5 percent of those in the bottom fifth of the income distribution in 1975 remained there in 1991. What happened to them? They moved up to the top three-fifths of the income distribution -- middle class or higher. Moreover, three out of 10 of the lowest income earners in 1975 moved all the way into the top fifth of income earners by 1991. Those who were poor in 1975 had an inflation-adjusted average income gain of $27,745 by 1991. Those workers who were in the top fifth of income earners in 1975 were better off in 1991 by an average of only $4,354. The bottom line is, the richer are getting richer and the poor are getting richer.
Poverty in the United States, in an absolute sense, has virtually disappeared. Today, there's nothing remotely resembling poverty of yesteryear. However, if poverty is defined in the relative sense, the lowest fifth of income-earners, "poverty" will always be with us. No matter how poverty is defined, if I were an unborn spirit, condemned to a life of poverty, but God allowed me to choose which nation I wanted to be poor in, I'd choose the United States. Our poor must be the envy of the world's poor.
Brave Newark World
By Mike S. Adams
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
The University of Delaware has just become one of the most Orwellian campuses in America. Students in its residence halls are now being subjected to a re-education program that is actually dubbed - in the university’s own tax-payer funded materials - as “treatment” for students who have incorrect attitudes and beliefs.
Delaware now requires nearly 7,000 students in its residence halls to adopt specific public university-approved (read: government-approved) views on issues ranging from race, to sexuality, to philosophy. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (see www.TheFire.org) is calling for the total dismantling of the program. Readers of this column should call (302-831-2111) or write president@udel.edu to Patrick Harker President of The University of Delaware asking him to do the same.
It is not at all uncommon for a university to establish official views and try to force them on students in the residence hall environment. Students living in the university housing complexes are often required to attend training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs).
But, at Delaware, the RA who facilitates these meetings has already received his own training, including a “diversity facilitation training” session. There, he is taught that “[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.”
The Delaware RA is also taught that the term “reverse racism” is created by whites to deny their privilege. An official Delaware training manual says that “those in denial use the term reverse racism to refer to hostile behavior by people of color toward whites, and to affirmative action policies, which allegedly give ‘preferential treatment’ to people of color over whites.” Then, after defining the term “reverse racism” the manual claims that “there is no such thing as ‘reverse racism.’” Later, it says the non-existent term “reverse racism” is an example of “racism.”
Lewis Carroll would have been proud.
The university also suggests that during one-on-one sessions with students, the RA should ask intrusive personal questions such as the following:
“When did you discover your sexual identity?” “When was the last time you felt oppressed?” “Who was oppressing you?” “How did it feel?”
“Can you think of a time when someone was offended by what you said?” How did it make you feel?” “How do you think it made them feel?”
Students who express discomfort with the questioning often meet with disapproval from the RA, who often writes a report on the student and delivers it to a superior. One student was identified in a write-up as the “worst” one-on-one session stating that she was tired of “having diversity shoved down her throat.”
According to the university materials, the goal of residence life education is for students in the university’s residence halls to achieve certain “competencies” that include statements like: “Students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society,” “Students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression,” and “Students will be able to utilize their knowledge of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality.”
In other words, the student can become competent by becoming a Marxist. Fortunately, Delaware stops short of requiring the student to wear a “Hillary 2008” t-shirt.
But that may well change soon.
Presently, students are actually pressured or even required to take actions that outwardly indicate agreement with the university’s official ideology, regardless of their beliefs as individuals. Such actions include displaying specific door decorations and committing to reduce their ecological footprint by at least 20% and fighting for “oppressed social groups.” (There is no indication that one of these groups is made up of University of Delaware residents who are oppressed by RAs who can’t stop asking “how do you feel?”).
In the Office of Residence Life’s internal materials, these programs are described using a chilling language of ideological re-education. In a manual relating to the assessment of student learning the residence hall lesson plans are actually referred to as “treatments.”
President Harker must be made aware of the United States Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943). Writing for the Court, Justice Robert H. Jackson declared, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
There is little question that the Barnette case applies to administrators at Delaware. Anyone can see that if these officials are not high, they are certainly petty.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
The University of Delaware has just become one of the most Orwellian campuses in America. Students in its residence halls are now being subjected to a re-education program that is actually dubbed - in the university’s own tax-payer funded materials - as “treatment” for students who have incorrect attitudes and beliefs.
Delaware now requires nearly 7,000 students in its residence halls to adopt specific public university-approved (read: government-approved) views on issues ranging from race, to sexuality, to philosophy. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (see www.TheFire.org) is calling for the total dismantling of the program. Readers of this column should call (302-831-2111) or write president@udel.edu to Patrick Harker President of The University of Delaware asking him to do the same.
It is not at all uncommon for a university to establish official views and try to force them on students in the residence hall environment. Students living in the university housing complexes are often required to attend training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs).
But, at Delaware, the RA who facilitates these meetings has already received his own training, including a “diversity facilitation training” session. There, he is taught that “[a] racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality.”
The Delaware RA is also taught that the term “reverse racism” is created by whites to deny their privilege. An official Delaware training manual says that “those in denial use the term reverse racism to refer to hostile behavior by people of color toward whites, and to affirmative action policies, which allegedly give ‘preferential treatment’ to people of color over whites.” Then, after defining the term “reverse racism” the manual claims that “there is no such thing as ‘reverse racism.’” Later, it says the non-existent term “reverse racism” is an example of “racism.”
Lewis Carroll would have been proud.
The university also suggests that during one-on-one sessions with students, the RA should ask intrusive personal questions such as the following:
“When did you discover your sexual identity?” “When was the last time you felt oppressed?” “Who was oppressing you?” “How did it feel?”
“Can you think of a time when someone was offended by what you said?” How did it make you feel?” “How do you think it made them feel?”
Students who express discomfort with the questioning often meet with disapproval from the RA, who often writes a report on the student and delivers it to a superior. One student was identified in a write-up as the “worst” one-on-one session stating that she was tired of “having diversity shoved down her throat.”
According to the university materials, the goal of residence life education is for students in the university’s residence halls to achieve certain “competencies” that include statements like: “Students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society,” “Students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression,” and “Students will be able to utilize their knowledge of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality.”
In other words, the student can become competent by becoming a Marxist. Fortunately, Delaware stops short of requiring the student to wear a “Hillary 2008” t-shirt.
But that may well change soon.
Presently, students are actually pressured or even required to take actions that outwardly indicate agreement with the university’s official ideology, regardless of their beliefs as individuals. Such actions include displaying specific door decorations and committing to reduce their ecological footprint by at least 20% and fighting for “oppressed social groups.” (There is no indication that one of these groups is made up of University of Delaware residents who are oppressed by RAs who can’t stop asking “how do you feel?”).
In the Office of Residence Life’s internal materials, these programs are described using a chilling language of ideological re-education. In a manual relating to the assessment of student learning the residence hall lesson plans are actually referred to as “treatments.”
President Harker must be made aware of the United States Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943). Writing for the Court, Justice Robert H. Jackson declared, “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
There is little question that the Barnette case applies to administrators at Delaware. Anyone can see that if these officials are not high, they are certainly petty.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Inconvenient Tax Truths
Charlie Rangel and other liberal leaders want to raise tax rates even if it means lower tax revenues.
By Pete Du Pont
Tuesday, October 30, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
Nobel Peace laureate Al Gore believes global warming is "an inconvenient truth." Here are some economic truths that America's liberal leadership finds too inconvenient to support.
Tax rate reductions increase tax revenues. This truth has been proved at both state and federal levels, including by President Bush's 2003 tax cuts on income, capital gains and dividends. Those reductions have raised federal tax receipts by $785 billion, the largest four-year revenue increase in U.S. history. In fiscal 2007, which ended last month, the government took in 6.7% more tax revenues than in 2006.
These increases in tax revenue have substantially reduced the federal budget deficits. In 2004 the deficit was $413 billion, or 3.5% of gross domestic product. It narrowed to $318 billion in 2005, $248 billion in 2006 and $163 billion in 2007. That last figure is just 1.2% of GDP, which is half of the average of the past 50 years.
Lower tax rates have be so successful in spurring growth that the percentage of federal income taxes paid by the very wealthy has increased. According to the Treasury Department, the top 1% of income tax filers paid just 19% of income taxes in 1980 (when the top tax rate was 70%), and 36% in 2003, the year the Bush tax cuts took effect (when the top rate became 35%). The top 5% of income taxpayers went from 37% of taxes paid to 56%, and the top 10% from 49% to 68% of taxes paid. And the amount of taxes paid by those earning more than $1 million a year rose to $236 billion in 2005 from $132 billion in 2003, a 78% increase.
Finally, another inconvenient truth is that there have been 49 consecutive months of job growth as a result of the economic expansion induced by President Bush's 2003 tax rate reductions.
One would think that this positive economic performance would inspire Congress to continue the successful policies that caused it. But the liberal establishment takes a negative view of tax rate reductions and embraces the opposite approach: ensure expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 2011 and in the meantime enact substantial tax increases.
Rep. Charles Rangel of New York, chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, last week introduced an estimated $3.5 trillion tax increase that would raise the capital gains tax rate from to 19.6% from 15% and places a surtax of as much as 4.6% on people making more than $150,000 a year. Mr. Rangel applies it not to current taxable income but to adjusted gross income, thus phasing down itemized deductions such as charitable contributions, home mortgage deductions, and state and local tax deductions. Together with the end of the Bush tax cuts, Mr. Rangel's plan would increase the top income tax rate to 44% from 35% for individuals, small-business owners and farmers, who make up about three-fourths of taxpayers in the highest bracket.
While raising taxes on individuals, the Rangel bill would reduce corporate tax rates to 30.5% from 35% and eliminate the alternative minimum tax. That would be "paid for" by increasing taxes on hedge funds and buyout firms by about $48 billion.
Federal tax revenues have been rising between 6.7% and 14.5% in each of the past three years, but the proposed tax increases, by slowing rather than stimulating the economy, would ensure that these percentages decline. Hillary Clinton defines the liberal tax policy as "we are going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good," but in the unlikely event that the tax bill passes Congress next year, President Bush's veto pen will surely take away from the liberal leadership things that will do harm to the common good.
On the other hand, the 2008 elections could lead to a very different outcome, for the Rangel bill shows in which direction tax policy will proceed if there is a Democratic president and Congress in 2009.
A much more interesting approach was introduced in the House three weeks ago by Rep. Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican: elimination of the Alternative Minimum Tax, extension of the 15% capital gains and dividend rates that expire in 2010, and giving taxpayers a choice between filing under the current tax system or a new option with just two income tax brackets, 10% for joint filers with incomes less than $100,000 and 25% for those with higher incomes. It includes a $25,000 standard deduction plus a $3,500-a-person exemption, which comes to $39,000 for a family of four. The new option would be a flat-tax choice, with no other exemptions or loopholes, and the AMT would be gone.
Every taxpayer would be able to make a choice between the current tax system with the AMT burden, tax rates from 10% to 35%, and many complex deduction options, or the Taxpayer Choice Act. Mr. Ryan estimates that the federal government's revenues--excluding AMT revenues, the elimination of which would cost the government only about 2.4% of revenues over 10 years--would be about the same as under the current system, and the top 5% and 1% of taxpayers would pay slightly higher taxes than they do today.
Such a system would stimulate the economy, increase economic growth and job opportunities, and simplify a very complex and frustrating current tax system. But for the liberal establishment a flat tax with lower rates would be a very inconvenient truth. Much better in their view are the substantial Rangel tax increases.
By Pete Du Pont
Tuesday, October 30, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
Nobel Peace laureate Al Gore believes global warming is "an inconvenient truth." Here are some economic truths that America's liberal leadership finds too inconvenient to support.
Tax rate reductions increase tax revenues. This truth has been proved at both state and federal levels, including by President Bush's 2003 tax cuts on income, capital gains and dividends. Those reductions have raised federal tax receipts by $785 billion, the largest four-year revenue increase in U.S. history. In fiscal 2007, which ended last month, the government took in 6.7% more tax revenues than in 2006.
These increases in tax revenue have substantially reduced the federal budget deficits. In 2004 the deficit was $413 billion, or 3.5% of gross domestic product. It narrowed to $318 billion in 2005, $248 billion in 2006 and $163 billion in 2007. That last figure is just 1.2% of GDP, which is half of the average of the past 50 years.
Lower tax rates have be so successful in spurring growth that the percentage of federal income taxes paid by the very wealthy has increased. According to the Treasury Department, the top 1% of income tax filers paid just 19% of income taxes in 1980 (when the top tax rate was 70%), and 36% in 2003, the year the Bush tax cuts took effect (when the top rate became 35%). The top 5% of income taxpayers went from 37% of taxes paid to 56%, and the top 10% from 49% to 68% of taxes paid. And the amount of taxes paid by those earning more than $1 million a year rose to $236 billion in 2005 from $132 billion in 2003, a 78% increase.
Finally, another inconvenient truth is that there have been 49 consecutive months of job growth as a result of the economic expansion induced by President Bush's 2003 tax rate reductions.
One would think that this positive economic performance would inspire Congress to continue the successful policies that caused it. But the liberal establishment takes a negative view of tax rate reductions and embraces the opposite approach: ensure expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 2011 and in the meantime enact substantial tax increases.
Rep. Charles Rangel of New York, chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, last week introduced an estimated $3.5 trillion tax increase that would raise the capital gains tax rate from to 19.6% from 15% and places a surtax of as much as 4.6% on people making more than $150,000 a year. Mr. Rangel applies it not to current taxable income but to adjusted gross income, thus phasing down itemized deductions such as charitable contributions, home mortgage deductions, and state and local tax deductions. Together with the end of the Bush tax cuts, Mr. Rangel's plan would increase the top income tax rate to 44% from 35% for individuals, small-business owners and farmers, who make up about three-fourths of taxpayers in the highest bracket.
While raising taxes on individuals, the Rangel bill would reduce corporate tax rates to 30.5% from 35% and eliminate the alternative minimum tax. That would be "paid for" by increasing taxes on hedge funds and buyout firms by about $48 billion.
Federal tax revenues have been rising between 6.7% and 14.5% in each of the past three years, but the proposed tax increases, by slowing rather than stimulating the economy, would ensure that these percentages decline. Hillary Clinton defines the liberal tax policy as "we are going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good," but in the unlikely event that the tax bill passes Congress next year, President Bush's veto pen will surely take away from the liberal leadership things that will do harm to the common good.
On the other hand, the 2008 elections could lead to a very different outcome, for the Rangel bill shows in which direction tax policy will proceed if there is a Democratic president and Congress in 2009.
A much more interesting approach was introduced in the House three weeks ago by Rep. Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican: elimination of the Alternative Minimum Tax, extension of the 15% capital gains and dividend rates that expire in 2010, and giving taxpayers a choice between filing under the current tax system or a new option with just two income tax brackets, 10% for joint filers with incomes less than $100,000 and 25% for those with higher incomes. It includes a $25,000 standard deduction plus a $3,500-a-person exemption, which comes to $39,000 for a family of four. The new option would be a flat-tax choice, with no other exemptions or loopholes, and the AMT would be gone.
Every taxpayer would be able to make a choice between the current tax system with the AMT burden, tax rates from 10% to 35%, and many complex deduction options, or the Taxpayer Choice Act. Mr. Ryan estimates that the federal government's revenues--excluding AMT revenues, the elimination of which would cost the government only about 2.4% of revenues over 10 years--would be about the same as under the current system, and the top 5% and 1% of taxpayers would pay slightly higher taxes than they do today.
Such a system would stimulate the economy, increase economic growth and job opportunities, and simplify a very complex and frustrating current tax system. But for the liberal establishment a flat tax with lower rates would be a very inconvenient truth. Much better in their view are the substantial Rangel tax increases.
The Left and the Term "Islamo-Fascism"
By Dennis Prager
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Last week, at universities around America, the conservative activist David Horowitz organized "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week." The week featured a guest speaker, the showing of the documentary, "Obsession," about radical Islam, and related activities.
As one of those speakers -- at the University of California at Santa Barbara -- I was particularly interested in the controversy Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week engendered as well as in the larger question of whether the term "Islamo-Fascism" is valid.
Various Muslim student groups condemned these awareness weeks and the term itself, charging that both are no more than expressions of anti-Muslim bigotry, i.e., "Islamophobia." Nevertheless, Muslim student groups decided not to actively disrupt the week. Therefore most of the opposition to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week events came from leftist student groups.
This opposition took the form of opposing funding of speakers invited to campus; writing articles in campus newspapers attacking the speakers, the Awareness Week and the term "Islamo-Fascism" as essentially racist; and in some cases disrupting the speech.
I experienced the first two forms of leftist opposition; David Horowitz experienced the third as well. He was invited to speak at Emory University, but leftist students packed the hall and shouted him down. Emory officials did nothing to stop the harassment and the suppression of speech, and Horowitz was unable to deliver his talk. It is considerably more difficult to get conservative speakers invited to most American universities -- or for them to be able to speak without being harassed -- than it is for a Holocaust-denying, genocide-advocating leader, such as Iran's Ahmadinejad at Columbia University, to deliver a speech at an American university.
In my case, about a quarter of the 300 students who came to my talk at UCSB were leftists opposed to my coming. But they allowed me to deliver my remarks without once trying to shout me down. There were, I believe, three reasons for this. One is that UCSB has a relatively calm political climate. Second, there was a serious police presence and it was clear that disrupters would be removed, if not arrested. Third, students told me afterward that I disarmed those who came to oppose me. Contrary to the demonized figure they had assumed I am -- in one UCSB student newspaper column, I was compared to a Ku Klux Klanner for speaking on Islamo-Fascism -- they saw a decent man, a sometimes funny guy, and heard a low-keyed, intellectual speech that contained not one word of gratuitous hatred.
It is worth mentioning that following my lecture, the student who wrote the column comparing me to a Ku Klux Klanner came over to me and said he was writing a column of apology to me and asked to be photographed with me. This is not surprising. Students at most universities are almost brainwashed into being leftist -- and the way they are taught to disagree with their political opponents is by using ad hominem attacks. Conservatives are described over and over as mean-spirited, war-loving, greedy, bigoted, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, homophobic, sexist, intolerant and oblivious to human suffering.
Such ad hominem labels are the left's primary rhetorical weapons. So when leftist students are actually confronted with even one articulate conservative, many enter a world of cognitive dissonance. That is one reason why universities rarely invite conservatives to speak: they might change some students' minds.
Regarding the term "Islamo-Fascism," most students heard the arguments I presented for the legitimacy of the term for the first time in their lives. Very briefly summarized, these arguments were:
First, the term is not anti-Muslim. One may object to the term on factual grounds, i.e., one may claim that there are no fascistic behaviors among people acting in the name of Islam -- but such a claim is a denial of the obvious.
So once one acknowledges the obvious, that there is fascistic behavior among a core of Muslims -- specifically, a cult of violence and the wanton use of physical force to impose an ideology on others -- the term "Islamo-Fascism" is entirely appropriate.
Second, the question then arises as to whether that term is anti-Muslim in that it besmirches the name of Islam and attempts to describe all Muslims as fascist. This objection, too, has a clear response.
The term no more implies all Muslims or Islam is fascistic than the term "German fascism" implied all Germans were fascists or "Italian fascism" or "Japanese fascism" implied that all Italians or all Japanese were fascists. Indeed, even religious groups have been labeled as fascist. During World War II, for example, Croatian Catholic fascists were called Catholic Fascists, and no one argued that the term was invalid because it purportedly labeled all Catholics or Catholicism fascist. When the left uses the term "American imperialism," are they implying that all Americans are imperialists? Then why does Islamo-Fascism label all Muslims?
Third, given the horrors being perpetrated by some Muslims in the name of Islam -- from the genocide currently being practiced by the Islamic Republic of Sudan, to the mass murders of innocents in Iraq, Israel, America, Britain, Bali, Thailand, the Philippines and elsewhere -- what term is more accurate than "Islamo-Fascism"? "Islamic totalitarianism"? "Jihadists"? "Bad Muslims"?
The left's organized crusade against Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week was simply the latest shame in the long and shameful history of the left's inability to confront those engaged in great evil -- like the left's ferocious opposition during the Cold War to labeling communism as "totalitarian" or "evil" and its nearly universal condemnation of President Ronald Reagan's description of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire."
That Muslim student groups and other Muslim organizations joined with the left in the ad hominem condemnation of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week was most unfortunate. Many Muslims know well that there is indeed such a thing as Islamo-Fascism, and they should be the first to join in fighting it. It is not those who use the term "Islamo-Fascism" who are sullying the name of Islam; it is the Islamo-Fascists.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Last week, at universities around America, the conservative activist David Horowitz organized "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week." The week featured a guest speaker, the showing of the documentary, "Obsession," about radical Islam, and related activities.
As one of those speakers -- at the University of California at Santa Barbara -- I was particularly interested in the controversy Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week engendered as well as in the larger question of whether the term "Islamo-Fascism" is valid.
Various Muslim student groups condemned these awareness weeks and the term itself, charging that both are no more than expressions of anti-Muslim bigotry, i.e., "Islamophobia." Nevertheless, Muslim student groups decided not to actively disrupt the week. Therefore most of the opposition to Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week events came from leftist student groups.
This opposition took the form of opposing funding of speakers invited to campus; writing articles in campus newspapers attacking the speakers, the Awareness Week and the term "Islamo-Fascism" as essentially racist; and in some cases disrupting the speech.
I experienced the first two forms of leftist opposition; David Horowitz experienced the third as well. He was invited to speak at Emory University, but leftist students packed the hall and shouted him down. Emory officials did nothing to stop the harassment and the suppression of speech, and Horowitz was unable to deliver his talk. It is considerably more difficult to get conservative speakers invited to most American universities -- or for them to be able to speak without being harassed -- than it is for a Holocaust-denying, genocide-advocating leader, such as Iran's Ahmadinejad at Columbia University, to deliver a speech at an American university.
In my case, about a quarter of the 300 students who came to my talk at UCSB were leftists opposed to my coming. But they allowed me to deliver my remarks without once trying to shout me down. There were, I believe, three reasons for this. One is that UCSB has a relatively calm political climate. Second, there was a serious police presence and it was clear that disrupters would be removed, if not arrested. Third, students told me afterward that I disarmed those who came to oppose me. Contrary to the demonized figure they had assumed I am -- in one UCSB student newspaper column, I was compared to a Ku Klux Klanner for speaking on Islamo-Fascism -- they saw a decent man, a sometimes funny guy, and heard a low-keyed, intellectual speech that contained not one word of gratuitous hatred.
It is worth mentioning that following my lecture, the student who wrote the column comparing me to a Ku Klux Klanner came over to me and said he was writing a column of apology to me and asked to be photographed with me. This is not surprising. Students at most universities are almost brainwashed into being leftist -- and the way they are taught to disagree with their political opponents is by using ad hominem attacks. Conservatives are described over and over as mean-spirited, war-loving, greedy, bigoted, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, homophobic, sexist, intolerant and oblivious to human suffering.
Such ad hominem labels are the left's primary rhetorical weapons. So when leftist students are actually confronted with even one articulate conservative, many enter a world of cognitive dissonance. That is one reason why universities rarely invite conservatives to speak: they might change some students' minds.
Regarding the term "Islamo-Fascism," most students heard the arguments I presented for the legitimacy of the term for the first time in their lives. Very briefly summarized, these arguments were:
First, the term is not anti-Muslim. One may object to the term on factual grounds, i.e., one may claim that there are no fascistic behaviors among people acting in the name of Islam -- but such a claim is a denial of the obvious.
So once one acknowledges the obvious, that there is fascistic behavior among a core of Muslims -- specifically, a cult of violence and the wanton use of physical force to impose an ideology on others -- the term "Islamo-Fascism" is entirely appropriate.
Second, the question then arises as to whether that term is anti-Muslim in that it besmirches the name of Islam and attempts to describe all Muslims as fascist. This objection, too, has a clear response.
The term no more implies all Muslims or Islam is fascistic than the term "German fascism" implied all Germans were fascists or "Italian fascism" or "Japanese fascism" implied that all Italians or all Japanese were fascists. Indeed, even religious groups have been labeled as fascist. During World War II, for example, Croatian Catholic fascists were called Catholic Fascists, and no one argued that the term was invalid because it purportedly labeled all Catholics or Catholicism fascist. When the left uses the term "American imperialism," are they implying that all Americans are imperialists? Then why does Islamo-Fascism label all Muslims?
Third, given the horrors being perpetrated by some Muslims in the name of Islam -- from the genocide currently being practiced by the Islamic Republic of Sudan, to the mass murders of innocents in Iraq, Israel, America, Britain, Bali, Thailand, the Philippines and elsewhere -- what term is more accurate than "Islamo-Fascism"? "Islamic totalitarianism"? "Jihadists"? "Bad Muslims"?
The left's organized crusade against Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week was simply the latest shame in the long and shameful history of the left's inability to confront those engaged in great evil -- like the left's ferocious opposition during the Cold War to labeling communism as "totalitarian" or "evil" and its nearly universal condemnation of President Ronald Reagan's description of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire."
That Muslim student groups and other Muslim organizations joined with the left in the ad hominem condemnation of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week was most unfortunate. Many Muslims know well that there is indeed such a thing as Islamo-Fascism, and they should be the first to join in fighting it. It is not those who use the term "Islamo-Fascism" who are sullying the name of Islam; it is the Islamo-Fascists.
A Letter to the Editor of the Star Tribue
Monday, October 29, 2007
I started listening to Garrison Keillor when I was a law student at the University of Minnesota and Keillor had the weekday morning drivetime slot on Minnesota Public Radio. I thought he was terrific, a guy with talent to burn who could easily make it on the national stage. That was more than thirty years ago. Since he achieved fame on the national stage, however, Keillor has turned into an extraordinarily depressive, unfunny humorist.
Apparently wanting to add yet another angry liberal to its stable of opinion writers, the Minneapolis Star Tribune has taken Keillor on as a weekly political commentator. Here's a representative bit of his political wit and wisdom:
C.A.A. Note: This is a letter written to a newspaper (along with a conservative blogger's commentary) and it contains enough interesting comments to warrant a post here.
I started listening to Garrison Keillor when I was a law student at the University of Minnesota and Keillor had the weekday morning drivetime slot on Minnesota Public Radio. I thought he was terrific, a guy with talent to burn who could easily make it on the national stage. That was more than thirty years ago. Since he achieved fame on the national stage, however, Keillor has turned into an extraordinarily depressive, unfunny humorist.
Apparently wanting to add yet another angry liberal to its stable of opinion writers, the Minneapolis Star Tribune has taken Keillor on as a weekly political commentator. Here's a representative bit of his political wit and wisdom:
Now I'm an old tired Democrat, sick of this infernal war that may go on for the rest of my life and in which more of our brethren will die miserably, both American and Iraqi. I'm sick of politics today, the cleverness and soullessness of it. I am still angry at Al Gore for wearing those stupid sweaters in 2000 and pretending he didn't know Bill Clinton, and I am angry at everyone who voted for Ralph Nader. I hope the next time they turn the key in the ignition their air bags blow up.The Star Tribune's thoroughgoing liberalism rules the paper from stem to stern with the exception of metro columnist Katherine Kersten -- and one columnist who has asked us to protect his or her identity. S/he writes that s/he has become the self-appointed "Anti-Keillor" to rebut Keillor's liberal rubbish whenever it appears in the Star Tribune. Because Keillor's wretched column appears in the Strib's expanded Sunday opinion section, our correspondent will be writing most Mondays, starting today. S/he writes:
In his October 28 column, Garrison Keillor refers to Republicans as the “I’ve Got Mine” party. Logically, that would make Democrats the “Give Me Yours” party, but name calling won’t get us anywhere.Our correspondent signs this letter to the editor as ""The Other Conservative Strib Columnist." I'm pretty sure it won't see the light of day in the Star Tribune, where the editor of the letters to the editor is -- what else? -- another know-nothing liberal.
Liberal Democrats like Keillor believe needy people need money, and that government must give it to them. The idea is that we all contribute to the pot through taxes, and then government expertly doles out the cash to those who need it most.
Traditional Republicans, however, believe that government tends to be wasteful and inefficient with money...or anything else. We think along the lines of P.J. O’Rourke, who wrote: "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."
I have yet to meet a liberal fan of higher taxes who ever wrote a donation check to the IRS. Why is that? If you really believe you’re helping the needy by paying more taxes, what’s stopping you?
Keillor writes that Republicans wrecked a consensus we once had in America about taxing people according to their ability to pay. But such a “consensus” could have existed only in the minds of liberals, who make up less than half the population. That’s not a consensus. And he left out the second half of Marx’s maxim, which is “to each according to his need,” presumably because that would have set off alarm bells.
Keillor also believes that well-off Americans have no interest in providing a safety net for the less-fortunate. He must not have seen the Nov. 28, 2006 report on ABC News (“Who Gives More -- The Rich or The Poor?”), which found that, of the top 25 states where people give an above-average percent of their income, 24 voted Republican in the last presidential election. Here's the most telling quote from that story: "You find that people who believe it's the government's job to make incomes more equal, are far less likely to give their money away."
Or Keillor must not have read Who Really Cares by Arthur Brooks, which demonstrates that conservatives give about 30 percent more to charity than liberals. And incidentally, conservative-headed families make slightly less money. If Garrison would like a copy of the book, just let me know. I’m happy to mail him one free. That’s what we conservatives do. We don’t wait for government to help others. We do it ourselves.
C.A.A. Note: This is a letter written to a newspaper (along with a conservative blogger's commentary) and it contains enough interesting comments to warrant a post here.
Monday, October 29, 2007
The Education of Rochelle Reed
By James Taranto
Monday, October 29, 2007 1:51 p.m. EDT
Rochelle Reed, an editor at the Tribune of San Luis Obispo, Calif., published an essay recently about her son's decision to join the Army. "This was definitely not the way things were supposed to turn out," Mrs. Reed writes:
Judging by Mrs. Reed's account, American liberals harbor a deep and invidious prejudice against the military--a prejudice Mrs. Reed herself is now overcoming, thanks to the bravery of her son.
A year ago, a famous liberal Democrat remarked, "You know, education--if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq." Perhaps he didn't know any better. Rochelle Reed now does.
Monday, October 29, 2007 1:51 p.m. EDT
Rochelle Reed, an editor at the Tribune of San Luis Obispo, Calif., published an essay recently about her son's decision to join the Army. "This was definitely not the way things were supposed to turn out," Mrs. Reed writes:
Never in a million years did I imagine my son would join the Army. Nor did Evan. In high school, he'd hang up on recruiters who called the house. He'd blurt, "Get away from me!" to the ones who trawled the local hangouts. Our home was liberal Democrat and anti-war and now, at 21, he was a Michael Moore fan. The night before he left, he spent his time reading "Stupid White Men." . . .Mrs. Reed's piece is sincere and candid, and our purpose in noting it is not to pick on her. But it is quite a window she provides into the "liberal Democrat and antiwar" subculture of which she is a part. Because of her family's politics, "never in a million years" did she think her son would join the military. The people she knows see his decision as a cause for sorrow, not pride. Mrs. Reed has to talk them out of the assumption that only "arrogant patriotism" (the adjective itself is telling) or "murderous bloodlust" would motivate someone to serve his country, that no "kid in his right mind" would do so.
When I tell people that Evan has joined the Army, their reactions are almost always the same: their faces freeze, they pause way too long, and then they say, "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry for you." I hang my head and look mournful, accepting their sympathy for the worry that lives in me. But as it dawns on them that Evan wasn't drafted, as Vietnam still clings to my generation, their expressions become quizzical, then disbelieving. I know what they're thinking: Why in the world would any kid in his right mind choose to enlist when we're in the middle of a war? I begin telling them the story, desperate to assure them it wasn't arrogant patriotism or murderous blood lust that convinced him to join. What finally hooked him was a recruiter's comment that if he thought the country's role in Iraq was so screwed up, he should try to fix it.
Judging by Mrs. Reed's account, American liberals harbor a deep and invidious prejudice against the military--a prejudice Mrs. Reed herself is now overcoming, thanks to the bravery of her son.
A year ago, a famous liberal Democrat remarked, "You know, education--if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq." Perhaps he didn't know any better. Rochelle Reed now does.
101 Love Crimes and Legislative Positions
By Lee Culpepper
Monday, October 29, 2007
Liberal politicians quiver in bliss -- stroking their delusional consciences. They pimp a provocative fantasy that liberals are born superiorly caring and compassionate. For liberals, lamenting social injustices indulges some perverse pleasures. While they wallow in their liberal love-fests for entitlement programs, their brand of kindness and charity merely exacerbates the inequalities they vow to amend.
In fact, liberals might love “victims” so much that the victims are literally incapacitated by love. Liberal entitlement programs are more like weapons of mass destruction. Whether motivated by good intensions or psychopathic satisfaction, liberals refuse to stop loving victims into oblivion.
Consequently, liberals are essentially getting away with heinous love crimes. Love crimes are a lot like hate crimes; they stem from stereotypes and bigoted opinions. “Vulnerabilities” like ethnicity, religion, sexual preference, and gender supposedly stimulate love (as opposed to hate) in offenders. Also analogous to hate crimes, love crimes can occur even when the offender bears no actual love (instead of hate) towards the victim. Liberals commit love crimes whenever they single out victims for government handouts based on some belief or stereotype about that group's alleged “vulnerability.” Unfortunately, liberals are enigmas. We may never know all the prejudiced weaknesses that stimulate their love.
Nevertheless, in exchange for this acidic tenderness, devotedly victimized disciples happily surrender votes and every scrap of self-reliance. Once victims are unable to take care of themselves, it’s too late. Liberals have already ravaged them. The government will never take care of any “victimized group” as well as the significant majority of that group can take care of itself. Furthermore, the charity of good citizens is a lot more reliable and effective than government handouts. Look at what happened to all those victims in New Orleans who waited on the government to take care of them during and after Katrina.
If Katrina is too narrow of an example, then consider the devastating consequences of the 1960’s “War on Poverty.” Liberals attacked crime with love -- awarding criminals “new” rights. As a result, violent crime and murder rates exploded. They ambushed children with sex education in public schools. Their love ambush catapulted teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases through the roof. Liberals also waylaid the poor by supporting unwed pregnancies and making welfare a career instead of temporary help. As a result of allegedly good intensions, the liberals’ “War on Poverty” obliterated the structure of black families in America.
In all fairness, maybe liberals are just legally insane -- repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Despite the continued failure of their unwavering do-gooder policies, liberals refuse to recognize the errors within their detrimental beliefs.
Liberal politicians generally have not suffered any consequences for their love crimes either. But the time has come for liberals to pay for all their love transgressions. Ironically, sentencing them to exactly what they want might be the justice they deserve.
President Bush spoke last week about the future of Cuba. As Fidel Castro inches ever closer to fertilizing palm trees, maybe we could negotiate shipping the liberals off to the People’s Paradise of Cuba. We could then more easily juxtapose their policies with Castro’s. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid could talk about how easily their version of the State Children’s Insurance Program would integrate with the wonderful public health care that already exists in Cuba – according to future-Cuban Michael Moore, of course.
And since Senator Hillary Clinton and President Jimmy Carter epitomize love crime offenders, the two of them should be sentenced to eternity together. Unfortunately for Bill, this would be one tryst he would have to sit out. (Hopefully, he would still move to Cuba though.) His exclusion from Cuban politics would simply be due to his idea of love crimes not fitting the legal definition.
Best of all, with Hillary and Jimmy in charge of Cuba, they would not need any of the evil profit that motivates big corporations to constantly improve technology. Liberals would be effervescent if we just dropped off legal marijuana and condoms every week. With everything they need in Cuba, liberals would be free to legislate 100 laws regarding how everyone can live at the expense of everyone else. And they could encapsulate all these positions under one more symbolic law, which would make it legal for all of them to die happy -- as they love each other to death.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Liberal politicians quiver in bliss -- stroking their delusional consciences. They pimp a provocative fantasy that liberals are born superiorly caring and compassionate. For liberals, lamenting social injustices indulges some perverse pleasures. While they wallow in their liberal love-fests for entitlement programs, their brand of kindness and charity merely exacerbates the inequalities they vow to amend.
In fact, liberals might love “victims” so much that the victims are literally incapacitated by love. Liberal entitlement programs are more like weapons of mass destruction. Whether motivated by good intensions or psychopathic satisfaction, liberals refuse to stop loving victims into oblivion.
Consequently, liberals are essentially getting away with heinous love crimes. Love crimes are a lot like hate crimes; they stem from stereotypes and bigoted opinions. “Vulnerabilities” like ethnicity, religion, sexual preference, and gender supposedly stimulate love (as opposed to hate) in offenders. Also analogous to hate crimes, love crimes can occur even when the offender bears no actual love (instead of hate) towards the victim. Liberals commit love crimes whenever they single out victims for government handouts based on some belief or stereotype about that group's alleged “vulnerability.” Unfortunately, liberals are enigmas. We may never know all the prejudiced weaknesses that stimulate their love.
Nevertheless, in exchange for this acidic tenderness, devotedly victimized disciples happily surrender votes and every scrap of self-reliance. Once victims are unable to take care of themselves, it’s too late. Liberals have already ravaged them. The government will never take care of any “victimized group” as well as the significant majority of that group can take care of itself. Furthermore, the charity of good citizens is a lot more reliable and effective than government handouts. Look at what happened to all those victims in New Orleans who waited on the government to take care of them during and after Katrina.
If Katrina is too narrow of an example, then consider the devastating consequences of the 1960’s “War on Poverty.” Liberals attacked crime with love -- awarding criminals “new” rights. As a result, violent crime and murder rates exploded. They ambushed children with sex education in public schools. Their love ambush catapulted teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases through the roof. Liberals also waylaid the poor by supporting unwed pregnancies and making welfare a career instead of temporary help. As a result of allegedly good intensions, the liberals’ “War on Poverty” obliterated the structure of black families in America.
In all fairness, maybe liberals are just legally insane -- repeating the same mistakes over and over again. Despite the continued failure of their unwavering do-gooder policies, liberals refuse to recognize the errors within their detrimental beliefs.
Liberal politicians generally have not suffered any consequences for their love crimes either. But the time has come for liberals to pay for all their love transgressions. Ironically, sentencing them to exactly what they want might be the justice they deserve.
President Bush spoke last week about the future of Cuba. As Fidel Castro inches ever closer to fertilizing palm trees, maybe we could negotiate shipping the liberals off to the People’s Paradise of Cuba. We could then more easily juxtapose their policies with Castro’s. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid could talk about how easily their version of the State Children’s Insurance Program would integrate with the wonderful public health care that already exists in Cuba – according to future-Cuban Michael Moore, of course.
And since Senator Hillary Clinton and President Jimmy Carter epitomize love crime offenders, the two of them should be sentenced to eternity together. Unfortunately for Bill, this would be one tryst he would have to sit out. (Hopefully, he would still move to Cuba though.) His exclusion from Cuban politics would simply be due to his idea of love crimes not fitting the legal definition.
Best of all, with Hillary and Jimmy in charge of Cuba, they would not need any of the evil profit that motivates big corporations to constantly improve technology. Liberals would be effervescent if we just dropped off legal marijuana and condoms every week. With everything they need in Cuba, liberals would be free to legislate 100 laws regarding how everyone can live at the expense of everyone else. And they could encapsulate all these positions under one more symbolic law, which would make it legal for all of them to die happy -- as they love each other to death.
'Fairness' Is Foul
Liberals vs. the First Amendment.
John Fund
Monday, October 29, 2007 12:01 a.m.
It wasn't that hard for Indiana's Rep. Mike Pence to build media and congressional support for his Free Flow of Information Act, which would protect the confidentiality of contacts between reporters and sources. It passed the House this month by an overwhelming vote of 398-21. His next battle will be a lot harder--to permanently ban the Fairness Doctrine, the regulation many liberals are now actively trying to revive in an effort to silence their critics.
Until the FCC scrapped the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, it required broadcasters to provide equal time to all sides of "controversial" issues. In practice, this led to what Bill Monroe, a former host of NBC's "Meet the Press," called "timid, don't-rock-the-boat coverage." On radio, Newsweek's Howard Fineman notes, it "effectively kept partisan shows off the airwaves," so that in 1980 there were a mere 75 talk radio stations. Today there are 1,800.
But the Fairness Doctrine has always had fans in the corridors of power because it gave incumbents a way of muzzling their opponents. The Kennedy administration used it as a political weapon. Bill Ruder, Kennedy's assistant secretary of commerce, explained: "Our strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue." The Nixon administration similarly used the doctrine to torment left-wing broadcasters.
Democrats who have become "Fairness" mongers insist they simply want to restore civility and balance to the airwaves. Al Gore, in a typically overheated speech last year bemoaned "the destruction of [the] marketplace of ideas" which he blamed in part on the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, after which "Rush Limbaugh and other hate-mongers began to fill the airwaves."
Sen. Dianne Feinstein rails against "one-sided programming" that has pushed the American people into "extreme views without a lot of information." She thinks Americans deserve to know "both sides of the story." Isn't it enough that National Public Radio, subsidized by the government, serves as a vehicle for liberal voices in just about every community in the country?
True, commercial radio is dominated by conservatives, but perhaps that's because liberal arguments in their full-throated glory just haven't sold as well. Air America, the liberal talk radio network that debuted in 2004, is in perpetual financial trouble. Then there's the GreenStone talk radio network started last year by feminists Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem. It offered cutting-edge liberal thinking pitched to a female audience--and flopped completely.
Rep. Pence says he knows all about the power of talk radio because he used to host a statewide show in Indiana, where he describes himself as "the decaf Rush Limbaugh." He believes the Fairness Doctrine would "amount to government control over political views expressed on the public airwaves." In June his first effort to impose a one-year moratorium on any revival of the Fairness Doctrine by the FCC passed, 309-115, with nearly half of House Democrats voting in favor.
But a one-year moratorium was an easy vote, because there is no reason to expect the Fairness Doctrine to make a comeback before 2009, when a new president--perhaps a Democrat--appoints a majority of FCC commissioners.
That's why Mr. Pence is proposing the Broadcaster Freedom Act, a bill that would permanently bury the Fairness Doctrine. Because House Democratic leaders are unlikely to allow it to come to the floor for a vote, Mr. Pence has launched a "discharge petition," a device to bypass House committees and move the bill directly to the floor. He needs 218 members--a House majority--to sign the petition. He has collected 185 signatures, but all from Republicans. Democrats are being told by their leadership that signing such a petition would undermine their control of the House.
Mr. Pence, says that "freedom should not be a partisan issue" and that he is optimistic that he can collect the signature of every Republican and then pluck off some 20 of the Democrats who voted for his one-year moratorium last summer (he'd need at least 18).
The stakes are high. "Lovers of liberty must expose calls to restore the Fairness Doctrine for the fraudulent power-grab that they plainly are," writes Brian Anderson, editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal.
That's because the attempts to control the airwaves won't stop with so-called equal time rules. Al Franken, the liberal former Air America host who is now running for the Senate in Minnesota, is already slipping into the role of potential legislative censor of his old industry. "You shouldn't be able to lie on the air," he told Newsweek's Mr. Fineman earlier this year. "You can't utter obscenities in a broadcast, so why should you be able to lie? You should be fined for lying."
In fact, you can be "fined" for lying, if the person you lie about successfully sues for defamation. But the First Amendment makes it exceedingly difficult for defamation plaintiffs to prevail, especially if they are public figures--and for good reason. Under a more pro-plaintiff legal regime, "the pall of fear and timidity imposed upon those who would give voice to public criticism is an atmosphere in which the First Amendment freedoms cannot survive," Justice William Brennan wrote in New York Times v. Sullivan (1964).
Justice Brennan used to be a liberal hero. If he were alive today, he would surely be dismayed to learn that liberals seem to have concluded they have no use for the First Amendment.
John Fund
Monday, October 29, 2007 12:01 a.m.
It wasn't that hard for Indiana's Rep. Mike Pence to build media and congressional support for his Free Flow of Information Act, which would protect the confidentiality of contacts between reporters and sources. It passed the House this month by an overwhelming vote of 398-21. His next battle will be a lot harder--to permanently ban the Fairness Doctrine, the regulation many liberals are now actively trying to revive in an effort to silence their critics.
Until the FCC scrapped the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, it required broadcasters to provide equal time to all sides of "controversial" issues. In practice, this led to what Bill Monroe, a former host of NBC's "Meet the Press," called "timid, don't-rock-the-boat coverage." On radio, Newsweek's Howard Fineman notes, it "effectively kept partisan shows off the airwaves," so that in 1980 there were a mere 75 talk radio stations. Today there are 1,800.
But the Fairness Doctrine has always had fans in the corridors of power because it gave incumbents a way of muzzling their opponents. The Kennedy administration used it as a political weapon. Bill Ruder, Kennedy's assistant secretary of commerce, explained: "Our strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue." The Nixon administration similarly used the doctrine to torment left-wing broadcasters.
Democrats who have become "Fairness" mongers insist they simply want to restore civility and balance to the airwaves. Al Gore, in a typically overheated speech last year bemoaned "the destruction of [the] marketplace of ideas" which he blamed in part on the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, after which "Rush Limbaugh and other hate-mongers began to fill the airwaves."
Sen. Dianne Feinstein rails against "one-sided programming" that has pushed the American people into "extreme views without a lot of information." She thinks Americans deserve to know "both sides of the story." Isn't it enough that National Public Radio, subsidized by the government, serves as a vehicle for liberal voices in just about every community in the country?
True, commercial radio is dominated by conservatives, but perhaps that's because liberal arguments in their full-throated glory just haven't sold as well. Air America, the liberal talk radio network that debuted in 2004, is in perpetual financial trouble. Then there's the GreenStone talk radio network started last year by feminists Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem. It offered cutting-edge liberal thinking pitched to a female audience--and flopped completely.
Rep. Pence says he knows all about the power of talk radio because he used to host a statewide show in Indiana, where he describes himself as "the decaf Rush Limbaugh." He believes the Fairness Doctrine would "amount to government control over political views expressed on the public airwaves." In June his first effort to impose a one-year moratorium on any revival of the Fairness Doctrine by the FCC passed, 309-115, with nearly half of House Democrats voting in favor.
But a one-year moratorium was an easy vote, because there is no reason to expect the Fairness Doctrine to make a comeback before 2009, when a new president--perhaps a Democrat--appoints a majority of FCC commissioners.
That's why Mr. Pence is proposing the Broadcaster Freedom Act, a bill that would permanently bury the Fairness Doctrine. Because House Democratic leaders are unlikely to allow it to come to the floor for a vote, Mr. Pence has launched a "discharge petition," a device to bypass House committees and move the bill directly to the floor. He needs 218 members--a House majority--to sign the petition. He has collected 185 signatures, but all from Republicans. Democrats are being told by their leadership that signing such a petition would undermine their control of the House.
Mr. Pence, says that "freedom should not be a partisan issue" and that he is optimistic that he can collect the signature of every Republican and then pluck off some 20 of the Democrats who voted for his one-year moratorium last summer (he'd need at least 18).
The stakes are high. "Lovers of liberty must expose calls to restore the Fairness Doctrine for the fraudulent power-grab that they plainly are," writes Brian Anderson, editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal.
That's because the attempts to control the airwaves won't stop with so-called equal time rules. Al Franken, the liberal former Air America host who is now running for the Senate in Minnesota, is already slipping into the role of potential legislative censor of his old industry. "You shouldn't be able to lie on the air," he told Newsweek's Mr. Fineman earlier this year. "You can't utter obscenities in a broadcast, so why should you be able to lie? You should be fined for lying."
In fact, you can be "fined" for lying, if the person you lie about successfully sues for defamation. But the First Amendment makes it exceedingly difficult for defamation plaintiffs to prevail, especially if they are public figures--and for good reason. Under a more pro-plaintiff legal regime, "the pall of fear and timidity imposed upon those who would give voice to public criticism is an atmosphere in which the First Amendment freedoms cannot survive," Justice William Brennan wrote in New York Times v. Sullivan (1964).
Justice Brennan used to be a liberal hero. If he were alive today, he would surely be dismayed to learn that liberals seem to have concluded they have no use for the First Amendment.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
The Return of the Thought Police
"Hate crime" legislation is an assault on civil liberties.
By Wendy Kaminer
Sunday, October 28, 2007 12:01 a.m.
I mean no disregard for the sufferings of crime victims when I say we should be wary of laws named after them. However well-intentioned, penal laws that memorialize victims deter reasoned debate about the rights of the accused. They rely on emotional blackmail: Oppose a law named for a murdered child, and you seem to insult her memory and exacerbate her parents' grief.
The Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act is no exception to this rule. By invoking memories of University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard's brutal 1998 slaying, it makes a sentimental bid for expanded federal hate-crime legislation covering violent crimes motivated by a victim's sexual orientation or "gender identity," as well as race, sex, religion, ethnicity or disability.
Its prospects are dimmed by the threat of a presidential veto, but last month the Matthew Shepard Act was attached to the Defense Appropriations Bill by a 60-vote majority in the Senate; a companion bill passed the House (with the support of 212 Democrats and 25 Republicans.) Naturally, the bill enjoys the enthusiastic support of civil-rights groups, including the historically civil libertarian American Civil Liberties Union.
The ACLU has withheld support from hate-crime legislation in the past but wholeheartedly embraces this bill, which applies only to acts of violence and has been carefully drafted to avoid criminalizing pure speech: It provides that evidence of a defendant's hateful speech or associations are only admissible at trial if they "specifically relate" to the offense charged. In other words, speech could be offered as evidence that a violent act was motivated by bias, but it would not be a crime in itself.
Still, distinguishing hateful bias crimes from other hateful acts of violence punishes ideas and expression, no matter how scrupulously the legislation is crafted. When someone convicted of assaulting one woman is subject to an enhanced prison sentence or a more vigorous prosecution because his assault was motivated by a hateful belief in the inherent inferiority of all women, then he is being punished for his thoughts as well as his conduct.
While motive or state of mind are routinely considered in criminal cases (as mitigating or aggravating factors,) ideology is not routinely invoked in determining the seriousness of an alleged crime. Hate crime legislation, however, is expressly designed to punish particular thoughts or ideas.
Its advocates argue that hate crimes demand differential treatment because they are crimes against communities, not just individuals. Hate crimes "are more serious than a normal assault because they target not just an individual, but an entire group of people," New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler asserts. So, without directly criminalizing speech, the proposed Matthew Shepard Act (like other hate-crime laws) does effectively and intentionally criminalize bias, when bias is shown to bear a direct relationship to a violent crime.
It's not surprising that civil-rights advocates concerned with what they view as epidemics of unaddressed violence against particular, presumptively vulnerable groups support the criminalization of bias. Civil libertarians, however, ought to be more sensitive to the creation of thought crimes--even when "bad" thoughts are only punished in the course of punishing bad acts. Free-speech advocates who believe that misogynist pornography should be legal, for example, should question whether evidence of a defendant's porn collection should be introduced at a sexual-assault trial in order to convict him of a hate crime. It's sophistry to suggest that in such a case the defendant would suffer punishment only for his conduct, and not his beliefs.
But freedom of thought is not the only liberty at stake in this debate. The Matthew Shepard Act would also subject defendants to double jeopardy for a single offense. The bill expressly states that defendants prosecuted in state court may be prosecuted for the same crime in federal court, if federal officials determine that "the verdict or sentence obtained pursuant to state charges left demonstrably unvindicated the federal interest in eradicating bias-motivated violence."
The constitutionality of this provision is not in question. The Supreme Court has long allowed state and federal authorities to conduct separate trials for the same offense, and reasonable people will differ as to the justice of this, especially when the state has demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to prosecute fairly a horrendous crime.
Civil rights-era cases offer the best argument for dual prosecutions by dual sovereigns: In 1965, federal prosecutors convicted Klan member Collie LeRoy Wilkins of a civil-rights crime in the killing of activist Viola Liuzzo after his acquittal in Alabama state court. More recently, in a controversial 1993 case, federal prosecutors convicted two police officers of beating Los Angeles motorist Rodney King (and violating his civil rights) after their acquittal by the state of California.
Still, exceptions to double jeopardy remain controversial for civil libertarians: The ACLU officially opposes dual prosecutions, stating, "There should be no exception to double jeopardy principles simply because the same offense may be prosecuted by two different sovereigns . . . even important federal interests do not justify balancing away a defendant's rights under the double jeopardy clause."
This policy was briefly suspended by the ACLU board in 1992, in response to the Rodney King case, but it was reinstated in 1993 after an impassioned debate. The ACLU's unequivocal endorsement of the Matthew Shepard Act violates its own stated, civil-liberties principles (which will perhaps be amended soon).
Is it necessary or fair to expand federal criminal jurisdiction to allow for dual federal and state prosecutions of alleged hate crimes? Arguably--if strong empirical evidence demonstrates that states are generally unwilling or unable to prosecute these crimes. Otherwise federal hate-crime legislation addresses an illusory threat to civil rights, while it exacerbates an actual crisis for civil liberty.
The continuing expansion of federal criminal jurisdiction has given federal law enforcement officials unprecedented power over each of us. As Gene Healy of the Cato Institute has observed, the federal criminal code is so vast and comprehensive that it enables prosecutors to "pick targets they think they should get rather than offenses that need to be prosecuted." Mr. Healy estimates that about 4,000 crimes are "scattered throughout the tens of thousands of pages of the United States code," stressing that the exact increase in federal crimes has been difficult to track. One frequently cited 1999 study by the American Bar Association noted that 40% of all federal criminal laws enacted after the Civil War dated back only to 1970.
While libertarians have mounted consistent, principled resistance to this expansion of federal criminal jurisdiction (and Cato offered thoughtful testimony against the federal hate-crime bill), generally both liberals and conservatives have adopted result-oriented approaches to federalizing crime: Liberals who favor decriminalizing marijuana possession oppose federal laws prohibiting it, which conservative anti-drug warriors support. Liberal gay rights advocates support the federalization of bias crimes against gay people, which conservatives wary of expanding gay rights oppose.
This may look like pragmatism, but it's more like shortsightedness. Expansions of federal criminal jurisdiction are often responses to concerns of the moment--from carjacking and cockfighting to child abuse and juvenile crime--that can be addressed adequately by the states (especially with federal incentives). The necessity of many federal penal laws is more often presumed than demonstrated, and outweighed by the cumulative threat that this growing body of law poses to liberty.
Matthew Shepard's killers were convicted of homicide and kidnapping by the state of Wyoming and are serving consecutive life sentences. His torture and murder remain awful to contemplate, but civil libertarians ought not be squeamish about questioning the consequences of the law that would bear his name.
By Wendy Kaminer
Sunday, October 28, 2007 12:01 a.m.
I mean no disregard for the sufferings of crime victims when I say we should be wary of laws named after them. However well-intentioned, penal laws that memorialize victims deter reasoned debate about the rights of the accused. They rely on emotional blackmail: Oppose a law named for a murdered child, and you seem to insult her memory and exacerbate her parents' grief.
The Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act is no exception to this rule. By invoking memories of University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard's brutal 1998 slaying, it makes a sentimental bid for expanded federal hate-crime legislation covering violent crimes motivated by a victim's sexual orientation or "gender identity," as well as race, sex, religion, ethnicity or disability.
Its prospects are dimmed by the threat of a presidential veto, but last month the Matthew Shepard Act was attached to the Defense Appropriations Bill by a 60-vote majority in the Senate; a companion bill passed the House (with the support of 212 Democrats and 25 Republicans.) Naturally, the bill enjoys the enthusiastic support of civil-rights groups, including the historically civil libertarian American Civil Liberties Union.
The ACLU has withheld support from hate-crime legislation in the past but wholeheartedly embraces this bill, which applies only to acts of violence and has been carefully drafted to avoid criminalizing pure speech: It provides that evidence of a defendant's hateful speech or associations are only admissible at trial if they "specifically relate" to the offense charged. In other words, speech could be offered as evidence that a violent act was motivated by bias, but it would not be a crime in itself.
Still, distinguishing hateful bias crimes from other hateful acts of violence punishes ideas and expression, no matter how scrupulously the legislation is crafted. When someone convicted of assaulting one woman is subject to an enhanced prison sentence or a more vigorous prosecution because his assault was motivated by a hateful belief in the inherent inferiority of all women, then he is being punished for his thoughts as well as his conduct.
While motive or state of mind are routinely considered in criminal cases (as mitigating or aggravating factors,) ideology is not routinely invoked in determining the seriousness of an alleged crime. Hate crime legislation, however, is expressly designed to punish particular thoughts or ideas.
Its advocates argue that hate crimes demand differential treatment because they are crimes against communities, not just individuals. Hate crimes "are more serious than a normal assault because they target not just an individual, but an entire group of people," New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler asserts. So, without directly criminalizing speech, the proposed Matthew Shepard Act (like other hate-crime laws) does effectively and intentionally criminalize bias, when bias is shown to bear a direct relationship to a violent crime.
It's not surprising that civil-rights advocates concerned with what they view as epidemics of unaddressed violence against particular, presumptively vulnerable groups support the criminalization of bias. Civil libertarians, however, ought to be more sensitive to the creation of thought crimes--even when "bad" thoughts are only punished in the course of punishing bad acts. Free-speech advocates who believe that misogynist pornography should be legal, for example, should question whether evidence of a defendant's porn collection should be introduced at a sexual-assault trial in order to convict him of a hate crime. It's sophistry to suggest that in such a case the defendant would suffer punishment only for his conduct, and not his beliefs.
But freedom of thought is not the only liberty at stake in this debate. The Matthew Shepard Act would also subject defendants to double jeopardy for a single offense. The bill expressly states that defendants prosecuted in state court may be prosecuted for the same crime in federal court, if federal officials determine that "the verdict or sentence obtained pursuant to state charges left demonstrably unvindicated the federal interest in eradicating bias-motivated violence."
The constitutionality of this provision is not in question. The Supreme Court has long allowed state and federal authorities to conduct separate trials for the same offense, and reasonable people will differ as to the justice of this, especially when the state has demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to prosecute fairly a horrendous crime.
Civil rights-era cases offer the best argument for dual prosecutions by dual sovereigns: In 1965, federal prosecutors convicted Klan member Collie LeRoy Wilkins of a civil-rights crime in the killing of activist Viola Liuzzo after his acquittal in Alabama state court. More recently, in a controversial 1993 case, federal prosecutors convicted two police officers of beating Los Angeles motorist Rodney King (and violating his civil rights) after their acquittal by the state of California.
Still, exceptions to double jeopardy remain controversial for civil libertarians: The ACLU officially opposes dual prosecutions, stating, "There should be no exception to double jeopardy principles simply because the same offense may be prosecuted by two different sovereigns . . . even important federal interests do not justify balancing away a defendant's rights under the double jeopardy clause."
This policy was briefly suspended by the ACLU board in 1992, in response to the Rodney King case, but it was reinstated in 1993 after an impassioned debate. The ACLU's unequivocal endorsement of the Matthew Shepard Act violates its own stated, civil-liberties principles (which will perhaps be amended soon).
Is it necessary or fair to expand federal criminal jurisdiction to allow for dual federal and state prosecutions of alleged hate crimes? Arguably--if strong empirical evidence demonstrates that states are generally unwilling or unable to prosecute these crimes. Otherwise federal hate-crime legislation addresses an illusory threat to civil rights, while it exacerbates an actual crisis for civil liberty.
The continuing expansion of federal criminal jurisdiction has given federal law enforcement officials unprecedented power over each of us. As Gene Healy of the Cato Institute has observed, the federal criminal code is so vast and comprehensive that it enables prosecutors to "pick targets they think they should get rather than offenses that need to be prosecuted." Mr. Healy estimates that about 4,000 crimes are "scattered throughout the tens of thousands of pages of the United States code," stressing that the exact increase in federal crimes has been difficult to track. One frequently cited 1999 study by the American Bar Association noted that 40% of all federal criminal laws enacted after the Civil War dated back only to 1970.
While libertarians have mounted consistent, principled resistance to this expansion of federal criminal jurisdiction (and Cato offered thoughtful testimony against the federal hate-crime bill), generally both liberals and conservatives have adopted result-oriented approaches to federalizing crime: Liberals who favor decriminalizing marijuana possession oppose federal laws prohibiting it, which conservative anti-drug warriors support. Liberal gay rights advocates support the federalization of bias crimes against gay people, which conservatives wary of expanding gay rights oppose.
This may look like pragmatism, but it's more like shortsightedness. Expansions of federal criminal jurisdiction are often responses to concerns of the moment--from carjacking and cockfighting to child abuse and juvenile crime--that can be addressed adequately by the states (especially with federal incentives). The necessity of many federal penal laws is more often presumed than demonstrated, and outweighed by the cumulative threat that this growing body of law poses to liberty.
Matthew Shepard's killers were convicted of homicide and kidnapping by the state of Wyoming and are serving consecutive life sentences. His torture and murder remain awful to contemplate, but civil libertarians ought not be squeamish about questioning the consequences of the law that would bear his name.
War, like life, is not a movie
By Mark Steyn
Saturday, October 27, 2007
As far as I know, the movie "Deliverance" has been featured in political discourse just the once. Back in 1996, Pat Buchanan, hot from his triumph over Bob Dole in the New Hampshire primary, warned the country-club Republicans that he was coming to get them "like a character out of Deliverance." In the film, you'll recall, a quartet of suburban guys spend a nightmare weekend in the backwoods, in the course of which one of their number winds up getting sodomized by a mountain man. ("Squeal, piggy!")
At the time of Pat's remark, I remember thinking: What a great country! In how many other political cultures can a fellow identify himself with a stump-toothed inbred psycho hillbilly homosexual rapist as an applause line? I'd love to think he'd paid some demographic-positioning consultants to focus-group the thing, but it seems more likely it was an impromptu flourish by the candidate.
Now, however, Newsweek has attempted a more sustained political deployment of the movie. In a column headlined "War and Deliverance," their Middle East editor, Christopher Dickey, makes the picture the defining metaphor for "the Mesopotamian quagmire." The Atlanta suburbanites in the picture include Burt Reynolds as the obsessive wannabe back-to-nature survivalist and Jon Voight as "the perfectly ordinary man, the just-getting-by guy," but the one who, in the end, delivers his pals from the hell of their weekend in the country.
Unlike most of us, whose knowledge of the film relies on hazy memories from the 1970s and late-night TV screenings, Dickey knows the story in depth: His dad wrote the novel and the screenplay. And, as he sees it, the Burt Reynolds character with his "untested ersatz fortitude" is "Dick Cheney's closet fantasy of himself," and the Jon Voight character is "the rest of us, just scared and trying to get by." As for the river whose rapids they set out to negotiate, "that's the war in Iraq."
Christopher Dickey paints with a broad brush: "On a grand scale they [the administration] could reinterpret the Constitution until it became meaningless." (Monitoring jihadist phone logs being the reinterpretation into meaninglessness, unlike, say, partial-birth abortion, which is merely an ancient constitutional right the founders had cannily anticipated a need for.) So one's first reaction to this is a faint flicker of surprise that Dickey doesn't see Cheney as the mountain man and the Constitution as his rape victim. One's second reaction is that the metaphor is dishonest. When it comes to "closet fantasies" about toppling Saddam, it's not Dick Cheney versus "the rest of us." Throughout the 1990s and all the way up to the Iraq war resolution, there were a lot of folks auditioning for the Burt Reynolds role: Bill Clinton, Al Gore and almost every other prominent Democrat indulged in just as much "ersatz fortitude" about Iraq and its WMD as Dick Cheney ever did.
But the third and bigger point is that, enjoyable as they are, pop-culture metaphors aren't really of much use, especially when you're up against cultures where life is still defined by how you live as opposed to what you experience via media. It seems to me, for example, that when anti-war types bemoan Iraq as this generation's Vietnam "quagmire," older folks are thinking of the real Vietnam – the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and whatnot – but most anybody under 50 is thinking of Vietnam movies: some vague video-store mélange of "The Full Metal Deer Apocalypse."
Take the Scott Thomas Beauchamp debacle at the New Republic, in which the magazine ran an atrocity-a-go-go Baghdad diary piece by a serving soldier about dehumanized troops desecrating graves, abusing disfigured women, etc. It smelled phony from the get-go – except to the professional media class from whose ranks the New Republic's editors are drawn: To them, it smelled great, because it aligned reality with the movie looping endlessly through the windmills of their mind, a nonstop Coppola-Stone retrospective in which ill-educated conscripts are the dupes of a nutso officer class.
It's the same with all those guys driving around with "9/11 Was An Inside Job" bumper stickers. That aligns reality with every conspiracy movie from the past three decades: It's always the government who did it – sometimes it's some supersecret agency working deep within the bureaucracy from behind an unassuming nameplate on a Washington street; and sometimes it's the president himself – but when poor Joe Schmoe on the lam from the Feds eventually unravels it, the cunning conspiracy is always the work of a ruthlessly efficient all-powerful state. So Iraq is Vietnam. And 9/11 is the Kennedy assassination, with ever higher percentages of the American people gathering on the melted steely knoll.
There's a kind of decadence about all this: If 9/11 was really an inside job, you wouldn't be driving around with a bumper sticker bragging that you were on to it. Fantasy is a by-product of security: it's the difference between hanging upside down in your dominatrix's bondage parlor after work on Friday and enduring the real thing for years on end in Saddam's prisons.
That's the real flaw in Christopher Dickey's "Deliverance" metaphor: If Cheney is Burt Reynolds, and the rest of America is Jon Voight, and the river is Iraq, who are the hillbillies? Well, presumably (for he doesn't spell it out) they're the dark forces you make yourself vulnerable to when you blunder into somewhere you shouldn't be. When the quartet returns to Atlanta a man short, they may understand how thin the veneer of civilization is, but they don't have to worry that their suburban cul-de-sacs will be overrun and reduced to the same state of nature as the backwoods.
That's the flaw in the thesis: Robert D. Kaplan, a shrewd observer of global affairs, has referred to the jihadist redoubts and other lawless fringes of the map as "Indian territory." It's a cute joke but a misleading one. The difference between the old Indian territory and the new is this: No one had to worry about the Sioux riding down Fifth Avenue, just as Burt Reynolds never had to worry about the mountain man breaking into his rec room. But Iran has put bounties on London novelists, assassinated dissidents in Paris, blown up community centers in Buenos Aires, seeded proxy terror groups in Lebanon and Palestine, radicalized Muslim populations throughout Central Asia – and it's now going nuclear. The leaders of North Korea, Sudan and Syria are not stump-toothed Appalachian losers: Their emissaries wear suits and dine in Manhattan restaurants every night.
Life is not a movie, especially when your enemies don't watch the same movies, and don't buy into the same tired narratives. To return to that 1996 presidential race, Bob Dole, apropos Pat Buchanan's experience hosting a CNN talk-show, muttered testily at one point, "I was in the real crossfire. It wasn't on television. It was over in Italy somewhere, a long time ago." Happy the land for whom crossfire is purely televisual and metaphorical. But, when it turns real, it's important to know the difference.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
As far as I know, the movie "Deliverance" has been featured in political discourse just the once. Back in 1996, Pat Buchanan, hot from his triumph over Bob Dole in the New Hampshire primary, warned the country-club Republicans that he was coming to get them "like a character out of Deliverance." In the film, you'll recall, a quartet of suburban guys spend a nightmare weekend in the backwoods, in the course of which one of their number winds up getting sodomized by a mountain man. ("Squeal, piggy!")
At the time of Pat's remark, I remember thinking: What a great country! In how many other political cultures can a fellow identify himself with a stump-toothed inbred psycho hillbilly homosexual rapist as an applause line? I'd love to think he'd paid some demographic-positioning consultants to focus-group the thing, but it seems more likely it was an impromptu flourish by the candidate.
Now, however, Newsweek has attempted a more sustained political deployment of the movie. In a column headlined "War and Deliverance," their Middle East editor, Christopher Dickey, makes the picture the defining metaphor for "the Mesopotamian quagmire." The Atlanta suburbanites in the picture include Burt Reynolds as the obsessive wannabe back-to-nature survivalist and Jon Voight as "the perfectly ordinary man, the just-getting-by guy," but the one who, in the end, delivers his pals from the hell of their weekend in the country.
Unlike most of us, whose knowledge of the film relies on hazy memories from the 1970s and late-night TV screenings, Dickey knows the story in depth: His dad wrote the novel and the screenplay. And, as he sees it, the Burt Reynolds character with his "untested ersatz fortitude" is "Dick Cheney's closet fantasy of himself," and the Jon Voight character is "the rest of us, just scared and trying to get by." As for the river whose rapids they set out to negotiate, "that's the war in Iraq."
Christopher Dickey paints with a broad brush: "On a grand scale they [the administration] could reinterpret the Constitution until it became meaningless." (Monitoring jihadist phone logs being the reinterpretation into meaninglessness, unlike, say, partial-birth abortion, which is merely an ancient constitutional right the founders had cannily anticipated a need for.) So one's first reaction to this is a faint flicker of surprise that Dickey doesn't see Cheney as the mountain man and the Constitution as his rape victim. One's second reaction is that the metaphor is dishonest. When it comes to "closet fantasies" about toppling Saddam, it's not Dick Cheney versus "the rest of us." Throughout the 1990s and all the way up to the Iraq war resolution, there were a lot of folks auditioning for the Burt Reynolds role: Bill Clinton, Al Gore and almost every other prominent Democrat indulged in just as much "ersatz fortitude" about Iraq and its WMD as Dick Cheney ever did.
But the third and bigger point is that, enjoyable as they are, pop-culture metaphors aren't really of much use, especially when you're up against cultures where life is still defined by how you live as opposed to what you experience via media. It seems to me, for example, that when anti-war types bemoan Iraq as this generation's Vietnam "quagmire," older folks are thinking of the real Vietnam – the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and whatnot – but most anybody under 50 is thinking of Vietnam movies: some vague video-store mélange of "The Full Metal Deer Apocalypse."
Take the Scott Thomas Beauchamp debacle at the New Republic, in which the magazine ran an atrocity-a-go-go Baghdad diary piece by a serving soldier about dehumanized troops desecrating graves, abusing disfigured women, etc. It smelled phony from the get-go – except to the professional media class from whose ranks the New Republic's editors are drawn: To them, it smelled great, because it aligned reality with the movie looping endlessly through the windmills of their mind, a nonstop Coppola-Stone retrospective in which ill-educated conscripts are the dupes of a nutso officer class.
It's the same with all those guys driving around with "9/11 Was An Inside Job" bumper stickers. That aligns reality with every conspiracy movie from the past three decades: It's always the government who did it – sometimes it's some supersecret agency working deep within the bureaucracy from behind an unassuming nameplate on a Washington street; and sometimes it's the president himself – but when poor Joe Schmoe on the lam from the Feds eventually unravels it, the cunning conspiracy is always the work of a ruthlessly efficient all-powerful state. So Iraq is Vietnam. And 9/11 is the Kennedy assassination, with ever higher percentages of the American people gathering on the melted steely knoll.
There's a kind of decadence about all this: If 9/11 was really an inside job, you wouldn't be driving around with a bumper sticker bragging that you were on to it. Fantasy is a by-product of security: it's the difference between hanging upside down in your dominatrix's bondage parlor after work on Friday and enduring the real thing for years on end in Saddam's prisons.
That's the real flaw in Christopher Dickey's "Deliverance" metaphor: If Cheney is Burt Reynolds, and the rest of America is Jon Voight, and the river is Iraq, who are the hillbillies? Well, presumably (for he doesn't spell it out) they're the dark forces you make yourself vulnerable to when you blunder into somewhere you shouldn't be. When the quartet returns to Atlanta a man short, they may understand how thin the veneer of civilization is, but they don't have to worry that their suburban cul-de-sacs will be overrun and reduced to the same state of nature as the backwoods.
That's the flaw in the thesis: Robert D. Kaplan, a shrewd observer of global affairs, has referred to the jihadist redoubts and other lawless fringes of the map as "Indian territory." It's a cute joke but a misleading one. The difference between the old Indian territory and the new is this: No one had to worry about the Sioux riding down Fifth Avenue, just as Burt Reynolds never had to worry about the mountain man breaking into his rec room. But Iran has put bounties on London novelists, assassinated dissidents in Paris, blown up community centers in Buenos Aires, seeded proxy terror groups in Lebanon and Palestine, radicalized Muslim populations throughout Central Asia – and it's now going nuclear. The leaders of North Korea, Sudan and Syria are not stump-toothed Appalachian losers: Their emissaries wear suits and dine in Manhattan restaurants every night.
Life is not a movie, especially when your enemies don't watch the same movies, and don't buy into the same tired narratives. To return to that 1996 presidential race, Bob Dole, apropos Pat Buchanan's experience hosting a CNN talk-show, muttered testily at one point, "I was in the real crossfire. It wasn't on television. It was over in Italy somewhere, a long time ago." Happy the land for whom crossfire is purely televisual and metaphorical. But, when it turns real, it's important to know the difference.
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Lone Survivor
On Monday Lt. Michael Murphy was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. Meet the man who told his story.
By Mark Lasswell
Saturday, October 27, 2007 12:01 a.m.
ARLINGTON, Va.--At the White House on Monday, the parents of Navy Lt. Michael Murphy received the Medal of Honor posthumously awarded to their son. One of his former SEAL teammates, Marcus Luttrell, was on hand in the East Room but not entirely there. As a military aide read the citation extolling Lt. Murphy for his "conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life" during a ferocious firefight in Afghanistan in 2005, Mr. Luttrell's mind was firmly back in the mountains of the Hindu Kush on the day that Lt. Murphy died.
"Somebody had to tap me on the shoulder to bring me back. I kind of zoned out," Mr. Luttrell recalled in an interview two days after the ceremony. As he spoke, his thoughts seemed to drift back to the battle again. "I remember how loud it was. And I remember our lungs being on fire"--but here he paused, then added: "I was thinking that nobody can have any idea what the hell happened up on that mountain that day."
The bare outlines are harrowing enough. A four-man contingent of Navy SEALs were inserted by helicopter at night on June 28, 2005, in the desolate mountain region near the border with Pakistan. The men were: Mr. Luttrell, a hospital corpsman second class at the time; Gunner's Mate Second Class Danny Dietz; Sonar Technician Second Class Matthew Axelson; and Lt. Michael Murphy, the officer in charge and one of Mr. Luttrell's closest friends. They were on a reconnaissance mission, trying to locate a guerrilla commander who was aligned with the Taliban.
The SEALs scrambled across the unforgiving terrain toward their target, but after daylight broke the mission started to go awry. Three goat herders--and their goats--happened upon the SEALs. The Americans recognized that they had a potentially lethal problem: The herders glowering at them were likely Taliban sympathizers who would report the Americans' presence.
With deep misgivings, the SEALs resolved to let the herders go--a decision they quickly regretted. Radio communications problems prevented the SEALs from calling headquarters for assistance; moving across the mountainsides with little cover in daylight would almost certainly attract enemy attention. All they could do was hunker down. And then the shooting started. Dozens of Taliban fighters had taken up a position above the SEALs and were pouring lead down on them.
Over the next two hours, a terrible dance unfolded. Swarming Taliban fighters would try to slide down the mountain slopes on either side of the SEALs, who furiously picked them off until the Americans were nearly overwhelmed by force of numbers; then the SEALs would fling themselves blindly down the mountain, hoping to alight still alive, with a little cover, so they could take up the fight again.
After a series of these desperate plunges, the SEALs were in a grim state: shot up, hit by the shrapnel of rocket-propelled grenades, running out of ammunition. Danny Dietz died first--he had been badly wounded, but then was shot fatally as Mr. Luttrell tried to help him to safety.
As Mr. Luttrell recounts in "Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10," his book about the episode, the remaining three SEALs' final plunge down the mountain landed them in a ravine. Matthew Axelson was grievously wounded and would die that day. Lt. Murphy, bleeding from a stomach wound, "groped in his pocket for his mobile phone, the one we had dared not use because it would betray our position," Mr. Luttrell writes. "And then Lieutenant Murphy walked out into the open ground. He walked until he was more or less in the center, gunfire all around him, and he sat on a small rock and began punching in the numbers to HQ."
Any act of heroic battlefield self-sacrifice is almost incomprehensible to those whom soldiers fight to protect, but the fact that Lt. Murphy was performing such a familiar task--moving out into an open space seeking a cell-phone signal--under such murderous circumstances lends his actions an almost unbearable poignancy. While he was on the phone, calling for help, Lt. Murphy was shot in the back, the bullet exiting through his chest, yet he continued to talk--even, astonishingly, finishing the conversation: "Roger that, sir. Thank you."
But it was too late. SEALs Murphy and Axelson were killed, and then the day's disaster was compounded when an MH-47 Chinook helicopter carrying a quick-response force was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade during a rescue effort, killing 16.
It was the worst single day of American fatalities of the war in Afghanistan, and the worst loss of life in SEAL history. But Mr. Luttrell miraculously survived the fight in the mountains. Just as the SEALs were making their last stand, with Taliban fighters closing in, he was blown from the ravine to relative safety by a grenade explosion.
With three broken vertebrae, badly wounded and barely able to walk, he eluded the enemy for the better part of four days, three of them under the care of villagers who took him in and were then obliged by custom to protect their guest against all threats--even against the Taliban fighters who discovered Mr. Luttrell's whereabouts. The Taliban menaced the village, but, loath to create enemies in a region where they rely on local assistance, never attacked. Mr. Luttrell was rescued by U.S. forces on July 2.
War veterans returning to civilian life commonly find themselves in jobs that are, in light of their recent battlefield experience, decidedly incongruous. For Mr. Luttrell, coming home after his discharge in June has meant an incongruity of a kind he would never have imagined. The former SEAL--a man with special-operations training in marksmanship and underwater demolition, a recipient of the Navy Cross for combat heroism, a warrior who fought in both Iraq and Afghanistan--has been working for the past five months as a publicist. It is strictly a volunteer position and reluctantly undertaken, to be sure, and Mr. Luttrell has only one client: the memory of that terrible day in Afghanistan. He wants the world to know about the sacrifices of Lt. Murphy, of his two other dead SEAL teammates, and of the eight SEALs and eight Army Night Stalkers killed in the failed helicopter rescue. It is a timely effort, coming during a period in this country when the heroism of American soldiers is not reliably noted, much less honored, in every corner.
"It's not about me, it's about my guys," he says of his publicity labors since leaving the service. "It's like the job I was doing before I got out. There were probably plenty of missions that I didn't want to go on because I was tired or whatever, but I still did it. Because it's not about me."
Mr. Luttrell was born in Houston in 1975 but grew up in rural Texas on the horse farms his family owned, much of the time in the piney-woods country in the eastern part of the state. He would clearly rather do just about anything than talk to the media. At 6 feet 5 inches tall and well over 200 pounds, with long, cowboyish sideburns, he is Texas taciturn to begin with, and the secrecy of SEAL missions tends to make frogmen--as the naval Sea, Air, Land team-members call themselves--a less-than-loquacious bunch.
In the months following the mountain fight, queries from family and friends about the gun battle and debriefings following inaccurate news reports on the incident became such a distraction, Mr. Luttrell says, that it was difficult to concentrate on his SEAL duties.
"Normally I wouldn't talk about any of our operations. This one wouldn't leave me alone," he says. "It kept banging on my door and I had to do something about it." The solution, he thought, would be to set the facts down in print so that they would be on the public record. Then maybe he could move on.
With clearance from his superiors, Mr. Luttrell began looking into writing a book and was eventually put in touch with British writer Patrick Robinson, whose military thrillers often involve the U.S. Navy. Their collaboration, "Lone Survivor," was published in June; it quickly became a nonfiction best seller.
"All I wanted to do was stop talking" about what happened in Afghanistan, Mr. Luttrell says, "and now I'm neck-deep in it." Another frustration is the inadequacy of words to convey the experience. "I can sit here and tell you that I got into a gunfight," Mr. Luttrell says, "but you can't put it into words. Your heartbeat doesn't raise, the hair on the back of your neck doesn't stand up when I tell you that. When you're out there--the stuff we get into--people get sick. You get so scared, you urinate on yourself. That's fear."
Hollywood, he says, has no idea what war is like. That's why he's wary of negotiations currently under way to film "Lone Survivor." If it happens, he says with the trace of a grimace, he'll probably "go out there and help," otherwise it might turn into "a love story" or a special-effects extravaganza with "people spinning from wires, which it wasn't. It was about death and people dying."
It should be noted that Mr. Luttrell is giving away his income from "Lone Survivor," reportedly putting it in a trust to aid military charities and the families of the dead soldiers, although now he says simply: "I'm in control of it so it goes to the right places."
For now, Mr. Luttrell is heading back to East Texas. Not far from his parents' place, he and his twin brother, Morgan--who followed him into the SEALs--own a ranch. The two men each have a large tattoo on their backs, one half of the trident badge awarded to newly minted SEALs. "When we come together, and it makes the whole thing, you're like, 'Oh, I know what that is.' It was just something we did to honor all the guys who went before us and are here today. And it signifies that without him I'm only half a frogman."
The ranch is devoted to rehabilitating sick and injured horses--about a dozen of them at any one time. The place is likely to be restorative for Mr. Luttrell, as well. "Out there it's pretty peaceful and I work all the time," he says. But he hasn't been able to stay at home for more than a few days at a time since being plunged into "Lone Survivor" concerns.
"Being a civilian hasn't set in just yet. Except when I try to get on a military base and I can't because I don't have an ID anymore." When he feels especially troubled by thoughts about the firefight in the mountains, his instinct--as it is when dealing with his injuries, from which he is still recovering--is simply to "suck it up." But sometimes he calls his old SEAL buddies. It's not always easy to reach them. "I forgot how busy it is being a team guy."
I talked to Mr. Luttrell at the Crystal Gateway Marriott hotel on Wednesday morning, not far from the Pentagon. In the lobby before the interview, it was the uniformed military personnel who caught the eye as they headed out the front door, most likely on their way to doing business at the Pentagon. The few civilian guests in evidence attracted less attention. A family was at the front desk checking out. And then there was the tall young man in blue jeans who was saying goodbye to a pleasant-looking older couple near the entrance. The woman in the couple was much shorter than the young man, who had to lean over--a little awkwardly, as if he had a tricky back--when he hugged her. Not a remarkable farewell scene in most hotels, but in this one it was unutterably moving.
Marcus Luttrell was saying goodbye to Dan and Maureen Murphy, Lt. Murphy's parents. The parting wasn't tearful; it was a cordial exchange between people who have a deep bond and who seem to know that they'll be speaking again soon. Probably on Sunday, in fact. That's the day, each week, when Mr. Luttrell calls the families--the other survivors.
By Mark Lasswell
Saturday, October 27, 2007 12:01 a.m.
ARLINGTON, Va.--At the White House on Monday, the parents of Navy Lt. Michael Murphy received the Medal of Honor posthumously awarded to their son. One of his former SEAL teammates, Marcus Luttrell, was on hand in the East Room but not entirely there. As a military aide read the citation extolling Lt. Murphy for his "conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life" during a ferocious firefight in Afghanistan in 2005, Mr. Luttrell's mind was firmly back in the mountains of the Hindu Kush on the day that Lt. Murphy died.
"Somebody had to tap me on the shoulder to bring me back. I kind of zoned out," Mr. Luttrell recalled in an interview two days after the ceremony. As he spoke, his thoughts seemed to drift back to the battle again. "I remember how loud it was. And I remember our lungs being on fire"--but here he paused, then added: "I was thinking that nobody can have any idea what the hell happened up on that mountain that day."
The bare outlines are harrowing enough. A four-man contingent of Navy SEALs were inserted by helicopter at night on June 28, 2005, in the desolate mountain region near the border with Pakistan. The men were: Mr. Luttrell, a hospital corpsman second class at the time; Gunner's Mate Second Class Danny Dietz; Sonar Technician Second Class Matthew Axelson; and Lt. Michael Murphy, the officer in charge and one of Mr. Luttrell's closest friends. They were on a reconnaissance mission, trying to locate a guerrilla commander who was aligned with the Taliban.
The SEALs scrambled across the unforgiving terrain toward their target, but after daylight broke the mission started to go awry. Three goat herders--and their goats--happened upon the SEALs. The Americans recognized that they had a potentially lethal problem: The herders glowering at them were likely Taliban sympathizers who would report the Americans' presence.
With deep misgivings, the SEALs resolved to let the herders go--a decision they quickly regretted. Radio communications problems prevented the SEALs from calling headquarters for assistance; moving across the mountainsides with little cover in daylight would almost certainly attract enemy attention. All they could do was hunker down. And then the shooting started. Dozens of Taliban fighters had taken up a position above the SEALs and were pouring lead down on them.
Over the next two hours, a terrible dance unfolded. Swarming Taliban fighters would try to slide down the mountain slopes on either side of the SEALs, who furiously picked them off until the Americans were nearly overwhelmed by force of numbers; then the SEALs would fling themselves blindly down the mountain, hoping to alight still alive, with a little cover, so they could take up the fight again.
After a series of these desperate plunges, the SEALs were in a grim state: shot up, hit by the shrapnel of rocket-propelled grenades, running out of ammunition. Danny Dietz died first--he had been badly wounded, but then was shot fatally as Mr. Luttrell tried to help him to safety.
As Mr. Luttrell recounts in "Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10," his book about the episode, the remaining three SEALs' final plunge down the mountain landed them in a ravine. Matthew Axelson was grievously wounded and would die that day. Lt. Murphy, bleeding from a stomach wound, "groped in his pocket for his mobile phone, the one we had dared not use because it would betray our position," Mr. Luttrell writes. "And then Lieutenant Murphy walked out into the open ground. He walked until he was more or less in the center, gunfire all around him, and he sat on a small rock and began punching in the numbers to HQ."
Any act of heroic battlefield self-sacrifice is almost incomprehensible to those whom soldiers fight to protect, but the fact that Lt. Murphy was performing such a familiar task--moving out into an open space seeking a cell-phone signal--under such murderous circumstances lends his actions an almost unbearable poignancy. While he was on the phone, calling for help, Lt. Murphy was shot in the back, the bullet exiting through his chest, yet he continued to talk--even, astonishingly, finishing the conversation: "Roger that, sir. Thank you."
But it was too late. SEALs Murphy and Axelson were killed, and then the day's disaster was compounded when an MH-47 Chinook helicopter carrying a quick-response force was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade during a rescue effort, killing 16.
It was the worst single day of American fatalities of the war in Afghanistan, and the worst loss of life in SEAL history. But Mr. Luttrell miraculously survived the fight in the mountains. Just as the SEALs were making their last stand, with Taliban fighters closing in, he was blown from the ravine to relative safety by a grenade explosion.
With three broken vertebrae, badly wounded and barely able to walk, he eluded the enemy for the better part of four days, three of them under the care of villagers who took him in and were then obliged by custom to protect their guest against all threats--even against the Taliban fighters who discovered Mr. Luttrell's whereabouts. The Taliban menaced the village, but, loath to create enemies in a region where they rely on local assistance, never attacked. Mr. Luttrell was rescued by U.S. forces on July 2.
War veterans returning to civilian life commonly find themselves in jobs that are, in light of their recent battlefield experience, decidedly incongruous. For Mr. Luttrell, coming home after his discharge in June has meant an incongruity of a kind he would never have imagined. The former SEAL--a man with special-operations training in marksmanship and underwater demolition, a recipient of the Navy Cross for combat heroism, a warrior who fought in both Iraq and Afghanistan--has been working for the past five months as a publicist. It is strictly a volunteer position and reluctantly undertaken, to be sure, and Mr. Luttrell has only one client: the memory of that terrible day in Afghanistan. He wants the world to know about the sacrifices of Lt. Murphy, of his two other dead SEAL teammates, and of the eight SEALs and eight Army Night Stalkers killed in the failed helicopter rescue. It is a timely effort, coming during a period in this country when the heroism of American soldiers is not reliably noted, much less honored, in every corner.
"It's not about me, it's about my guys," he says of his publicity labors since leaving the service. "It's like the job I was doing before I got out. There were probably plenty of missions that I didn't want to go on because I was tired or whatever, but I still did it. Because it's not about me."
Mr. Luttrell was born in Houston in 1975 but grew up in rural Texas on the horse farms his family owned, much of the time in the piney-woods country in the eastern part of the state. He would clearly rather do just about anything than talk to the media. At 6 feet 5 inches tall and well over 200 pounds, with long, cowboyish sideburns, he is Texas taciturn to begin with, and the secrecy of SEAL missions tends to make frogmen--as the naval Sea, Air, Land team-members call themselves--a less-than-loquacious bunch.
In the months following the mountain fight, queries from family and friends about the gun battle and debriefings following inaccurate news reports on the incident became such a distraction, Mr. Luttrell says, that it was difficult to concentrate on his SEAL duties.
"Normally I wouldn't talk about any of our operations. This one wouldn't leave me alone," he says. "It kept banging on my door and I had to do something about it." The solution, he thought, would be to set the facts down in print so that they would be on the public record. Then maybe he could move on.
With clearance from his superiors, Mr. Luttrell began looking into writing a book and was eventually put in touch with British writer Patrick Robinson, whose military thrillers often involve the U.S. Navy. Their collaboration, "Lone Survivor," was published in June; it quickly became a nonfiction best seller.
"All I wanted to do was stop talking" about what happened in Afghanistan, Mr. Luttrell says, "and now I'm neck-deep in it." Another frustration is the inadequacy of words to convey the experience. "I can sit here and tell you that I got into a gunfight," Mr. Luttrell says, "but you can't put it into words. Your heartbeat doesn't raise, the hair on the back of your neck doesn't stand up when I tell you that. When you're out there--the stuff we get into--people get sick. You get so scared, you urinate on yourself. That's fear."
Hollywood, he says, has no idea what war is like. That's why he's wary of negotiations currently under way to film "Lone Survivor." If it happens, he says with the trace of a grimace, he'll probably "go out there and help," otherwise it might turn into "a love story" or a special-effects extravaganza with "people spinning from wires, which it wasn't. It was about death and people dying."
It should be noted that Mr. Luttrell is giving away his income from "Lone Survivor," reportedly putting it in a trust to aid military charities and the families of the dead soldiers, although now he says simply: "I'm in control of it so it goes to the right places."
For now, Mr. Luttrell is heading back to East Texas. Not far from his parents' place, he and his twin brother, Morgan--who followed him into the SEALs--own a ranch. The two men each have a large tattoo on their backs, one half of the trident badge awarded to newly minted SEALs. "When we come together, and it makes the whole thing, you're like, 'Oh, I know what that is.' It was just something we did to honor all the guys who went before us and are here today. And it signifies that without him I'm only half a frogman."
The ranch is devoted to rehabilitating sick and injured horses--about a dozen of them at any one time. The place is likely to be restorative for Mr. Luttrell, as well. "Out there it's pretty peaceful and I work all the time," he says. But he hasn't been able to stay at home for more than a few days at a time since being plunged into "Lone Survivor" concerns.
"Being a civilian hasn't set in just yet. Except when I try to get on a military base and I can't because I don't have an ID anymore." When he feels especially troubled by thoughts about the firefight in the mountains, his instinct--as it is when dealing with his injuries, from which he is still recovering--is simply to "suck it up." But sometimes he calls his old SEAL buddies. It's not always easy to reach them. "I forgot how busy it is being a team guy."
I talked to Mr. Luttrell at the Crystal Gateway Marriott hotel on Wednesday morning, not far from the Pentagon. In the lobby before the interview, it was the uniformed military personnel who caught the eye as they headed out the front door, most likely on their way to doing business at the Pentagon. The few civilian guests in evidence attracted less attention. A family was at the front desk checking out. And then there was the tall young man in blue jeans who was saying goodbye to a pleasant-looking older couple near the entrance. The woman in the couple was much shorter than the young man, who had to lean over--a little awkwardly, as if he had a tricky back--when he hugged her. Not a remarkable farewell scene in most hotels, but in this one it was unutterably moving.
Marcus Luttrell was saying goodbye to Dan and Maureen Murphy, Lt. Murphy's parents. The parting wasn't tearful; it was a cordial exchange between people who have a deep bond and who seem to know that they'll be speaking again soon. Probably on Sunday, in fact. That's the day, each week, when Mr. Luttrell calls the families--the other survivors.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Trillion-Dollar Baby
Charlie Rangel's very revealing tax increase.
Wall Street Journal
Friday, October 26, 2007 12:01 a.m.
You can't say Charlie Rangel lacks for ambition. The House Ways and Means Chairman has been saying he wants to pass "the mother of all tax reforms," and even that doesn't do justice to the trillion-dollar tax baby he delivered unto Washington yesterday.
No one thinks his plan has a chance of becoming law this year, but its beauty is as a signal of Democratic intentions for 2009. In proposing what would be the largest tax increase in history, Mr. Rangel is showing the world what he wants the tax code to look like if Democrats run the entire government. None of the Presidential candidates will admit this before November 2008, but give Mr. Rangel credit for having the courage of Hillary Clinton's convictions.
The New Yorker is wily enough to realize he has to wrap this homely child in the ribbon of "tax reform," and yesterday he even invoked the memory of Ronald Reagan's 1986 reform success. If only the Gipper were still here to have fun with that one. Readers of a certain age might recall that the 1986 reform traded lower tax rates (a top rate of 28%) for fewer loopholes and deductions. Mr. Rangel's idea of reform is to raise tax rates in order to offer more deductions.
With one very revealing exception. Mr. Rangel does propose to cut the corporate tax rate, of all things, to 30.5% from 35% today. He'd "pay" for this by reducing business credits and deductions. This is revealing because it is a tacit admission that tax rates really do matter to investment choices.
Mr. Rangel has apparently been listening to the numerous American CEOs and economists who've been saying that the high U.S. corporate tax rate has been driving ever more of their business and capital offshore. Corporate tax rates have been falling even in Europe, and the U.S. now finds itself with nearly the highest rate in the developed world. So at least regarding corporate taxes, Mr. Rangel is an honorary supply-sider.
Yet when it comes to individuals, Mr. Rangel seems to think that he can raise rates and no one will behave differently. Thus he proposes to raise taxes on business and the upper-middle class in order to reduce the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) that Democrats created to soak the rich but is now threatening to skewer the middle class. For next year Mr. Rangel would "patch" the AMT problem at a cost of roughly $50 billion by sticking it to Wall Street private equity firms in real estate trusts, oil and gas, and buy-out firms. We wonder if he's checked this out with Chuck Schumer, the New York Senator who has been vacuuming campaign contributions by saying he'll protect these firms from this kind of increase. They're going to want their money back.
But where Mr. Rangel really gets busy is with his plan for a long-term "revenue neutral" AMT fix. He wants to abolish the AMT permanently and greatly expand "refundable tax credits" for low income families, while adding a 4% income tax surcharge on anyone who makes more than $200,000 a year, or 4.6% if you make $500,000 ($250,000 for singles). Mr. Rangel also wants to raise the capital gains tax rate to 19.6% from 15% today, and raise taxes on dividends, business partnerships, and companies with foreign subsidiaries. Add it all up and you get new taxes of $1 trillion or more.
All of this is done in the name of tax "fairness," but it's hard to see how this would make the U.S. code more equitable. Millions of those who'd receive the tax credits already pay no income tax, so they would merely be getting another government subsidy. The group that gets slammed hardest is the entrepreneurial class. Tax Foundation data show that three of four taxpayers in the highest income tax bracket are small business owners or farmers. If Mr. Rangel's plan ever becomes law, look for millions of Americans and small-businesses to "incorporate" themselves so they can pay the lower corporate rate. Previous tax reforms have tried to keep the corporate and top income tax rates equal precisely to avoid this kind of tax gaming.
We sympathize a little with Mr. Rangel, whose bad luck has been to take over his tax chair just when the AMT is becoming the tax that ate the middle-class in the high-tax "blue" states of New York, California and New Jersey. Democrats are desperate to avoid blame for this, even as they've boxed themselves in with their "paygo" promise to offset every tax cut with a tax increase or entitlement spending cut.
Amid slow growth and a housing recession, this couldn't be a worse time to raise taxes on capital gains, dividends and small business. Democrats would be smarter to drop the tax increases and "paygo," and simply patch the AMT for another year. And if Mr. Rangel really wants to reform the tax code in 2009, he's going to have read up on what the Gipper accomplished. All he's proposed so far is a trillion-dollar bomb.
Wall Street Journal
Friday, October 26, 2007 12:01 a.m.
You can't say Charlie Rangel lacks for ambition. The House Ways and Means Chairman has been saying he wants to pass "the mother of all tax reforms," and even that doesn't do justice to the trillion-dollar tax baby he delivered unto Washington yesterday.
No one thinks his plan has a chance of becoming law this year, but its beauty is as a signal of Democratic intentions for 2009. In proposing what would be the largest tax increase in history, Mr. Rangel is showing the world what he wants the tax code to look like if Democrats run the entire government. None of the Presidential candidates will admit this before November 2008, but give Mr. Rangel credit for having the courage of Hillary Clinton's convictions.
The New Yorker is wily enough to realize he has to wrap this homely child in the ribbon of "tax reform," and yesterday he even invoked the memory of Ronald Reagan's 1986 reform success. If only the Gipper were still here to have fun with that one. Readers of a certain age might recall that the 1986 reform traded lower tax rates (a top rate of 28%) for fewer loopholes and deductions. Mr. Rangel's idea of reform is to raise tax rates in order to offer more deductions.
With one very revealing exception. Mr. Rangel does propose to cut the corporate tax rate, of all things, to 30.5% from 35% today. He'd "pay" for this by reducing business credits and deductions. This is revealing because it is a tacit admission that tax rates really do matter to investment choices.
Mr. Rangel has apparently been listening to the numerous American CEOs and economists who've been saying that the high U.S. corporate tax rate has been driving ever more of their business and capital offshore. Corporate tax rates have been falling even in Europe, and the U.S. now finds itself with nearly the highest rate in the developed world. So at least regarding corporate taxes, Mr. Rangel is an honorary supply-sider.
Yet when it comes to individuals, Mr. Rangel seems to think that he can raise rates and no one will behave differently. Thus he proposes to raise taxes on business and the upper-middle class in order to reduce the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) that Democrats created to soak the rich but is now threatening to skewer the middle class. For next year Mr. Rangel would "patch" the AMT problem at a cost of roughly $50 billion by sticking it to Wall Street private equity firms in real estate trusts, oil and gas, and buy-out firms. We wonder if he's checked this out with Chuck Schumer, the New York Senator who has been vacuuming campaign contributions by saying he'll protect these firms from this kind of increase. They're going to want their money back.
But where Mr. Rangel really gets busy is with his plan for a long-term "revenue neutral" AMT fix. He wants to abolish the AMT permanently and greatly expand "refundable tax credits" for low income families, while adding a 4% income tax surcharge on anyone who makes more than $200,000 a year, or 4.6% if you make $500,000 ($250,000 for singles). Mr. Rangel also wants to raise the capital gains tax rate to 19.6% from 15% today, and raise taxes on dividends, business partnerships, and companies with foreign subsidiaries. Add it all up and you get new taxes of $1 trillion or more.
All of this is done in the name of tax "fairness," but it's hard to see how this would make the U.S. code more equitable. Millions of those who'd receive the tax credits already pay no income tax, so they would merely be getting another government subsidy. The group that gets slammed hardest is the entrepreneurial class. Tax Foundation data show that three of four taxpayers in the highest income tax bracket are small business owners or farmers. If Mr. Rangel's plan ever becomes law, look for millions of Americans and small-businesses to "incorporate" themselves so they can pay the lower corporate rate. Previous tax reforms have tried to keep the corporate and top income tax rates equal precisely to avoid this kind of tax gaming.
We sympathize a little with Mr. Rangel, whose bad luck has been to take over his tax chair just when the AMT is becoming the tax that ate the middle-class in the high-tax "blue" states of New York, California and New Jersey. Democrats are desperate to avoid blame for this, even as they've boxed themselves in with their "paygo" promise to offset every tax cut with a tax increase or entitlement spending cut.
Amid slow growth and a housing recession, this couldn't be a worse time to raise taxes on capital gains, dividends and small business. Democrats would be smarter to drop the tax increases and "paygo," and simply patch the AMT for another year. And if Mr. Rangel really wants to reform the tax code in 2009, he's going to have read up on what the Gipper accomplished. All he's proposed so far is a trillion-dollar bomb.
Prosecuting Our Friends
By Mona Charen
Friday, October 26, 2007
Imagine that you are a human rights lawyer who would like to establish the legal principle of "universal jurisdiction" -- the notion that former leaders should be vulnerable to suit anywhere on earth. You gaze around the globe and notice Buddhist monks being mowed down in Myanmar; women stoned to death for supposed adultery in Iran; rape victims murdered by their families in Pakistan for the sake of "honor"; torture, rape and killing of hundreds of thousands in Darfur. Any of those get your juices flowing?
Not if you are a standard issue, liberal human rights type at the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School or the Center for Constitutional Rights in Manhattan. No, they've teamed up to sue 77-year-old Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, former president of Bolivia, who now lives in the United States. Lozada, a free market reformer and staunch ally of the U.S., is accused of complicity in the death of 67 people in La Paz in 2003.
The idea that former leaders should be prosecuted is misguided in the extreme. How then can you coax a despot from power? But even leaving that aside, the accusation against Lozada is far-fetched. Opposition groups under the leadership of Evo Morales (now president of Bolivia) had blockaded the capital city of La Paz preventing supplies of food and fuel from entering. Lozada called out the army to break the blockade. Some of the blockaders were armed. Dozens of people were killed. This is the basis for a formal charge of "genocide" by the Morales government against the former president as well as the human rights lawsuit by our self-righteous friends in pinstripes.
It seems that for a certain kind of liberal, the only savory enemy is a friend of the United States.
Meanwhile, now that Bolivia has tumbled into the embrace of Castro acolyte Evo Morales, who memorably promised to become "America's worst nightmare" before his election, the country is on the brink of civil war. Just last week, according to Reuters, 7,000 protesters shut down the nation's airport. Morales has been lauded in the American press as the first "indigenous" leader of Latin America's poorest country. (His ancestry is Indian.) Less touted is his career as a coca (as in cocaine) grower, leader of the coca growers union and head of the Movement to Socialism party.
The previous president had cooperated with the United States in attempting to shift farmers from coca to other crops. Morales has halted that program. Coca production has increased. He has also nationalized a number of industries, including the energy sector, and appropriated a Swiss tin smelter. No compensation to the Swiss or others should be expected, Morales announced at the time. The results are unsurprising. As Investor's Business Daily noted, "A gas-rich country now suffers from gas shortages." (Recall the old joke: What happens 10 years after the communists capture the Sahara? A sand shortage.)
If we are judged by the company we keep, Morales is flunking. His closest ally is Hugo Chavez of Venezuela (in fact, while we're talking about allegations, some have suggested that it was illegal contributions from Chavez that financed the blockade of La Paz of 2003 and helped bring Morales to power). Morales's other dear friend is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, who visited Bolivia in September after speaking at the United Nations. "An imperial spokesman tried to disrespect you, calling you a cruel little tyrant," Morales noted in his introduction, "You responded with the greatness of a revolutionary." Ahmadinejad returned the compliment by handing Morales a check for $1 billion.
While Harvard law professors and Manhattan liberals sue Morales's political foe in federal court, Morales is cementing relations with Nicaragua, Ecuador, Venezuela, Cuba and Iran while further impoverishing his people (with the exception of the drug growers). The Comedy Channel's Jon Stewart missed that memo. He recently hosted the Bolivian leader and credulously presented him to the audience as someone who would "nationalize resources and help distribute some of the money to the poorer folk in Bolivia . . . to institute agrarian reform -- and you did this within eight months of your election!" Cue the applause. And there was plenty.
Large swaths of Latin America are once again allying themselves with America's enemies. Ahmadinejad has been to the region three times in the past 24 months. Yet the great minds of Harvard, Hollywood and New York tamely offer platforms to the likes of Morales and issue fatwas against pro-American deposed leaders. What's wrong with this picture?
Friday, October 26, 2007
Imagine that you are a human rights lawyer who would like to establish the legal principle of "universal jurisdiction" -- the notion that former leaders should be vulnerable to suit anywhere on earth. You gaze around the globe and notice Buddhist monks being mowed down in Myanmar; women stoned to death for supposed adultery in Iran; rape victims murdered by their families in Pakistan for the sake of "honor"; torture, rape and killing of hundreds of thousands in Darfur. Any of those get your juices flowing?
Not if you are a standard issue, liberal human rights type at the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School or the Center for Constitutional Rights in Manhattan. No, they've teamed up to sue 77-year-old Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, former president of Bolivia, who now lives in the United States. Lozada, a free market reformer and staunch ally of the U.S., is accused of complicity in the death of 67 people in La Paz in 2003.
The idea that former leaders should be prosecuted is misguided in the extreme. How then can you coax a despot from power? But even leaving that aside, the accusation against Lozada is far-fetched. Opposition groups under the leadership of Evo Morales (now president of Bolivia) had blockaded the capital city of La Paz preventing supplies of food and fuel from entering. Lozada called out the army to break the blockade. Some of the blockaders were armed. Dozens of people were killed. This is the basis for a formal charge of "genocide" by the Morales government against the former president as well as the human rights lawsuit by our self-righteous friends in pinstripes.
It seems that for a certain kind of liberal, the only savory enemy is a friend of the United States.
Meanwhile, now that Bolivia has tumbled into the embrace of Castro acolyte Evo Morales, who memorably promised to become "America's worst nightmare" before his election, the country is on the brink of civil war. Just last week, according to Reuters, 7,000 protesters shut down the nation's airport. Morales has been lauded in the American press as the first "indigenous" leader of Latin America's poorest country. (His ancestry is Indian.) Less touted is his career as a coca (as in cocaine) grower, leader of the coca growers union and head of the Movement to Socialism party.
The previous president had cooperated with the United States in attempting to shift farmers from coca to other crops. Morales has halted that program. Coca production has increased. He has also nationalized a number of industries, including the energy sector, and appropriated a Swiss tin smelter. No compensation to the Swiss or others should be expected, Morales announced at the time. The results are unsurprising. As Investor's Business Daily noted, "A gas-rich country now suffers from gas shortages." (Recall the old joke: What happens 10 years after the communists capture the Sahara? A sand shortage.)
If we are judged by the company we keep, Morales is flunking. His closest ally is Hugo Chavez of Venezuela (in fact, while we're talking about allegations, some have suggested that it was illegal contributions from Chavez that financed the blockade of La Paz of 2003 and helped bring Morales to power). Morales's other dear friend is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, who visited Bolivia in September after speaking at the United Nations. "An imperial spokesman tried to disrespect you, calling you a cruel little tyrant," Morales noted in his introduction, "You responded with the greatness of a revolutionary." Ahmadinejad returned the compliment by handing Morales a check for $1 billion.
While Harvard law professors and Manhattan liberals sue Morales's political foe in federal court, Morales is cementing relations with Nicaragua, Ecuador, Venezuela, Cuba and Iran while further impoverishing his people (with the exception of the drug growers). The Comedy Channel's Jon Stewart missed that memo. He recently hosted the Bolivian leader and credulously presented him to the audience as someone who would "nationalize resources and help distribute some of the money to the poorer folk in Bolivia . . . to institute agrarian reform -- and you did this within eight months of your election!" Cue the applause. And there was plenty.
Large swaths of Latin America are once again allying themselves with America's enemies. Ahmadinejad has been to the region three times in the past 24 months. Yet the great minds of Harvard, Hollywood and New York tamely offer platforms to the likes of Morales and issue fatwas against pro-American deposed leaders. What's wrong with this picture?
The End of America As We Know It
By John Hawkins
Friday, October 26, 2007
"This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper." -- T. S. Eliot
Like most conservatives, I am an optimist with an unshakable faith in the United States of America and the benevolence of a just God who looks down upon us.
Yet and still, the lack of seriousness our politicians and much of our populace display towards the grave issues we face as a nation has grown to such an extent that it may become a threat to this country's very survival in the coming years.
Despite the fact that we have a national debt that exceeds 9 trillion dollars, an amount that comes out to almost $30,000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States -- there are screams of outrage if the rate of growth in any of this country's entitlement programs is cut and there are massive pushes to hand out even more goodies, not to the poor, but to the middle-class. Meanwhile, Social Security will start going into the red for the first time during the next 10 years, Medicare costs are continuing to surge, and more than 8% of our tax dollars ($233 billion in 2007) goes to pay interest on the national debt. Yes, we have gotten away with not paying what we owe for quite a while, but some day the bill will come due and unless something changes, our children may not have the money to pay our debts.
Then there's illegal immigration. We have 12-20 million foreigners who have entered our country illegally and we have hundreds of thousands more pouring over the borders each year. Many of these illegals are poorly educated, don't speak English, have no loyalty to or respect for America, commit identity fraud, ignore deportation orders from judges, don't pay taxes, and have children in this country so they can use them to collect welfare and food stamps. In parts of the nation, illegals are also at the root of crime waves, are overcrowding our schools, and are driving up car insurance rates and running hospitals into the ground.
My friends, if we don't have a border and enforce it, eventually, we're not going to have a country. The Roman Empire found that out the hard way and for that matter, so did the Indians when our ancestors arrived here. A lot of people believe that, "it can't happen here," but that's probably what Mexico said right before all the Americans who moved into Texas declared that they were living in an independent state. Unless we do something to slow the growth of illegal immigration, one day parts of this country may suffer the same fate.
We also can't forget the mediocrity of our education system, which currently seems to be much more concerned about catering to the needs of the teachers’ unions than educating our children. The unions fight tooth and nail against stringent testing for students, merit pay, vouchers and all other measures that might improve the quality of our schools while making the life of their members harder. Meanwhile, about a third of the students in our country aren't even getting high school degrees and at the bottom end of the scale, in places like Detroit, fewer than 25% of the students go on to graduate. Even the students who do graduate are getting a watered down, politically correct education that's inferior in most ways to the one that people received in this country 50 years ago.
In a world where American workers have to compete with people who are happy to make 25 cents an hour in some backwards corner of the globe, having a highly educated workforce is essential. Long term, our citizenry is going to have to be better educated than in the past so that they can continue to provide a good living for their families. Unfortunately, we're going backwards in that area, when we need to be rapidly improving.
We also cannot forget the moral and cultural foundation that all the success of this country has been built on. If we abandon the values that made America successful, we will cease to be a great nation. If we embrace multiculturalism instead of American culture, atheism instead of Christianity, security instead of independence, rights without responsibilities, and break down the foundation of our country by defiling the sanctity of marriage, we will squander the magnificent legacy that has been left to us by previous generations of Americans.
Additionally, we cannot afford to take the external threats to our nation lightly. We are at war with genocidal, religious fanatics who are capable of killing American civilians in enormous numbers with nuclear, biological, and chemical attacks on our homeland. The United Nations has become a wretched, corrupt, talking shop that makes the League of Nations look like a model of efficiency and our once great NATO alliance has become a laughingstock.
If Iran isn't stopped from acquiring nuclear weapons, it will create an arms race in the Middle East and will eventually lead to nuclear proliferation around the globe. Remember the very real fear of a nuclear Armageddon that Americans felt during parts of the Cold War? Well, imagine the danger of having 25-30 nations, many of them hostile to the United States, all armed with nuclear weapons.
It has also become impossible to ignore the fact that the cradle of Western civilization, in Europe, appears to be heading into a death spiral. Western Europe is riddled with nations that have stagnant economies, unsustainable social welfare systems, rapidly aging secular populations, and massive problems assimilating new immigrants. It's entirely possible that much of that region, which has long been prosperous and allied with the United States, will be a fast declining cesspool in 30 years.
These are major issues that our nation will have to deal with, today, and in the coming decades. Of course, that doesn't mean we all need to put on "The end is near," sandwich boards and head out to the corner to warn people that we're doomed. To the contrary, Americans have proven time and time again throughout our history that we're capable to meeting any challenge that we choose to take on.
However, we seem to have lost some of the common sense that came so readily to previous generations in our country. We have too many people in this nation who seem to have a minimal knowledge of history and economics, who are ready to abandon the capitalism, independence, and common decency that made this nation into the greatest country this earth has ever seen -- all in exchange for the largely empty promises of demagogues who will "take care of us."
Add to that a heavily partisan, politicized environment where different political parties can't even agree on the most basic facts, much less the issues -- and an incompetent mainstream media that cries wolf on an almost daily basis about something that's going to kill us -- and we're producing a society riddled with people who have extreme difficulty coping with or even recognizing basic threats.
In other words, as a society, we are losing our common sense, our moral compass, and even our survival instinct. For the sake of future generations and for the sake of this country, which has been a gift from God to us and the world, we must do better.
Friday, October 26, 2007
"This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper." -- T. S. Eliot
Like most conservatives, I am an optimist with an unshakable faith in the United States of America and the benevolence of a just God who looks down upon us.
Yet and still, the lack of seriousness our politicians and much of our populace display towards the grave issues we face as a nation has grown to such an extent that it may become a threat to this country's very survival in the coming years.
Despite the fact that we have a national debt that exceeds 9 trillion dollars, an amount that comes out to almost $30,000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States -- there are screams of outrage if the rate of growth in any of this country's entitlement programs is cut and there are massive pushes to hand out even more goodies, not to the poor, but to the middle-class. Meanwhile, Social Security will start going into the red for the first time during the next 10 years, Medicare costs are continuing to surge, and more than 8% of our tax dollars ($233 billion in 2007) goes to pay interest on the national debt. Yes, we have gotten away with not paying what we owe for quite a while, but some day the bill will come due and unless something changes, our children may not have the money to pay our debts.
Then there's illegal immigration. We have 12-20 million foreigners who have entered our country illegally and we have hundreds of thousands more pouring over the borders each year. Many of these illegals are poorly educated, don't speak English, have no loyalty to or respect for America, commit identity fraud, ignore deportation orders from judges, don't pay taxes, and have children in this country so they can use them to collect welfare and food stamps. In parts of the nation, illegals are also at the root of crime waves, are overcrowding our schools, and are driving up car insurance rates and running hospitals into the ground.
My friends, if we don't have a border and enforce it, eventually, we're not going to have a country. The Roman Empire found that out the hard way and for that matter, so did the Indians when our ancestors arrived here. A lot of people believe that, "it can't happen here," but that's probably what Mexico said right before all the Americans who moved into Texas declared that they were living in an independent state. Unless we do something to slow the growth of illegal immigration, one day parts of this country may suffer the same fate.
We also can't forget the mediocrity of our education system, which currently seems to be much more concerned about catering to the needs of the teachers’ unions than educating our children. The unions fight tooth and nail against stringent testing for students, merit pay, vouchers and all other measures that might improve the quality of our schools while making the life of their members harder. Meanwhile, about a third of the students in our country aren't even getting high school degrees and at the bottom end of the scale, in places like Detroit, fewer than 25% of the students go on to graduate. Even the students who do graduate are getting a watered down, politically correct education that's inferior in most ways to the one that people received in this country 50 years ago.
In a world where American workers have to compete with people who are happy to make 25 cents an hour in some backwards corner of the globe, having a highly educated workforce is essential. Long term, our citizenry is going to have to be better educated than in the past so that they can continue to provide a good living for their families. Unfortunately, we're going backwards in that area, when we need to be rapidly improving.
We also cannot forget the moral and cultural foundation that all the success of this country has been built on. If we abandon the values that made America successful, we will cease to be a great nation. If we embrace multiculturalism instead of American culture, atheism instead of Christianity, security instead of independence, rights without responsibilities, and break down the foundation of our country by defiling the sanctity of marriage, we will squander the magnificent legacy that has been left to us by previous generations of Americans.
Additionally, we cannot afford to take the external threats to our nation lightly. We are at war with genocidal, religious fanatics who are capable of killing American civilians in enormous numbers with nuclear, biological, and chemical attacks on our homeland. The United Nations has become a wretched, corrupt, talking shop that makes the League of Nations look like a model of efficiency and our once great NATO alliance has become a laughingstock.
If Iran isn't stopped from acquiring nuclear weapons, it will create an arms race in the Middle East and will eventually lead to nuclear proliferation around the globe. Remember the very real fear of a nuclear Armageddon that Americans felt during parts of the Cold War? Well, imagine the danger of having 25-30 nations, many of them hostile to the United States, all armed with nuclear weapons.
It has also become impossible to ignore the fact that the cradle of Western civilization, in Europe, appears to be heading into a death spiral. Western Europe is riddled with nations that have stagnant economies, unsustainable social welfare systems, rapidly aging secular populations, and massive problems assimilating new immigrants. It's entirely possible that much of that region, which has long been prosperous and allied with the United States, will be a fast declining cesspool in 30 years.
These are major issues that our nation will have to deal with, today, and in the coming decades. Of course, that doesn't mean we all need to put on "The end is near," sandwich boards and head out to the corner to warn people that we're doomed. To the contrary, Americans have proven time and time again throughout our history that we're capable to meeting any challenge that we choose to take on.
However, we seem to have lost some of the common sense that came so readily to previous generations in our country. We have too many people in this nation who seem to have a minimal knowledge of history and economics, who are ready to abandon the capitalism, independence, and common decency that made this nation into the greatest country this earth has ever seen -- all in exchange for the largely empty promises of demagogues who will "take care of us."
Add to that a heavily partisan, politicized environment where different political parties can't even agree on the most basic facts, much less the issues -- and an incompetent mainstream media that cries wolf on an almost daily basis about something that's going to kill us -- and we're producing a society riddled with people who have extreme difficulty coping with or even recognizing basic threats.
In other words, as a society, we are losing our common sense, our moral compass, and even our survival instinct. For the sake of future generations and for the sake of this country, which has been a gift from God to us and the world, we must do better.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Playing the Blame Game
By Michael Reagan
Thursday, October 25, 2007
It was inevitable – a huge swath of Southern California was ablaze in one of the worst wildfires in the state's history, yet all that gasbag liberals could do in the face of this disaster was to go looking for someone to blame.
While hundreds of heroic firefighters risk life and limb to save as many homes as possible, and state and federal disaster officials bend every effort to put in place all the firefighting assets available to them, the likes of Harry Reid and Barbara Boxer and their allies scurry to use this immense tragedy to make political capital out of it.
Reid was bad enough, dredging up the specter of imagined global warming to explain why California was burning, but Sen. Boxer outdid him by reaching down into her bag of slime to blame the fact that the fires were beyond the control of firefighters on the war in Iraq and the fact that many California National Guardsmen were involved there on the firing line and not at home on the fire lines.
They ignore a few salient facts, such as the reality that California is a bone-dry desert filled with highly flammable undergrowth and subject to a phenomenon known as Santa Ana winds, which at this time of the year tend to come roaring down the valleys towards heavily populated areas, ready to spread the fires that inevitably erupt in the fall months.
Given those facts, it is easy to understand -- if you want to understand – why, from time to time, this tinderbox of an area is given to destructive wildfires.
But the partisan liberals who infest the political arena in California don't want to understand, and they certainly don't want you to understand these simple facts. They want to use such natural disasters to fan the flames of anger at the president and anybody else who doesn't share their ultra left-wing views and agenda.
What they want most, however, is to direct your attention away from the real culprits – their ardent supporters among the environmentalist extremists, whose agenda they fully support and sanction through laws they enact at every opportunity.
A major reason why the fires spread so quickly was the universal presence of all those dead trees, tinderbox-dry underbrush, assorted weeds and all-but-dead grass that has been allowed to exist because the preventive controlled burning of this flammable material has been stopped dead in its tracks by the tree huggers and spotted owl-lovers who routinely put critters above humans.
Without all that ready-to-ignite material, the fires would never have been able to gobble up thousands of acres and reduce thousands of homes to smoking rubble. It seems that to the wackos who dominate both the extremist environmentalist movement and the controlling left wing of the Democrat party, human habitats are less important than owl nests.
Notice that neither Mr. Gore nor his environmentalist friends who are so worried about saving the trees have arrived on the fire lines with even a thimbleful of water to douse the flames. Instead they stand far off, tut-tutting about the horror of it all, blaming global warming, President Bush and the Iraq war for a tragedy to which they so abundantly contributed.
Thanks largely to their efforts to stop fire-preventive controlled burning for the past 20 years, they may have saved a few spotted owls, but the thousands of people who lost their homes paid the price for their victory over common-sense preventive measures.
The very warmth and dry climate that all but guarantee wildfire outbreaks are the exact reasons why people live here. And recurrent wildfires that threaten their homes and their lives are the price they pay to escape the harshness of winter and the summertime humidity that plague much of the nation. All through the winter there is a huge influx of people from colder climates coming here to enjoy a warm, dry climate.
Californians understand this. They know the fires will come. It's the price nature makes them pay and when the bill arrives they shrug their shoulders and get on with their lives. Most of all, they don't scurry around looking for somebody to blame. They are adults.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
It was inevitable – a huge swath of Southern California was ablaze in one of the worst wildfires in the state's history, yet all that gasbag liberals could do in the face of this disaster was to go looking for someone to blame.
While hundreds of heroic firefighters risk life and limb to save as many homes as possible, and state and federal disaster officials bend every effort to put in place all the firefighting assets available to them, the likes of Harry Reid and Barbara Boxer and their allies scurry to use this immense tragedy to make political capital out of it.
Reid was bad enough, dredging up the specter of imagined global warming to explain why California was burning, but Sen. Boxer outdid him by reaching down into her bag of slime to blame the fact that the fires were beyond the control of firefighters on the war in Iraq and the fact that many California National Guardsmen were involved there on the firing line and not at home on the fire lines.
They ignore a few salient facts, such as the reality that California is a bone-dry desert filled with highly flammable undergrowth and subject to a phenomenon known as Santa Ana winds, which at this time of the year tend to come roaring down the valleys towards heavily populated areas, ready to spread the fires that inevitably erupt in the fall months.
Given those facts, it is easy to understand -- if you want to understand – why, from time to time, this tinderbox of an area is given to destructive wildfires.
But the partisan liberals who infest the political arena in California don't want to understand, and they certainly don't want you to understand these simple facts. They want to use such natural disasters to fan the flames of anger at the president and anybody else who doesn't share their ultra left-wing views and agenda.
What they want most, however, is to direct your attention away from the real culprits – their ardent supporters among the environmentalist extremists, whose agenda they fully support and sanction through laws they enact at every opportunity.
A major reason why the fires spread so quickly was the universal presence of all those dead trees, tinderbox-dry underbrush, assorted weeds and all-but-dead grass that has been allowed to exist because the preventive controlled burning of this flammable material has been stopped dead in its tracks by the tree huggers and spotted owl-lovers who routinely put critters above humans.
Without all that ready-to-ignite material, the fires would never have been able to gobble up thousands of acres and reduce thousands of homes to smoking rubble. It seems that to the wackos who dominate both the extremist environmentalist movement and the controlling left wing of the Democrat party, human habitats are less important than owl nests.
Notice that neither Mr. Gore nor his environmentalist friends who are so worried about saving the trees have arrived on the fire lines with even a thimbleful of water to douse the flames. Instead they stand far off, tut-tutting about the horror of it all, blaming global warming, President Bush and the Iraq war for a tragedy to which they so abundantly contributed.
Thanks largely to their efforts to stop fire-preventive controlled burning for the past 20 years, they may have saved a few spotted owls, but the thousands of people who lost their homes paid the price for their victory over common-sense preventive measures.
The very warmth and dry climate that all but guarantee wildfire outbreaks are the exact reasons why people live here. And recurrent wildfires that threaten their homes and their lives are the price they pay to escape the harshness of winter and the summertime humidity that plague much of the nation. All through the winter there is a huge influx of people from colder climates coming here to enjoy a warm, dry climate.
Californians understand this. They know the fires will come. It's the price nature makes them pay and when the bill arrives they shrug their shoulders and get on with their lives. Most of all, they don't scurry around looking for somebody to blame. They are adults.
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