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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scumbria who wrote (278452)	7/21/2002 1:26:18 PM
From: FastC6	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

You must be surrounded with folks like SearchREctums in the UK....how do you tolerate it? . .

To: Scumbria who wrote (278452)	7/21/2002 1:49:56 PM
From: greenspirit	Respond to of 769670

Israel! O Israel! Three homely truths on Israel’s behalf. May 13, 2002 8:45 a.m. nationalreview.com Israel at the moment is in mortal peril. Its enemies have been becoming smarter, better organized, more thoroughly imbued with hatred and animosity, and intoxicated with signs of weakness they think they have detected. Above all, Israel's enemies have discovered a weapon almost impossible to block. They have invented human bombs. They sew explosives into the civilian garments of males and females of almost any age. We should not be surprised one day to learn of bombs being hidden in an infant's baby carriage. What her enemies have not counted on is Israel's capacity for reawakening, for toughness, for resolve. And for intelligence and ingenuity. There is another secret weapon that no one speaks of: the strength of God. Israel is also the bearer of a Mystery, even when many in Israel are unwitting, even unwilling, to think so, or even be so. Many small tribes have come and gone in human history. Have long ago disappeared, their languages (if written) now known only to a half-dozen scholars in the world. Not so the tribe of Benjamin. The worldwide bonds of Jews, wherever they may be, scattered round the world, are primarily of the spirit, chords of memory, a mysterious unity of shared interior destiny. It is safer, of course, to think of this in secular terms to keep it out here in front of us, where we can manage it. But in the twilight of the day wonderment slips under our defenses.... What else is going on? What else? Being Jewish is one of history's greatest stories. Perhaps it holds a hidden key...opens a secret door. There are some things that are never said, on behalf of Israel. Here's one: In 1946, more than 20 million European refugees from World War II, and scores of millions more in Asia, even in Africa, were seeking desperately to move toward home, or at least to settle down wherever they were, and to build new lives. Even in 1950, millions of refugees still remained. By the year 2000, virtually all of these had found homes, often even prosperity unrivaled in the past, and opportunity never earlier known. But not those refugees dwelling among the richest peoples of the world, the Arab lands and all their oil fields. There more than three million Arab refugees are still being kept in camps, despite severe labor shortages in the nations of the oil fields, which have been importing laborers from all over Asia, as far away as Bangladesh and Indonesia. These poverty-stricken refugees were deliberately kept within these camps for political reasons. They were kept as breeding camps for terror. As wounds festering with hatred. This has been one of the cruelest uses of human beings in our lifetime. Around them, just to the East, lies unparalleled wealth and luxury, in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. While they are kept in misery, and lack of opportunity. Why do Arabs treat Arab brothers so? Why do we? Why does the United States pay scores of millions of dollars to help keep these peoples in these awful camps? There is much work to be done in the Middle East. There is still much poverty there, despite the enormous wealth from black gold, crude oil whose existence was known for centuries but whose utility awaited the discovery of a modern political economy, in faraway America. For this wealth was conferred upon the region, let us recall, chiefly by American ingenuity in inventing the piston engine, in figuring out how to convert crude oil into usable gasoline, and in working out the techniques for drilling, transporting, storing, and dispensing gas and oil at local filling stations around the world. There is vast poverty in the Middle East, down below the thin crust of sheikdom. And knowledge is now widespread about how to create wealth from the bottom up, as once poverty-stricken East Asia has, as China and India are now doing. There is absolutely no need for the misery in the Arab refugee camps. These camps are a blot on the conscience of Islam. They are a blot on the conscience of us all. But the biggest blot of all is the unconscionable political decision of the Arab states to maintain these camps in existence, as weapons against Israel. It is wrong to use human beings as political weapons. These camps were built to be forms of weaponry. The individuals actually blowing themselves up today are only doing retail what the Arab regimes began doing wholesale much earlier: using whole camps as silent weapons. Finally, let us voice some homely truths about any future Palestinian state. In 1949, there were about 50 nations in the world for the launching of the U.N. and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Since then, well more a hundred new independent states have come into existence, and rather swiftly gained international recognition. The world seems to welcome new independent states. So there has been every presumption for a long time that the Palestinians might well want, and ought to have, a new state. The Palestinians might, of course, have chosen to become a federal republic of Jordan, or even of Syria, or Lebanon. But they might have taken stock, and decided (improbably) that there is enough economic possibility to carve out a small, thriving commercial republic at the crossroads of three continents, on the West Bank of the Jordan, and around the crescent into the Gaza Strip. At this point, the world would rightly have expected the Palestinians to develop a political system (there is much experience in the world in developing a wide variety of political systems) that would shelter them within the rule of law, with firm protection for individual and minority rights, a free press, an independent judiciary, and the rest. And also, at least a rudimentary outline of a dynamic economy that could provide incentives to their needy and talented people, so as to undergird a new democracy with real economic promise, for the poor as well as the already proven middle class. Instead, during the past 50 years, the Palestinians have achieved neither of these elementary conditions. They have squandered their talents, and wasted much blood, on terror and war. The face the Palestinians show to the world is the hideous face of Yasser Arafat, corrupt, dishonest, cruel, wanton. Yet anyone who has met Palestinians of culture, civilizing experiences, and traditional Arab manners, knows that men and women of their quality set a very high standard before the world. It is an outrage that such good people must be embarrassed before the world by Arafat's public blustering. It is such a waste of precious time and opportunity that they are forced into the background by the physical threat his thugs pose to their families. It is the tragedy of the Palestinians that their movement has been dominated by thugs. It is the disgrace of the Arab world that these thugs have gotten their lush financing from the political and economic elites of neighboring Arab nations, not least from Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. And also from the stupid among the Europeans. These three points are, I believe, homely truths. They are truths too seldom expressed: It is wrong, inhuman, and unacceptable: (1) to use the living human flesh of men and women as human bombs, who walk with apparent innocence among other human beings in the normal activities of human life, in order to blast them apart; (2) to keep the poor and the needy in the misery of refugee camps, at the heart of the richest region on this planet, and to hold them there as political pawns and weapons; and (3) to pour out on war and terror precious energies and talents that ought to be going into the building of an admirable civic and political order, and a vibrant commercial economy, able to energize a talented people with opportunity and expanding prosperity. Providing they have a realistic political and economic foundation ready, the world leans toward wanting Palestinians to have an independent country (if that is what they choose). But the Palestinians need concurrently to construct a political economy that will give their aspirations body. They have not done that yet. May God swiftly send them able leadership, so that they can.

To: Scumbria who wrote (278452)	7/21/2002 2:24:23 PM
From: SeachRE	Respond to of 769670

Scumboy, your self-serving comments makes me wonder if extremists like EV could be right for once.Should the US get into real trouble economically(which I doubt) your own beloved Israel will suffer mightily(I'm for Israel, but I ain't dumb). The point is: All power to the US ,economically, and all its friends will benefit. Parasitizing the US can only last so long...The only Carville thing I quote is: "It's the Economy, Stupid".The Economy is IT! The rest(moral ethics, war power,blah-blah) comes last.The latter are the Republican ideas.Heheheh

To: Scumbria who wrote (278452)	7/21/2002 3:17:46 PM
From: greenspirit	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Take Heart, An antidote to anti-Americanism. nationalreview.com What's So Great About America by Dinesh D'Souza (Regnery; 218 pp., $27.95) I have a problem with anti-Americanism. Not just an emotional problem, though I have that too, but an intellectual problem. I mean, I don't get it. America — what's not to like? I can't even claim the interesting status of a reformed anti-American; I've always liked this country and her people, since I first made your acquaintance in the streets of Northampton, England, back in my childhood. "France is everyone's second country," some dolt is supposed to have said. Well, the hell with that; the U.S.A. is my second country, and always has been. Hundreds of millions of people all over the world think the same way. The title What's So Great About America (there is, please note, no question mark) therefore strikes my eyes somewhat as might What's So Great About Dating Beautiful Women, or What's So Great About Eating Pâté de Foie Gras While Listening to Mozart on a Luxury Yacht in the Aegean. If you asked me to write a book on the topic, I wouldn't know where to start. I think I would probably do a lousy job, out of sheer lack of comprehension of the point of view I was trying to counter. Dinesh D'Souza, to judge from the general tone of his book, and from some occasional personal comments he has included, is of exactly the same cast of mind as myself. I therefore stand in awe of him for having done so brilliantly well what I do not think I could have done. I had better say before proceeding that this book does not contain any striking or original insights. Most of what the author has to say will be familiar to anyone who reads conservative magazines or visits websites like this one. What's So Great is not pioneering political science: It is pop-political science. That's OK. There is hardly any work a writer can more usefully engage in than to bring to a large, general audience ideas that have been worked over and polished smooth by small cliques of interested parties. I am myself at the moment engaged in writing a pop-math book. If I can do as well with the Riemann Hypothesis as Dinesh has done with the conservative think-tank critique of anti-Americanism, I shall feel well pleased with myself. As an immigrant himself (from India), D'Souza knows a thing that I know too, but that all too many Americans don't: He knows that this country has a very distinctive culture all its own, as peculiar in its own way as the culture of Japan or Russia. While Americans obsess about their differences, to the rest of the world you all look remarkably alike. A black American has far, far more in common with a white American than he has with a Nigerian, or even with a black Englishman. The way you talk, the way you think, the way you deal with each other, the way you fight wars — all are unique. Americans even have a distinctive way of walking — a thing Malcolm Muggeridge commented on, watching U.S. troops marching into Paris after the city's liberation in 1944. It is an amazing thing that a country so far from everywhere else, with manners and folkways so different from everyone else's, should have created a culture that is so attractive — even, as D'Souza notes, to those who profess to be America's enemies. (Recall the old joke about the students of a Third World country — whichever one was in the news at the time — who spend their mornings at the front of the U.S. embassy throwing rocks, their afternoons at the back, waiting in line for visas.) He easily identifies the heart of the matter, which is of course freedom — the freedom to make your own life, rather than submit to having it made by others. The first time I ever went to the Far East, my host was a college student about the same age as myself, studying hotel management. How did he get interested in that? I asked him. He laughed. In Taiwan, he explained, all high-school seniors took a single examination. All were then ranked by their examination result, in a huge list. The top such-and-such percent of the list was assigned to intense studies like medicine or science, the next to history and literature, the next to law and accounting... That's how things work, out there in not-America — even in those parts of it not under the heel of oppressive tyrannies. D'Souza has similar tales to tell about India — a very free country by Third World standards, yet still one in which large parts of a person's life are decided for him (or, even more so, her). In a chapter subtitled "Freedom and Its Abuses," D'Souza takes on the downside of all this freedom, and the conservative critique of modern American culture: the one arguing that: "[I]n America freedom has established itself as the highest value ... at the expense of decency, community and virtue." Of course, when people are free to chose, a lot of them will choose things that are stupid, trashy, empty, or ugly. A lot of them — look around you. D'Souza's approach to this is the one favored by Socrates: If you show people the Good, they will naturally choose it. We are just not showing it clearly enough. Our freedom and autonomy are precious commodities, and conservatives better than anyone else recognize that it is a great tragedy when they are trivialized and abused. Their mission, therefore, is to steer the American ethic of authenticity to its highest manifestaion, and to ennoble freedom by showing it the path to virtue. Virtue is already much more widespread among Americans than you yourselves realize. If I may be forgiven another China anecdote: After my first few weeks in the People's Republic, back in 1982, I found myself at the bar of the Beijing Hotel next to another Englishman, an engineer from Birmingham who had been in the country for several months helping Chinese firms install his company's equipment. "Well," I said breezily, after basic introductions, "And how are they treating you?" "Oh, fine," he replied. "Wonderful, really. It's the way they treat each other that makes me sick!" The way they treat each other. Anyone that has lived in an unfree culture knows what that engineer was talking about. The snooping and spying, the endless maneuvering for petty advantage, the meanness and cruelty... Sure, you can find these things in the U.S.A. too; but they are way less common here than anywhere else in the world; and it is a wonderful thing to see — I have seen it with my own eyes, a dozen times — how they fall away from third-world immigrants like the discarded fragments of some protective carapace no longer needed, as the reality of freedom sinks in and the human soul rises to meet the challenges of personal autonomy. As D'Souza argues in his final chapter, American liberty, under American law, actually produces a superior type of human being — one who, free to choose, chooses virtue and nobility of spirit much more often than not: "[A] vast improvement," as he says, "over the wretched, servile, fatalistic and intolerant human being that traditional societies have always produced, and that Islamic societies produce now." D'Souza does anti-Americans the courtesy of taking their arguments seriously, and methodically refutes every one of them. Was this country founded in racism? No, he argues: The founders did not see themselves as establishing a finished thing, perfect and immutable, with the institutions of colonial racism cemented in, but a kind of country that could improve and rectify itself — as, of course it did, and continues to do. Does the U.S. throw its weight around? Considerably less than any other great power has ever done — imagine how much throwing-around of weight would have resulted if the U.S.S.R. had won the Cold War! Does this country act selfishly towards other nations? If "selfishly" means "in pursuit of America's own national interests," then yes, it does. What nation doesn't? And what nation has ever been so firm in the belief that the best way to advance its interests is not to oppress other peoples, but to help lift them up? Early in WWII, a desperate Winston Churchill appealed to the U.S.A. for help. Roosevelt sent to Congress, and Congress approved, the "Lend-Lease" program, giving Britain easy access to American arms and supplies. Churchill described Lend-Lease as "one of the least sordid acts in history." There is, of course, plenty of sordidness to be found in American life, and in this nation's conduct of her affairs. It is none the less true that by comparison with other states past and present, and even with her own past self, America is the least sordid nation that ever was. This country has been going through some dark days recently, and no doubt has more tests ahead of her. In this fine, heartening, and timely book, Dinesh D'Souza shows why America will survive these trials with her courage, magnanimity, and good sense intact, confound her detractors, and show humanity the way forward to a saner, more secure world. Let freedom ring!