Obama proposes to become the tax collector for the corporate-welfare state.
National Review Online
Friday, December 18, 2009
For Democrats, the Holy Grail of health care has always been “universal coverage.” The words have flowed effortlessly out of their mouths so often that most of them probably long ago stopped thinking about what it would mean in practice if their dream were ever really implemented.
Well, now they — and we — know. The ugly truth is that “universal coverage,” Obama-style, is a burdensome “individual mandate.” The federal government is not offering the American public something new and better that they couldn’t already get on their own. It is handing down a punitive tax on anyone who dares to allocate their limited resources to things other than one-size-fits-all health insurance. In the bill being pushed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, U.S. households will be forced to pay $750 to the IRS for every adult without federally approved coverage. In other words, “universal coverage” in the real world would be another unfunded mandated handed down by the federal government.
What’s more, it would hit low-wage workers the hardest. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates the average premium for standard family insurance coverage under the Reid bill will reach $14,100 in 2016. For a worker making $100,000, that’s 14 percent of his income. But for someone making $50,000, it’s a 28 percent hidden tax. The Democrats like to tout the expansive new subsidies they would offer to make insurance “affordable.” But the truth is that the vast majority of workers would get no such help. They work for employers who would be forced to offer them insurance, and they will have no choice but to take it. And though the employers would pay much of the premiums, it’s really the employees who would shoulder the burden in the form of lower take-home pay.
For much of the year, the Left kept quiet about the punitive aspects of the individual mandate because they sensed a once-in-a-generation opportunity to secure a glide-path to a federal health-care takeover. No longer. Sen. Joe Lieberman’s principled opposition to any and all forms of the so-called “public option” has finally woken them up to the monster they helped create. For the Left, it’s one thing to require every American to participate in a program that has as one option something like Medicare. It’s quite another if the only options available are private health insurers. The thought of a Democratic Congress creating a guaranteed marketplace of captive consumers for the for-profit health-insurance industry is now shaking the already fragile foundation of the Obamacare edifice.
Recently, analysts at the Lewin Group, a consulting firm, examined the impact of Senator Reid’s bill. Not surprisingly, they found that the individual mandate would be very costly for the middle class. Households with at least one uninsured resident would see an average increase in their costs of $1,205 per year, assuming full implementation. For uninsured households with incomes between $40,000 and $50,000 per year, costs would jump $1,841 annually, on average. Those with incomes between $50,000 and $75,000 would pay $2,100 more each year.
That’s not the kind of change the public believes in. They were promised painless reforms that would weed out inefficient care and direct the savings to more coverage. Instead, what they would get out of this process is onerous new federal requirements, taxes, fines, and fees, all to pay for a program that promises fewer choices, more bureaucracy, and lower-quality care. It’s no secret why the public has turned decisively against the congressional plans. They would deliver less for more.
“A New Tax on the Uninsured” is not exactly a catchy slogan. But it is an accurate description of what Obamacare’s individual mandate would deliver.
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Gitmo Does Not Cause Terrorism
Doubt It? Ask the Blind Sheikh.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
Thursday, December 17, 2009
So we’re going to shut down the detention center at the U.S. naval base on Guantanamo Bay and move the 200-plus terrorists detained there to a seldom-used civilian correctional center in Thomson, Ill. And we’re doing it, the Obama administration and Sen. Dick Durbin assure us, not because they want to use federal money to indemnify their home state for a white-elephant prison Illinois taxpayers should never have built, but because Guantanamo Bay simply must be closed. Gitmo, they say, causes terrorism.
It’s worth remembering that the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman, perhaps the world’s most influential jihadist, was never held in Gitmo. Instead, he and eleven of his followers got the gold-plated due-process plan: a nine-month 1995 trial in the criminal justice system for waging war against the American people. (That’s not rhetoric; that was the charge: conspiracy to levy war against the United States — Section 2384 of the federal penal code.)
The red-carpet treatment didn’t begin or end with the trial. There were Miranda warnings upon arrest (no one cooperated). Counsel was appointed, with the defendants choosing their lawyers — and, for some, Uncle Sam paid for two or more attorneys. Mountains of evidence were culled from intelligence files and duly shared with overseas terrorist organizations. The defense enjoyed a couple of years to make motions to get more discovery, to suppress evidence, and to dismiss the indictment. When things finally went to trial, there was a two-month defense case (that’s much longer than most criminal trials), which allowed them to put the government on trial for its investigative tactics. There was a post-trial hearing on their motion to vacate their convictions and dismiss the case on the ground of “outrageous government misconduct.” There was elaborate litigation before severe sentences were imposed: The Blind Sheikh got life imprisonment, and the other sentences ranged from 25 years to life. That was followed by a three-year appeals process, during which the court appointed new lawyers to argue that their clients had been railroaded through the incompetence of the old lawyers, while the old lawyers continued arguing that their clients had been railroaded by the malevolence of the government. Finally, when the appeals were done and the convictions upheld, the defendants began filing habeas corpus petitions — a practice that continues to this day — claiming that this or that constitutional right was infringed, or that this or that prison condition was inhumane.
So the Islamic world and its sundry terrorist bands were all very impressed with this ostentatious display of our humanity, our benign intentions, and “our values” — right? Wrong. The usual Islamist organizations claimed that America had put Islam on trial — the original slander that was refitted after 9/11 into the equally spurious charge that America is at war with Islam. In early 1997, about a year after sentencing, Sheikh Abdel Rahman’s Egyptian terrorist organization, al-Gama’at al-Islamia (the Islamic Group), issued a statement declaring “all American interests legitimate targets” for “legitimate jihad” until the release of all those convicted terrorists, beginning with their beloved leader.
A few months later, Abdel Rahman’s always-helpful American lawyers (one of whom has since been convicted of helping him run Gama’at from his U.S. prison cell) issued a statement pressuring U.S. officials to release him. “It sounds,” they wrote, “like the Sheikh’s condition is deteriorating and obviously could be life-threatening.” On cue, Gama’at publicly warned that if any harm were to come to the sheikh, the group would “target . . . all of those Americans who participated in subjecting his life to danger.” The terrorists elaborated that they considered every American official, from Pres. Bill Clinton down to “the despicable jailer,” to be “partners endangering the Sheikh’s life.” The organization promised to do everything in its power to free Abdel Rahman.
On Nov. 17, 1997, they made good on the promise. As 58 foreign tourists visited an archeological site in Luxor, Egypt, they were set upon by six Gama’at murderers. The jihadists brutally shot and stabbed them to death — also killing several Egyptian police. The torso of one victim was slit so the terrorists could insert in it a leaflet demanding the release of the Blind Sheikh. Similar leaflets were scattered about the carnage.
Luxor was not the last of these atrocities, but it is the most savage so far, and it is the scene that should leap to mind every time some useful idiot like Senator Durbin makes the absurd claim that Guantanamo Bay must be shut down because it causes terrorism and spurs terrorist recruitment. That this claim is mindlessly repeated by high-ranking military officers and intelligence officials doesn’t make it any less absurd.
We are talking about people who live in sharia states where they still stone women for adultery, apostates for daring to abandon Islam, and homosexuals for breathing. We are talking about people who riot and murder over cartoons — people who use mosques to hide weapons and Korans to transmit terrorist messages and then murder non-Muslims for purportedly defaming their religion. It makes no difference to these people that we detain Muslim terrorists in military brigs under the laws of war rather than detaining them in civilian prisons after trial in our criminal justice system.
After 17 years of attacks, we should have learned the difference between causes of terrorism and pretexts for terrorism. Terrorism is caused, and terrorist recruitment is driven, by Islamist ideology and by American weakness in the face of terror attacks. In that sense, Senator Durbin causes more terrorism than Gitmo ever will. Terrorist organizations are encouraged when they come to believe they can win — when they come to believe they can outlast America because we lack resolve.
The Blind Sheikh, echoed by Osama bin Laden, has promised for years that if “battalions of Islam” keep reprising Hezbollah’s 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, and al-Qaeda’s orchestration of the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia, then the Americans will pack up and go home. The terrorists tell their recruits we’re soft and won’t defend ourselves if it gets ugly. When a U.S. senator takes to the floor of the chamber and compares heroic American troops to Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot, he confirms Abdel Rahman and bin Laden’s views. When he suggests that terrorism is somehow caused by locking up terrorists in a secure, offshore military facility, where they can no longer threaten Americans or anyone else, the Islamic world’s fence-sitters start thinking, “The jihadists are right: America doesn’t have the stomach to tough it out. If we just make it bloody enough, we can win.”
The only part of Gitmo that causes terrorism is its front gates, when we allow terrorists to walk out of them so they can go back to the battle. Gitmo is a pretext for terrorism. Terrorists use it because, unlike us, they know it’s irresponsible not to study and understand the enemy. They know the Left exercises outsize influence on the media and that the Left’s key characteristic is projection.
Leftists don’t like Gitmo (or the PATRIOT Act, or warrantless surveillance, or military commissions, or Bush, or Cheney, or . . . ) so, presto, Gitmo becomes a “cause” of terrorism. Perversely, jihadist murderers become the vessels of our values: They’re noble savages and they don’t murder because they believe their religion commands them to. They do it, we’re told, because of national-security policies that just happen to be the ones despised by the Left. The terrorists are onto this game even if we’re not. So they snicker and say, “Oh, yes, of course, it’s been Gitmo all along — that’s why we do it!” They know some pointy-headed intelligence analyst, some ambitious general, some craven U.S. senator, or even some pandering American president is bound to repeat the canard until it becomes received wisdom. And the press will play along, never pausing to ask: “Well, then, how come 9/11 and the Cole and the embassy bombings and Khobar and Bojinka and the Trade Center bombing all happened before there ever was a Gitmo?” (To which the answer, of course, would be “Israel!”)
Long before there was a Gitmo, Muslim terrorists also plotted to accomplish the release of their captured confederates, either through escape plots or extortionate terrorist attacks — like the massacre at Luxor. For them and their millions of sympathizers, the issue isn’t where the jihadists are detained, or under what theory (law of war or civilian prosecution) this detention is justified. The issue is that we detain them, period. In the Muslim world, where illiteracy is rampant, there are not many scholars of American law. And, as we’ve already seen, even the ACLU is saying there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Gitmo and the new Gitmo North at Thomson. If that’s what the lefty lawyers are saying, what do you suppose the jihadists think?
From the prison where he serves his life sentence, Abdel Rahman was able to announce to the world: “The Sheikh is calling on you, morning and evening: Oh Muslims! Oh Muslims! And he finds no respondents. It is a duty upon all the Muslims around the world to come to free the Sheikh, and to rescue him from his jail.” That he was in a nice civilian jail after a nice civilian trial didn’t make any difference. Of Americans, the sheikh decreed: “Muslims everywhere [must] dismember their nation, tear them apart, ruin their economy, provoke their corporations, destroy their embassies, attack their interests, sink their ships, and shoot down their planes, kill them on land, at sea, and in the air. Kill them wherever you find them.” Osama bin Laden later called this the green light — the necessary Islamic fatwa — for the 9/11 attacks. It was four years before there was a Gitmo for Dick Durbin to blame. So should we shut down all the civilian prisons, too?
By Andrew C. McCarthy
Thursday, December 17, 2009
So we’re going to shut down the detention center at the U.S. naval base on Guantanamo Bay and move the 200-plus terrorists detained there to a seldom-used civilian correctional center in Thomson, Ill. And we’re doing it, the Obama administration and Sen. Dick Durbin assure us, not because they want to use federal money to indemnify their home state for a white-elephant prison Illinois taxpayers should never have built, but because Guantanamo Bay simply must be closed. Gitmo, they say, causes terrorism.
It’s worth remembering that the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman, perhaps the world’s most influential jihadist, was never held in Gitmo. Instead, he and eleven of his followers got the gold-plated due-process plan: a nine-month 1995 trial in the criminal justice system for waging war against the American people. (That’s not rhetoric; that was the charge: conspiracy to levy war against the United States — Section 2384 of the federal penal code.)
The red-carpet treatment didn’t begin or end with the trial. There were Miranda warnings upon arrest (no one cooperated). Counsel was appointed, with the defendants choosing their lawyers — and, for some, Uncle Sam paid for two or more attorneys. Mountains of evidence were culled from intelligence files and duly shared with overseas terrorist organizations. The defense enjoyed a couple of years to make motions to get more discovery, to suppress evidence, and to dismiss the indictment. When things finally went to trial, there was a two-month defense case (that’s much longer than most criminal trials), which allowed them to put the government on trial for its investigative tactics. There was a post-trial hearing on their motion to vacate their convictions and dismiss the case on the ground of “outrageous government misconduct.” There was elaborate litigation before severe sentences were imposed: The Blind Sheikh got life imprisonment, and the other sentences ranged from 25 years to life. That was followed by a three-year appeals process, during which the court appointed new lawyers to argue that their clients had been railroaded through the incompetence of the old lawyers, while the old lawyers continued arguing that their clients had been railroaded by the malevolence of the government. Finally, when the appeals were done and the convictions upheld, the defendants began filing habeas corpus petitions — a practice that continues to this day — claiming that this or that constitutional right was infringed, or that this or that prison condition was inhumane.
So the Islamic world and its sundry terrorist bands were all very impressed with this ostentatious display of our humanity, our benign intentions, and “our values” — right? Wrong. The usual Islamist organizations claimed that America had put Islam on trial — the original slander that was refitted after 9/11 into the equally spurious charge that America is at war with Islam. In early 1997, about a year after sentencing, Sheikh Abdel Rahman’s Egyptian terrorist organization, al-Gama’at al-Islamia (the Islamic Group), issued a statement declaring “all American interests legitimate targets” for “legitimate jihad” until the release of all those convicted terrorists, beginning with their beloved leader.
A few months later, Abdel Rahman’s always-helpful American lawyers (one of whom has since been convicted of helping him run Gama’at from his U.S. prison cell) issued a statement pressuring U.S. officials to release him. “It sounds,” they wrote, “like the Sheikh’s condition is deteriorating and obviously could be life-threatening.” On cue, Gama’at publicly warned that if any harm were to come to the sheikh, the group would “target . . . all of those Americans who participated in subjecting his life to danger.” The terrorists elaborated that they considered every American official, from Pres. Bill Clinton down to “the despicable jailer,” to be “partners endangering the Sheikh’s life.” The organization promised to do everything in its power to free Abdel Rahman.
On Nov. 17, 1997, they made good on the promise. As 58 foreign tourists visited an archeological site in Luxor, Egypt, they were set upon by six Gama’at murderers. The jihadists brutally shot and stabbed them to death — also killing several Egyptian police. The torso of one victim was slit so the terrorists could insert in it a leaflet demanding the release of the Blind Sheikh. Similar leaflets were scattered about the carnage.
Luxor was not the last of these atrocities, but it is the most savage so far, and it is the scene that should leap to mind every time some useful idiot like Senator Durbin makes the absurd claim that Guantanamo Bay must be shut down because it causes terrorism and spurs terrorist recruitment. That this claim is mindlessly repeated by high-ranking military officers and intelligence officials doesn’t make it any less absurd.
We are talking about people who live in sharia states where they still stone women for adultery, apostates for daring to abandon Islam, and homosexuals for breathing. We are talking about people who riot and murder over cartoons — people who use mosques to hide weapons and Korans to transmit terrorist messages and then murder non-Muslims for purportedly defaming their religion. It makes no difference to these people that we detain Muslim terrorists in military brigs under the laws of war rather than detaining them in civilian prisons after trial in our criminal justice system.
After 17 years of attacks, we should have learned the difference between causes of terrorism and pretexts for terrorism. Terrorism is caused, and terrorist recruitment is driven, by Islamist ideology and by American weakness in the face of terror attacks. In that sense, Senator Durbin causes more terrorism than Gitmo ever will. Terrorist organizations are encouraged when they come to believe they can win — when they come to believe they can outlast America because we lack resolve.
The Blind Sheikh, echoed by Osama bin Laden, has promised for years that if “battalions of Islam” keep reprising Hezbollah’s 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, and al-Qaeda’s orchestration of the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia, then the Americans will pack up and go home. The terrorists tell their recruits we’re soft and won’t defend ourselves if it gets ugly. When a U.S. senator takes to the floor of the chamber and compares heroic American troops to Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot, he confirms Abdel Rahman and bin Laden’s views. When he suggests that terrorism is somehow caused by locking up terrorists in a secure, offshore military facility, where they can no longer threaten Americans or anyone else, the Islamic world’s fence-sitters start thinking, “The jihadists are right: America doesn’t have the stomach to tough it out. If we just make it bloody enough, we can win.”
The only part of Gitmo that causes terrorism is its front gates, when we allow terrorists to walk out of them so they can go back to the battle. Gitmo is a pretext for terrorism. Terrorists use it because, unlike us, they know it’s irresponsible not to study and understand the enemy. They know the Left exercises outsize influence on the media and that the Left’s key characteristic is projection.
Leftists don’t like Gitmo (or the PATRIOT Act, or warrantless surveillance, or military commissions, or Bush, or Cheney, or . . . ) so, presto, Gitmo becomes a “cause” of terrorism. Perversely, jihadist murderers become the vessels of our values: They’re noble savages and they don’t murder because they believe their religion commands them to. They do it, we’re told, because of national-security policies that just happen to be the ones despised by the Left. The terrorists are onto this game even if we’re not. So they snicker and say, “Oh, yes, of course, it’s been Gitmo all along — that’s why we do it!” They know some pointy-headed intelligence analyst, some ambitious general, some craven U.S. senator, or even some pandering American president is bound to repeat the canard until it becomes received wisdom. And the press will play along, never pausing to ask: “Well, then, how come 9/11 and the Cole and the embassy bombings and Khobar and Bojinka and the Trade Center bombing all happened before there ever was a Gitmo?” (To which the answer, of course, would be “Israel!”)
Long before there was a Gitmo, Muslim terrorists also plotted to accomplish the release of their captured confederates, either through escape plots or extortionate terrorist attacks — like the massacre at Luxor. For them and their millions of sympathizers, the issue isn’t where the jihadists are detained, or under what theory (law of war or civilian prosecution) this detention is justified. The issue is that we detain them, period. In the Muslim world, where illiteracy is rampant, there are not many scholars of American law. And, as we’ve already seen, even the ACLU is saying there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Gitmo and the new Gitmo North at Thomson. If that’s what the lefty lawyers are saying, what do you suppose the jihadists think?
From the prison where he serves his life sentence, Abdel Rahman was able to announce to the world: “The Sheikh is calling on you, morning and evening: Oh Muslims! Oh Muslims! And he finds no respondents. It is a duty upon all the Muslims around the world to come to free the Sheikh, and to rescue him from his jail.” That he was in a nice civilian jail after a nice civilian trial didn’t make any difference. Of Americans, the sheikh decreed: “Muslims everywhere [must] dismember their nation, tear them apart, ruin their economy, provoke their corporations, destroy their embassies, attack their interests, sink their ships, and shoot down their planes, kill them on land, at sea, and in the air. Kill them wherever you find them.” Osama bin Laden later called this the green light — the necessary Islamic fatwa — for the 9/11 attacks. It was four years before there was a Gitmo for Dick Durbin to blame. So should we shut down all the civilian prisons, too?
Save the SEALs
No way to treat special operators.
By Clifford D. May
Thursday, December 17, 2009
What can the Navy brass be thinking? On December 7, Pearl Harbor Day, a Navy SEAL — one of an elite band of highly skilled and extraordinarily brave American warriors — faced arraignment. The charge: He punched a terrorist.
To be precise, he punched a terrorist suspect — Ahmed Hashim Abed, the alleged ringleader behind the killing, burning, and mutilating of four American contractors in Fallujah, Iraq, in March 2004. Abed’s followers then strung up two of the corpses on a bridge over the Euphrates River.
Abed was run down by the SEALs in September 2009. Exactly, what happened after that is a bit hazy. He spent time in U.S. custody, then in Iraqi custody, and eventually was returned to U.S. custody. At some point, he claimed one of the Americans who apprehended him punched in the stomach, or maybe the mouth.
Three SEALs are now in trouble. Petty Officer 2nd Class Matthew McCabe stands accused of “assault, dereliction of performance of duty for willfully failing to safeguard a detainee, and making a false official statement.” Petty Officers Julio Heurtas and Jonathan Keefe are being charged with “impeding the investigation and dereliction of duty in failing to safeguard a detainee.”
The three refused the offer of a “captain’s mast,” which is a non-judicial, disciplinary hearing, because that would leave it to a commanding officer to determine what happened. They are saying they did not harm Abed and they want to be fully cleared of all charges. They want to continue their careers with no blemish, no asterisk, no record of the case in their files. They’re willing to risk prison to achieve that.
The court martial is scheduled to begin in January. It is not clear whether Abed will be flown in from Iraq, where he is being detained, to Virginia to face them in the courtroom.
Surely, these SEALs — like all American citizens — deserve the presumption of innocence. It’s also worth recalling that the al-Qaeda manual recommends that all detainees complain of torture and abuse.
But what if it turns out that one of the SEALs did give the guy a shot? What if Abed was uncooperative, or spit at them, or bragged about how he slaughtered the Americans (one of whom was a retired SEAL) and how they begged for their lives and squealed like pigs as they died? I can imagine how a normal guy — even one as disciplined as a SEAL — might lose his temper for a moment.
In that case, I wouldn’t expect a senior officer to turn a blind eye. I’d expect him to take the SEALs aside and say, “Let me be clear: You guys cut the John Wayne stuff or you’re going to be peeling potatoes on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf for the next six months. Understood?” The reply would be: “Yes, sir! Understood, sir!” And that would be the end of that.
But a court martial? Maybe there’s more to it than we know. But how much more could there be? Abed is alive. He has two eyes, two ears, ten fingers, and ten toes. This much is clear: If a single alleged knuckle sandwich is all it takes to remove three special operators from the battlefield, Abed won this battle.
In his remarks accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama said, “Even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules, I believe the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war. That is what makes us different from those whom we fight. That is a source of our strength.”
I agree. Our troops should uphold the highest standards. Notwithstanding such rare but extravagantly publicized lapses as Abu Ghraib, they do exhibit a degree of self-restraint that no other military, now or in the past, can match.
But this, too, needs to be recognized: The notion that international law provides strict legal protections for terrorists is a new and dubious innovation, cooked up by transnational lawyers seeking power for themselves and their organizations, along with unprecedented limitations on American power and sovereignty.
The Geneva Conventions are treaties that bind signatories in order to render conflicts among those signatories less brutal. The Geneva Conventions were never designed to protect those who have not signed them and who routinely violate them.
As Obama rightly noted: Terrorists abide by no rules. Therefore, they are not entitled to the protection of the rules. If we treat them humanely — as we do and as we should — that is our choice based on our values, our standards, and our humanity. It is not based on their rights. Rules that tie the hands of only one side in a conflict are neither moral nor useful.
A terrorist in American custody should be aware that he is in the presence of principled professionals. But he should not believe that he is untouchable or that he is entitled to the rights enjoyed by an American citizen under the U.S. Constitution — a document he’d gladly trample underfoot.
He should know that the troops who detain him are not like him: They won’t chop off his head on video tape while chanting praise for a divinity pleased by the carnage. But he also should know that if he asks for a fat lip, he might just get a fat lip.
By Clifford D. May
Thursday, December 17, 2009
What can the Navy brass be thinking? On December 7, Pearl Harbor Day, a Navy SEAL — one of an elite band of highly skilled and extraordinarily brave American warriors — faced arraignment. The charge: He punched a terrorist.
To be precise, he punched a terrorist suspect — Ahmed Hashim Abed, the alleged ringleader behind the killing, burning, and mutilating of four American contractors in Fallujah, Iraq, in March 2004. Abed’s followers then strung up two of the corpses on a bridge over the Euphrates River.
Abed was run down by the SEALs in September 2009. Exactly, what happened after that is a bit hazy. He spent time in U.S. custody, then in Iraqi custody, and eventually was returned to U.S. custody. At some point, he claimed one of the Americans who apprehended him punched in the stomach, or maybe the mouth.
Three SEALs are now in trouble. Petty Officer 2nd Class Matthew McCabe stands accused of “assault, dereliction of performance of duty for willfully failing to safeguard a detainee, and making a false official statement.” Petty Officers Julio Heurtas and Jonathan Keefe are being charged with “impeding the investigation and dereliction of duty in failing to safeguard a detainee.”
The three refused the offer of a “captain’s mast,” which is a non-judicial, disciplinary hearing, because that would leave it to a commanding officer to determine what happened. They are saying they did not harm Abed and they want to be fully cleared of all charges. They want to continue their careers with no blemish, no asterisk, no record of the case in their files. They’re willing to risk prison to achieve that.
The court martial is scheduled to begin in January. It is not clear whether Abed will be flown in from Iraq, where he is being detained, to Virginia to face them in the courtroom.
Surely, these SEALs — like all American citizens — deserve the presumption of innocence. It’s also worth recalling that the al-Qaeda manual recommends that all detainees complain of torture and abuse.
But what if it turns out that one of the SEALs did give the guy a shot? What if Abed was uncooperative, or spit at them, or bragged about how he slaughtered the Americans (one of whom was a retired SEAL) and how they begged for their lives and squealed like pigs as they died? I can imagine how a normal guy — even one as disciplined as a SEAL — might lose his temper for a moment.
In that case, I wouldn’t expect a senior officer to turn a blind eye. I’d expect him to take the SEALs aside and say, “Let me be clear: You guys cut the John Wayne stuff or you’re going to be peeling potatoes on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf for the next six months. Understood?” The reply would be: “Yes, sir! Understood, sir!” And that would be the end of that.
But a court martial? Maybe there’s more to it than we know. But how much more could there be? Abed is alive. He has two eyes, two ears, ten fingers, and ten toes. This much is clear: If a single alleged knuckle sandwich is all it takes to remove three special operators from the battlefield, Abed won this battle.
In his remarks accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama said, “Even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules, I believe the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war. That is what makes us different from those whom we fight. That is a source of our strength.”
I agree. Our troops should uphold the highest standards. Notwithstanding such rare but extravagantly publicized lapses as Abu Ghraib, they do exhibit a degree of self-restraint that no other military, now or in the past, can match.
But this, too, needs to be recognized: The notion that international law provides strict legal protections for terrorists is a new and dubious innovation, cooked up by transnational lawyers seeking power for themselves and their organizations, along with unprecedented limitations on American power and sovereignty.
The Geneva Conventions are treaties that bind signatories in order to render conflicts among those signatories less brutal. The Geneva Conventions were never designed to protect those who have not signed them and who routinely violate them.
As Obama rightly noted: Terrorists abide by no rules. Therefore, they are not entitled to the protection of the rules. If we treat them humanely — as we do and as we should — that is our choice based on our values, our standards, and our humanity. It is not based on their rights. Rules that tie the hands of only one side in a conflict are neither moral nor useful.
A terrorist in American custody should be aware that he is in the presence of principled professionals. But he should not believe that he is untouchable or that he is entitled to the rights enjoyed by an American citizen under the U.S. Constitution — a document he’d gladly trample underfoot.
He should know that the troops who detain him are not like him: They won’t chop off his head on video tape while chanting praise for a divinity pleased by the carnage. But he also should know that if he asks for a fat lip, he might just get a fat lip.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
America Through the Reality Lens
Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Culturally, this has been the decade of the reality show. And what do we have to show for it? Not much more than the contestants themselves.
Survey the wreckage. Richard Hatch, the first "Survivor" champion, was just released from prison (he didn't pay taxes on his winnings). The marriage of the Octoparents, Jon and Kate, is a shambles. Richard and Mayumi Heene were so desperate to land a reality series, they concocted an enormous hoax, convincing the country their child had been carried away in a balloon. Michaele and Tareq Salahi tried to claw their way onto the sure-to-be-hideous series "Real Housewives of D.C." by brazening their way into a state dinner. And alleged wife-killer Ryan Jenkins, a contestant on two VH1 shows, is a stark reminder that fame is not a reflection of good character.
Which brings us to "Jersey Shore." The show, which just started airing on MTV, follows a gaggle of barely literate bridge-and-tunnel steakheads and slatterns as they spend their summer at "the greatest meat market in the world." One of the absurdly tanned gibbons goes by the moniker "the Situation" because it gives him the excuse to ask women, "Do you love the Situation?" as he lifts his shirt to show off his washboard abs. Even if they all put their heads together, it's doubtful they could beat a carnival chicken at Tic-Tac-Toe.
In a teaser for this week's episode, one of the girls is punched in the face at a bar. But, after "consulting with experts on the issue of violence," MTV announced it wouldn't show the actual assault. While I can't fault the decision, it is kind of funny. The producers see nothing wrong with glorifying drunken idiocy and moral buffoonery in every episode, but they "responsibly" draw the line at physical violence because MTV is loath to promote reckless behavior.
Uh huh.
When the not-so-hidden cameras catch one of the girls cheating on her boyfriend with a housemate sporting a pierced you-know-what, that's just pure entertainment. "You have your penis pierced. I love it," the drunken vamp exclaims.
Don't get me wrong; it's great television. But gladiatorial games would be great TV, too.
The Los Angeles Times reported the other day that the reality show industry is suddenly having a crisis of conscience about its impact on the culture. That's nice to hear, but it's not nearly enough.
British historian Arnold Toynbee argued that civilizations thrive when the lower classes aspire to be like the upper classes, and they decay when the upper classes try to be like the lower classes. Looked at through this prism, it's hard not to see America in a prolonged period of decay.
It's not all bad news, to be sure. The elite minority's general acceptance of racial and sexual equality as important values has been a moral triumph. But not without costs. As part of this transformation, society has embraced what social scientist Charles Murray calls "ecumenical niceness." A core tenet of ecumenical niceness is that harsh judgments of the underclass -- or people with underclass values -- are forbidden. An added corollary: People with old-fashioned notions of decency are fair game.
Long before the rise of reality shows, ecumenical niceness created a moral vacuum. Out-of-wedlock birth was once a great shame; now it's something of a happy lifestyle choice. The cavalier use of profanity was once crude; now it's increasingly conversational. Self-discipline was once a virtue; now self-expression is king.
Reality-show culture has thrived in that moral vacuum, accelerating the decay and helping to create a society in which celebrity is the new nobility. One senses that Richard Heene thought -- maybe still thinks -- that the way to make his kids proud of him was to land a reality show. Paris Hilton, famous for being famous thanks in part to a "reality" sex tape released days before her 2003 reality show "The Simple Life," is now a cultural icon of no redeeming value whatsoever.
Whatever you think of what Toynbee and Murray would call the "proletarianization of the elites," one point is beyond dispute: The rich can afford moral lassitude more than the poor can. Hilton, heir to a hotel fortune, has life as simple as she wants it to be. Tiger Woods is surely a cad, but as a pure matter of economics, he can afford to be one.
The question is: can the rest of us afford to live in a society constantly auditioning to make an ass of itself on TV.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Culturally, this has been the decade of the reality show. And what do we have to show for it? Not much more than the contestants themselves.
Survey the wreckage. Richard Hatch, the first "Survivor" champion, was just released from prison (he didn't pay taxes on his winnings). The marriage of the Octoparents, Jon and Kate, is a shambles. Richard and Mayumi Heene were so desperate to land a reality series, they concocted an enormous hoax, convincing the country their child had been carried away in a balloon. Michaele and Tareq Salahi tried to claw their way onto the sure-to-be-hideous series "Real Housewives of D.C." by brazening their way into a state dinner. And alleged wife-killer Ryan Jenkins, a contestant on two VH1 shows, is a stark reminder that fame is not a reflection of good character.
Which brings us to "Jersey Shore." The show, which just started airing on MTV, follows a gaggle of barely literate bridge-and-tunnel steakheads and slatterns as they spend their summer at "the greatest meat market in the world." One of the absurdly tanned gibbons goes by the moniker "the Situation" because it gives him the excuse to ask women, "Do you love the Situation?" as he lifts his shirt to show off his washboard abs. Even if they all put their heads together, it's doubtful they could beat a carnival chicken at Tic-Tac-Toe.
In a teaser for this week's episode, one of the girls is punched in the face at a bar. But, after "consulting with experts on the issue of violence," MTV announced it wouldn't show the actual assault. While I can't fault the decision, it is kind of funny. The producers see nothing wrong with glorifying drunken idiocy and moral buffoonery in every episode, but they "responsibly" draw the line at physical violence because MTV is loath to promote reckless behavior.
Uh huh.
When the not-so-hidden cameras catch one of the girls cheating on her boyfriend with a housemate sporting a pierced you-know-what, that's just pure entertainment. "You have your penis pierced. I love it," the drunken vamp exclaims.
Don't get me wrong; it's great television. But gladiatorial games would be great TV, too.
The Los Angeles Times reported the other day that the reality show industry is suddenly having a crisis of conscience about its impact on the culture. That's nice to hear, but it's not nearly enough.
British historian Arnold Toynbee argued that civilizations thrive when the lower classes aspire to be like the upper classes, and they decay when the upper classes try to be like the lower classes. Looked at through this prism, it's hard not to see America in a prolonged period of decay.
It's not all bad news, to be sure. The elite minority's general acceptance of racial and sexual equality as important values has been a moral triumph. But not without costs. As part of this transformation, society has embraced what social scientist Charles Murray calls "ecumenical niceness." A core tenet of ecumenical niceness is that harsh judgments of the underclass -- or people with underclass values -- are forbidden. An added corollary: People with old-fashioned notions of decency are fair game.
Long before the rise of reality shows, ecumenical niceness created a moral vacuum. Out-of-wedlock birth was once a great shame; now it's something of a happy lifestyle choice. The cavalier use of profanity was once crude; now it's increasingly conversational. Self-discipline was once a virtue; now self-expression is king.
Reality-show culture has thrived in that moral vacuum, accelerating the decay and helping to create a society in which celebrity is the new nobility. One senses that Richard Heene thought -- maybe still thinks -- that the way to make his kids proud of him was to land a reality show. Paris Hilton, famous for being famous thanks in part to a "reality" sex tape released days before her 2003 reality show "The Simple Life," is now a cultural icon of no redeeming value whatsoever.
Whatever you think of what Toynbee and Murray would call the "proletarianization of the elites," one point is beyond dispute: The rich can afford moral lassitude more than the poor can. Hilton, heir to a hotel fortune, has life as simple as she wants it to be. Tiger Woods is surely a cad, but as a pure matter of economics, he can afford to be one.
The question is: can the rest of us afford to live in a society constantly auditioning to make an ass of itself on TV.
Obama and the Malleability of History
In pursuit of noble goals, Obama ignobly twists the truth.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
President Obama has given a number of major speeches touching on world affairs since he announced his bid for the presidency. All have invoked historical examples — usually for moral purposes, but often at the expense of both literal and figurative truth.
THE VICTORY COLUMN SPEECH
1) Candidate Barack Obama had supposedly made a presumptuous request to speak at the Berlin Wall and been denied (the Germans might later have regretted that turndown, since a year later Obama, tit-for-tat, declined an invitation to speak there on the 20th anniversary of the wall’s fall), and so he chose the Victory Column as his backdrop instead.
It was an ironic setting for a historic speech on global peace, since the monument is formed of gun barrels taken from conquered enemies, and it commemorates defeats of the Danish, Austrians, and French — as well as Nazi chest-thumping over the annexation of Austria. The monument is an icon to aggressive nationalism, which is why the French wished to destroy it after World War II.
2) The speech’s noble — and utopian — motif was that the “world” (“a world that stands as one”) was responsible for saving Berlin during the airlift and can come together to achieve such noble things again. Not mentioned was the fact that it was the United States Air Force, with help from Britain, that fed Berlin. Most of our other allies thought the airlift was either impossible or counterproductive. As for the Russians whose blockade had made the airlift necessary, they predicted failure in days. The airlift was a testament to unilateral American-British action, and to the failure of the U.N. or any other world body to save the Berliners.
3) Obama warned in that speech, “As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya.” This Gore-like motif is controversial to say the least. I don’t think it is a historical fact that periodic droughts in Kansas have been proven to be due to global warming. “Shrinking coastlines” I think refers to mathematical projections, and is an overstatement concerning a possibly greater-than-average two-millimeter change during the 20th century. As to cars in Boston melting the Arctic ice caps, that too is unproven, as we witnessed this week with Al Gore’s various exaggerations about human activity as a cause of rapid polar melting.
THE CAIRO SPEECH
1) The following can be said of Obama’s Islamic mythography: a) Islam did not pave “the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment.” To the extent Islam was involved at all, it was Greek scholars fleeing Ottoman pressure at Byzantium who sparked the Western Renaissance, while the Enlightenment’s Romantic movements proclaimed a desire to free classical lands from supposed Ottoman backwardness. b) Breakthroughs in navigation, pens, printing, medicine, etc. were largely Western or Chinese innovations. c) “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Córdoba during the Inquisition.” Córdoba had few Muslims when the Inquisition began in 1478, having been reconquered by the Christians well over two centuries earlier. d) Left unsaid was that the great colonizers of the Middle East were not the Europeans, but the Ottoman Muslims, who were far harsher and ruled far longer.
2) “No system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.” Would that include postwar Japan, Italy, and Germany? Should we not have attempted to impose a system of government in Iraq or Afghanistan?
3) “For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights.” During the 1860s, more than 600,000 Americans died over slavery in America’s bloodiest war, which resulted in universal citizenship; during the 1960s and 1970s, racial turmoil over matters of racial equality was not nonviolent.
THE WEST POINT SPEECH
1) “Commanders in Afghanistan repeatedly asked for support to deal with the reemergence of the Taliban, but these reinforcements did not arrive.” Obama did not cite a single specific request for more troops that was denied by the Pentagon during Bush’s time in office. One might fault the Bush administration’s strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the problem was largely a command theory of “light footprint,” which sought not to alienate indigenous populations through a large, obtrusive American presence. So far there is no evidence of a denied troop request between 2001 and 2009.
2) “I then announced a strategy recognizing the fundamental connection between our war effort in Afghanistan, and the extremist safe-havens in Pakistan.” That obvious strategy predated Obama, who inherited from his predecessor everything from Predator drone attacks to carrot-and-stick diplomacy with the Pakistanis.
3) “This is the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by al-Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak.” This is, of course, true, but leaves out the inconvenient fact that the 19 hijackers of 9/11 were — like most al-Qaeda operatives — Sunni Arabs who came to the borderlands from somewhere else, supported by Gulf private money and energized by radical teaching that emanates from Gulf and Cairo Wahhabi mosques. The epicenter of radical Islam is not Waziristan. Rather, it is found at the nexus between petro-money and radical Islamic teaching in the Arab world.
4) “In the past, we too often defined our relationship with Pakistan narrowly.” That may be true of the Carter and Reagan administrations, or the Clinton tolerance for a nuclear Pakistan, but it is hard to accept as a description of the Bush administration’s eight years of ongoing massive American military and economic aid, public pressure for democratic reform, and close consultation with India and Pakistan about regional disagreements. The logical corollary should have been praise for the Bush administration’s holistic engagement and rebuke for the Carter-era policy (continued under Reagan) that armed Islamic fundamentalists to fight the Soviets without much worry over the blowback in either Afghanistan or Pakistan.
5) “As a country, we are not as young — and perhaps not as innocent — as we were when Roosevelt was president.” In fact, American diplomacy is far more transparent than it ever was during the Roosevelt administration, which engaged in all sorts of secret accords affecting millions, including the future of most of Eastern Europe.
THE NOBEL PRIZE SPEECH
1) Obama suggested that “In some countries, the failure to uphold human rights is excused by the false suggestion that these are Western principles.” Bush made an analogous argument that the desire for freedom is innate in the heart of everyone as a result of being human. Nevertheless, the formal articulation of human rights is an entirely Western concept — as Obama inadvertently acknowledged earlier by citing the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” This is a U.N. proclamation that was drafted by Westerners and based on ideas found in the Magna Carta (1215), the English Bill of Rights (1689), the French Declaration on the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789), and the U.S. Constitution (1788) and Bill of Rights (1791), and which is still opposed by many Islamic countries because of its secularism. It is true, not false, that upholding human rights is a Western principle, one lamentably not shared by most people on the globe, particularly among present members of the United Nations Human Rights Council.
2) “These extremists are not the first to kill in the name of God; the cruelties of the Crusades are amply recorded.” The Crusades, in terms of history’s catalogue of bloody wars and deaths, were a minor affair, especially in comparison to the turmoil of the much earlier Islamic expansions through North Africa and Iberia, or the later savage Ottoman inroads into Asia Minor and Eastern Europe.
3) “Only when Europe became free did it finally find peace.” Not exactly. “Finally,” I think, is not an accurate adverb for a mere 60-some years of peace in Europe (excluding things like Milosevic’s war against the Croatians, Bosnians, and Kosovars). So far, Europeans haven’t even matched the prior, century-long achievement of the Congress of Vienna (1815–1914).
THE OBAMA FORMULA
In these minor and major historical distortions, there are two recurrent themes. The most obvious is that George W. Bush has been culpable, and that a far more sensitive and astute Obama is here to set things right. Historical citations will be crafted, in deductive fashion, to support that thesis.
But there is a second sort in which the self-proclaimed global healer Obama marshals history for noble purposes. And in service to his inspirational global ecumenism, the president apparently feels free to twist and fudge the past in order to suggest that our cultures are all roughly equal, with pasts that are likewise both good and bad, and thus we now need to bond and unify with appreciation of one another’s differences.
Obama feels that reverence for both the facts and spirit of history is not as important as that noble aim. If, for example, Muslims can be assured that the West has been just as culpable as they have been, and if they can be praised by unduly exaggerating their past cultural achievements, then perhaps the Islamic world will see that the United States is a broker of good will.
The alternatives to Obama’s constant historical revisionism would be to be quiet about history’s often disturbing truths — or to admit that the present globalization, in terms of economics, politics, culture, and military affairs, is largely an embrace of Westernization and the result of the unique dynamism and morality of Western culture itself.
To articulate the latter truth abroad would be chauvinistic and impolitic. To be quiet about it would be diplomatic. But to distort it for noble intentions has been nevertheless ignoble.
By Victor Davis Hanson
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
President Obama has given a number of major speeches touching on world affairs since he announced his bid for the presidency. All have invoked historical examples — usually for moral purposes, but often at the expense of both literal and figurative truth.
THE VICTORY COLUMN SPEECH
1) Candidate Barack Obama had supposedly made a presumptuous request to speak at the Berlin Wall and been denied (the Germans might later have regretted that turndown, since a year later Obama, tit-for-tat, declined an invitation to speak there on the 20th anniversary of the wall’s fall), and so he chose the Victory Column as his backdrop instead.
It was an ironic setting for a historic speech on global peace, since the monument is formed of gun barrels taken from conquered enemies, and it commemorates defeats of the Danish, Austrians, and French — as well as Nazi chest-thumping over the annexation of Austria. The monument is an icon to aggressive nationalism, which is why the French wished to destroy it after World War II.
2) The speech’s noble — and utopian — motif was that the “world” (“a world that stands as one”) was responsible for saving Berlin during the airlift and can come together to achieve such noble things again. Not mentioned was the fact that it was the United States Air Force, with help from Britain, that fed Berlin. Most of our other allies thought the airlift was either impossible or counterproductive. As for the Russians whose blockade had made the airlift necessary, they predicted failure in days. The airlift was a testament to unilateral American-British action, and to the failure of the U.N. or any other world body to save the Berliners.
3) Obama warned in that speech, “As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya.” This Gore-like motif is controversial to say the least. I don’t think it is a historical fact that periodic droughts in Kansas have been proven to be due to global warming. “Shrinking coastlines” I think refers to mathematical projections, and is an overstatement concerning a possibly greater-than-average two-millimeter change during the 20th century. As to cars in Boston melting the Arctic ice caps, that too is unproven, as we witnessed this week with Al Gore’s various exaggerations about human activity as a cause of rapid polar melting.
THE CAIRO SPEECH
1) The following can be said of Obama’s Islamic mythography: a) Islam did not pave “the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment.” To the extent Islam was involved at all, it was Greek scholars fleeing Ottoman pressure at Byzantium who sparked the Western Renaissance, while the Enlightenment’s Romantic movements proclaimed a desire to free classical lands from supposed Ottoman backwardness. b) Breakthroughs in navigation, pens, printing, medicine, etc. were largely Western or Chinese innovations. c) “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Córdoba during the Inquisition.” Córdoba had few Muslims when the Inquisition began in 1478, having been reconquered by the Christians well over two centuries earlier. d) Left unsaid was that the great colonizers of the Middle East were not the Europeans, but the Ottoman Muslims, who were far harsher and ruled far longer.
2) “No system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other.” Would that include postwar Japan, Italy, and Germany? Should we not have attempted to impose a system of government in Iraq or Afghanistan?
3) “For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights.” During the 1860s, more than 600,000 Americans died over slavery in America’s bloodiest war, which resulted in universal citizenship; during the 1960s and 1970s, racial turmoil over matters of racial equality was not nonviolent.
THE WEST POINT SPEECH
1) “Commanders in Afghanistan repeatedly asked for support to deal with the reemergence of the Taliban, but these reinforcements did not arrive.” Obama did not cite a single specific request for more troops that was denied by the Pentagon during Bush’s time in office. One might fault the Bush administration’s strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the problem was largely a command theory of “light footprint,” which sought not to alienate indigenous populations through a large, obtrusive American presence. So far there is no evidence of a denied troop request between 2001 and 2009.
2) “I then announced a strategy recognizing the fundamental connection between our war effort in Afghanistan, and the extremist safe-havens in Pakistan.” That obvious strategy predated Obama, who inherited from his predecessor everything from Predator drone attacks to carrot-and-stick diplomacy with the Pakistanis.
3) “This is the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by al-Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak.” This is, of course, true, but leaves out the inconvenient fact that the 19 hijackers of 9/11 were — like most al-Qaeda operatives — Sunni Arabs who came to the borderlands from somewhere else, supported by Gulf private money and energized by radical teaching that emanates from Gulf and Cairo Wahhabi mosques. The epicenter of radical Islam is not Waziristan. Rather, it is found at the nexus between petro-money and radical Islamic teaching in the Arab world.
4) “In the past, we too often defined our relationship with Pakistan narrowly.” That may be true of the Carter and Reagan administrations, or the Clinton tolerance for a nuclear Pakistan, but it is hard to accept as a description of the Bush administration’s eight years of ongoing massive American military and economic aid, public pressure for democratic reform, and close consultation with India and Pakistan about regional disagreements. The logical corollary should have been praise for the Bush administration’s holistic engagement and rebuke for the Carter-era policy (continued under Reagan) that armed Islamic fundamentalists to fight the Soviets without much worry over the blowback in either Afghanistan or Pakistan.
5) “As a country, we are not as young — and perhaps not as innocent — as we were when Roosevelt was president.” In fact, American diplomacy is far more transparent than it ever was during the Roosevelt administration, which engaged in all sorts of secret accords affecting millions, including the future of most of Eastern Europe.
THE NOBEL PRIZE SPEECH
1) Obama suggested that “In some countries, the failure to uphold human rights is excused by the false suggestion that these are Western principles.” Bush made an analogous argument that the desire for freedom is innate in the heart of everyone as a result of being human. Nevertheless, the formal articulation of human rights is an entirely Western concept — as Obama inadvertently acknowledged earlier by citing the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” This is a U.N. proclamation that was drafted by Westerners and based on ideas found in the Magna Carta (1215), the English Bill of Rights (1689), the French Declaration on the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789), and the U.S. Constitution (1788) and Bill of Rights (1791), and which is still opposed by many Islamic countries because of its secularism. It is true, not false, that upholding human rights is a Western principle, one lamentably not shared by most people on the globe, particularly among present members of the United Nations Human Rights Council.
2) “These extremists are not the first to kill in the name of God; the cruelties of the Crusades are amply recorded.” The Crusades, in terms of history’s catalogue of bloody wars and deaths, were a minor affair, especially in comparison to the turmoil of the much earlier Islamic expansions through North Africa and Iberia, or the later savage Ottoman inroads into Asia Minor and Eastern Europe.
3) “Only when Europe became free did it finally find peace.” Not exactly. “Finally,” I think, is not an accurate adverb for a mere 60-some years of peace in Europe (excluding things like Milosevic’s war against the Croatians, Bosnians, and Kosovars). So far, Europeans haven’t even matched the prior, century-long achievement of the Congress of Vienna (1815–1914).
THE OBAMA FORMULA
In these minor and major historical distortions, there are two recurrent themes. The most obvious is that George W. Bush has been culpable, and that a far more sensitive and astute Obama is here to set things right. Historical citations will be crafted, in deductive fashion, to support that thesis.
But there is a second sort in which the self-proclaimed global healer Obama marshals history for noble purposes. And in service to his inspirational global ecumenism, the president apparently feels free to twist and fudge the past in order to suggest that our cultures are all roughly equal, with pasts that are likewise both good and bad, and thus we now need to bond and unify with appreciation of one another’s differences.
Obama feels that reverence for both the facts and spirit of history is not as important as that noble aim. If, for example, Muslims can be assured that the West has been just as culpable as they have been, and if they can be praised by unduly exaggerating their past cultural achievements, then perhaps the Islamic world will see that the United States is a broker of good will.
The alternatives to Obama’s constant historical revisionism would be to be quiet about history’s often disturbing truths — or to admit that the present globalization, in terms of economics, politics, culture, and military affairs, is largely an embrace of Westernization and the result of the unique dynamism and morality of Western culture itself.
To articulate the latter truth abroad would be chauvinistic and impolitic. To be quiet about it would be diplomatic. But to distort it for noble intentions has been nevertheless ignoble.
Something's Still Rotten in Denmark
Ken Blackwell
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
President Barack Obama has completed his months-long “deliberations” over his latest Afghanistan policy. He got more applause from Republicans than from Democrats after his long-running Hamlet act. The Prince of Denmark was famous for his indecision: “To be or not to be…”
Obama was much more decisive about climate change, however. He promised hope and change, but when it comes to climate change, we have to hope we can arrest the lethal cycles of mercury readings up and down. “Climate change” is now the new buzzword. It used to be “global warming.” All warming all the time. But when earth’s atmosphere stubbornly declined to heat up, the warm-mongers had to find a new term. So now it’s climate change. You really can’t miss with that one. For sure, the climate will be changing somewhere. Now, references to global warming tend to be buried in the second paragraphs, or better yet, abbreviated as AGW. That’s short for anthropogenic global warming. AGW is also short for “it’s your fault.”
That’s because Mr. Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency recently declared that carbon dioxide is a toxic chemical and it does threaten the planet. Here’s another hint: whenever you hear “planet,” reach for your wallet. They’re coming after you. We used to talk about the world and the earth, as in “for God so loved the world,” and, especially at Christmas time, “peace on earth, good will to men.”
But singling out our own planet would be not racist, or sexist, or “speciesist,” but impermissibly earth-centric. Why, if you care about earth first, you’ll be called a “denier” as quick as you can say Copernicus.
Fred Thompson last year did a radio commentary on the receding of the polar ice caps. He didn’t invoke the horrid specter of polar bears drowning, or penguins molting. Thompson simply asked about a NASA study that said the polar ice caps are receding—on Mars. If Martian ice caps are receding, does that call into question AGW? Does it mean that climate change on earth might be a result of solar activity?
We don’t know. It may mean nothing of the kind. But the release of hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit shows a mindset among the climate scientists that should give us all a chill. Corresponding with Penn State researchers, the East Anglians fed all their data to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN’s high commission of environmental pooh-bahs.
Well, maybe not all their data. We may not have the baseline data on temperatures, but we do have the data that has been massaged, manipulated, and worked over by East Anglians applying serious scientific methods they refer to in their emails as “tricks,” as ways to “hide the decline.”
These East Anglians also tell us they know how to eject from their “community” any doubters, any scientists who are not playing ball. If these skeptics get their articles published in “peer-reviewed” journals, then we just blackball the journal.
That was easy.
Thomas Jefferson was our first Democratic President. Our first man of science in the White House, Jefferson was also a founder of the American Philosophical Society. After his Presidency, he founded the University of Virginia. Mr. Jefferson described his university. “Here we are not afraid to follow truth, wherever it may lead, or to tolerate error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”
That open-mindedness is alien to the East Anglians. Also alien to them is the idea of a deity. Jefferson took many of his philosophical ideas from the French Enlightenment, but he rejected their atheism. You could tell the world was created, Jefferson said; it was obvious from the “intelligence in the design.”
To the East Anglians and all those leaders who are gathering in Copenhagen, the underlying assumption is that we’ve got the whole world in our hands—sorry, planet-- that we are the ones heating its atmosphere, or at least changing it, and that we are the ones who can and must stop what we are doing. Any resistance to their plans for global governance must be crushed—just as you run neo-Nazis out of the public square.
The East Anglians would also be appalled by Mr. Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address. He concluded with a prayer: “May that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe lead our councils to what is best, and give them a favorable issue for your peace and prosperity.”
To acknowledge that there is a God above us who has infinite power, who rules the destinies of the universe, who leads in our councils, is something you will never see in a Copenhagen summit. It’s why I think there’s something rotten in Denmark.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
President Barack Obama has completed his months-long “deliberations” over his latest Afghanistan policy. He got more applause from Republicans than from Democrats after his long-running Hamlet act. The Prince of Denmark was famous for his indecision: “To be or not to be…”
Obama was much more decisive about climate change, however. He promised hope and change, but when it comes to climate change, we have to hope we can arrest the lethal cycles of mercury readings up and down. “Climate change” is now the new buzzword. It used to be “global warming.” All warming all the time. But when earth’s atmosphere stubbornly declined to heat up, the warm-mongers had to find a new term. So now it’s climate change. You really can’t miss with that one. For sure, the climate will be changing somewhere. Now, references to global warming tend to be buried in the second paragraphs, or better yet, abbreviated as AGW. That’s short for anthropogenic global warming. AGW is also short for “it’s your fault.”
That’s because Mr. Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency recently declared that carbon dioxide is a toxic chemical and it does threaten the planet. Here’s another hint: whenever you hear “planet,” reach for your wallet. They’re coming after you. We used to talk about the world and the earth, as in “for God so loved the world,” and, especially at Christmas time, “peace on earth, good will to men.”
But singling out our own planet would be not racist, or sexist, or “speciesist,” but impermissibly earth-centric. Why, if you care about earth first, you’ll be called a “denier” as quick as you can say Copernicus.
Fred Thompson last year did a radio commentary on the receding of the polar ice caps. He didn’t invoke the horrid specter of polar bears drowning, or penguins molting. Thompson simply asked about a NASA study that said the polar ice caps are receding—on Mars. If Martian ice caps are receding, does that call into question AGW? Does it mean that climate change on earth might be a result of solar activity?
We don’t know. It may mean nothing of the kind. But the release of hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit shows a mindset among the climate scientists that should give us all a chill. Corresponding with Penn State researchers, the East Anglians fed all their data to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN’s high commission of environmental pooh-bahs.
Well, maybe not all their data. We may not have the baseline data on temperatures, but we do have the data that has been massaged, manipulated, and worked over by East Anglians applying serious scientific methods they refer to in their emails as “tricks,” as ways to “hide the decline.”
These East Anglians also tell us they know how to eject from their “community” any doubters, any scientists who are not playing ball. If these skeptics get their articles published in “peer-reviewed” journals, then we just blackball the journal.
That was easy.
Thomas Jefferson was our first Democratic President. Our first man of science in the White House, Jefferson was also a founder of the American Philosophical Society. After his Presidency, he founded the University of Virginia. Mr. Jefferson described his university. “Here we are not afraid to follow truth, wherever it may lead, or to tolerate error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”
That open-mindedness is alien to the East Anglians. Also alien to them is the idea of a deity. Jefferson took many of his philosophical ideas from the French Enlightenment, but he rejected their atheism. You could tell the world was created, Jefferson said; it was obvious from the “intelligence in the design.”
To the East Anglians and all those leaders who are gathering in Copenhagen, the underlying assumption is that we’ve got the whole world in our hands—sorry, planet-- that we are the ones heating its atmosphere, or at least changing it, and that we are the ones who can and must stop what we are doing. Any resistance to their plans for global governance must be crushed—just as you run neo-Nazis out of the public square.
The East Anglians would also be appalled by Mr. Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address. He concluded with a prayer: “May that Infinite Power which rules the destinies of the universe lead our councils to what is best, and give them a favorable issue for your peace and prosperity.”
To acknowledge that there is a God above us who has infinite power, who rules the destinies of the universe, who leads in our councils, is something you will never see in a Copenhagen summit. It’s why I think there’s something rotten in Denmark.
Free Stuff From Sam
John Stossel
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
I just got a free golf cart.
Actually, it cost me $6,490 -- but the dealer, Colin Riley of Tucson, Ariz., points out that there's a $6,480 federal tax credit on such vehicles. Riley runs ads that say: "FREE ELECTRIC CAR … !"
Some consumers probably assume it's a car-dealer scam, but it's not. It's an Uncle Sam scam.
The tax code is outrageously complex and damaging in many ways, but it is made especially complex and damaging when congressmen use it "creatively" to manipulate us into doing things they deem "socially constructive." These are things that always bestow advantages on some politically connected manufacturers at the expense of others. After all, you were either planning to buy a golf cart or you weren't. If you were, the policy is unnecessary. If you weren't, you were induced to spend money on that product rather than something else. The unseen victim is whoever would have sold you the alternative product.
Such manipulation is at the heart of the entire "green" strategy.
The Wall Street journal reports that business is busy taking advantage of the tax credit. "Is that about the coolest thing you've ever heard?" Roger Gaddis of Ada Electric Cars in Oklahoma said.
I thought "free" golf carts were outrageous enough that the publicity would embarrass Congress into killing the tax credit. I thought the media would be all over it. But even though Riley has received thousands of calls for cars -- and sold hundreds -- he hasn't seen much media attention. The Journal commented, "You can't blame a guy for exploiting loopholes that Congress offers."
In Florida, Tony Colangelo also sells subsidized cars. He said the golf-cart credit is -- good for politicians:
"It's all (about) going green. They want all those gas vehicles off the street. They'd rather have the electric than anything."
The golf-cart boom follows an IRS ruling that many golf carts qualify for the electric-car credit. A credit is better than a subsidy since you keep money the IRS would have taken. Still, it is an insidious form of manipulation used to benefit some forms of industry at the expense of others.
Colangelo says: "I never, in my entire life, got anything back from the government, and I've always paid taxes. Why shouldn't the people who worked hard for their money get something back?"
Because government shouldn't be in the business of taking money and giving it back! That just gives the venal cretins more power over our lives.
After I drove the car onto my first Fox Business Network show last week, viewers wrote in asking how they could get one.
But others got the concept.
Sirsickofit writes: "People, please stop asking for information on the golf carts. ... Stossel is trying to make a point!! If you purchase these carts you will be adding to the problems."
True.
I'd like my taxes (and government spending) cut, too, but I don't want a manipulative favor from government -- I'll give my cart to charity.
The electric-vehicle subsidy is ludicrous not just because it is a form of industrial policy -- which almost always picks losers -- it's also destructive because it creates more pollution, not less. That's because much of the electricity needed for their operation comes from burning coal. As the National Research Council puts it:
"Although they produce no emissions during operation, they rely on electricity powered largely by fossil fuels for their fuel and energy intensive battery manufacturing."
In addition, check out the complexity of the credit:
"(1) $2,500, plus (2) $417 for each kilowatt hour of traction battery capacity in excess of 4 kilowatt hours. Section 30D(b)(1) limits the amount of the credit allowed for a vehicle to amounts ranging from $7,500 to $15,000, depending on the gross vehicle weight rating of the vehicle."
How many hours will accountants and tax lawyers waste over that?
Congress makes life worse every time it meets, and green hysteria sucks so many good things from the country.
Government is a meddling presumptuous pain in the neck. The sooner we get it to stop manipulating us through tax laws, the better.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
I just got a free golf cart.
Actually, it cost me $6,490 -- but the dealer, Colin Riley of Tucson, Ariz., points out that there's a $6,480 federal tax credit on such vehicles. Riley runs ads that say: "FREE ELECTRIC CAR … !"
Some consumers probably assume it's a car-dealer scam, but it's not. It's an Uncle Sam scam.
The tax code is outrageously complex and damaging in many ways, but it is made especially complex and damaging when congressmen use it "creatively" to manipulate us into doing things they deem "socially constructive." These are things that always bestow advantages on some politically connected manufacturers at the expense of others. After all, you were either planning to buy a golf cart or you weren't. If you were, the policy is unnecessary. If you weren't, you were induced to spend money on that product rather than something else. The unseen victim is whoever would have sold you the alternative product.
Such manipulation is at the heart of the entire "green" strategy.
The Wall Street journal reports that business is busy taking advantage of the tax credit. "Is that about the coolest thing you've ever heard?" Roger Gaddis of Ada Electric Cars in Oklahoma said.
I thought "free" golf carts were outrageous enough that the publicity would embarrass Congress into killing the tax credit. I thought the media would be all over it. But even though Riley has received thousands of calls for cars -- and sold hundreds -- he hasn't seen much media attention. The Journal commented, "You can't blame a guy for exploiting loopholes that Congress offers."
In Florida, Tony Colangelo also sells subsidized cars. He said the golf-cart credit is -- good for politicians:
"It's all (about) going green. They want all those gas vehicles off the street. They'd rather have the electric than anything."
The golf-cart boom follows an IRS ruling that many golf carts qualify for the electric-car credit. A credit is better than a subsidy since you keep money the IRS would have taken. Still, it is an insidious form of manipulation used to benefit some forms of industry at the expense of others.
Colangelo says: "I never, in my entire life, got anything back from the government, and I've always paid taxes. Why shouldn't the people who worked hard for their money get something back?"
Because government shouldn't be in the business of taking money and giving it back! That just gives the venal cretins more power over our lives.
After I drove the car onto my first Fox Business Network show last week, viewers wrote in asking how they could get one.
But others got the concept.
Sirsickofit writes: "People, please stop asking for information on the golf carts. ... Stossel is trying to make a point!! If you purchase these carts you will be adding to the problems."
True.
I'd like my taxes (and government spending) cut, too, but I don't want a manipulative favor from government -- I'll give my cart to charity.
The electric-vehicle subsidy is ludicrous not just because it is a form of industrial policy -- which almost always picks losers -- it's also destructive because it creates more pollution, not less. That's because much of the electricity needed for their operation comes from burning coal. As the National Research Council puts it:
"Although they produce no emissions during operation, they rely on electricity powered largely by fossil fuels for their fuel and energy intensive battery manufacturing."
In addition, check out the complexity of the credit:
"(1) $2,500, plus (2) $417 for each kilowatt hour of traction battery capacity in excess of 4 kilowatt hours. Section 30D(b)(1) limits the amount of the credit allowed for a vehicle to amounts ranging from $7,500 to $15,000, depending on the gross vehicle weight rating of the vehicle."
How many hours will accountants and tax lawyers waste over that?
Congress makes life worse every time it meets, and green hysteria sucks so many good things from the country.
Government is a meddling presumptuous pain in the neck. The sooner we get it to stop manipulating us through tax laws, the better.
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