Pre-emption, Democrat Style
Best of the Web Today - April 8, 2004
By JAMES TARANTO
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Do Democrats believe in pre-emption? The answer would seem to be yes, but only retrospectively. They've been trying their hardest to turn the Sept. 11 commission (which heard testimony from Condoleezza Rice this morning) into a forum to pillory the Bush administration for not acting in advance to prevent the attacks on America. At the same time, many have been blasting Bush for acting "pre-emptively" in Iraq (though Iraq's liberation wasn't actually pre-emptive, as we explained last year).
But it gets even crazier. Somehow we're supposed to believe that the blame for failing to pre-empt Sept. 11 rests entirely with President Bush, who'd been in office less than eight months, while President Clinton did his level best, even though his approach to terror over eight years was sporadic at best. Yet it's clear that political leaders in both parties underestimated the dangers of al Qaeda. "Tragically," as Rice observed this morning, "before September 11, this country simply was not on a war footing." Neither George W. Bush nor Al Gore made much mention of terrorism in his 2000 campaign.
Today, of course, we are on a war footing, and another presidential campaign is under way. John Kerry, the presumed Democratic nominee, has joined the chorus of condemnation over Iraq, though he himself voted for the war. Of course, even if you think things would be better if Saddam Hussein were still in power, you can't undo history. So the crucial question is: What does he plan to do about Iraq if he becomes president?
Well, here's his answer, as reported by the New York Times:
In an interview on Wednesday with American Urban Radio Networks, Mr. Kerry described the president's Iraq policy as "one of the greatest failures of diplomacy and failures of judgment that I have seen in all the time that I've been in public life."
Still, even as he attacked Mr. Bush, Mr. Kerry was notably vague in saying how he would handle the matter as president. His advisers said he had no plans to offer a policy speech about a war that aides to Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry alike said they now expected to provide a bloody backdrop for the campaign for months.
"Right now, what I would do differently is, I mean, look,
I'm not the president, and I didn't create this mess so I
don't want to acknowledge a mistake that I haven't made,"
Mr. Kerry said on Wednesday on CNN.
Wow, that's leadership! Robert Kuttner, a left-liberal Boston Globe columnist, expands the theme to domestic policy:
Suppose John Kerry actually gets elected president. Here's what he has to look forward to.
On the economic front, most observers expect higher interest rates in late 2004. Kerry will face a sluggish economy and perhaps a double-dip recession.
The reason for the higher interest rates is the Bush deficits. At some point soon, money markets will start demanding a better return if they are to keep buying government bonds.
To undo the fiscal mess, Kerry would be torn between reassuring Wall Street with a lot of deficit cutting and trying to find some funds to restore domestic social investment.
Kerry has been running an almost entirely negative campaign, blaming President Bush for everything that's wrong in the world and even for some things that are right. Now he and his supporters seem to be preparing for an entirely negative presidency. They are already arguing that Kerry's failures are Bush's fault. That's not the kind of pre-emption America needs.
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Oh, Those Sophisticated Europeans
"Uprising in Iraq Could Derail Bush," reads the headline of a Washington dispatch in yesterday's Guardian, the left-wing London newspaper. The subheadline: "As US forces suffer another bloody day, Republicans turn on president."
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Republicans are turning on President Bush? We'd heard about Democrats Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd giving hysterically overwrought speeches calling Iraq another "Vietnam," but this was the first we'd heard of a revolt in the ranks of Bush's own party. So we read Julian Borger's article. The entire basis for the claim of a GOP revolt is in these two paragraphs:
Edward Kennedy, his fellow Democratic senator from Massachusetts, described Iraq as "George Bush's Vietnam." Paul Bremer, the US governor in Iraq, said: "There is nothing in common with Vietnam." But Republican senator John McCain said Mr Bush should avoid the mistakes of the Vietnam war: "We have to tell the American people that we are in this for the long haul. We cannot say, as we did in Vietnam, that the light is at the end of the tunnel."
Other members of the president's party, raised the alarm over the emergence of the Shia militia and general unravelling of security. Senator Chuck Hagel, told the Washington Post the US was "dangerously close" to losing control in Iraq.
Perpetual gadflies John McCain and Chuck Hagel criticize President Bush, and the Guardian's Washington correspondent thinks that's news? That's like saying Democrats are abandoning John Kerry and citing Zell Miller as the only example. What's more, the McCain remark isn't even critical of the president, who certainly agrees with McCain that "we are in this for the long haul."
We hear a lot about the sophistication of Europeans, and especially left-wing Europeans, but they seem pretty provincial to us. You'd think the Washington correspondent for Britain's most prominent left-wing newspaper could trouble himself to learn a thing or two about American politics.
Oh, Those Sophisticated Americans
Then again, American journalists can be pretty clueless too. Newsweek's Howard Fineman claims that "fissures are appearing" in President Bush's conservative base, and he lists five issues. Here's one:
5. The draft. The Republican Party and Bush in particular are strong on college campuses, much stronger than the establishment press tends to realize. But that could be jeopardized if talk of reinstating the draft gets serious. So far, administration officials have talked only about the need to ensure a steady supply of high-tech specialists in the armed forces. But if you visit colleges--and I do, of all sizes and descriptions--the undertone of worry is there, big time.
In fact, the only politicians who've talked of reinstituting the draft are Democrats, notably Charlie Rangel, who wants conscription in order to hinder America's national security.
They Scare Ted Kennedy, Anyway
Those who are crying quagmire, including Julian Borger of the Guardian, might want to read an article in today's paper by Borger's colleague Rory McCarthy, reporting from near Fallujah:
"The Americans think we are afraid while we recognise them as cowards," said the young man, the commander of this small band of fighters in this village. "We have many heroes who are standing here and elsewhere. We will not be afraid of their tanks and their weapons and their other equipment. We will stay until we defeat them."
Suddenly the gunmen scattered, unnerved by the sound of an
approaching US helicopter. Villagers who had been standing
in the street fled into their shops and houses and, within
seconds, the crossroads was deserted.
Just because they're cowards doesn't mean they're not dangerous, but we'd venture to say the U.S. Marines can handle these guys.
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This Just In
"Fighting Continues"--headline, Newsday (Long Island, N.Y.), April 8
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The Same War
Jonathan Rauch of National Journal weighs in with a powerful column advancing an argument we've been making for years--that Israel and America are waging essentially the same war against Islamist terrorists:
What America is doing against Al Qaeda and what Israel is doing against Hamas are the same kind of thing, and that thing is not "extrajudicial killing" or "terrorism," but war. Denying that the war is a war has consequences--among them, reluctance to do what is necessary to win. A clever combatant knows that wars are won by many means (many of them nonmilitary) but that killing the other guy before he kills you is one of them. Is killing a Yassin or a bin Laden "extrajudicial"? Yes, but so is the war against militant Islamism. And our side didn't start it.
Further evidence can be found in the news from Iraq. "Palestinian fedayeen fighters have joined the ranks of the rebel Mahdi Army militia in recent days, militia leaders here told The Jerusalem Post Wednesday," the paper reports from Baghdad.
Back in the disputed territories, the Post reports, "hundreds of Palestinians marched in the streets of Ramallah on Wednesday to condemn the US and express their support for the resistance attacks against the coalition forces in Iraq." Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a terror group, issued a statement welcoming the "intifada" in Iraq.
Moving On Up
John Kerry's campaign has hired Zack Exley, now director of special operations for the far-left MoveOn Political Action Committee, to run his online operations<font size=3>, CNN reports. The MoveOn PAC is an offshoot of MoveOn.org, known for its shrill attacks on President Bush, as well as its harassment campaigns against its critics.
Writing for FrontPageMag.com, The <font size=4>American Spectator's Shawn Macomber notes that Exley was the brains behind a 2000 campaign site called GWBush.com, "which mostly made unsubstantiated claims about the Republican presidential candidate's alleged cocaine use":<font size=3>
The site remains active to this day, hawking bumper stickers and T-shirts with tender patriotic devotions emblazoned on them, such as: "Imperialism. A Way of Life Worth Bombing For"; "Regime Change Starts At Home"; "Bush is a Punk Ass Chump"; and, oddly enough, for a site selling wares, "Capitalism: It's Great in Theory, It Just Didn't Work in Practice." . . .
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In a commentary on MoveOn.org last year, Exley urged his fellow Democrats to "reject false, jingoistic patriotism."
"Our leaders remind us in nearly every speech they make that we live in the greatest, freest, most just nation on Earth," Exley wrote. "They remind us so often, that one can't help but wonder if they really do believe it. . . . What if America wasn't--or isn't--number one?"
As Macomber notes, one wonders if Kerry agrees with his
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Another SOMA Turnabout
Last month an Oregon county announced that it was refusing to issue marriage licenses, in protest against the traditional definition of marriage as a union of a man and a woman. We noted that this approach could be useful in staving off court-mandated same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, and some Bay State legislators have expressed interest in the idea, which we called the Suspense of Marriage Act.
Now the New York Post reports a legislator in the Empire State is making a similar proposal, but with the aim of putting same-sex couples on an equal footing with ordinary ones:
Assemblywoman Deborah Glick (D-Manhattan) said she would introduce legislation today to remove all references to marriage from the state Domestic Relations Law and replace them with the term "civil unions."
"There would be civil unions for all," Glick told The Post. . . .
"I suspect, that in the end, the courts will deal with the blatant inequality that is existing in the law today," said Glick.
Our idea was to make the ban on new marriage licenses temporary, lasting only until the Massachusetts Legislature resolves the question. Glick's proposal, by contrast, will give ammunition to opponents' argument that the aim of same-sex marriage is to destroy marriage itself.
But Surgeons Who Perform Operations Save More Lives
"Surgeons Who Play Video Games Err Less"--headline, Associated Press, April 7
The Early Bird
Agence France-Presse picks up on a New Scientist report that "tiny parasites called pig whipworms appear to have an astonishing effect on symptoms for a crippling form of bowel disease." Inflammatory bowel disease has become much more common over the past 50 years, coinciding with "a sharp fall in infections by classic intestinal parasites such as roundworm and human whipworms."
Researcher Joel Weinstock recruited 200 sufferers from the condition. "By regularly drinking a concoction of thousands of pig whipworm eggs, many of them saw symptoms, such as abdominal pain, bleeding and diarrhoea, disappear." Unlike human whipworms, pig whipworms are "a friendly gut-stabilising parasite because the eggs, after developing, do not survive very long in the human body."
A European regulatory agency has approved the elixir for sale. "It will be sold under the name of 'TSO' (for Trichuris Suis Ova), presumably because 'Drinkable Pig Whipworms' may not be a smart branding strategy."
But really, if they want to encourage the drinking of worms, why not market them as "tequila"? |
