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Shameless Fear-Mongering
This morning flyers were posted all over the building where I work. "Thanks to Bush and His Administration," it began, there’s going to be a "Mandaory [sic] Draft for Boys and Girls (Ages 18-26)." It then listed several web addresses that purport to prove the truth of this statement. This is, of course, just a paper version of an e-mail that’s been making the rounds among college students. The lie about a Bush-backed conscription bill has been fully debunked. Indeed, I visited the sites listed on the flyer, and they indicate clearly that the sponsor of the draft bill is the left-wing Democrat Charlie Rangel. I guess this is the sort of desperate thrashing about that we’re going to see on the part of the Kerry campaign in these final weeks before Election Day.
Posted by John Moser | Link to this Entry | Comments [8] | 9/27/2004 11:43 AM
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Safire on All-Kidnap-All-the-Time Media Manipulation
William Safire pens a timely and thoughtful op-ed, "The Kidnap Weapon," which argues for more responsible coverage of Zarqawi terrorist kidnappings. A few excerpts: We know, too, that the kidnap weapon is aimed at the U.S. election. What we do not know is how its heavily publicized use will cut. Will Americans react to all-kidnap-all-the-time by being revolted at the savagery and turn to the candidate determined to wipe out the barbarians? Or will we be so revolted as to think Iraqis are hopelessly uncivilized or beaten down, and turn to the candidate who will get us out of there the fastest?John Kerry, who has evidently decided to replace Howard Dean as the antiwar candidate, last weekend helped to magnify the terrorists’ kidnap weapon. In a scheduled commercial Kerry personally approved, just before charging that George Bush had no plan to get us out of Iraq, the Democratic campaign underscored the message Zarqawi has been sending: "Americans," said Kerry’s announcer, "are being kidnapped, held hostage, even beheaded." It’s bad enough for some thoughtless media outlets to become an echo chamber for scare propaganda; it’s worse when the nominee of a major party approves its use to press his antiwar candidacy.
Posted by Lucas Morel | Link to this Entry | Comments [2] | 9/27/2004 11:00 AM
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Steyn on John Kerry and Francis Crick
I love reading Mark Steyn (by the way, I know next to nothing about him). The guy is clear and exteremely funny. This piece is entitled "The Kerryness of Kerry," (although I think I have seen an earlier version and put it out, it’s worth seeing it again) and I don’t believe that it could be any funnier than it is. You must read it. A sample: "If it weren’t for the small matter of the war for civilization, I’d find it hard to resist a Kerry Presidency. Groucho Marx once observed that an audience will laugh at an actress playing an old lady pretending to fall downstairs, but, for a professional comic to laugh, it has to be a real old lady. That’s how I feel about the Kerry campaign. For the professional political analyst, watching Mondale or Dukakis or Howard Dean stuck in the part of the guy who falls downstairs is never very satisfying: they’re average, unexceptional fellows whom circumstances have conspired to transform into walking disasters. But Senator Kerry was made for the role, a vain thin-skinned droning blueblood with an indestructible sense of his own status but none at all of his own ridiculousness. If Karl Rove had labored for a decade to produce a walking parody of the contemporary Democratic Party’s remoteness, condescension, sense of entitlement, public evasiveness and tortured relationship with military matters, he couldn’t have improved on John F Kerry."
The thing with Steyn is that he can write a very serious piece with as much ease. The current issue (October) of The Atlantic Monthly has a precious Steyn article (last two pages of the issue, not avaliable on line) on Francis Crick, who, along with Jim Watson, "discovered the secret of life" (DNA), and is the most important biologist of the twentieth century (he died this year). If you think Darwin was off base, think again, for Crick is reductionist in the extreme. This is the guy who "set us on a path to a biotechnological era that may yet be only an intermediate stage to a post human future." Man and chimp share 98.5 percent of their genetic code, but we also share 75 percent of our genetic makeup with the pumpkin. We all evolved from the same soup of chemicals. Steyn: "It turns out there is a fly in my soup--and a chimp and a worm, and a pumpkin." You see the point. (The Churchill story about "I am a gloworm" seems unnecessary). Steyn doesn’t mean to be funny in this one, but you can’t help but smile through it. Crick was a militant atheist. No love, no mind, no free will. No human beings. Just pumpkins. Very clear. Read it.
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments | 9/27/2004 10:18 AM
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The final attack against Bush
So the full court press is on. Ted Kennedy " told a national audience yesterday that the Bush administration’s Iraq policy has made America less safe because it has been a diversion from the struggle against Al Qaeda and the occupation has been marked by "blunder after blunder," foreshadowing a new election-season speech he is scheduled to deliver today at George Washington University." James Fallows in The Atlantic (the whole, long, article is not available on line) gives the more sophisticated view, while Ted Kennedy--the only great American statesman who has less authority on such matters than John Kerry--gives the practical view. And then Kerry will pick it up in the debates. This is it. This is what will determine whether or not Kerry’s latest mode will fly. I say bring it on, bring on even the CIA: Robert Novak reports that the CIA is at war with Bush; and publicly at war! They are no longer willing to call Rumsfeld and the other "ideologues" (i.e., neo-cons), they are going after the president. If this is true--and there are many other reasons to think so--then what you have is an extraordinary (i.e., unique, dangerous) situation wherein the CIA will be used--and has already let itself be used both by leaking the National Intelligent Estimate and by Paul Pillar’s public speech that Novak recounts--in a political campaign against the sitting chief executive. We will soon find out what Porter Goss is made of, will we not?
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments [2] | 9/27/2004 9:30 AM
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Registering voters
Sunday’s New York Times carried a front page story on how both parties are registering voters at a good clip. They looked at county by county date and discovered that in traditional Demo counties the registration has increased by 250 percent since January over the same period in 2000. The GOP registration has increased only 25 percent in Republican areas. "While comparable data could not be obtained for other swing states, similar registration drives have been mounted in them as well, and party officials on both sides say record numbers of new voters are being registered nationwide. This largely hidden but deadly earnest battle is widely believed by campaign professionals and political scientists to be potentially decisive in the presidential election." I have been hearing about this massive drive by the Dems from GOP operatives for many months; they are clearly worried about it. The Demos were organized early and threw a lot of money at it, most of it by soft money groups like America Votes, which will spend about $300 million on the project nationwide. As the registration drive winds down, emphasis will be placed on keeping in touch with voters and then making sure they vote. In Franklin County (Columbus) it is claimed that almost all potential voters have been regsited; it had 650,000 registered voters in 2000, and is now up to 800,000.
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments [8] | 9/27/2004 7:58 AM
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The end of liberal credibility
Victor Davis Hanson reflects on the Rather’s problem, and the old media’s problem as well. He agrees that there is a revolution taking place. Hanson: "It has taken a lot to end the credibility of the liberal dynasty, inasmuch as there were many prior provocations — Peter Arnett airing a blatantly dishonest 1998 mythodrama on CNN about Americans using Sarin gas in Laos; Dan Rather giving a flawed 1988 account of American grotesqueries in Vietnam (The Wall Within), replete with phony veterans spinning lies about horrific war crimes. But then we have not quite seen anything like the shamelessness of airing forged documents backed by unhinged witnesses and verified by suspect ’experts’ — all in a time of war and with the intent of smearing a sitting conservative president."
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments [1] | 9/27/2004 7:44 AM
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Bush offends the sophists
John Zvesper doesn’t think that Bush’s speech at the UN was for domestic consumption. It was a serious speech, but many journalists, representatives of tyrannies, and even those who claim to represent liberal democracies took offense. Read the whole thing; but a sample paragraph:
What most offended these sophisticated UN delegates was Bush’s rejection of their postmodern pieties, their unwavering faith in the dogmas of pragmatism and moral and cultural relativism. Bush justified his call for the expansion of liberty by asserting that "the dignity of every human life" is "honored by the rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women, protection of private property, free speech, equal justice, and religious tolerance." Many of these traditional liberal principles have become suspect in pragmatic, "progressive" circles. But especially grating to the postmodern mentality that dominates sophisticated minds in liberal democracies is Bush’s claim that "we know with certainty" that "the desire for freedom resides in every human heart," and that therefore the "bright line between justice and injustice—between right and wrong—is the same in every age, and every culture, and every nation." Recognition of such self-evident truths is completely inadmissible in the postmodern faith, in which the only certainty is that nothing is certain. 
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments | 9/26/2004 9:01 PM
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Dirty bomb suspects arrested
British police said Saturday they had arrested four men under anti-terrorism legislation after a tip-off from a newspaper which said the suspects tried to buy explosives for a
dirty bomb.
The Saudis were prepared to pay $540,600 for a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of "red mercury", a mysterious radioactive substance which is rumored to have been developed by Russian scientists during the Cold War. (Thanks to Little Green Footballs).
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments [1] | 9/26/2004 9:19 AM
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Indian Country
Robert Kaplan explains the importance of small tactical units in warfare now and in the future. This is fighting in Indian Country: "you want to whack bad guys quietly and cover your tracks with humanitarian-aid projects." Worth reading the whole op-ed. A piece of it:
"In Indian Country, it is not only the outbreak of a full-scale insurgency that must be avoided, but the arrival in significant numbers of the global media. It would be difficult to fight more cleanly than the Marines did in Fallujah. Yet that still wasn’t a high enough standard for independent foreign television voices such as al-Jazeera, whose very existence owes itself to the creeping liberalization in the Arab world for which the U.S. is largely responsible. For the more we succeed in democratizing the world, not only the more security vacuums that will be created, but the more constrained by newly independent local medias our military will be in responding to those vacuums. From a field officer’s point of view, an age of democracy means an age of restrictive rules of engagement.
The American military now has the most thankless task of any military in the history of warfare: to provide the security armature for an emerging global civilization that, the more it matures--with its own mass media and governing structures--the less credit and sympathy it will grant to the very troops who have risked and, indeed, given their lives for it. And as the thunderous roar of a global cosmopolitan press corps gets louder--demanding the application of abstract principles of universal justice that, sadly, are often neither practical nor necessarily synonymous with American national interest--the smaller and more low-key our deployments will become. In the future, military glory will come down to shadowy, page-three skirmishes around the globe, which the armed services will quietly celebrate among their own subculture."
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments [1] | 9/26/2004 8:49 AM
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Women and men
An AP story: "Beyond the tired cliches and sperm-and-egg basics taught in grade school science class, researchers are discovering that men and women are even more different than anyone realized.
It turns out that major illnesses like heart disease and lung cancer are influenced by gender and that perhaps treatments for women ought to be slightly different from the approach used for men.
These discoveries are part of a quiet but revolutionary change infiltrating U.S. medicine as a growing number of scientists realize there’s more to women’s health than just the anatomy that makes them female, and that the same diseases often affect men and women in different ways.
’Women are different than men, not only psychologically (but) physiologically, and I think we need to understand those differences,’ says Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association."
This is a brief review of Desmond Morris’s book, "The Naked Woman" Morris writes: "Every woman has a beautiful body, beautiful because it is the brilliant end-point of a million years of evolution." The reviewer writes: "Where The Naked Woman falls down, as it were, is on the theory that binds these facts together. It’s the same old argument that Richard Dawkins propagated in The Selfish Gene, secular Britain’s creed: human traits can be explained with reference to how they helped primitive man survive in the wild. Men fancy curvy women because big hips mean easy childbirth. We laugh because apes emit a laugh-like panting sound during group bonding games. That sort of thing.
And while it may well be true that the character and appearance of men and women can be explained by imagining how each trait helped our ancestors survive, the various hypotheses sometimes read like a sophisticated after-dinner game for pop anthropologists. In his chapter on hair, Morris speculates that women have long head hair because when they were aquatic apes, it gave their babies something to hang on to as they swam around. Well OK, but prove it. Find me a remnant of aquatic mummy-ape flippers."
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments | 9/25/2004 10:43 PM
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Multilateralism at work
David Brooks has a few thoughts about Darfur and multilateralism. Here is how he starts:
"And so we went the multilateral route.
Confronted with the murder of 50,000 in Sudan, we eschewed all that nasty old unilateralism, all that hegemonic, imperialist, go-it-alone, neocon, empire, coalition-of-the-coerced stuff. Our response to this crisis would be so exquisitely multilateral, meticulously consultative, collegially cooperative and ally-friendly that it would make John Kerry swoon and a million editorialists nod in sage approval.
And so we Americans mustered our outrage at the massacres in Darfur and went to the United Nations. And calls were issued and exhortations were made and platitudes spread like béarnaise. The great hum of diplomacy signaled that the global community was whirring into action.
Meanwhile helicopter gunships were strafing children in Darfur."
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments | 9/25/2004 10:34 PM
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The small, graceless man and Allawi
Mark Steyn, I must say, is a wonderful writer. He reflects on Kerry’s comments on Prime Minister Allawi. A sample: "What a small, graceless man Kerry is. The nature of adversarial politics in a democratic society makes George W. Bush his opponent. But it was entirely Kerry’s choice to expand the field, to put himself on the other side of Allawi and the Iraqi people. Given his frequent boasts that he knows how to reach out to America’s allies, it’s remarkable how often he feels the need to insult them: Britain, Australia, and now free Iraq. But, because this pampered cipher has floundered for 18 months to find any rationale for his candidacy other than his indestructible belief in his own indispensability, Kerry finds himself a month before the election with no platform to run on other than American defeat. He has decided to co-opt the jihadist death-cult, the Baathist dead-enders, the suicide bombers and other misfits and run as the candidate of American failure. This would be shameful if he weren’t so laughably inept at it."
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments [1] | 9/25/2004 11:41 AM
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Opportunity Costs
The Knight Ridder Washington Bureau has a story reporting that according to the Iraqi Ministry of Health, US and coalition action has killed or injured 66% of the Iraqis killed or injured in the insurgency. It quotes an American military spokesman as saying that “damage will happen.” The spokesman also says that “the insurgents were living in residential areas, sometimes in homes filled with munitions. ‘As long as they continue to do that, they are putting the residents at risk," he said. "We will go after them.’"
James Fallows has an interesting article in the October Atlantic (not available online) presenting all the things we could not or cannot do (the opportunity costs we have incurred) as a result of invading Iraq. The last paragraph reads in part:
The administration’s focus on Iraq “hampered the campaign in Afghanistan before fighting began and wound it down prematurely, along the way losing the chance to capture Osama bin laden. [Because of its focus on Iraq, the administration] turned a blind eye . . . to WMD threats from North Korea and Iran far more serious than any posed by Saddam Hussein . . . It overused and wore out its army in invading Iraq—without committing enough troops for a successful occupation. It saddled the United States with ongoing costs that dwarf its spending for domestic security. . . .”
Posted by David Tucker | Link to this Entry | Comments [246] | 9/25/2004 1:53 PM
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Kerry’s disgraceful week
Bill Kristol begins his thoughts on Kerry’s disgraceful behavior last week with the following:
"We really don’t know what a President John Kerry would do about Iraq. His flip-flops about the war, his inconsistencies, the ambiguity of his current position (win or withdraw?)--all of these mean we can only guess about a Kerry presidency. He would probably be inclined to get out of Iraq as soon as possible; it might be the case, however, that as president he would nonetheless find himself staying and fighting. Who knows?
What we do know is this: Kerry and his advisers have behaved disgracefully this past week. That behavior is sufficient grounds for concern about his fitness to be president."
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments | 9/25/2004 11:37 AM
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John Kerry’s diplomacy
I have been busy all day with unimportant meetings (it’s days like this I regret becoming a prof), so I am playing some catch-up. I was struck by both the substance and the rhetoric of Prime Minister Allawi’s speech to Congress, as well as his press conference with President Bush. This is a serious fellow. I was also dumbfounded by John Kerry immediate response. It was shocking! Here is this man--an ally--who is now the head of a country trying to rebuild the Hitlerian/Satlinist mess his suffering country was left, and the Democratic candidate for president attacks him! This may be stupidest thing, the most irresponsible, the most disgraceful thing John Kerry has done in this campaign. I had to find other places on TV where it was played, just to confirm it. Each time I saw it I became angrier, and more fully convinced that this man will never become president. The American people--if they have had any doubt until now--will take this as the last straw. I am sure of it.
Joseph Knippenberg seems to agree with me, and he calmed down enough to write a few coherent paragraphs about the Kerry campaign’s undiplomatic activity, ending with Kerry’s remarks on Allawi. Also note what Joe Lockhart, a senior Kerry advisor, said about Allawi: "The last thing you want to be seen as is a puppet of the United States, and you can almost see the hand underneath the shirt today moving the lips." I am amazed.
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments [8] | 9/24/2004 3:55 PM
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Kerry and Vietnam
This New York Times piece considers (in fits) how the Vietnam crossfire has hurt Kerry. There is a comparison throughout to Bush’s National Guard service, and or issues (made up or not) surrounding it, but, try as they might, the Times has to admit that the comparison isn’t valid. Especially notice this comment from the historian and Kerry biographer (is it hagiographer?) Douglas Brinkley: "Every American now knows that there’s something really screwy about George Bush and the National Guard, and they know that John Kerry was not the war hero we thought he was." I think this is true, but do we not know this because Doug Brinkley helped us find out. The guy ought to lose his tenure, as Dan Rather ought to lose his job.
Posted by Peter Schramm | Link to this Entry | Comments | 9/24/2004 11:01 AM
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Fishing for a Great Communicator . . . Sort of
In "The Candidates, Seen From the Classroom", Stanley Fish reports that by a vote of 13-2 his freshman writing class believes President Bush communicates his ideas better than Senator Kerry. Fish told his students, "Put aside whatever preferences you might have for either candidate’s positions . . . just tell me who does a better job of articulating his positions, and why." One student said of Kerry, "He’s kind of ’skippy,’ all over the place." Kind of reminds you of his policy positions.
To the objection, "Doesn’t Mr. Bush’s directness and simplicity of presentation reflect a simplicity of mind and an incapacity for nuance, while Mr. Kerry’s ideas are just too complicated for the rhythms of publicly accessible prose?" Fish replies, Sorry, but that’s dead wrong. If you can’t explain an idea or a policy plainly in one or two sentences, it’s not yours; and if it’s not yours, no one you speak to will be persuaded of it, or even know what it is, or (and this is the real point) know what you are. Fish still intends to vote for the Great Obfuscator, but he for one is not hopeful that the coming presidential debates will help Kerry rebound from his plummeting poll numbers.
Posted by Lucas Morel | Link to this Entry | Comments [223] | 9/24/2004 9:54 AM
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