What the terrorist surveillance fight is really all about.
Wall Street Journal
Wednesday, August 8, 2007 12:01 a.m.
To hear the critics tell it, the warrantless wiretapping law passed by Congress this weekend is an immoral license for a mad President Bush and his spymasters to eavesdrop on all Americans. For those willing to believe such things, mere facts don't matter. But for anyone still amenable to reason, the deal is worth parsing for its national security precedents, good and bad. The next Democratic President might be grateful.
The good news is that the new law will at least allow the National Security Agency to monitor terrorist communications again. That ability has been severely limited since January, when Mr. Bush agreed to put the wiretap program under the supervision of a special court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The new law provides a six-month fix to the outdated FISA provision that had defined even foreign-to-foreign calls as subject to a U.S. judicial warrant.
The first duty of Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell is to prevent the next terrorist attack, and it's disgraceful that some have vilified him for trying to revive our intelligence ability in that cause. His effort has been no different, and no less honorable, than a general arguing for more troops.
But it's important to understand for the debate ahead why all of this has become so ferociously controversial. Opposition from the Democratic left to this intelligence program isn't merely part of the partisan blood feud against a weak President near the end of his term. It is part of a far larger ideological campaign to erode Presidential war powers. Goaded by the ACLU and much of the press corps, many Democrats want to use the courts and lawsuits to restrict Mr. Bush and future Presidents in their ability to gather intelligence in the war on terror. For a flavor of this strategy, spend a few minutes on the ACLU's Web site.
In that regard, even the weekend deal is far from encouraging. For example, the new law does not offer explicit liability protection for telecom companies that cooperate with the wiretap program. Instead, the most Democrats would accept is language to "compel" the cooperation of these companies going forward. The Administration hope is that this "I had no choice" claim will be an adequate defense against future lawsuits, but in the U.S. tort lottery that is no sure thing.
Meantime, Democrats blocked any retroactive liability protection for companies that thought they were doing their patriotic duty by cooperating with the National Security Agency after 9/11. The goal here isn't merely to open another rich target for the tort bar. It is to use lawsuits to raise the costs for private actors of cooperating with the executive branch. Even if they lose at the ballot box or in Congress, these antiwar activists still might be able to hamstring the executive via the courts.
That's also the explicit strategy in trying to expand the reach of the special FISA court to all wiretaps, foreign and domestic. The left is howling that the NSA will no longer need a FISA warrant for each wiretap (of which there were 2,176 in 2006). That's the best part of the bill. But the Administration did concede to let FISA judges review the procedures for wiretapping up to 120 days after the fact. If a judge objects, the wiretapping can at least continue, pending appeal all the way to the Supreme Court.
This is the kind of review that judges are neither allowed to perform under the Constitution, nor equipped to provide as a matter of policy. Whatever the merits of the 1978 FISA law, no Administration has ever conceded that that law trumped a President's power to make exceptions to FISA if national security requires it. To do so would be a direct infringement on the President's Article II powers as Commander in Chief to protect the nation against its enemies.
The courts have been explicit about this, with the FISA appellate court asserting in a 2002 opinion (In Re: Sealed Case) that "we take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President's constitutional power." FISA established a process by which certain domestic wiretaps in the context of the Cold War could be approved, not a limit on what wiretaps were ever allowed.
In the weekend deal, the Bush Administration grants the FISA court power to review procedures even for foreign communications, which is unprecedented. Under Article III of the Constitution, the courts are granted the power to settle disputes. The judiciary also has power under the Fourth Amendment, which gives courts the ability to issue warrants. But nowhere does the Constitution empower our nation's judges to serve as foreign policy advisers or reviewers of intelligence policy. Judges have no particular expertise on intelligence, and in any case they are unaccountable to voters if their decisions are faulty. Recent news reports have suggested that several current FISA judges are uncomfortable with making such intelligence decisions, and rightly so.
As for the possibility that Presidents will abuse this power, fear of exposure is an even more powerful disincentive than legal constraint. The political costs of being seen as spying on Americans for partisan ends would be tremendous. Congress, on the other hand, is only too happy to use the courts to squeeze executive power, in part because this allows the Members to dodge responsibility themselves. If there's another terror attack, the President still gets the blame even if some unelected judge refused a warrant. Congress can blame everyone else.
This is a statutory version of Senator Jay Rockefeller's famous decision to write a letter to Dick Cheney objecting to the warrantless wiretap program after he'd been briefed on it, but then sticking the letter (literally) in a drawer. Only after the program was exposed did he unearth the letter to show he'd objected all along, though he'd done nothing at all to stop it.
The weekend law expires in six months, and it would be nice to think enough Democrats would put aside this ideological obsession to work with Mr. Bush on a more permanent wiretap statute. Given the current state of Beltway rationality, we aren't optimistic.
As negotiations unfold, we hope the President resists any deal that compromises the ability of his successors to defend the country. In 18 months, Mr. Bush will be leaving office, but the terrorist threat will continue. The stakes are too large for any President to accept new judicial limitations on his ability to track terrorists at home or abroad. Rather than accept such limits, Mr. Bush could use Congressional recalcitrance as an opportunity to withdraw the terrorist surveillance program from FISA authority, and thus toss the issue squarely in the middle of the 2008 Presidential campaign.
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Propaganda Redux
Take it from this old KGB hand: The left is abetting America's enemies with its intemperate attacks on President Bush.
By Ion Mihai Pacepa
Tuesday, August 7, 2007 12:01 a.m.
During last week's two-day summit, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown thanked President Bush for leading the global war on terror. Mr. Brown acknowledged "the debt the world owes to the U.S. for its leadership in this fight against international terrorism" and vowed to follow Winston Churchill's lead and make Britain's ties with America even stronger.
Mr. Brown's statements elicited anger from many of Mr. Bush's domestic detractors, who claim the president concocted the war on terror for personal gain. But as someone who escaped from communist Romania--with two death sentences on his head--in order to become a citizen of this great country, I have a hard time understanding why some of our top political leaders can dare in a time of war to call our commander in chief a "liar," a "deceiver" and a "fraud."
I spent decades scrutinizing the U.S. from Europe, and I learned that international respect for America is directly proportional to America's own respect for its president.
My father spent most of his life working for General Motors in Romania and had a picture of President Truman in our house in Bucharest. While "America" was a vague place somewhere thousands of miles away, he was her tangible symbol. For us, it was he who had helped save civilization from the Nazi barbarians, and it was he who helped restore our freedom after the war--if only for a brief while. We learned that America loved Truman, and we loved America. It was as simple as that.
Later, when I headed Romania's intelligence station in West Germany, everyone there admired America too. People would often tell me that the "Amis" meant the difference between night and day in their lives. By "night" they meant East Germany, where their former compatriots were scraping along under economic privation and Stasi brutality. That was then.
But in September 2002, a German cabinet minister, Herta Dauebler-Gmelin, had the nerve to compare Mr. Bush to Hitler. In one post-Iraq-war poll 40% of Canada's teenagers called the U.S. "evil," and even before the fall of Saddam 57% of Greeks answered "neither" when asked which country was more democratic, the U.S. or Iraq.
Sowing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks of the Soviet-bloc intelligence community during the years I worked at its top levels. This same strategy is at work today, but it is regarded as bad manners to point out the Soviet parallels. For communists, only the leader counted, no matter the country, friend or foe. At home, they deified their own ruler--as to a certain extent still holds true in Russia. Abroad, they asserted that a fish starts smelling from the head, and they did everything in their power to make the head of the Free World stink.
The communist effort to generate hatred for the American president began soon after President Truman set up NATO and propelled the three Western occupation forces to unite their zones to form a new West German nation. We were tasked to take advantage of the reawakened patriotic feelings stirring in the European countries that had been subjugated by the Nazis, in order to shift their hatred for Hitler over into hatred for Truman--the leader of the new "occupation power." Western Europe was still grateful to the U.S. for having restored its freedom, but it had strong leftist movements that we secretly financed. They were like putty in our hands.
The European leftists, like any totalitarians, needed a tangible enemy, and we gave them one. In no time they began beating their drums decrying President Truman as the "butcher of Hiroshima." We went on to spend many years and many billions of dollars disparaging subsequent presidents: Eisenhower as a war-mongering "shark" run by the military-industrial complex, Johnson as a mafia boss who had bumped off his predecessor, Nixon as a petty tyrant, Ford as a dimwitted football player and Jimmy Carter as a bumbling peanut farmer. In 1978, when I left Romania for good, the bloc intelligence community had already collected 700 million signatures on a "Yankees-Go-Home" petition, at the same time launching the slogan "Europe for the Europeans."
During the Vietnam War we spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America's presidents sent Genghis Khan-style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. Those weren't facts. They were our tales, but some seven million Americans ended up being convinced their own president, not communism, was the enemy. As Yuri Andropov, who conceived this dezinformatsiya war against the U.S., used to tell me, people are more willing to believe smut than holiness.
The final goal of our anti-American offensive was to discourage the U.S. from protecting the world against communist terrorism and expansion. Sadly, we succeeded. After U.S. forces precipitously pulled out of Vietnam, the victorious communists massacred some two million people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Another million tried to escape, but many died in the attempt. This tragedy also created a credibility gap between America and the rest of the world, damaged the cohesion of American foreign policy, and poisoned domestic debate in the U.S.
Unfortunately, partisans today have taken a page from the old Soviet playbook. At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, for example, Bush critics continued our mud-slinging at America's commander in chief. One speaker, Martin O'Malley, now governor of Maryland, had earlier in the summer stated he was more worried about the actions of the Bush administration than about al Qaeda. On another occasion, retired four-star general Wesley Clark gave Michael Moore a platform to denounce the American commander in chief as a "deserter." And visitors to the national chairman of the Democratic Party had to step across a doormat depicting the American president surrounded by the words, "Give Bush the Boot."
Competition is indeed the engine that has driven the American dream forward, but unity in time of war has made America the leader of the world. During World War II, 405,399 Americans died to defeat Nazism, but their country of immigrants remained sturdily united. The U.S. held national elections during the war, but those running for office entertained no thought of damaging America's international prestige in their quest for personal victory. Republican challenger Thomas Dewey declined to criticize President Roosevelt's war policy. At the end of that war, a united America rebuilt its vanquished enemies. It took seven years to turn Nazi Germany and imperial Japan into democracies, but that effort generated an unprecedented technological explosion and 50 years of unmatched prosperity for us all.
Now we are again at war. It is not the president's war. It is America's war, authorized by 296 House members and 76 senators. I do not intend to join the armchair experts on the Iraq war. I do not know how we should handle this war, and they don't know either. But I do know that if America's political leaders, Democrat and Republican, join together as they did during World War II, America will win. Otherwise, terrorism will win. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi predicted just before being killed: "We fight today in Iraq, tomorrow in the land of the Holy Places, and after there in the West."
On July 28, I celebrated 29 years since President Carter signed off on my request for political asylum, and I am still tremendously proud that the leader of the Free World granted me my freedom. During these years I have lived here under five presidents--some better than others--but I have always felt that I was living in paradise. My American citizenship has given me a feeling of pride, hope and security that is surpassed only by the joy of simply being alive. There are millions of other immigrants who are equally proud that they restarted their lives from scratch in order to be in this magnanimous country. I appeal to them to help keep our beloved America united and honorable. We may not be able to change the habits of our current political representatives, but we may be able to introduce healthy new blood into the U.S. Congress.
For once, the communists got it right. It is America's leader that counts. Let's return to the traditions of presidents who accepted nothing short of unconditional surrender from our deadly enemies. Let's vote next year for people who believe in America's future, not for the ones who live in the Cold War past.
By Ion Mihai Pacepa
Tuesday, August 7, 2007 12:01 a.m.
During last week's two-day summit, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown thanked President Bush for leading the global war on terror. Mr. Brown acknowledged "the debt the world owes to the U.S. for its leadership in this fight against international terrorism" and vowed to follow Winston Churchill's lead and make Britain's ties with America even stronger.
Mr. Brown's statements elicited anger from many of Mr. Bush's domestic detractors, who claim the president concocted the war on terror for personal gain. But as someone who escaped from communist Romania--with two death sentences on his head--in order to become a citizen of this great country, I have a hard time understanding why some of our top political leaders can dare in a time of war to call our commander in chief a "liar," a "deceiver" and a "fraud."
I spent decades scrutinizing the U.S. from Europe, and I learned that international respect for America is directly proportional to America's own respect for its president.
My father spent most of his life working for General Motors in Romania and had a picture of President Truman in our house in Bucharest. While "America" was a vague place somewhere thousands of miles away, he was her tangible symbol. For us, it was he who had helped save civilization from the Nazi barbarians, and it was he who helped restore our freedom after the war--if only for a brief while. We learned that America loved Truman, and we loved America. It was as simple as that.
Later, when I headed Romania's intelligence station in West Germany, everyone there admired America too. People would often tell me that the "Amis" meant the difference between night and day in their lives. By "night" they meant East Germany, where their former compatriots were scraping along under economic privation and Stasi brutality. That was then.
But in September 2002, a German cabinet minister, Herta Dauebler-Gmelin, had the nerve to compare Mr. Bush to Hitler. In one post-Iraq-war poll 40% of Canada's teenagers called the U.S. "evil," and even before the fall of Saddam 57% of Greeks answered "neither" when asked which country was more democratic, the U.S. or Iraq.
Sowing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks of the Soviet-bloc intelligence community during the years I worked at its top levels. This same strategy is at work today, but it is regarded as bad manners to point out the Soviet parallels. For communists, only the leader counted, no matter the country, friend or foe. At home, they deified their own ruler--as to a certain extent still holds true in Russia. Abroad, they asserted that a fish starts smelling from the head, and they did everything in their power to make the head of the Free World stink.
The communist effort to generate hatred for the American president began soon after President Truman set up NATO and propelled the three Western occupation forces to unite their zones to form a new West German nation. We were tasked to take advantage of the reawakened patriotic feelings stirring in the European countries that had been subjugated by the Nazis, in order to shift their hatred for Hitler over into hatred for Truman--the leader of the new "occupation power." Western Europe was still grateful to the U.S. for having restored its freedom, but it had strong leftist movements that we secretly financed. They were like putty in our hands.
The European leftists, like any totalitarians, needed a tangible enemy, and we gave them one. In no time they began beating their drums decrying President Truman as the "butcher of Hiroshima." We went on to spend many years and many billions of dollars disparaging subsequent presidents: Eisenhower as a war-mongering "shark" run by the military-industrial complex, Johnson as a mafia boss who had bumped off his predecessor, Nixon as a petty tyrant, Ford as a dimwitted football player and Jimmy Carter as a bumbling peanut farmer. In 1978, when I left Romania for good, the bloc intelligence community had already collected 700 million signatures on a "Yankees-Go-Home" petition, at the same time launching the slogan "Europe for the Europeans."
During the Vietnam War we spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America's presidents sent Genghis Khan-style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. Those weren't facts. They were our tales, but some seven million Americans ended up being convinced their own president, not communism, was the enemy. As Yuri Andropov, who conceived this dezinformatsiya war against the U.S., used to tell me, people are more willing to believe smut than holiness.
The final goal of our anti-American offensive was to discourage the U.S. from protecting the world against communist terrorism and expansion. Sadly, we succeeded. After U.S. forces precipitously pulled out of Vietnam, the victorious communists massacred some two million people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Another million tried to escape, but many died in the attempt. This tragedy also created a credibility gap between America and the rest of the world, damaged the cohesion of American foreign policy, and poisoned domestic debate in the U.S.
Unfortunately, partisans today have taken a page from the old Soviet playbook. At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, for example, Bush critics continued our mud-slinging at America's commander in chief. One speaker, Martin O'Malley, now governor of Maryland, had earlier in the summer stated he was more worried about the actions of the Bush administration than about al Qaeda. On another occasion, retired four-star general Wesley Clark gave Michael Moore a platform to denounce the American commander in chief as a "deserter." And visitors to the national chairman of the Democratic Party had to step across a doormat depicting the American president surrounded by the words, "Give Bush the Boot."
Competition is indeed the engine that has driven the American dream forward, but unity in time of war has made America the leader of the world. During World War II, 405,399 Americans died to defeat Nazism, but their country of immigrants remained sturdily united. The U.S. held national elections during the war, but those running for office entertained no thought of damaging America's international prestige in their quest for personal victory. Republican challenger Thomas Dewey declined to criticize President Roosevelt's war policy. At the end of that war, a united America rebuilt its vanquished enemies. It took seven years to turn Nazi Germany and imperial Japan into democracies, but that effort generated an unprecedented technological explosion and 50 years of unmatched prosperity for us all.
Now we are again at war. It is not the president's war. It is America's war, authorized by 296 House members and 76 senators. I do not intend to join the armchair experts on the Iraq war. I do not know how we should handle this war, and they don't know either. But I do know that if America's political leaders, Democrat and Republican, join together as they did during World War II, America will win. Otherwise, terrorism will win. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi predicted just before being killed: "We fight today in Iraq, tomorrow in the land of the Holy Places, and after there in the West."
On July 28, I celebrated 29 years since President Carter signed off on my request for political asylum, and I am still tremendously proud that the leader of the Free World granted me my freedom. During these years I have lived here under five presidents--some better than others--but I have always felt that I was living in paradise. My American citizenship has given me a feeling of pride, hope and security that is surpassed only by the joy of simply being alive. There are millions of other immigrants who are equally proud that they restarted their lives from scratch in order to be in this magnanimous country. I appeal to them to help keep our beloved America united and honorable. We may not be able to change the habits of our current political representatives, but we may be able to introduce healthy new blood into the U.S. Congress.
For once, the communists got it right. It is America's leader that counts. Let's return to the traditions of presidents who accepted nothing short of unconditional surrender from our deadly enemies. Let's vote next year for people who believe in America's future, not for the ones who live in the Cold War past.
The Sun, Stupid
By Bill Steigerwald
Monday, August 6, 2007
Go outside at noon on a cloudless day.
Hold up your arm with your palm perpendicular to the blinding bright spot high in the sky. Feel the heat on your hand? It’s coming from 93 million miles away. Yet it’s so powerful it’ll eventually burn your flesh.
Even filtered by our atmosphere, even after traveling eight minutes at the speed of light, sunshine is so full of energy it can create life on Earth, turn water to gas and melt polar ice.
But the sun can’t cause global warming.
The sun is so distant and so small in our sky we forget how enormous it is -- and what a speck of space dust Earth is. Our home star composes 99.82 percent of the mass of the solar system. The sun's mass is 330,000 times the Earth's mass. About 1 million Earths could fit inside the sun.
The sun is a furnace of nuclear fusion beyond human comprehension. Although just an ordinary star, it produces an incomprehensible 386 billion-billion megawatts of energy per second.
It’s also real hot. Its core is a hellish 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. Its surface is 11,000 degrees. Its corona, which extends millions of miles into space, has temperatures of 1.8 million degrees.
But the sun doesn’t just bathe our tender planet in light and heat. It also blasts us with an invisible hurricane of high-energy electrons and protons that travel at 1.6 million miles per hour.
This solar wind, which extends past Pluto and constantly changes speed, density, direction and magnetic power, can produce auroras like our Northern Lights and knock out electric power grids on Earth’s surface.
But the sun can’t be causing global warming.
In fact, if you believe the global warming hysterics, the sun’s mighty powers to affect our climate have been eclipsed by man’s accelerating greenhouse gas output.
The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been saying the sun is responsible for about 10 percent of the roughly 1 degree-Fahrenheit rise in Earth’s average temperature over the last century.
But now a new European study of solar activity concludes the sun's effect on global warming is “negligible.” Since 1985, the study shows, such factors as sunspots and solar irradiance are trending away from heating the Earth.
The Royal Society, the United Kingdom's national science academy, pronounced that this new study “comprehensively” disproves claims that the cause of recent global warming is increased solar activity. Humans are to blame. Natch.
Lots of other studies have come to the opposite conclusion, of course.
Going back 10,000 years, a 1998 study found that past periods of global warming coincided nicely with increased sunspot activity, which occur during increases in the sun's brightness and energy output. In 2004, a study by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research said Earth was getting hotter because the sun was burning brighter than it had in 1,000 years.
We don't want to get into an ugly debate about the prime cause of global warming. But maybe all those sun-worshipping ancestors of ours were not such dummies after all.
Sure, they lived in caves, thought gods controlled the weather and couldn’t even spell SUV. But eons ago they figured out what should still be obvious to every creature on Earth today.
The mighty sun is in charge of what happens on puny Earth -- not humans or their fires.
Monday, August 6, 2007
Go outside at noon on a cloudless day.
Hold up your arm with your palm perpendicular to the blinding bright spot high in the sky. Feel the heat on your hand? It’s coming from 93 million miles away. Yet it’s so powerful it’ll eventually burn your flesh.
Even filtered by our atmosphere, even after traveling eight minutes at the speed of light, sunshine is so full of energy it can create life on Earth, turn water to gas and melt polar ice.
But the sun can’t cause global warming.
The sun is so distant and so small in our sky we forget how enormous it is -- and what a speck of space dust Earth is. Our home star composes 99.82 percent of the mass of the solar system. The sun's mass is 330,000 times the Earth's mass. About 1 million Earths could fit inside the sun.
The sun is a furnace of nuclear fusion beyond human comprehension. Although just an ordinary star, it produces an incomprehensible 386 billion-billion megawatts of energy per second.
It’s also real hot. Its core is a hellish 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. Its surface is 11,000 degrees. Its corona, which extends millions of miles into space, has temperatures of 1.8 million degrees.
But the sun doesn’t just bathe our tender planet in light and heat. It also blasts us with an invisible hurricane of high-energy electrons and protons that travel at 1.6 million miles per hour.
This solar wind, which extends past Pluto and constantly changes speed, density, direction and magnetic power, can produce auroras like our Northern Lights and knock out electric power grids on Earth’s surface.
But the sun can’t be causing global warming.
In fact, if you believe the global warming hysterics, the sun’s mighty powers to affect our climate have been eclipsed by man’s accelerating greenhouse gas output.
The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been saying the sun is responsible for about 10 percent of the roughly 1 degree-Fahrenheit rise in Earth’s average temperature over the last century.
But now a new European study of solar activity concludes the sun's effect on global warming is “negligible.” Since 1985, the study shows, such factors as sunspots and solar irradiance are trending away from heating the Earth.
The Royal Society, the United Kingdom's national science academy, pronounced that this new study “comprehensively” disproves claims that the cause of recent global warming is increased solar activity. Humans are to blame. Natch.
Lots of other studies have come to the opposite conclusion, of course.
Going back 10,000 years, a 1998 study found that past periods of global warming coincided nicely with increased sunspot activity, which occur during increases in the sun's brightness and energy output. In 2004, a study by the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research said Earth was getting hotter because the sun was burning brighter than it had in 1,000 years.
We don't want to get into an ugly debate about the prime cause of global warming. But maybe all those sun-worshipping ancestors of ours were not such dummies after all.
Sure, they lived in caves, thought gods controlled the weather and couldn’t even spell SUV. But eons ago they figured out what should still be obvious to every creature on Earth today.
The mighty sun is in charge of what happens on puny Earth -- not humans or their fires.
Monday, August 6, 2007
The Democrats revive liberalism
By Star Parker
Monday, August 6, 2007
I believe that reasonable people look at facts and draw rational conclusions.
It's why I am mystified at the open and passionate embrace today by the Democratic Party of plain old unadulterated liberalism.
Being labeled a liberal fifteen years ago was the kiss of political death. Today's Democratic presidential candidates seem to wear it like a badge of honor.
Or perhaps I should qualify this to say that the programs and ideas they're selling are pure garden-variety liberalism. Maybe they are less enthusiastic about the liberal label.
A popular term of left wing spin-meisters these days is "progressive."
Liberalism did not fall from favor like an out of vogue restaurant or some fad. It lost its glow because facts show it doesn't work.
I am talking about the liberal idea that government is the answer to our problems. Tax here and spend there, take from this one and redistribute to that one, and you can solve any social or economic problem.
Ironically, globally, as China, India, and Africa see the light of day by shedding government controls and planning, this is where our Democrats want to take us.
There has been ink about the Democratic candidates snubbing the annual meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council, which represents the moderate wing of the Party, while they plan to attend a bloggers convention sponsored by the ultra-left Web site Daily Kos.
You can argue as several have that in the general election the Democratic nominee will scurry back toward the center. But today every Democratic candidate is entrenched unapologetically in the far left.
The DLC was the base for the "new Democrat" that defined Bill Clinton.
And Bill Clinton, as we must recall, signed into law in 1996, the first and enormously successful retreat from the failed welfare state, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, aka welfare reform.
The act ended welfare as an unqualified entitlement, and introduced time limits and work requirements.
The result? Welfare rolls decreased almost 60 percent. And, as USA Today reported last year, the tenth anniversary of welfare reform, "Nearly 70 percent of all single women are working, compared to 66 percent of married women, a reversal of the past. Single women's incomes have risen ... Child poverty rates have dropped, particularly among blacks and Hispanics. Teen pregnancies are down. Child support collections are up."
Is every problem solved? Of course not. But the achievement has been historic.
Welfare was a horrible and destructive disaster. Blacks continue to pay the price today in the broken families and communities that are its legacy.
We must understand why welfare reform worked. It trashed the great lie that government planning and programs can solve human problems. And it brought clearly to light the truth that when personal responsibility is restored, and life's realities are brought back into focus, people, all people, know what to do and become productive and creative.
Liberals could not imagine that the lives of the poor could improve by getting rid of government and they couldn't have been more wrong.
Someone recently e-mailed me the following wonderful quote from Rabbi Daniel Lapin, head of an organization called Toward Tradition:
"Politics is nothing more than the practical application of our most deeply held beliefs."
The deeply held belief of the left, that government can solve the problems of the poor, destroyed black families and black communities.
The deeply held beliefs of conservatives -- faith, traditional values, work, and personal responsibility -- is restoring these families and communities.
The left may talk today about courting values voters. But big government values voters is an oxymoron.
The country now is at a real crossroads and we're going to have to wake up if we care about our children. The failures of the welfare state and social engineering go beyond poor black women.
Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post wrote this past week about the unsustainable entitlement burdens of Social Security and Medicare.
Taxes will have to go up, according to Samuelson, anywhere from 30-50 percent to meet the outstanding obligations of these entitlements. The chunk of the federal budget that they will consume will increase from 40 percent, to 75 percent in 2030.
Yet every Democrat today is talking about new government poverty programs, new entitlements, and socialized medicine.
Can voters next year possibly buy into this denial of reality and delusional retreat into the failures of the past?
If you are a values voter, I hope you'll join me in prayer that it doesn't happen.
The future of a great country is at stake.
Monday, August 6, 2007
I believe that reasonable people look at facts and draw rational conclusions.
It's why I am mystified at the open and passionate embrace today by the Democratic Party of plain old unadulterated liberalism.
Being labeled a liberal fifteen years ago was the kiss of political death. Today's Democratic presidential candidates seem to wear it like a badge of honor.
Or perhaps I should qualify this to say that the programs and ideas they're selling are pure garden-variety liberalism. Maybe they are less enthusiastic about the liberal label.
A popular term of left wing spin-meisters these days is "progressive."
Liberalism did not fall from favor like an out of vogue restaurant or some fad. It lost its glow because facts show it doesn't work.
I am talking about the liberal idea that government is the answer to our problems. Tax here and spend there, take from this one and redistribute to that one, and you can solve any social or economic problem.
Ironically, globally, as China, India, and Africa see the light of day by shedding government controls and planning, this is where our Democrats want to take us.
There has been ink about the Democratic candidates snubbing the annual meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council, which represents the moderate wing of the Party, while they plan to attend a bloggers convention sponsored by the ultra-left Web site Daily Kos.
You can argue as several have that in the general election the Democratic nominee will scurry back toward the center. But today every Democratic candidate is entrenched unapologetically in the far left.
The DLC was the base for the "new Democrat" that defined Bill Clinton.
And Bill Clinton, as we must recall, signed into law in 1996, the first and enormously successful retreat from the failed welfare state, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, aka welfare reform.
The act ended welfare as an unqualified entitlement, and introduced time limits and work requirements.
The result? Welfare rolls decreased almost 60 percent. And, as USA Today reported last year, the tenth anniversary of welfare reform, "Nearly 70 percent of all single women are working, compared to 66 percent of married women, a reversal of the past. Single women's incomes have risen ... Child poverty rates have dropped, particularly among blacks and Hispanics. Teen pregnancies are down. Child support collections are up."
Is every problem solved? Of course not. But the achievement has been historic.
Welfare was a horrible and destructive disaster. Blacks continue to pay the price today in the broken families and communities that are its legacy.
We must understand why welfare reform worked. It trashed the great lie that government planning and programs can solve human problems. And it brought clearly to light the truth that when personal responsibility is restored, and life's realities are brought back into focus, people, all people, know what to do and become productive and creative.
Liberals could not imagine that the lives of the poor could improve by getting rid of government and they couldn't have been more wrong.
Someone recently e-mailed me the following wonderful quote from Rabbi Daniel Lapin, head of an organization called Toward Tradition:
"Politics is nothing more than the practical application of our most deeply held beliefs."
The deeply held belief of the left, that government can solve the problems of the poor, destroyed black families and black communities.
The deeply held beliefs of conservatives -- faith, traditional values, work, and personal responsibility -- is restoring these families and communities.
The left may talk today about courting values voters. But big government values voters is an oxymoron.
The country now is at a real crossroads and we're going to have to wake up if we care about our children. The failures of the welfare state and social engineering go beyond poor black women.
Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post wrote this past week about the unsustainable entitlement burdens of Social Security and Medicare.
Taxes will have to go up, according to Samuelson, anywhere from 30-50 percent to meet the outstanding obligations of these entitlements. The chunk of the federal budget that they will consume will increase from 40 percent, to 75 percent in 2030.
Yet every Democrat today is talking about new government poverty programs, new entitlements, and socialized medicine.
Can voters next year possibly buy into this denial of reality and delusional retreat into the failures of the past?
If you are a values voter, I hope you'll join me in prayer that it doesn't happen.
The future of a great country is at stake.
Confession of a Recovering Democrat
By Burt Prelutsky
Monday, August 6, 2007
I grew up in a home in which Franklin Roosevelt was regarded as a saint. Is it any wonder that it took me so many years before I finally saw the light? As a rule, I don’t approve of people who lay their own shortcomings at the feet of their parents, but when I realize that for no other reason than the way I was raised that I actually voted for Jimmy Carter, it’s awfully tempting to blame my folks.
But whoever is at fault, it is certainly high time to acknowledge how much harm was done to this country during FDR’s administrations, and how much spin left-wing historians have put on his record . For instance, he has often been credited with keeping America from going Communist during the Great Depression. But you might say the same about the leaders of Germany, Italy and Spain.
The fact is, Roosevelt simply introduced an American form of Communism, one the country was willing to swallow. There were no gulags or show trials; instead, there was an alphabet soup of new federal departments and bureaucracies, whose sole purpose was to diminish the power of the states and its citizens. FDR tried and pretty much succeeded in turning the federal government into a grotesque, power-crazy, creature that was all mouth and no brain. Compared to Roosevelt, Dr. Frankenstein was small potatoes.
Roosevelt can’t even be credited with leading the country out of the Great Depression. If anything, as others, including Amity Shlaes in her terrific book, “The Forgotten Man,” have pointed out, his economic policies undoubtedly prolonged the nation’s agony. In a move that would have delighted such knuckleheads as John Edwards and George Soros, FDR kept increasing taxes during the 1930s. Only an old time lefty or a modern-day Democrat would ever imagine that the solution to a financial malaise would be to increase the tax burden on businesses and individuals. It took World War II, not Roosevelt’s left-wing machinations, to get America back on its feet.
That’s one of the reasons why when Michael Savage contends that liberalism is a mental disorder, I am in complete agreement. Liberals simply refuse to learn from their mistakes. Even though a lower tax rate inevitably leads to a sounder economy, to this day Democrats continue to insist that taxes should be raised. A child of eight could figure out that lower taxes allows businesses to expand and to pay higher salaries to more workers, thus leading to more taxes being paid. But, then, most eight-year-olds aren’t liberals.
Another lesson that the Left refuses to learn is that when dealing with fascism, communism or Islamic fanaticism, so-called diplomacy never works. Inevitably, liberals turn to a toothless organization such as the League of Nations or the U.N. to settle things peacefully, ignoring the fact that 70 years of history prove that they have never settled anything, whether the trouble was in Ethiopia, China, Iraq or Darfur. Inevitably, the guys in striped pants have to step aside and let the soldiers do what must be done.
While I have your attention, will someone please tell me who the ignoramus was who came up with the notion of dual-citizenship? I’m betting that some liberal knucklehead was behind it. How on earth can anyone simultaneously be a citizen of the United States and of some other place? It sure sounds a lot like bigamy.
Finally, I had a bad night recently. I couldn’t get to sleep at all once it occurred to me that liberals could literally get away with murder. All they’d have to do is to plead insanity.
Monday, August 6, 2007
I grew up in a home in which Franklin Roosevelt was regarded as a saint. Is it any wonder that it took me so many years before I finally saw the light? As a rule, I don’t approve of people who lay their own shortcomings at the feet of their parents, but when I realize that for no other reason than the way I was raised that I actually voted for Jimmy Carter, it’s awfully tempting to blame my folks.
But whoever is at fault, it is certainly high time to acknowledge how much harm was done to this country during FDR’s administrations, and how much spin left-wing historians have put on his record . For instance, he has often been credited with keeping America from going Communist during the Great Depression. But you might say the same about the leaders of Germany, Italy and Spain.
The fact is, Roosevelt simply introduced an American form of Communism, one the country was willing to swallow. There were no gulags or show trials; instead, there was an alphabet soup of new federal departments and bureaucracies, whose sole purpose was to diminish the power of the states and its citizens. FDR tried and pretty much succeeded in turning the federal government into a grotesque, power-crazy, creature that was all mouth and no brain. Compared to Roosevelt, Dr. Frankenstein was small potatoes.
Roosevelt can’t even be credited with leading the country out of the Great Depression. If anything, as others, including Amity Shlaes in her terrific book, “The Forgotten Man,” have pointed out, his economic policies undoubtedly prolonged the nation’s agony. In a move that would have delighted such knuckleheads as John Edwards and George Soros, FDR kept increasing taxes during the 1930s. Only an old time lefty or a modern-day Democrat would ever imagine that the solution to a financial malaise would be to increase the tax burden on businesses and individuals. It took World War II, not Roosevelt’s left-wing machinations, to get America back on its feet.
That’s one of the reasons why when Michael Savage contends that liberalism is a mental disorder, I am in complete agreement. Liberals simply refuse to learn from their mistakes. Even though a lower tax rate inevitably leads to a sounder economy, to this day Democrats continue to insist that taxes should be raised. A child of eight could figure out that lower taxes allows businesses to expand and to pay higher salaries to more workers, thus leading to more taxes being paid. But, then, most eight-year-olds aren’t liberals.
Another lesson that the Left refuses to learn is that when dealing with fascism, communism or Islamic fanaticism, so-called diplomacy never works. Inevitably, liberals turn to a toothless organization such as the League of Nations or the U.N. to settle things peacefully, ignoring the fact that 70 years of history prove that they have never settled anything, whether the trouble was in Ethiopia, China, Iraq or Darfur. Inevitably, the guys in striped pants have to step aside and let the soldiers do what must be done.
While I have your attention, will someone please tell me who the ignoramus was who came up with the notion of dual-citizenship? I’m betting that some liberal knucklehead was behind it. How on earth can anyone simultaneously be a citizen of the United States and of some other place? It sure sounds a lot like bigamy.
Finally, I had a bad night recently. I couldn’t get to sleep at all once it occurred to me that liberals could literally get away with murder. All they’d have to do is to plead insanity.
Perceptions of Iraq War Are Starting to Shift
By Michael Barone
Monday, August 6, 2007
It's not often that an opinion article shakes up Washington and changes the way a major issue is viewed. But that happened last week, when The New York Times printed an opinion article by Brookings Institution analysts Michael O'Hanlon and Ken Pollack on the progress of the surge strategy in Iraq.
Yes, progress. O'Hanlon and Pollack supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 -- Pollack even wrote a book urging the overthrow of Saddam Hussein -- but they have sharply criticized military operations there in the ensuing years.
"As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq," they wrote, "we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily 'victory,' but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with."
Their bottom line: "There is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008."
That's not what almost all their fellow Democrats in Congress want to hear. Freshman Rep. Nancy Boyda of Kansas, who unseated Republican Jim Ryun last fall, bolted from a hearing room when retired Gen. Jack Keane described positive developments in Iraq. When she came back, she explained: "But let me first just say that the description of Iraq as in some way or another that it's a place that I might take the family for a vacation -- things are going so well -- those kinds of comments will in fact show up in the media and further divide this country, instead of saying, here's the reality of the problem. And people, we have to come together and deal with the reality of this issue."
But reality can change -- and in war it often does. For George W. Bush and his leading advisers, the reality of Iraq in June 2003 was that we had won a major military victory and that any postwar messiness was not a big problem. We'd put a proconsul in for a year, set up elections and install an Iraqi government, train Iraqi soldiers and police, and restrict our troops to a light footprint. But that reality changed, into full-fledged sectarian warfare, after al-Qaida bombed the Shiite mosque in Samarra in February 2006.
Bush and his military commanders acted as if that reality hadn't changed, until the voters weighed in last November. Then, Bush made changes, installing new commanders and ordering a surge -- an increase in troops, and a more forward strategy of confronting and cleaning out al-Qaida terrorists. And the reality apparently has once again changed.
It can be argued that the surge will prove insufficient to produce the "sustainable stability" that O'Hanlon and Pollack see as a possible result. Serious military experts have argued that we still don't have enough troops or that we won't be able to keep enough troops in place long enough -- current force rotations indicate a net drawdown of troops next spring. And certainly there is room to make the argument that Bush should have acted sooner, as the results of the Samarra bombing became apparent months before the voters' wakeup call.
But it is also reasonably clear that Boyda's "reality of this issue" -- that our effort in Iraq has definitively and finally failed so clearly that there should be no further discussion -- may no longer be operative. That, instead of accepting defeat and inviting chaos, we may be able to achieve a significant measure of success.
Wars don't stand still. In June 1942, the House of Commons debated a resolution of no confidence in Winston Churchill's government. Four months later came the war-changing victory at El Alamein.
Gen. David Petraeus, the author of the Army's new counterinsurgency manual and the commander in Iraq, is scheduled to report on the surge in mid-September. The prospect of an even partially positive report has sent chills up the spines of Democratic leaders in Congress. That, says House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, would be "a real big problem for us."
The Democratic base has been furious that Democrats in Congress haven't pulled the plug on the war already, and Democratic strategists have been anticipating big electoral gains from military defeat. But if the course of the war can change, so can public opinion. A couple of recent polls showed increased support for the decision to go to war and belief that the surge is working. If opinion continues to shift that way, if others come to see things as O'Hanlon and Pollack have, Democrats could find themselves trapped between a base that wants retreat and defeat, and a majority that wants victory.
Monday, August 6, 2007
It's not often that an opinion article shakes up Washington and changes the way a major issue is viewed. But that happened last week, when The New York Times printed an opinion article by Brookings Institution analysts Michael O'Hanlon and Ken Pollack on the progress of the surge strategy in Iraq.
Yes, progress. O'Hanlon and Pollack supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 -- Pollack even wrote a book urging the overthrow of Saddam Hussein -- but they have sharply criticized military operations there in the ensuing years.
"As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq," they wrote, "we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily 'victory,' but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with."
Their bottom line: "There is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008."
That's not what almost all their fellow Democrats in Congress want to hear. Freshman Rep. Nancy Boyda of Kansas, who unseated Republican Jim Ryun last fall, bolted from a hearing room when retired Gen. Jack Keane described positive developments in Iraq. When she came back, she explained: "But let me first just say that the description of Iraq as in some way or another that it's a place that I might take the family for a vacation -- things are going so well -- those kinds of comments will in fact show up in the media and further divide this country, instead of saying, here's the reality of the problem. And people, we have to come together and deal with the reality of this issue."
But reality can change -- and in war it often does. For George W. Bush and his leading advisers, the reality of Iraq in June 2003 was that we had won a major military victory and that any postwar messiness was not a big problem. We'd put a proconsul in for a year, set up elections and install an Iraqi government, train Iraqi soldiers and police, and restrict our troops to a light footprint. But that reality changed, into full-fledged sectarian warfare, after al-Qaida bombed the Shiite mosque in Samarra in February 2006.
Bush and his military commanders acted as if that reality hadn't changed, until the voters weighed in last November. Then, Bush made changes, installing new commanders and ordering a surge -- an increase in troops, and a more forward strategy of confronting and cleaning out al-Qaida terrorists. And the reality apparently has once again changed.
It can be argued that the surge will prove insufficient to produce the "sustainable stability" that O'Hanlon and Pollack see as a possible result. Serious military experts have argued that we still don't have enough troops or that we won't be able to keep enough troops in place long enough -- current force rotations indicate a net drawdown of troops next spring. And certainly there is room to make the argument that Bush should have acted sooner, as the results of the Samarra bombing became apparent months before the voters' wakeup call.
But it is also reasonably clear that Boyda's "reality of this issue" -- that our effort in Iraq has definitively and finally failed so clearly that there should be no further discussion -- may no longer be operative. That, instead of accepting defeat and inviting chaos, we may be able to achieve a significant measure of success.
Wars don't stand still. In June 1942, the House of Commons debated a resolution of no confidence in Winston Churchill's government. Four months later came the war-changing victory at El Alamein.
Gen. David Petraeus, the author of the Army's new counterinsurgency manual and the commander in Iraq, is scheduled to report on the surge in mid-September. The prospect of an even partially positive report has sent chills up the spines of Democratic leaders in Congress. That, says House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, would be "a real big problem for us."
The Democratic base has been furious that Democrats in Congress haven't pulled the plug on the war already, and Democratic strategists have been anticipating big electoral gains from military defeat. But if the course of the war can change, so can public opinion. A couple of recent polls showed increased support for the decision to go to war and belief that the surge is working. If opinion continues to shift that way, if others come to see things as O'Hanlon and Pollack have, Democrats could find themselves trapped between a base that wants retreat and defeat, and a majority that wants victory.
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Radicals Still Plentiful at CU
By John Andrews
Saturday, August 4, 2007
The easy part of the Ward Churchill affair is over. The fraudulent scholar and faux Indian was fired from the University Colorado faculty on July 24 for dishonesty in his academic profession, not for honesty in his radical politics.
Colorado citizens and taxpayers, acting through their elected regents, rightly rid themselves of a corrupt and treacherous employee. Churchill may sue all the way to the Supreme Court, but Chief Justice Roberts and his colleagues will finally uphold the board’s action.
Now comes the hard part: thinking through what we the people of Colorado mean by a great university in a free society, then finding the political will to reform our academic institutions accordingly.
“How Many Ward Churchills?,” a 2006 report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, concluded that abuse of the professor’s podium to undermine the ideal of higher learning itself is common nationwide. Wild Ward appears to have many soulmates among the Boulder faculty. Elizabeth Hoffman, Hank Brown’s predecessor as CU president, validated them with absurd talk of McCarthyism. Churchill’s departure will do little to cure the wider intellectual rot you can sense on campus.
His former fiefdom, the Department of Ethnic Studies, proclaims online that ht “empowers students to move beyond existing social, cultural and political paradigms to more inclusive paradigms in which they are the subjects of their own reality.” Relying on “critical race theory, critical class theory, feminist theory, liberation theology, postmodernism, and postcolonial theory,” say these shapers of tomorrow’s radicals, “we engage emergent epistemologies of racial/ethnic communities to critically question established disciplinary canons.”
Loosely translated, this means America should be ashamed of itself, needs reinventing (or even, as Churchill has suggested, erasing), and in the process, a hard rain’s gonna fall. Fine, go ahead and think that. It’s a free country. But alongside this bizarre sideshow of our tax dollars at work, why not provide equal time for a CU Department of Western Civilization academically devoted to “advancing the ideals of freedom (with) loyalty to the past (and) responsibility to the future”? Talk about radical.
But Boulder wouldn’t dare, would it? Sadly, no. Those words are from the brochure of a tiny Center for Western Civilization begun at the university as a solo effort by classics professor Christian Kopff. “The permanent things, embedded in tradition, are good things for human life,” his defiant prospectus continues. He invites students to join “in the fruitful exploration of the benefits and significance of Western Culture, from the ancient Greeks to the American Founding.”
For perspective on the center’s pathetic $86,000 budget (just increased by President Brown, with touching gratitude from Kopff), consider that CU spends $22 million annually on diversity programs. This includes nearly 100 activities so tangled and varied – but none addressing intellectual or political diversity, of course – that administrators conceded to an Independence Institute researcher there’s no complete list.
With a 6-3 Republican majority on the Board of Regents, you might Kopff would be faring better. But it was clear who runs the asylum when Regent Tom Lucero brought a resolution last December that would have directed administrators and faculty to start a Department of Western Civilization, Republicans Pat Hayes and Paul Schauer sided with the three Democratic regents to defeat it, 5-4.
Were the GOP dissenters swayed by the inner voice of multiculturalism, or pressured by faculty postmodernists? They haven’t said, but you have to wonder if the same five votes were what elected the liberal Hayes as chairman in June, edging out conservative Republican Steve Bosley.
Bosley at least heads the search committee seeking a successor for Hank Brown, who is leaving next year. But will CU’s new president be chosen by the 8-1 bloc that fired Ward Churchill, or by the 5-4 alliance that squashed Western Civ? That’s the next big showdown between “critical class theory” and "the permanent things."
Saturday, August 4, 2007
The easy part of the Ward Churchill affair is over. The fraudulent scholar and faux Indian was fired from the University Colorado faculty on July 24 for dishonesty in his academic profession, not for honesty in his radical politics.
Colorado citizens and taxpayers, acting through their elected regents, rightly rid themselves of a corrupt and treacherous employee. Churchill may sue all the way to the Supreme Court, but Chief Justice Roberts and his colleagues will finally uphold the board’s action.
Now comes the hard part: thinking through what we the people of Colorado mean by a great university in a free society, then finding the political will to reform our academic institutions accordingly.
“How Many Ward Churchills?,” a 2006 report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, concluded that abuse of the professor’s podium to undermine the ideal of higher learning itself is common nationwide. Wild Ward appears to have many soulmates among the Boulder faculty. Elizabeth Hoffman, Hank Brown’s predecessor as CU president, validated them with absurd talk of McCarthyism. Churchill’s departure will do little to cure the wider intellectual rot you can sense on campus.
His former fiefdom, the Department of Ethnic Studies, proclaims online that ht “empowers students to move beyond existing social, cultural and political paradigms to more inclusive paradigms in which they are the subjects of their own reality.” Relying on “critical race theory, critical class theory, feminist theory, liberation theology, postmodernism, and postcolonial theory,” say these shapers of tomorrow’s radicals, “we engage emergent epistemologies of racial/ethnic communities to critically question established disciplinary canons.”
Loosely translated, this means America should be ashamed of itself, needs reinventing (or even, as Churchill has suggested, erasing), and in the process, a hard rain’s gonna fall. Fine, go ahead and think that. It’s a free country. But alongside this bizarre sideshow of our tax dollars at work, why not provide equal time for a CU Department of Western Civilization academically devoted to “advancing the ideals of freedom (with) loyalty to the past (and) responsibility to the future”? Talk about radical.
But Boulder wouldn’t dare, would it? Sadly, no. Those words are from the brochure of a tiny Center for Western Civilization begun at the university as a solo effort by classics professor Christian Kopff. “The permanent things, embedded in tradition, are good things for human life,” his defiant prospectus continues. He invites students to join “in the fruitful exploration of the benefits and significance of Western Culture, from the ancient Greeks to the American Founding.”
For perspective on the center’s pathetic $86,000 budget (just increased by President Brown, with touching gratitude from Kopff), consider that CU spends $22 million annually on diversity programs. This includes nearly 100 activities so tangled and varied – but none addressing intellectual or political diversity, of course – that administrators conceded to an Independence Institute researcher there’s no complete list.
With a 6-3 Republican majority on the Board of Regents, you might Kopff would be faring better. But it was clear who runs the asylum when Regent Tom Lucero brought a resolution last December that would have directed administrators and faculty to start a Department of Western Civilization, Republicans Pat Hayes and Paul Schauer sided with the three Democratic regents to defeat it, 5-4.
Were the GOP dissenters swayed by the inner voice of multiculturalism, or pressured by faculty postmodernists? They haven’t said, but you have to wonder if the same five votes were what elected the liberal Hayes as chairman in June, edging out conservative Republican Steve Bosley.
Bosley at least heads the search committee seeking a successor for Hank Brown, who is leaving next year. But will CU’s new president be chosen by the 8-1 bloc that fired Ward Churchill, or by the 5-4 alliance that squashed Western Civ? That’s the next big showdown between “critical class theory” and "the permanent things."
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