Michelle Malkin
Friday, January 02, 2009
If you think the bad economy has "solved" America's immigration problems, welcome to your end-of-the-year reality check. It's certainly true illegal crossings from the south are down and that many foreign workers are returning to their native lands as work dries up. But border chaos, haphazard enforcement, massive backlogs and deportation negligence remain the order of the day.
A half-million citizenship applications have been pending for more than nine months. Some 700,000 illegal alien absconders -- fugitives from deportation like Barack Obama's aunt Zeituni Onyango -- are free. An estimated 4-5 million illegal visa overstayers from around the world remain in the country. Both Big Business and left-wing ethnic groups have colluded to prevent an employer verification program for workers' citizenship status from getting implemented nationwide. And the borders are still largely borders in name only.
In June, the White House pushed through a $1.6-billion border security spending plan ... for Mexico and Central America. While our own border fence remains incomplete, taxpayers shelled out for helicopters, surveillance equipment, computer infrastructure, expansion of intelligence databases, anti-corruption initiatives, human rights education and training, and anti-money laundering programs for our southern neighbors. So, how's the so-called Merida Initiative working out?
As terrorized citizens of Mexico will tell you, all hell has broken loose. Corrupt police officials and narco-insurgents have left a horrific trail of beheaded and bullet-ridden bodies in their wake on both sides of the border. Mexican Army incursions into U.S. territory are a regular occurrence. In Monterrey, bandits opened fire and threw a grenade at the U.S. consulate this fall. A top Mexican immigration official was arrested in October carrying about 77 kilos of pot in Arizona. On a single weekend in Tijuana, 40 people were murdered, including nine victims who were decapitated. Two weeks ago, famed American anti-kidnapping negotiator Felix Bautista disappeared from the "relatively safe" northern industrial city of Saltillo in Coahuila state. No word on his whereabouts.
The apocalyptic conditions have prompted some Mexican lawmakers to revisit the country's ban on capital punishment. That's right. Members of the same foreign government that took America to court over our death penalty laws -- and tried to block the state of Texas from executing illegal alien Death Row murderers -- are now open to the idea of imposing the death penalty on the thugs on their own soil. And after years of vehement protests against the United States for its meager attempts at immigration enforcement, Mexico is cracking down hard on illegal Cuban immigrants caught trying to enter the country from the south. They forged an agreement with Cuba to immediately send back illegal aliens -- none of that "undocumented worker" mushiness for them -- and punish human smugglers.
Such lawlessness, Mexico has apparently realized, is a grave threat to its people. Without order, there can be no peace. And chaos, as I've argued endlessly since September 11, is an invitation for those with far more nefarious intentions. Perhaps this is why Mexico slapped a 60-year prison term on a human smuggler who helped some 200 illegal aliens cross into the United States from Mexico -- including Hezbollah supporters. In a little-noticed announcement this month, Mexican prosecutors reported the stiff sentence against Salim Boughader Mucharrafille, a Mexican of Lebanese descent who operated a cafe in Tijuana and smuggled terrorist sympathizers into San Diego. Mucharrafille's accomplice was Imelda Ortiz Abdala, a Mexican foreign service official who helmed the Mexican consulate in Beirut.
No illegal alien demonstrations ensued following the sentencing.
No cries of racism and xenophobia clouded the news. No demands for amnesty and open borders arose. One hopes the incoming Obama administration can learn from our neighbors to the south the hard lesson Washington has abandoned since 9/11: Immigration control is a national security issue. Blood-stained reality clarifies the mind.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Israel's Proportionate Response
Michael Gerson
Friday, January 02, 2009
WASHINGTON -- There is no question -- none -- that Israel's attack on Hamas in Gaza is justified. No nation can tolerate a portion of its people living in the conditions of the London Blitz -- listening for sirens, sleeping in bomb shelters and separated from death only by the randomness of a Qassam missile's flight. And no group aspiring to nationhood, such as Hamas, can be exempt from the rules of sovereignty, morality and civilization, which, at the very least, forbid routine murder attempts against your neighbors.
Israel's response has been criticized as "disproportionate," which betrays a misunderstanding of proportion's meaning. The goal of military action, when unavoidable, is not to take one life in exchange for each one unjustly taken; this is mere vengeance. The goal is to remove the conditions that lead to conflict and the taking of life. So far, Israel's actions have been proportionate to this objective. And the convoys of fuel, medical supplies and food sent by Israel into Gaza show an appropriate concern for Palestinian suffering, even during a broad assault on Hamas forces.
Israel's immediate goal is simple: to stop missile barrages by Hamas on southern Israel. But it is not a coincidence that this action was taken by the primary sponsors of the peace process in Israeli politics. The Israeli public will not accept any further risks for peace as long as Hamas missiles fly. Those missiles are a daily symbol that Israeli territorial concessions result in the strengthening of committed enemies and the death of Israeli citizens. The removal of this threat is not an obstacle to the peace process. It is the prerequisite for the resumption of the peace process.
It is also not a coincidence that the Israeli attack took place in the last days of a reliably favorable Bush administration -- for which the president-elect, above all, should be grateful. If Israel concludes the main phase of its Gaza operations by Inauguration Day -- as it seems to want -- this will allow Obama to renew a peace push with a fresh start and a large obstacle (hopefully) removed.
But the risks are considerable. A repeat of Israel's 2006 experience in Lebanon would be a massive blow to the Jewish state -- a demonstration of impotence in the face of mortal threats. The Lebanon campaign did not fail because of international pressure and criticism. It failed because Hezbollah terrorists could credibly claim the victory of survival -- confirmed by a cease-fire that allowed their rearmament. Syria and Iran were strengthened -- not because of Israel's attack on Hezbollah, but because Israel didn't prevail.
The Israelis have an advantage this time around. In Lebanon, Hezbollah received a flood of weapons and support from bordering Syria. In Gaza, arms smuggling has been a problem, but bordering Egypt is not pro-Hamas. Israeli air raids have been effective in destroying Hamas infrastructure, weapons stockpiles and smuggling tunnels.
Israel recognizes that Hamas will claim victory no matter how badly it is damaged. But the real determination of winners and losers will come six months after a cease-fire. And there are two objective criteria of Israeli success: an end of rocket and mortar attacks on Israel and an end of large-scale arms smuggling to Hamas.
What would be the shape of such a victory? That is not yet clear. Israel could reoccupy Gaza, overthrow Hamas and enforce its terms. But Israeli leaders, by most accounts, don't prefer this massive exertion, which also would imply that Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza was a mistake. It is more likely that a ground invasion, if it comes, would last a matter of days. In this case, Israel would reserve the right to resume attacks in Gaza at any time after the conclusion of a cease-fire -- responding to every tunnel that is dug and every missile that is fired. And Hamas could, of course, finally observe a cease-fire that doesn't involve random attacks on Israeli families.
In this crisis, Israel faces a test of its wisdom and competence: Would its leaders really have undertaken such a high-risk operation without a clear endgame?
America, in turn, faces a test of its moral judgment. This conflict is not a contest between shades of gray in mist and fog. It is a matter of distinguishing between murderers and victims -- and of supporting an ally until a clear victory against terrorism is achieved.
Friday, January 02, 2009
WASHINGTON -- There is no question -- none -- that Israel's attack on Hamas in Gaza is justified. No nation can tolerate a portion of its people living in the conditions of the London Blitz -- listening for sirens, sleeping in bomb shelters and separated from death only by the randomness of a Qassam missile's flight. And no group aspiring to nationhood, such as Hamas, can be exempt from the rules of sovereignty, morality and civilization, which, at the very least, forbid routine murder attempts against your neighbors.
Israel's response has been criticized as "disproportionate," which betrays a misunderstanding of proportion's meaning. The goal of military action, when unavoidable, is not to take one life in exchange for each one unjustly taken; this is mere vengeance. The goal is to remove the conditions that lead to conflict and the taking of life. So far, Israel's actions have been proportionate to this objective. And the convoys of fuel, medical supplies and food sent by Israel into Gaza show an appropriate concern for Palestinian suffering, even during a broad assault on Hamas forces.
Israel's immediate goal is simple: to stop missile barrages by Hamas on southern Israel. But it is not a coincidence that this action was taken by the primary sponsors of the peace process in Israeli politics. The Israeli public will not accept any further risks for peace as long as Hamas missiles fly. Those missiles are a daily symbol that Israeli territorial concessions result in the strengthening of committed enemies and the death of Israeli citizens. The removal of this threat is not an obstacle to the peace process. It is the prerequisite for the resumption of the peace process.
It is also not a coincidence that the Israeli attack took place in the last days of a reliably favorable Bush administration -- for which the president-elect, above all, should be grateful. If Israel concludes the main phase of its Gaza operations by Inauguration Day -- as it seems to want -- this will allow Obama to renew a peace push with a fresh start and a large obstacle (hopefully) removed.
But the risks are considerable. A repeat of Israel's 2006 experience in Lebanon would be a massive blow to the Jewish state -- a demonstration of impotence in the face of mortal threats. The Lebanon campaign did not fail because of international pressure and criticism. It failed because Hezbollah terrorists could credibly claim the victory of survival -- confirmed by a cease-fire that allowed their rearmament. Syria and Iran were strengthened -- not because of Israel's attack on Hezbollah, but because Israel didn't prevail.
The Israelis have an advantage this time around. In Lebanon, Hezbollah received a flood of weapons and support from bordering Syria. In Gaza, arms smuggling has been a problem, but bordering Egypt is not pro-Hamas. Israeli air raids have been effective in destroying Hamas infrastructure, weapons stockpiles and smuggling tunnels.
Israel recognizes that Hamas will claim victory no matter how badly it is damaged. But the real determination of winners and losers will come six months after a cease-fire. And there are two objective criteria of Israeli success: an end of rocket and mortar attacks on Israel and an end of large-scale arms smuggling to Hamas.
What would be the shape of such a victory? That is not yet clear. Israel could reoccupy Gaza, overthrow Hamas and enforce its terms. But Israeli leaders, by most accounts, don't prefer this massive exertion, which also would imply that Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza was a mistake. It is more likely that a ground invasion, if it comes, would last a matter of days. In this case, Israel would reserve the right to resume attacks in Gaza at any time after the conclusion of a cease-fire -- responding to every tunnel that is dug and every missile that is fired. And Hamas could, of course, finally observe a cease-fire that doesn't involve random attacks on Israeli families.
In this crisis, Israel faces a test of its wisdom and competence: Would its leaders really have undertaken such a high-risk operation without a clear endgame?
America, in turn, faces a test of its moral judgment. This conflict is not a contest between shades of gray in mist and fog. It is a matter of distinguishing between murderers and victims -- and of supporting an ally until a clear victory against terrorism is achieved.
The Necessity of Israel
Charles Krauthammer
Friday, January 02, 2009
Late Saturday, thousands of Gazans received Arabic-language cell-phone messages from the Israeli military, urging them to leave homes where militants might have stashed weapons. -- Associated Press, Dec. 27
WASHINGTON -- Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating.
Israel is so scrupulous about civilian life that, risking the element of surprise, it contacts enemy noncombatants in advance to warn them of approaching danger. Hamas, which started this conflict with unrelenting rocket and mortar attacks on unarmed Israelis -- 6,464 launched from Gaza in the last three years -- deliberately places its weapons in and near the homes of its own people.
This has two purposes. First, counting on the moral scrupulousness of Israel, Hamas figures civilian proximity might help protect at least part of its arsenal. Second, knowing that Israelis have new precision weapons that may allow them to attack nonetheless, Hamas hopes that inevitable collateral damage -- or, if it is really fortunate, an errant Israeli bomb -- will kill large numbers of its own people for which, of course, the world will blame Israel.
For Hamas the only thing more prized than dead Jews are dead Palestinians. The religion of Jew-murder and self-martyrdom is ubiquitous. And deeply perverse, such as the Hamas TV children's program in which an adorable live-action Palestinian Mickey Mouse is beaten to death by an Israeli (then replaced by his more militant cousin, Nahoul the Bee, who vows to continue on Mickey's path to martyrdom).
At war today in Gaza, one combatant is committed to causing the most civilian pain and suffering on both sides. The other combatant is committed to saving as many lives as possible -- also on both sides. It's a recurring theme. Israel gave similar warnings to Southern Lebanese villagers before attacking Hezbollah in the Lebanon war of 2006. The Israelis did this knowing it would lose for them the element of surprise and cost the lives of their own soldiers.
That is the asymmetry of means between Hamas and Israel. But there is equal clarity regarding the asymmetry of ends. Israel has but a single objective in Gaza -- peace: the calm, open, normal relations it offered Gaza when it withdrew in 2005. Doing something never done by the Turkish, British, Egyptian and Jordanian rulers of Palestine, the Israelis gave the Palestinians their first sovereign territory ever in Gaza.
What ensued? This is not ancient history. Did the Palestinians begin building the state that is supposedly their great national aim? No. No roads, no industry, no courts, no civil society at all. The flourishing greenhouses that Israel left behind for the Palestinians were destroyed and abandoned. Instead, Gaza's Iranian-sponsored rulers have devoted all their resources to turning it into a terror base -- importing weapons, training terrorists, building tunnels with which to kidnap Israelis on the other side. And of course firing rockets unceasingly.
The grievance? It cannot be occupation, military control or settlers. They were all removed in September 2005. There's only one grievance and Hamas is open about it. Israel's very existence.
Nor does Hamas conceal its strategy. Provoke conflict. Wait for the inevitable civilian casualties. Bring down the world's opprobrium on Israel. Force it into an untenable cease-fire -- exactly as happened in Lebanon. Then, as in Lebanon, rearm, rebuild and mobilize for the next round. Perpetual war. Since its raison d'etre is the eradication of Israel, there are only two possible outcomes: the defeat of Hamas or the extinction of Israel.
Israel's only response is to try to do what it failed to do after the Gaza withdrawal. The unpardonable strategic error of its architect, Ariel Sharon, was not the withdrawal itself but the failure to immediately establish a deterrence regime under which no violence would be tolerated after the removal of any and all Israeli presence -- the ostensible justification for previous Palestinian attacks. Instead, Israel allowed unceasing rocket fire, implicitly acquiescing to a state of active war and indiscriminate terror.
Hamas' rejection of an extension of its often-violated six-month cease-fire (during which the rockets never stopped, just were less frequent) gave Israel a rare opportunity to establish the norm it should have insisted upon three years ago: no rockets, no mortar fire, no kidnapping, no acts of war. As the U.S. government has officially stated: a sustainable and enduring cease-fire.
If this fighting ends with anything less than that, Israel will have lost again. It can ill afford to lose any more wars.
Friday, January 02, 2009
Late Saturday, thousands of Gazans received Arabic-language cell-phone messages from the Israeli military, urging them to leave homes where militants might have stashed weapons. -- Associated Press, Dec. 27
WASHINGTON -- Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare but excruciating.
Israel is so scrupulous about civilian life that, risking the element of surprise, it contacts enemy noncombatants in advance to warn them of approaching danger. Hamas, which started this conflict with unrelenting rocket and mortar attacks on unarmed Israelis -- 6,464 launched from Gaza in the last three years -- deliberately places its weapons in and near the homes of its own people.
This has two purposes. First, counting on the moral scrupulousness of Israel, Hamas figures civilian proximity might help protect at least part of its arsenal. Second, knowing that Israelis have new precision weapons that may allow them to attack nonetheless, Hamas hopes that inevitable collateral damage -- or, if it is really fortunate, an errant Israeli bomb -- will kill large numbers of its own people for which, of course, the world will blame Israel.
For Hamas the only thing more prized than dead Jews are dead Palestinians. The religion of Jew-murder and self-martyrdom is ubiquitous. And deeply perverse, such as the Hamas TV children's program in which an adorable live-action Palestinian Mickey Mouse is beaten to death by an Israeli (then replaced by his more militant cousin, Nahoul the Bee, who vows to continue on Mickey's path to martyrdom).
At war today in Gaza, one combatant is committed to causing the most civilian pain and suffering on both sides. The other combatant is committed to saving as many lives as possible -- also on both sides. It's a recurring theme. Israel gave similar warnings to Southern Lebanese villagers before attacking Hezbollah in the Lebanon war of 2006. The Israelis did this knowing it would lose for them the element of surprise and cost the lives of their own soldiers.
That is the asymmetry of means between Hamas and Israel. But there is equal clarity regarding the asymmetry of ends. Israel has but a single objective in Gaza -- peace: the calm, open, normal relations it offered Gaza when it withdrew in 2005. Doing something never done by the Turkish, British, Egyptian and Jordanian rulers of Palestine, the Israelis gave the Palestinians their first sovereign territory ever in Gaza.
What ensued? This is not ancient history. Did the Palestinians begin building the state that is supposedly their great national aim? No. No roads, no industry, no courts, no civil society at all. The flourishing greenhouses that Israel left behind for the Palestinians were destroyed and abandoned. Instead, Gaza's Iranian-sponsored rulers have devoted all their resources to turning it into a terror base -- importing weapons, training terrorists, building tunnels with which to kidnap Israelis on the other side. And of course firing rockets unceasingly.
The grievance? It cannot be occupation, military control or settlers. They were all removed in September 2005. There's only one grievance and Hamas is open about it. Israel's very existence.
Nor does Hamas conceal its strategy. Provoke conflict. Wait for the inevitable civilian casualties. Bring down the world's opprobrium on Israel. Force it into an untenable cease-fire -- exactly as happened in Lebanon. Then, as in Lebanon, rearm, rebuild and mobilize for the next round. Perpetual war. Since its raison d'etre is the eradication of Israel, there are only two possible outcomes: the defeat of Hamas or the extinction of Israel.
Israel's only response is to try to do what it failed to do after the Gaza withdrawal. The unpardonable strategic error of its architect, Ariel Sharon, was not the withdrawal itself but the failure to immediately establish a deterrence regime under which no violence would be tolerated after the removal of any and all Israeli presence -- the ostensible justification for previous Palestinian attacks. Instead, Israel allowed unceasing rocket fire, implicitly acquiescing to a state of active war and indiscriminate terror.
Hamas' rejection of an extension of its often-violated six-month cease-fire (during which the rockets never stopped, just were less frequent) gave Israel a rare opportunity to establish the norm it should have insisted upon three years ago: no rockets, no mortar fire, no kidnapping, no acts of war. As the U.S. government has officially stated: a sustainable and enduring cease-fire.
If this fighting ends with anything less than that, Israel will have lost again. It can ill afford to lose any more wars.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Doomed to repeat history? The great hangover of '08
By Jonathan V. Last
Thursday, January 1, 2009
The Year of Our Lord 2008 was like most other years — only worse. In Somalia, a thousand people packed into a stadium to witness the stoning of a 13-year-old girl. The local Islamic militia accused her of adultery because she had been raped by three men. Adultery is punishable by death under Islamic law, or sharia.
In Britain, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, declared that Muslims should be able to maintain a separate legal system for resolving family and marital disputes according to sharia. Lord Phillips bravely noted, however, that flogging, amputating and stoning should be "out of the question" in the United Kingdom, which surely came as a relief to the country's Muslim rape victims.
Jurisprudence on the continent was similarly accommodating to faith in the public square. A judge in France annulled a Muslim marriage at the request of the husband, who was horrified to learn that his wife had lied about being a virgin.
There were no such legal victories for Islam in America, but there were some cultural triumphs. Random House pulled the plug on a novel titled "The Jewel of Medina." Deputy publisher Thomas Perry explained that the company received "cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment."
At the box office, "The Golden Compass" finished its North American run with $70 million. The movie was based on Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" novels, which some Christians consider offensive. The novels were published by Random House.
Law enforcement was arbitrary, too. In Atlanta, a woman vandalized some of the city's "Men at Work" signs to protest their sexism. Instead of charging her, the city volunteered to replace the offensive signs with ones reading "Workers Ahead" — at a cost to taxpayers of $144 apiece.
Meanwhile, in Grafton, Wis., Heidi Dalibor made the mistake of having two overdue books from the town library. Police went to her home, cuffed her, stuffed her into the back of a cruiser, and took her downtown.
If only they had been sexist books.
America suffered through — and survived — its quadrennial ordeal. Elections, like wars, are divisive. The left and the media (the same thing in 2008) fretted about the dangerous, deranged anger of John McCain's supporters.
The great William F. Buckley passed on in 2008. He founded the National Review and, as much as anyone, invented the modern conservative movement. Buckley was the kind of patrician-intellectual-adventurer who no longer exists outside F. Scott Fitzgerald novels. His son, the droll, preening novelist Christopher Buckley, waited until eight months after his father's death to endorse Barack Obama and then resign from the National Review.
In 2000, the wise and good American people rejected a serious politician with a varied record of actual accomplishments in favor of an ambitious, inexperienced one brimming with confidence about his superior judgment. In 2008, history repeated itself.
While still a one-term senator running for his party's nomination, Barack Obama told a prospective aide, "I think that I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that I'm gonna think I'm a better political director than my political director."
We revere sports in America partly because we believe they reveal character. During the presidential campaign, Obama often talked about his love of basketball. As a high school player, Obama said, he was always demanding more minutes from his coach. Today, he laughingly admits that he wasn't as good as he thought he was.
We can't say he didn't warn us.
In November, the people of Goodridge, Minn. (population 98), put America's grasping professional politicians to shame. The town's mayoral contest, pitting Bob Homme against Dave Brown, was deadlocked at 22 votes apiece. Neither Homme nor Brown had officially registered as a candidate; both were write-ins.
They agreed to settle the race with a coin toss. Brown won.
Perhaps there's hope for 2009 after all.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
The Year of Our Lord 2008 was like most other years — only worse. In Somalia, a thousand people packed into a stadium to witness the stoning of a 13-year-old girl. The local Islamic militia accused her of adultery because she had been raped by three men. Adultery is punishable by death under Islamic law, or sharia.
In Britain, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, declared that Muslims should be able to maintain a separate legal system for resolving family and marital disputes according to sharia. Lord Phillips bravely noted, however, that flogging, amputating and stoning should be "out of the question" in the United Kingdom, which surely came as a relief to the country's Muslim rape victims.
Jurisprudence on the continent was similarly accommodating to faith in the public square. A judge in France annulled a Muslim marriage at the request of the husband, who was horrified to learn that his wife had lied about being a virgin.
There were no such legal victories for Islam in America, but there were some cultural triumphs. Random House pulled the plug on a novel titled "The Jewel of Medina." Deputy publisher Thomas Perry explained that the company received "cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment."
At the box office, "The Golden Compass" finished its North American run with $70 million. The movie was based on Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" novels, which some Christians consider offensive. The novels were published by Random House.
Law enforcement was arbitrary, too. In Atlanta, a woman vandalized some of the city's "Men at Work" signs to protest their sexism. Instead of charging her, the city volunteered to replace the offensive signs with ones reading "Workers Ahead" — at a cost to taxpayers of $144 apiece.
Meanwhile, in Grafton, Wis., Heidi Dalibor made the mistake of having two overdue books from the town library. Police went to her home, cuffed her, stuffed her into the back of a cruiser, and took her downtown.
If only they had been sexist books.
America suffered through — and survived — its quadrennial ordeal. Elections, like wars, are divisive. The left and the media (the same thing in 2008) fretted about the dangerous, deranged anger of John McCain's supporters.
The great William F. Buckley passed on in 2008. He founded the National Review and, as much as anyone, invented the modern conservative movement. Buckley was the kind of patrician-intellectual-adventurer who no longer exists outside F. Scott Fitzgerald novels. His son, the droll, preening novelist Christopher Buckley, waited until eight months after his father's death to endorse Barack Obama and then resign from the National Review.
In 2000, the wise and good American people rejected a serious politician with a varied record of actual accomplishments in favor of an ambitious, inexperienced one brimming with confidence about his superior judgment. In 2008, history repeated itself.
While still a one-term senator running for his party's nomination, Barack Obama told a prospective aide, "I think that I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that I'm gonna think I'm a better political director than my political director."
We revere sports in America partly because we believe they reveal character. During the presidential campaign, Obama often talked about his love of basketball. As a high school player, Obama said, he was always demanding more minutes from his coach. Today, he laughingly admits that he wasn't as good as he thought he was.
We can't say he didn't warn us.
In November, the people of Goodridge, Minn. (population 98), put America's grasping professional politicians to shame. The town's mayoral contest, pitting Bob Homme against Dave Brown, was deadlocked at 22 votes apiece. Neither Homme nor Brown had officially registered as a candidate; both were write-ins.
They agreed to settle the race with a coin toss. Brown won.
Perhaps there's hope for 2009 after all.
The Squeegee Men of the New World Order
Sometimes deviancy can be defined back up.
By Jonah Goldberg
Thursday, January 1, 2009
If you’re old enough to have been around in the 1980s, and possibly even if you aren’t, you probably know the name Leon Klinghoffer. A wheelchair-bound elderly businessman, Klinghoffer was murdered and dumped over the side of the cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists in 1985.
But do you remember Gavriel Holtzberg? He was an American executed in Mumbai in November. His wife Rivka, an Israeli, was six months pregnant and was also executed at close range. How about Naomi and Alan Scherr? Naomi was Alan’s 13-year-old daughter. They were killed while having dinner in their Mumbai hotel. Paul Johnson Jr.? He was one of several Americans kidnapped and executed in 2004 in Saudi Arabia.
We don’t remember these names because nobody made a big deal about them. It’s not that their deaths were considered trivial events when they happened. But it was merely the news of the day, maybe the week, and little more.
Now compare that to Klinghoffer. His murder was a worldwide event. Presidents and prime ministers thundered their outrage. Newspapers editorialized ad nauseam about the cowardice and villainy of the perpetrators.
Yasir Arafat’s PLO had to play along, pretending they would never be involved in such a heinous act. Farouk Kaddoumi, Arafat’s “foreign minister,” suggested that Klinghoffer’s wife had murdered and dumped her husband overboard to collect the insurance money. For the record, the Klinghoffers took the cruise to celebrate their 36th wedding anniversary.
In 1993, near the height of America’s anger over out-of-control crime, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a seminal article for the American Scholar on “defining deviancy down.” Moynihan argued that crime had gotten so out of control, Americans responded by simply defining deviancy down until many crimes seemed normal.
One of his more famous examples was the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. On Feb. 14, 1929, seven gangsters were killed by rival gangsters. “The nation was shocked. The event became legend ...” Moynihan observed. “I leave it to others to judge, but it would appear that the society in the 1920s was simply not willing to put up with this degree of deviancy. In the end, the Constitution was amended, and Prohibition, which lay behind so much gangster violence, ended.” But by the early 1990s, the United States was experiencing the equivalent of a St. Valentine’s Day Massacre every weekend.
One response to the crime epidemic was to redefine violent crime as a “public health issue.” Traditional law enforcement was simply incapable of dealing with the “social pathologies” and “root causes” of the wave of gun violence and the like.
Fortunately, this approach, while far from dead, was relegated to the back burner by the successes of anti-crime initiatives in places like Rudy Giuliani’s New York. The solution, it largely turned out, wasn’t to become more tolerant of criminality by recasting it as a cultural or lifestyle choice or by invoking root causes (as The New York Times often did), but to become less tolerant of crime. In New York, turnstile jumpers, graffiti artists, even the infamous “squeegee men” were treated as the lawbreakers they were. One heartening moral of the story is that sometimes deviancy can be defined back up.
We learned a similar moral after 9/11. For years — starting around the time of Klinghoffer’s murder, as it happens — policymakers in both parties debated how to define terrorism. Is it a law-and-order issue or a military threat? If it’s a military threat, how do we define a “proportionate response” — this legalistic phrase entered the national-security lexicon back then, too. By the end of the 1990s, the best and the brightest of the Clinton administration found the answer in a lawerly kind of proportionality, blowing up empty office buildings as a way to “send a message” in response to attacks on America and her interests.
After 9/11, the gloves were off. The far left beseeched the government to retaliate with, at most, a proportionate response, but no one cared. We toppled the Taliban as a warm-up act. Terrorists weren’t criminals anymore, they were enemy combatants, ineligible for the Geneva Conventions. But the war in Iraq and reports of American zeal in the war on terror have left a sour taste in our mouths. That there have been no terrorist attacks on our soil only bolsters the sense that terrorism is manageable, even banal. Barack Obama leads a counteroffensive from a legal establishment that wants to treat terrorists like any other criminals. Terrorists in Mumbai or Jeddah are little more than the squeegee men of the New World Order.
This vain legalism will run its course for a good long while, I suspect. And we will hear and then forget a lot of names before we relearn some hard lessons.
By Jonah Goldberg
Thursday, January 1, 2009
If you’re old enough to have been around in the 1980s, and possibly even if you aren’t, you probably know the name Leon Klinghoffer. A wheelchair-bound elderly businessman, Klinghoffer was murdered and dumped over the side of the cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists in 1985.
But do you remember Gavriel Holtzberg? He was an American executed in Mumbai in November. His wife Rivka, an Israeli, was six months pregnant and was also executed at close range. How about Naomi and Alan Scherr? Naomi was Alan’s 13-year-old daughter. They were killed while having dinner in their Mumbai hotel. Paul Johnson Jr.? He was one of several Americans kidnapped and executed in 2004 in Saudi Arabia.
We don’t remember these names because nobody made a big deal about them. It’s not that their deaths were considered trivial events when they happened. But it was merely the news of the day, maybe the week, and little more.
Now compare that to Klinghoffer. His murder was a worldwide event. Presidents and prime ministers thundered their outrage. Newspapers editorialized ad nauseam about the cowardice and villainy of the perpetrators.
Yasir Arafat’s PLO had to play along, pretending they would never be involved in such a heinous act. Farouk Kaddoumi, Arafat’s “foreign minister,” suggested that Klinghoffer’s wife had murdered and dumped her husband overboard to collect the insurance money. For the record, the Klinghoffers took the cruise to celebrate their 36th wedding anniversary.
In 1993, near the height of America’s anger over out-of-control crime, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a seminal article for the American Scholar on “defining deviancy down.” Moynihan argued that crime had gotten so out of control, Americans responded by simply defining deviancy down until many crimes seemed normal.
One of his more famous examples was the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. On Feb. 14, 1929, seven gangsters were killed by rival gangsters. “The nation was shocked. The event became legend ...” Moynihan observed. “I leave it to others to judge, but it would appear that the society in the 1920s was simply not willing to put up with this degree of deviancy. In the end, the Constitution was amended, and Prohibition, which lay behind so much gangster violence, ended.” But by the early 1990s, the United States was experiencing the equivalent of a St. Valentine’s Day Massacre every weekend.
One response to the crime epidemic was to redefine violent crime as a “public health issue.” Traditional law enforcement was simply incapable of dealing with the “social pathologies” and “root causes” of the wave of gun violence and the like.
Fortunately, this approach, while far from dead, was relegated to the back burner by the successes of anti-crime initiatives in places like Rudy Giuliani’s New York. The solution, it largely turned out, wasn’t to become more tolerant of criminality by recasting it as a cultural or lifestyle choice or by invoking root causes (as The New York Times often did), but to become less tolerant of crime. In New York, turnstile jumpers, graffiti artists, even the infamous “squeegee men” were treated as the lawbreakers they were. One heartening moral of the story is that sometimes deviancy can be defined back up.
We learned a similar moral after 9/11. For years — starting around the time of Klinghoffer’s murder, as it happens — policymakers in both parties debated how to define terrorism. Is it a law-and-order issue or a military threat? If it’s a military threat, how do we define a “proportionate response” — this legalistic phrase entered the national-security lexicon back then, too. By the end of the 1990s, the best and the brightest of the Clinton administration found the answer in a lawerly kind of proportionality, blowing up empty office buildings as a way to “send a message” in response to attacks on America and her interests.
After 9/11, the gloves were off. The far left beseeched the government to retaliate with, at most, a proportionate response, but no one cared. We toppled the Taliban as a warm-up act. Terrorists weren’t criminals anymore, they were enemy combatants, ineligible for the Geneva Conventions. But the war in Iraq and reports of American zeal in the war on terror have left a sour taste in our mouths. That there have been no terrorist attacks on our soil only bolsters the sense that terrorism is manageable, even banal. Barack Obama leads a counteroffensive from a legal establishment that wants to treat terrorists like any other criminals. Terrorists in Mumbai or Jeddah are little more than the squeegee men of the New World Order.
This vain legalism will run its course for a good long while, I suspect. And we will hear and then forget a lot of names before we relearn some hard lessons.
If You Think Health Care is Expensive...
George Will
Thursday, January 01, 2009
WASHINGTON -- Health care, says the man most concerned with that 17 percent of America's economy, can be "a nation-ruining issue." As Michael Leavitt ends four years as secretary of health and human services, he offers this attention-arresting arithmetic: Absent fundamental reforms, over the next two decades the average American household's health care spending, including the portion of its taxes that pays for Medicare and Medicaid, will go from 23 percent to 41 percent of average household income.
It is, Leavitt says, "predictable" that today's traumatizing economic turbulence, by heightening Americans' insecurity, will complicate reforming entitlements. This, too, is predictable: By curtailing revenues, today's recession will bring closer the projected exhaustion of the Medicare Part A trust fund, from early 2019 to perhaps 2016. That should get the president-elect's attention.
When Medicare was created in 1965, America's median age was 28.4; now it is 36.6. The elderly are more numerous and medicine is more broadly competent than was then anticipated. Leavitt says that Medicare's "big three" hospital procedure expenses today are hip and knee replacements and cardiovascular operations with stents, which were not on medicine's menu in 1965.
After being elected to three terms as Utah's governor, but before coming to HHS, Leavitt headed the Environmental Protection Agency. He came to consider it a public health agency because the surge in Americans' longevity in the last third of the 20th century correlated with cleaner air and fewer water-borne diseases. Longevity is, however, expensive, and demography is compounding the problem.
In the 43 years since America decided that health care for the elderly would be paid for by people still working, the ratio of workers to seniors has steadily declined. And the number of seniors living long enough to have five or more chronic conditions -- 23 percent of Medicare beneficiaries -- has increased. Many of those conditions could be prevented or managed by better decisions about eating, exercising and smoking. The 20 percent of Americans who still smoke are a much larger percentage of the 23 percent who consume 67 percent of Medicare spending. Furthermore, nearly 30 percent of Medicare spending pays for care in the final year of patients' lives.
Suppose, says Leavitt, buying a car were like getting a knee operation. The dealer would say he does not know the final cumulative price, so just select a car and begin using it. Then a blizzard of bills would begin to arrive -- from the chassis manufacturer, the steering-wheel manufacturer, the seat and paint manufacturers. The dealership would charge for time spent there, and a separate charge would cover the salesperson's time.
Leavitt says that until health care recipients of common procedures can get, upfront, prices they can understand and compare, there will be little accountability or discipline in the system: "In the auto industry, if the steering-wheel maker charges an exorbitant price, the car company finds a more competitive supplier. In health care, if the medical equipment supplier charges an exorbitant price, none of the other medical participants care."
Medicare is a price-fixing system for upward of 12,000 procedures and drug codes -- and for hundreds of categories of equipment, the providers of which tenaciously oppose competition. Leavitt began implementing a tiny program of competitive bidding covering just 10 products in 10 cities.
Based on the 15 days it lasted before Congress repealed it, savings were projected to be substantial. That is why equipment providers got it repealed.
Rather than ruining the new year by dwelling on Medicare's unfunded liabilities of about $34 trillion (over a 75-year span), ruin it with this fact: In the next 50 years, Medicaid, the program for the poor -- broadly, sometimes very broadly defined -- could become a bigger threat than Medicare to the nation's prosperity.
This is partly because of the cost of long-term care for the indigent elderly, some of whom shed assets to meet Medicaid's eligibility standard -- sometimes as high as income under 200 percent of the federal poverty level. And many states, eager to expand the ranks of the dependent with the help of federal Medicaid money, use "income disregards" to make poverty an elastic concept. For example, they say: A person who gets a raise that eliminates his eligibility can disregard the portion of his income that pays for housing, or transportation.
Governments with powerful political incentives to behave this way will play an increasingly large role in health care. As is said, if you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it is free.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
WASHINGTON -- Health care, says the man most concerned with that 17 percent of America's economy, can be "a nation-ruining issue." As Michael Leavitt ends four years as secretary of health and human services, he offers this attention-arresting arithmetic: Absent fundamental reforms, over the next two decades the average American household's health care spending, including the portion of its taxes that pays for Medicare and Medicaid, will go from 23 percent to 41 percent of average household income.
It is, Leavitt says, "predictable" that today's traumatizing economic turbulence, by heightening Americans' insecurity, will complicate reforming entitlements. This, too, is predictable: By curtailing revenues, today's recession will bring closer the projected exhaustion of the Medicare Part A trust fund, from early 2019 to perhaps 2016. That should get the president-elect's attention.
When Medicare was created in 1965, America's median age was 28.4; now it is 36.6. The elderly are more numerous and medicine is more broadly competent than was then anticipated. Leavitt says that Medicare's "big three" hospital procedure expenses today are hip and knee replacements and cardiovascular operations with stents, which were not on medicine's menu in 1965.
After being elected to three terms as Utah's governor, but before coming to HHS, Leavitt headed the Environmental Protection Agency. He came to consider it a public health agency because the surge in Americans' longevity in the last third of the 20th century correlated with cleaner air and fewer water-borne diseases. Longevity is, however, expensive, and demography is compounding the problem.
In the 43 years since America decided that health care for the elderly would be paid for by people still working, the ratio of workers to seniors has steadily declined. And the number of seniors living long enough to have five or more chronic conditions -- 23 percent of Medicare beneficiaries -- has increased. Many of those conditions could be prevented or managed by better decisions about eating, exercising and smoking. The 20 percent of Americans who still smoke are a much larger percentage of the 23 percent who consume 67 percent of Medicare spending. Furthermore, nearly 30 percent of Medicare spending pays for care in the final year of patients' lives.
Suppose, says Leavitt, buying a car were like getting a knee operation. The dealer would say he does not know the final cumulative price, so just select a car and begin using it. Then a blizzard of bills would begin to arrive -- from the chassis manufacturer, the steering-wheel manufacturer, the seat and paint manufacturers. The dealership would charge for time spent there, and a separate charge would cover the salesperson's time.
Leavitt says that until health care recipients of common procedures can get, upfront, prices they can understand and compare, there will be little accountability or discipline in the system: "In the auto industry, if the steering-wheel maker charges an exorbitant price, the car company finds a more competitive supplier. In health care, if the medical equipment supplier charges an exorbitant price, none of the other medical participants care."
Medicare is a price-fixing system for upward of 12,000 procedures and drug codes -- and for hundreds of categories of equipment, the providers of which tenaciously oppose competition. Leavitt began implementing a tiny program of competitive bidding covering just 10 products in 10 cities.
Based on the 15 days it lasted before Congress repealed it, savings were projected to be substantial. That is why equipment providers got it repealed.
Rather than ruining the new year by dwelling on Medicare's unfunded liabilities of about $34 trillion (over a 75-year span), ruin it with this fact: In the next 50 years, Medicaid, the program for the poor -- broadly, sometimes very broadly defined -- could become a bigger threat than Medicare to the nation's prosperity.
This is partly because of the cost of long-term care for the indigent elderly, some of whom shed assets to meet Medicaid's eligibility standard -- sometimes as high as income under 200 percent of the federal poverty level. And many states, eager to expand the ranks of the dependent with the help of federal Medicaid money, use "income disregards" to make poverty an elastic concept. For example, they say: A person who gets a raise that eliminates his eligibility can disregard the portion of his income that pays for housing, or transportation.
Governments with powerful political incentives to behave this way will play an increasingly large role in health care. As is said, if you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it is free.
Responding to Incoming Missiles
Emmett Tyrrell
Thursday, January 01, 2009
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Does anyone know the name of the National Public Radio interviewer who was so disdainful of Israel's ambassador to the United States on the morning of Dec. 31? I missed his name. I would like to give him an award for sarcasm, rudeness and, well, controlled rage. Maybe he would accept my shoes.
The interviewer is perhaps a graduate of one of our country's esteemed anger management centers. Very theatrically, he cut the Israeli ambassador off in the midst of the ambassador's variations on the theme of peace and goodwill and that sort of thing.
I wonder what made the NPR catastrophist so angry. I can understand the professional journalist suffering some mild pique. The ambassador obviously was not giving him the answers he sought. Yet this fellow was downright contemptuous. To employ a word currently in fashion, I would say his response to the Israeli ambassador was disproportional.
It is dreadful that Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on earth, is under heavy aerial bombardment from Israel. Yet Hamas, the governing entity in Gaza, has been lobbing shrapnel-filled missiles into Israel on a regular basis for months. Two weeks ago, Hamas arbitrarily broke its six-month ceasefire with Israel, and the danger to Israeli life and property has gotten worse. How many missiles is Israel to suffer before it is warranted to defend its territory and its people?
Now that word "disproportional" is being raised among foreign policy elites. Israeli air strikes since Saturday have killed several hundred Palestinians and injured several thousand. So we are hearing that the Israeli actions are "disproportional."
I can almost imagine a learned seminar being convened here in Washington wherein the assembled gogues excogitate precisely how many incoming Hamas missiles will warrant one air strike or more. And how will these advocates of proportionality factor in the targets of the Israeli air strikes?
It is tragic that Palestinian civilians are dying, but Hamas locates its military installations and administrative facilities in civilian areas precisely to dissuade Israel from attacking Hamas as it insouciantly bombards Israel, its soldiers and, more frequently, its civilians.
A couple of decades back, I wrote that the Palestinian terrorists -- and Hamas is a fully accredited terrorist group -- were the only fighters I knew of that target civilians rather than soldiers. That was pretty much true back then. Yet as terrorist organizations have proliferated, the targeting solely of civilians has become widespread throughout the world. Now apparently the civilized world has become accustomed to this outrage. Yet it is to Israel's credit that it remains outraged by a terrorist group that would target noncombatants for strategic purposes.
I have no idea how many Hamas strikes against civilians warrant how many Israeli acts of retribution. Frankly, such calculations seem to me as beside the point. The real question is how many Israeli strikes are needed to close down Hamas? That is what is necessary. The Israelis have at their border a violent, unprincipled enemy that has vowed to destroy Israel. Hamas not only vows to destroy Israel, it bombards Israel and expects the world to object when Israel counterattacks.
Now that strikes me as irrational. Hamas should accept the consequences of its assaults on Israel. Hamas might even renew the ceasefire that it broke. For that matter, Hamas might end its war against Israel. I doubt the Israelis would object.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Does anyone know the name of the National Public Radio interviewer who was so disdainful of Israel's ambassador to the United States on the morning of Dec. 31? I missed his name. I would like to give him an award for sarcasm, rudeness and, well, controlled rage. Maybe he would accept my shoes.
The interviewer is perhaps a graduate of one of our country's esteemed anger management centers. Very theatrically, he cut the Israeli ambassador off in the midst of the ambassador's variations on the theme of peace and goodwill and that sort of thing.
I wonder what made the NPR catastrophist so angry. I can understand the professional journalist suffering some mild pique. The ambassador obviously was not giving him the answers he sought. Yet this fellow was downright contemptuous. To employ a word currently in fashion, I would say his response to the Israeli ambassador was disproportional.
It is dreadful that Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on earth, is under heavy aerial bombardment from Israel. Yet Hamas, the governing entity in Gaza, has been lobbing shrapnel-filled missiles into Israel on a regular basis for months. Two weeks ago, Hamas arbitrarily broke its six-month ceasefire with Israel, and the danger to Israeli life and property has gotten worse. How many missiles is Israel to suffer before it is warranted to defend its territory and its people?
Now that word "disproportional" is being raised among foreign policy elites. Israeli air strikes since Saturday have killed several hundred Palestinians and injured several thousand. So we are hearing that the Israeli actions are "disproportional."
I can almost imagine a learned seminar being convened here in Washington wherein the assembled gogues excogitate precisely how many incoming Hamas missiles will warrant one air strike or more. And how will these advocates of proportionality factor in the targets of the Israeli air strikes?
It is tragic that Palestinian civilians are dying, but Hamas locates its military installations and administrative facilities in civilian areas precisely to dissuade Israel from attacking Hamas as it insouciantly bombards Israel, its soldiers and, more frequently, its civilians.
A couple of decades back, I wrote that the Palestinian terrorists -- and Hamas is a fully accredited terrorist group -- were the only fighters I knew of that target civilians rather than soldiers. That was pretty much true back then. Yet as terrorist organizations have proliferated, the targeting solely of civilians has become widespread throughout the world. Now apparently the civilized world has become accustomed to this outrage. Yet it is to Israel's credit that it remains outraged by a terrorist group that would target noncombatants for strategic purposes.
I have no idea how many Hamas strikes against civilians warrant how many Israeli acts of retribution. Frankly, such calculations seem to me as beside the point. The real question is how many Israeli strikes are needed to close down Hamas? That is what is necessary. The Israelis have at their border a violent, unprincipled enemy that has vowed to destroy Israel. Hamas not only vows to destroy Israel, it bombards Israel and expects the world to object when Israel counterattacks.
Now that strikes me as irrational. Hamas should accept the consequences of its assaults on Israel. Hamas might even renew the ceasefire that it broke. For that matter, Hamas might end its war against Israel. I doubt the Israelis would object.
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