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

To: calgal who wrote (513558)	12/20/2003 1:56:02 PM
From: calgal	Respond to of 769667

URL:http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/garner.htm

To: calgal who wrote (513558)	12/20/2003 1:56:11 PM
From: calgal	Respond to of 769667

Re-Post: The value of persistence By Tony Blankley So, what does the capture of Saddam Hussein mean for Iraq, America, Howard Dean and the price of tea in China? The specialists came out of their spider holes in Washington and elsewhere to start weaving their intricate webs of analysis. For allegedly thoughtful people, it is wondrous how little thought they needed to precede commentary. By about 9 a.m. Sunday, every network had panels of these specialists explaining this remarkable event so that even we simple-minded non area specialists could know for certain what the future would hold. There were some differences of opinion. But, by and large, those specialists who one suspects were against the war in the first place saw dark implications for America and President Bush. For them, the man who 12 hours before was our greatest danger, was, by, say noon Sunday, a meaningless figure who might not know anything much about Iraq. For these specialists, the world had already passed Saddam by — and in fact, the resistance was only likely to increase. Pro-war specialists were more hopeful. Obviously, it is too soon for empirical, scientific measurement of the event's impact. Even the early polls mean little. The polls taken of Americans during the day on Sunday couldn't help but capture a more positive public view of Mr. Bush. Whether that uptick (or, arguably, surge) will weather the following weeks and months of typically rough press coverage, who can know. Likewise, whether Saddam cooperates and gives us vital information or not is — at this early point — still unknown even to Saddam himself. After all, it is in the nature of professional interrogation to elicit useful information from unwilling subjects. We can't know the future. But we can assess the event itself, for its inherent nature. In that regard, Saddam's arrest is a singular moment of perceived justice. Except for the most devoted Saddam loyalists amongst his Iraqi fellow tribesmen and Euro-American left-wing Bushophobes, the fact that this awful mass killer will face the consequences of his actions in a court of law is a deeply heartening assurance that the world is not completely unjust. We should not underestimate the significance of this fact. In a world filled with daily evidence that wickedness and brutality usually rewards people far more than modesty and charity, the idea of justice accomplished can be very powerful. We are, after all, homo sapiens — thinking men. Ideas matter. The Soviet Union, with all its nuclear weapons, tanks and millions of soldiers, collapsed when the idea took hold of them that their system couldn't compete. Not since the Nazi leadership was shipped off to Nuremberg has so major a world villain been brought to justice. This fact makes the Iraq war a far better thing than it was. Whether or not it turns out a geo-strategic success, the Iraqi war has accomplished something very good — it has delivered a deeply deserved and yearned for justice. Howard Dean's line — that it was the wrong war at the wrong time — has lost its thundering righteousness. Anyone with a sense of justice and decency would be embarrassed to continue reciting that line after Sunday morning. On Monday, Mr. Dean continued to thunder away. But even if one agrees with his technical analysis (such as it may be), the moral quotient has been subtracted from his message — and his persona. Either he doesn't fully believe what he continues to say, or, if he does, we must think less of him for it. The other useful idea that Saddam's arrest has presented the world is that America cannot be stopped. By our sheer magnitude and organized persistence, we will eventually find all enemies and accomplish all objectives. The Romans sometimes were opposed by better generals and equally courageous warriors. The odd legion might even be massacred. But they maintained a Roman Peace for half a millennium by the perceived certainty of their ultimate success. Finding one rat in a hole in the ground in the middle of a vast land cannot help but be a vastly dispiriting fact to many of our current enemies. Thus Saddam's arrest discloses to the world that America is both an instrument for exemplary human justice and a remorseless, inevitably successful enemy if we are opposed. That's not a bad day's work for the 4th Armored Infantry Division. URL:http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20031216-090331-3717r.htm

To: calgal who wrote (513558)	12/20/2003 2:17:23 PM
From: calgal	Respond to of 769667

One camel, two humps By Gary J. Andres Assuming he continues to excel in the primary campaign, most pundits agree Howard Dean will have to adroitly slide to the middle of the political spectrum after securing the nomination if he has any shot of occupying the White House. Mr. Dean's own comments about attracting "white southerners in pickups" and Al Gore's recent endorsement are early sparks in a campaign that recognizes the need to light a fire under centrist and establishment Democrats. Yet there is another school of thought, based in part on a book written almost a half-century ago, but still helpful in understanding contemporary American politics, that predicts Mr. Dean may start left and stay left — and even do pretty well in the process. Here's why. The "move to the center" theory is the product of a major supposition that under-girds much of modern political analysis in this country. Beneath the cozy blanket of conventional wisdom lies the assumption that American voters are arrayed on a left-right ideological spectrum, with the median voter — and the bulk of the electorate — somewhere in the middle. Visually — according to this view — the electorate resembles a Bell Curve, or what statisticians call a "normal distribution." Most of the voters are in the ideological center and the numbers dwindle as you move to the left or right. With most Republicans right of center on this scale and most Democrats more to the left, this theory explains why presidential primary candidates try to win the support of their base constituencies by taking one set of positions and then moving to the middle, adopting more centrist views, after securing the nomination. In 1957, political economist Anthony Downs published "An Economic Theory of Democracy," the book that laid the foundation for understanding American politics in this way. Mr. Downs' explanation of why candidates and parties converge to the center became ingrained in the psyche of political pundits and a staple in their menu of predictable offerings. Yet while America's political ideology may have been shaped like a Bell Curve 20 or 30 years ago, most students of contemporary politics believe the electorate has fundamentally changed over the past decade. And these changes would no doubt lead Mr. Downs to a different prediction about what Mr. Dean — or any other presidential contender — will do if he secures the nomination in today's political environment. Today's political landscape is shaped more like a two-humped camel than a bell-shaped curve. Most political observers believe one of the most dominant trends in today's political world is the collapse of the center, creating a bi-modal ideological distribution with a big chunk of voters arrayed right of center and an equal number located on the left. For the past decade, according to political scientists, the number of voters in the center of the ideological spectrum has been shrinking, while the percentage of self-identified Republican and Democrat partisans has grown, creating the new bimodal American electorate. What some commentators call the "50-50" nation is an example of this two-humped phenomenon; the marked increase in partisanship in political discourse is another. Mr. Downs recognizes that changing the ideological distribution of voters will alter candidate behavior. Moving to the center in a two-humped electorate "would lose far more voters at the extremes than they could be gain[ed] in the center," he says in the book. Joe Trippi, Mr. Dean's campaign manager, is also looking at bi-modal voting tendencies, wondering how he can take full advantage of it. Yet most American political journalists seem to have missed this possibility, still marching to the echoes of Bell Curve politics. They assume the only way Mr. Dean wins is to capture the nomination by pursuing the left-of-center Democratic base and then moderate his positions, moving to the center of the spectrum. But what if the center is not the electoral mother lode it used to be? Mr. Downs would argue he could actually lose net votes by moving to the center if he alienates core supporters and finds the middle substantially drained of voters. So if Mr. Dean does win the nomination, maybe the move to the center assumed by so many will not happen — a victim of a bi-modal political epoch. Maybe he starts left and stays left, setting up stark ideological match up in a 50-50 nation. Yet there is another possibility that represents bad news for Mr. Dean. The evenly divided, bi-modal electorate of 2000 may have shifted again after the events of September 11 and military successes like the capture last weekend of Saddam Hussein. The distribution of voters may still look like a camel, but the Republican "hump" may have just gotten bigger.

To: calgal who wrote (513558)	12/20/2003 2:17:34 PM
From: calgal	Respond to of 769667

Political satire By Diana West Iraq's interim foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, had a thing or two to tell the U.N. Security Council: "One year ago the Security Council was divided between those who wanted to appease Saddam Hussein and those who wanted to hold him accountable," the Kurdish mountain-guerrilla-turned-diplomat said, his words chilling the diplomatic double-talk of the Security Council hothouse. The United Nations "failed to help rescue the Iraqi people from a murderous tyranny," he said, "and today we are unearthing thousands of victims in horrifying testament to that failure." There was more: "Settling scores with the United States should not be at the cost of helping to bring stability to the Iraqi people," Mr. Zebari warned. "The U.N. must not fail the Iraqi people again." Such frankness reveals that not only does the emperor have no clothes, but neither does the secretary-general, who appeared shocked by Mr. Zebari's indictment. "This is not the time to pin blame and point fingers when everybody is trying to figure out how creatively we can organize ourselves to help Iraqis," the politically exposed Kofi Annan said by way of response, streaking down the high road in a moral blur. Jean-Marc de la Sabliere, French ambassador to the United Nations, made no such defensive bones about it: "I don't want to comment on the past." It is a strange state of affairs when U.N. diplomats, displaying an imperious non-accountability that pretty much went out of style with the divine right of Bourbons, are to be congratulated, sort of, just for acknowledging the existence of facts that need accounting for. That is, in refusing to pin blame, point fingers or comment on the past, they have in fact admitted there is something in the past upon which to pin blame, point fingers and comment. Even this implicit admission, it turns out, is something. Or so it seems after absorbing some of the weirder, practically extraterrestrial exercises in denial of another, even more palpable fact — the capture of Saddam Hussein. "Last night Saddam Hussein was in Fallujah," the New York Times reported an Iraqi man as saying, two days after the dictator was taken into U.S. military custody. "I didn't see him. But some people swore on the Koran at the mosques they saw him. What was on television was untrue." Another man pointed out that it would have taken "five years at least" to grow a beard like the one "Saddam Hussein" wore in the rat hole, proof enough, he said, that the deposed dictator remains a free man. Such reality-deprived reactions are not atypical. The captive "is someone wearing a Saddam mask," an Iraqi man explained to the Associated Press, adding: "It is a trick to help get President Bush elected." This last remark lifts (lowers) the blind-faith denial fantasy into genuine lunatic conspiracy theory. Similar theories abound in the Middle East — the Americans and the Israelis committed the September 11 atrocities to elicit sympathy for themselves is a popular one — where a government-run daily like Saudi Arabia's Al-Riyadh can editorialize that Saddam Hussein's capture was "a show" produced to "give new momentum to the American president just when he needs it." More disturbing still is the exploding popularity of such utterly crackpot theories here at home, in the heart of the Democratic Party. Maybe it started with Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, the Al-Gore-anointed, opinion-poll-tested front-runner, who has publicly floated the notion that President Bush had prior knowledge of September 11 and did nothing. This theory, cooked up out of the most toxic chaff of the Internet rumor mill, doesn't even qualify as half-baked. Which says as much about Dr. Dean as it does about the theory. The day after American forces seized Saddam Hussein, Rep. Jim McDermott, Washington Democrat, the congressman who declared in Baghdad last year that Mr. Bush would lie to get the United States into a war on Iraq, told an interviewer that Saddam Hussein's capture was a political stunt timed to help Mr. Bush politically. American forces could have captured him "a long time ago if they wanted," he said. Now, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has joined what you might call the Oliver Stone Democrats. Fox News Channel's Morton Kondracke reports that Madame Secretary told him President Bush may already know where Osama bin Laden is, but he is waiting for that perfect political moment to bust him. Question: Does this despicable theory reflect the depths to which Democrats believe Mr. Bush is capable of sinking — Mr. Kondracke's belief — or, rather, the depths to which Democrats would themselves sink in his place? Either answer is ugly enough to put on a Saddam mask and look good.