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Politics : THE VAST RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (5237)	1/5/2004 7:56:15 PM
From: calgal	Respond to of 6358

John Leo Dean's World URL:http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/leo.html newsandopinion.com \| This is a make-believe interview with Howard Dean. All the questions were made up, but all of the responses are real-life direct quotes from Dean. Q. Dr. Dean, it's been 28 months since the 9/11 attack. How would you assess the job President Bush has been doing in the war on terror? A. The president spent 30 months destroying our ability to defend ourselves against terrorism. Q. I see. What about catching Saddam Hussein? A. The capture of Saddam has not made America safer. If we are safer, how come we lost 10 more troops and raised the safety alert? Q. When Saddam's regime fell, you said, `I suppose that's a good thing.' How about something a bit more positive? A. I think it's terrific that he's gone. Q. Much better. What about your comment that we mustn't assume that Osama bin Laden is guilty of attacking us on 9/11. Isn't it a clue that bin Laden made a videotape bragging that he did it? How about saying something more forceful? A. I share the outrage of all Americans. Osama bin Laden has admitted he is responsible for killing 3,000 Americans as well as scores of men, women, and children around the world. This is exactly the kind of case that the death penalty is meant for. Q. Nice one. I understand you have some interesting theories about why President Bush is reluctant to cooperate with the Kean commission investigating 9/11. A. The most interesting theory that I've heard so far, which is nothing more than a theory, I can't think — it can't be proved — is that he was warned ahead of time by the Saudis. Now who knows what the real situation is . . . " Q. But why would you float a no-evidence rumor like that and call it interesting? A. Because it's a pretty odd theory. Q. So it's interesting because it's odd. Now about "partial-birth" abortion. Though you are a supporter of the abortion lobby, surely you must acknowledge that this is an issue that morally serious people can disagree on. A. This is an issue about nothing. It's an issue about extremism. Q. I see that in Iowa you said it might not be fair to blame President Bush for the current mad cow case, but didn't you go on to blame him anyway? A. Ordinary farmers in Iowa can't sell their calves right now because the president of the United States did not take the precautions that we could have easily predicted. Q. Didn't you say that if you don't get the nomination, your backers would boycott the election? A. Where do you think those million and a half people, half a million on the Internet, where do you think they're going to go? I don't know where they're going to go. They're certainly not going to vote for a conventional Washington politician. Q. Franklin Foer, writing in the New Republic, says you are "one of the most secular candidates to run for president in modern history." Would you like to say a few words here about religion? A. I don't go to church very often. My religion doesn't inform my public policy. Q. It must be a very private and special thing. How do you feel about conservative Christians? A. I don't want to listen to the fundamentalist preachers anymore. We've got to stop voting on guns, G-d, gays, and school prayer. Democrats should not write off communities of faith, including evangelicals. Q. Dr. Dean, a lot of people think that when you do talk about religion it tends to be some vague and gassy mention of "spirituality" that doesn't include anything about G-d or church. I wonder if you could comment on that. A. We are human, spiritual beings who deserve better consideration as human beings than we are getting from this administration. Q. I have another religion question, and it's only fair to warn you that I intend to use the words "church" and "G-d." When Martin Luther and Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church, powerful and wrenching issues were involved. When you broke with Episcopalianism in the 1980s, the big issue was your church's opposition to a bike path. Since few of us have found anything in the Bible about G-d's position on bike paths, I wonder — A. Churches are institutions that are about doing the work of G-d on Earth, and I didn't think [opposing the bike path] was very G-d-like and thought it was hypocritical of me to be a member of such an institution. Q. Bikes matter, Dr. Dean. JWR columnist Mark Steyn says you represent the passion of the bike-path left. Good luck with this crucial constituency.

To: calgal who wrote (5237)	1/5/2004 7:57:02 PM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6358

Suzanne Fields Life, literature and intellectuals URL:http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/fields.html newsandopinion.com \| Feodor Dostoyevsky was a Russian and a man of the 19th century, but he has the American and European intellectuals of the 21st century down good and proper. "Oh, tell, me, who first declared, who first proclaimed that man only does nasty things because he does not know his own real interests," he asked 140 years ago. "And that if he were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his real normal interest, man would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding his real advantage, he would see his own advantage in the good and nothing else. ?. Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure innocent child." So easily the "enlightened" men and women turn upside down the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, and they become distorted as tyranny, usurpation and panic. The "enlightened" of our present day interpret almost everything that the United States does — even when such things are clearly in their interest — as nasty, selfish and malevolent. Criticism of any public policy, or public man, is fair game in open and honest discussion, something to be not tolerated but encouraged. But many of our enlightened intellectuals — or who pretend to be intellectuals — start with the assumption that American policies, and the men and women who formulate them, are not debatable, but diabolical. Jean-Francois Revel, in his book "Anti-Americanism," documents how his colleagues among French intellectuals blame us for September 11. Terrorism is something we brought on ourselves with our economic, cultural and political liberties — free trade, capitalism, technological inventiveness. The intellectual left refuses "to renounce its demonized image of the United States, an image that it needs all the more since socialism has ended in shipwreck ... Woe upon those who would deprive them of the convenient Lucifer that is their last ideological lifeline." In England the attacks take a slightly different shape. Dr. Rowan Williams, who as the archbishop of Canterbury heads the established Anglican Church, demands that America show not righteous anger but sympathy for the men who murdered 3,000 of us on September 11. We must recognize that these mass murderers who crashed into the Twin Towers "have serious moral goals" that Americans merely fail to appreciate. Since we can't judge what's in our best and moral interests, he says, we must let the United Nations do it for us. The Rev. Billy Don Moyers may not be an authentic intellectual — he's a television producer — but he has America's number. He accuses the conservatives in charge of the government of acting on a strategy whose "stated and open aim is to strip from government all its functions except those that reward their rich and privileged benefactors." America's leaders are on a "homicidal" mission, steeped in malice. If you can't accuse a television producer of being an intellectual, you certainly can't describe a newspaper columnist as being one. Nevertheless, the Chutzpah Award for the year that just died must go to Polly Toynbee of London's daily Guardian for an enlightened rationalization and demonization that boils over like volcanic lava. Ms. Toynbee fell for the infamous Nigerian scam, and she had to find somebody to be mad at, and it couldn't be herself. She received a letter purporting to be from a 14-year old Nigerian girl who needed money to pay to complete her education. Ms. Toynbee was touched. She sent the child a check for 200 pounds ($356) and immediately felt warm and fuzzy for her act of charity. Warm and fuzzy soon evaporated. A perfect copy of her signature was soon attached to a form asking her bank to transfer a thousand pounds ($1,783) to an account in a bank in Japan. A suspicious clerk at her bank stopped the transfer just in time. The Nigerian bank scam is familiar to millions, and many of the greedy and gullible have been taken in by the familiar gross e-mails that clog computer terminals with offers of breast enhancement, penis enlargement and videos promising pornographic pleasure. Ms. Toynbee's brush with financial disaster taught her a lesson that has eluded everyone else. She learned that the villain in the fraud is not a Nigerian scammer, but . . . George W. Bush. "We reap from the third world what we sow," she told her readers. "If some Nigerians learned lessons in capitalism from global oil companies that helped corrupt and despoil that land, it is hardly surprising they absorbed some of the Texan oil values that now rule the White House." We don't need the intellectual Dostoyevsky to help us with this one. Damon Runyon nailed the likes of Polly Toynbee: "Life is tough, and it's really tough when you're stupid."