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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (16927)	11/20/2003 7:02:04 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793690

David Frum is having fun in Britain. "Telegraph News" The "mass movement" extended barely half the length of the railing. I'd seen larger crowds at poetry readings. Why this protest is deeply shameful By David Frum (Filed: 19/11/2003) As slogans go, "Hands Off Nepal" has a lot to recommend it: it's simple, direct - and yet at the same time, touched with a certain exotic romance. "What's going on in Nepal?" I asked one of the two compact men carrying the banner on which the slogan was painted. From behind the cloth stepped a good-looking young man in a long blue coat. "A people's resistance movement is battling the Nepalese government." What's that got to do with Iraq and President Bush, I asked him. The United States, he replied, was backing the government. Oh, I said: "Are you from Nepal?" He replied that he was from Turkey. What about him, I asked, jerking my thumb at one of the banner holders. "He's from Turkey, too." "Are there, in fact, any Nepalese here at all?" I asked him. "Not as yet, but" - he hastened to assure me - "we are expecting some Nepalese friends later." The anti-Bush demonstration in Lincoln's Inn Fields was called for six o'clock, but at the appointed hour, journalists and camera crews substantially outnumbered protesters. I joined a line of 14 journalists to interview a shapely woman dressed as a beauty contestant: "Miss Flaming Planet". Then, I was introduced to a man named Phil, the organiser of the event. He was wearing a woolly hat. I asked him how he kept an event like this on-message. Before Phil could answer, a sharp-faced man directly behind him intervened." Why do you ask that?" he said suspiciously. "Why do you think it's an improper question?" The sharp-faced man was not diverted by my answer-a-question-with-a-question technique. He returned to his main point." I just think it's an interesting question to ask" - "interesting" evidently being a euphemism for "just the kind of dirty trick I'd expect from The Daily Telegraph". "OK," I said. "Isn't it the tragedy of the Left that it has historically allowed itself to be infiltrated and captured by tiny sects with extremist ideologies? Aren't you worried it could happen again?" The sharp-faced man answered with a superior air. "When you have a mass movement like this, it's impossible for it to be captured by a small group." I looked up and down the south side of the square. The "mass movement" extended barely half the length of the railing. I'd seen larger crowds at poetry readings. And, in fact, the people looked very like the crowds you see at poetry readings: mostly white, shaggy but clean in appearance, polite and vaguely bookish in speech - the last inheritors of the landscape-loving English radicalism of William Blake, Thomas Paine and William Morris. I thought of the tens of thousands of marchers I'd seen at the big anti-war demo in October 2002, chanting Islamic slogans from under their caps and hijabs. They had not been bookish or polite. There was nothing woolly about them. But they were young and fierce - and numerous. It is they, not these ageing men and women carefully tucking away their litter, who represent the future of the British Left - if, that is, a politics that pooh-poohs the crimes of Osama bin Laden and rallies to aid the last-ditch struggles of the Ba'ath party of Iraq can in any meaningful way be called "Left" at all. The war on terror has glaringly exposed the moral contradictions of contemporary political radicalism: a politics that champions the rights of women and minorities, but only when those rights are threatened by white Europeans; a politics that celebrates creative non-violence at home but condones deadly extremism abroad; and, perhaps above all, a politics that traces its origins to the Enlightenment - and today raises its voice to protect militantly unenlightened terrorists from the justice dispensed by their victims. A woman pressed into my hands a mimeographed sheet touting the merits of the Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean. "You do know," I said, "that Dean now says that American troops must stay in Iraq?" "But of course," she said in a lovely French lilt. "Now that we - I mean you - are there, we must stay to clean up the mess. There is no choice." Good point. But not as good a point as this one I heard from a young member of the Socialist Workers Party, standing underneath a clutch of red banners. I goaded him a little: "Wouldn't Trotsky describe your allies in this coalition as religious obscurantists? And isn't the history of the Middle East that religious loyalties count for a whole lot more than ideology?" Mike (the name he gave) shrugged me off. "People in the Middle East are fighting because their own governments are repressing them. They come to feel that they have no alternative - and the mosque is always open. "But I can't help thinking that it's just not very realistic that people are going to kill each other because they say my God is better than your God. Give people freedom and an opportunity for something better: that's what they really want." I said: "You know, you sound exactly like Paul Wolfowitz." He flinched. At this point, another of those sharp-faced monitors slipped into the conversation - this one a shortish young man with East Asian features and angry eyes. "Be careful what you say: it's the press. They'll distort your quotes." "Here," I said. "I'll open up my computer and type the quote right in front of you. You can see it for yourself and correct anything I get wrong." "You can quote the content but still distort the context." I agree that context is everything, and the context of this week's events is that many thousands of British people intend to converge on central London to protest against the overthrow of one of the most cruel and murderous dictators of the 20th century - and to wave placards calling the American president who ordered the dictator's overthrow "the world's number one terrorist". It's a deeply shameful context, and though I would not quite endorse the verdict of the taxi driver with the poppy stuck in his dashboard who dropped me off at the demos ("Not many of them traitors out tonight, I see"), he at least saw something that they, with all their apparently abundant education could not: that the two leaders they most scorn are the latest in the long line of Anglo-American statesmen whose willingness to use force to defeat evil secured them their right to make bloody fools of themselves in Lincoln's Inn Fields and through the streets of London to Grosvenor Square. • David Frum is the author of The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W Bush (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). telegraph.co.uk

To: Sully- who wrote (16927)	11/20/2003 8:48:30 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793690

Medicare bill may cut both ways November 20, 2003 BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST President Bush's departure this week for a less-than-friendly reception in Britain while his most important piece of domestic legislation is in jeopardy looks like the wrong trip to the wrong place at the wrong time. The House Republican leadership trying to pass a prescription drug subsidy is not happy about his absence. But many rank-and-file GOP lawmakers will be delighted if the bill sinks while the president is away. Odds are that Medicare legislation, after nearly four months in a Senate-House conference following passage by both houses, will not sink. It is intended to inoculate Bush's re-election campaign from charges he has no compassion for senior citizens. Whether it actually achieves that end, the strategy worries many Republicans. The inoculation's side effects could depress the Republican political base in next year's election with disastrous consequences for the president. Apart from any political downside, the first fully Republican government -- presidency, Senate and House -- in 38 years is building a major addition to the welfare state. The prescription drug subsidy will be the first major new federal entitlement since Medicare in 1965. The danger of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy leading a lethal filibuster was diminished with a legislative sleight of hand that is standard practice on Capitol Hill. The bill's ''premium support'' provision -- attempting to graft free market competition onto this 1965 government program -- is anathema to Kennedy and friends. So the Senate-House conference miniaturized premium support into a six-region pilot project, an effective death sentence for privatization. That won support for the bill from two key Senate Finance Committee Democrats: Senators Max Baucus of Montana and John Breaux of Louisiana. The powerful American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) soon followed. Liberal contempt for a pilot project was sounded by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York. Proposing to limit the contaminating impact of private enterprise to Republican ''red'' states of 2000, Clinton added: ''Let them experiment on people who voted for them.'' Rep. Bill Thomas, the House Ways and Means Committee chairman and a Medicare conferee who knows more about the subject than anybody else in Congress, was infuriated. He stormed out of the session and said he was driving to the airport to fly home to California. He cooled off, however, and amended the pilot project. The agreement reached last Saturday, however, did not satisfy House conservatives such as Rep. Mike Pence, a second-term member from Indiana who is regarded highly enough by the party leadership to be named a deputy whip. When Pence heard the news at the Restoration Weekend attended by conservatives at The Breakers in Palm Beach, Fla., he informed House Majority Leader Tom DeLay he could not vote for this bill. DeLay was not happy. DeLay, arguably the single most powerful House member, had told colleagues that the prescription drug subsidy was the price for market reform of Medicare. Now, in the opinion of Pence, Rep. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and other conservatives, DeLay has delivered the subsidy but not reform. The tough Texas conservative, in trying to fix Medicare, has become one of its bigger fans -- sounding like Col. Nicholson building the bridge in ''The Bridge on the River Kwai.'' ''A great opportunity for the Republican Party has been lost,'' Pence told me. ''We should not be the party of entitlements.'' Scores of Pence's colleagues agree, but only 19 voted against the bill in June and fewer will do so this time. Many might contemplate defying George W. Bush, but breaking with Tom DeLay would be more painful. The AARP and the pharmaceutical industry have joined arms supporting this bill. Bush senior adviser Karl Rove, author of the inoculation theory, assembled private lobbyists late Monday in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a pep rally. But will the Republican inoculation turn out to be an infection? Republican seniors who now get their prescription drugs through supplementary private programs will not be happy about being driven into Medicare. The new bill's ''means testing'' turns out to be a tax increase for upper income senior Americans. Democrats who are raging over this bill sound like they are protesting being thrown into the briar patch. suntimes.com