 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Arnold's
Wild State Conservatives' hesitation over Schwarzenegger centers not so much on his social liberalism; rather, their concern is that he will bring the same elements to the job that made Jesse Ventura so feckless in Minnesota. Precisely because of his enormous celebrity, Schwarzenegger is the one person who might be able to intimidate the state legislature into making significant reforms — and California's legislature needs cleaning out even more than the governor's office. The legislature today is a wholly owned subsidiary of the public-employee unions and the trial lawyers. The liberal interests and their toadies in the legislature went wild when Davis came into office, passing bills by the bushel. Both the number of public employees and their salaries have soared. The big question is whether Schwarzenegger is serious about breaking this stranglehold; if he isn't, he shouldn't have bothered to run.
For liberals, Iraq has played the role of what Alfred Hitchcock used to call "the McGuffin" — the device that was needed to get the plot going. As the McGuffin in a script written by the Left, Iraq naturally sounds remarkably like Vietnam. Indeed, it sometimes seems as if the antiwar movement and its media accomplices have only one script. It involves a quagmire, tough guerrilla fighters who can blend into the population, an out-of-touch military, a corrupt despot who is hated by the people but backed by Washington . . . Hang on, something wrong there surely! There is a corrupt despot hated by the people in Iraq, but he is being hunted down by the U.S. Army. In other words, if the antiwar movement is to turn Iraq into a Vietnam, it needs to keep the actual details of what is happening there rather vague. Opponents of the Iraq war are not pioneering; they are remembering.
The possibility that the Joint Inquiry Report contains evidence of direct Saudi complicity in terrorist activities against American interests should come as no surprise. The four major Islamic "charities" — the Muslim World League (MWL), the Al Haramain Foundation, the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), and the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) — have for years supported terrorist activities. And contrary to what Riyadh would have us believe, none of them is "private" and "non-governmental"; all are directly controlled and financed by the Saudi regime. The MWL and the IIRO, for instance, are under the supervision of the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, while WAMY and Al Haramain are chaired by the Saudi minister of Islamic affairs. Paging through a recent WAMY publication, one finds a Wahhabi cleric exhorting Saudi youth to go fight the infidels in Iraq and praying several times a day for the destruction of America.
Professor Friedman's brief remark caused quite a stir — particularly in England. William Keegan, writing in The Observer, called Friedman's comment "the economic quote of the month — and probably the decade." Poppycock. The idea of instructing central banks to keep some broad measure of money growing at a 3 to 5 percent rate began as little more than a conditional suggestion. It was never a particularly important part of Milton Friedman's contribution to monetary economics, much less his numerous contributions to economics in general. The topic takes up merely a tenth of his 1962 classic Capitalism and Freedom, and that chapter ends by saying, "I should like to emphasize that I do not regard my particular proposal as a be-all and end-all of monetary management, as a rule which is somehow to be written in tablets of stone and enshrined for all future time." That was scarcely a dogmatic proclamation that must now preclude thoughtful reconsideration after four decades of experience.
In the days when I traveled into the remoter parts of Africa, I would often be surprised by a villager who would proceed to inform me of the latest events in the next country but three. There had been an attempted coup there, and my informant seemed inevitably to have been a party to the secret machinations of the plotters. "How do you know all this?" I would ask. The response: "I heard it on the BBC." The BBC was not a mere broadcasting organization — it was the Fount of Truth. Such a reputation is easily destroyed, of course. For conservative Britons, the BBC has long been not a fount of truth, or even of reasoned debate, but of insinuation, perfidy, political correctness, and cultural subversion. Among us today, the reverse of the African villager's belief seems to be true, or at least more true: I don't believe it, because I heard it on the BBC.
This business of interviewing candidates of a certain color — regardless of your plans or thinking — is a tricky one. Gene Upshaw, head of the Players Association, warned of this, way back: He said that, if you mandated something like the Rooney Rule, "it will lead to sham interviews and sham lists [of coaches]." But when Millen hired the coach of his dreams, Upshaw said that he had "treated [the rule] almost as a nuisance." Well, no kidding. Many commentators have scoffed at "courtesy" interviews, and "going through the motions," and "dog-'n'-pony shows" — but if they support tokenism — nay, mandate it — what else do they expect? They decry the indignity that a black coach has to suffer when he's used as a pawn in the satisfaction of a rule — but, again, what else do they expect? Teams had better interview these black candidates "in good faith," they say, and "with an open mind": but how is such a mental state to be determined?
The choice for conservatives is whether to make another uneasy peace with Specter in the prudential belief that no party holding a one-seat majority in the Senate should dump an incumbent who has won four previous elections in a swing state. The alternative is to rally behind Pat Toomey, an impressive congressman from Allentown who has launched an energetic primary bid against the man who has done more to frustrate conservative goals over the years than perhaps any other member of his caucus. Weyrich's complaint is a common one: Specter votes like a Democrat until late in his term. In 2001, for instance, Specter was in his usual form, helping slash the Bush administration's tax cuts by $250 billion. This year, however, he embraced the president's tax-relief proposals early on. "There's more reason for an economic stimulus now," he says. Skeptics think it's not the economy he's trying to jump-start as much as it is his Republican base — which he'll need in next April's primary.
Are you aware of the murderous history of George W. Bush — indeed, of the entire Bush family? Are you aware of the president's Nazi sympathies? His crimes against humanity? And do you know, by the way, that George W. Bush is a certifiable moron? If you haven't heard the news, you're not on the cutting edge of Bush-hating. Anyone with Internet access can discover an extensive network of websites like Bushbodycount.com, which accuses the president and his family of involvement in "mysterious" deaths; Fearbush.com and Takebackthemedia.com, which traffic in images of Bush in Nazi regalia; and Presidentmoron.com and Toostupidtobepresident.com, which portray the president as a drooling idiot. Taken together, the sites, and dozens of others like them, represent the far Left's online equivalent of the infamous Clinton Chronicles and Clinton Body Count videos and websites of the 1990s. Back then, the Clinton compilations troubled liberal observers and spurred a series of disapproving articles about Clinton-hating. Today, there appears to be less concern.
Certainly the British imperial enterprise had its dark sides. The opium traffic in China was one; the slave trade was of course another. When the Empire got properly into its stride, though, humanitarianism was a major driving force. Slavery was abolished throughout Britain's possessions in 1834, and much of the work of the Royal Navy through the middle decades of the 19th century was devoted to the suppression of slave trafficking by peoples of other nations — including this one. Nor could the idealistic side of imperialism be altogether separated from the commercial. Where endless civil wars are spreading chaos and misery, ordinary commerce, and even ordinary life, is impossible. The imperial power may then come as a blessed peacemaker, even if it is propelled by primarily commercial motives. This was how the young Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, viewed his campaigns in India. Probably many Indians saw them in the same light; and many more must have welcomed the British determination to stamp out such horrors as thuggee and suttee.
Horror Show — Andrew Stuttaford . . . Profoundly Disturbing: Shocking Movies That Changed History!, by Joe Bob Briggs The Kids Aren't Alright — Kate O'Beirne . . . Day Care Deception: What the Child Care Establishment Isn't Telling Us, by Brian C. Robertson Focus on Evil — Steven Menashi . . . Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators, by Riccardo Orizio Tidal Wave — William A. Rusher . . . Mexifornia: A State of Becoming, by Victor Davis Hanson Shelf Life: The Reagan Way — Michael Potemra on the lessons of Ronald Reagan. City Desk: A Village Voice — Richard Brookhiser on the folk-music tradition in New York. |
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
<% dim printurl
printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%>
