Best of the Web Today - February 11, 2004
By JAMES TARANTO
Bye-ku for Wesley Clark
Did I just get a
Dishonorable discharge
Or did I desert?
(Earlier bye-kus: Joe Lieberman, Dick Gephardt, Carol Moseley Braun, Yasuhiro Nakasone and Bob Graham.)
This Dog Won't Hunt
"Wesley Clark Assumes Underdog Status"--headline, Associated Press, Feb. 10
Vote for Kerry. Others Might.
You can pretty much put a fork in John Edwards too. John Kerry won a pair of big victories yesterday in states that border Edwards's North Carolina. Kerry out-polled the cheery, pleasant-looking trial lawyer, 41% to 26% in Tennessee and 52% to 27% in Virginia. Exit polls in both Tennessee and Virginia suggest that in these states as elsewhere, Kerry is winning because of the perception that he "can defeat George W. Bush." Slate's William Saletan argues that this is a dubious way to choose a nominee:
Two weeks ago, Kerry beat Howard Dean by 12 percentage points in the New Hampshire primary, convincing Democrats around the country that Kerry was their most electable candidate. How did Kerry win? By racking up a 4-to-1 advantage over Dean among voters who chose their candidate because "he can defeat George W. Bush in November." Among voters who chose their candidate because "he agrees with you on the major issues," Dean and Kerry were tied.
Let me say that again: Among voters who picked the candidate they wanted based on the issues, not the candidate they thought somebody else wanted, Kerry did not win the New Hampshire primary.
Is Kerry really the most electable candidate? Saletan cites evidence that "the closer you move to the center and center-right of the electorate, where the presidential race will probably be decided, the worse Kerry does. The opposite is true of Edwards." This proves nothing, of course, but it's fair to ask: If Democrats themselves aren't excited by Kerry, what makes them think anyone else will be?
'I'm a Multilateralist'
John Kerry has been trying to make the 2004 campaign about events that occurred 30 years ago. He keeps mentioning his naval service in Vietnam and of late has been implying that President Bush is somehow less than patriotic because he served in the Texas Air National Guard rather than the regular military.
Well, as long as this campaign is about the past, it's fair to make note of Kerry's foreign-policy views back in 1970. (Did we mention he served in Vietnam?) The Harvard Crimson reports that in February of that year, Kerry, then "an obscure underdog in the Democratic Congressional primary," held forth in an interview with the paper:
"I'm an internationalist," Kerry told The Crimson in 1970. "I'd like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations."
Kerry said he wanted "to almost eliminate CIA activity. The CIA is fighting its own war in Laos and nobody seems to care."
Thanks to 40-cent-an-hour Cambodian typists hired by the Crimson, the original article is here. It also reveals that Kerry enlisted in the Navy after "he approached his draft board for permission to study for a year in Paris, [and] the draft board refused." Then the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat by the way served in Vietnam.
The Kerry campaign "declined to comment" on the senator's 1970 remarks, but we hope someone asks him about them in a debate. Judging by his inconstant attitude toward the liberation of Iraq, it seems he still sympathizes with the idea that the U.N. should dictate U.S. military policy--which in 1970 meant the Soviet Union would have a veto over our foreign policy, and today means France would.
Kerry's Off-Key Singhing
United News of India reports that John Kerry has apologized to Sikhs:
During a campaign speech in Oklahoma last month, Senator Kerry had linked the Sikhs with terrorism, sparking off a sharp reaction from the community all across the United States. . . .
''It has been brought to my attention that remarks I made on Saturday, January 31 have been misunderstood to imply that adherents of the Sikh faith condone terrorism. Nothing could be farther from the truth and I regret that the imprecision of my statement led to this misunderstanding.
''I am deeply sorry for the offense caused by this comment. I was, of course, referring to specific terrorist groups, which have invoked Sikhism and committed past acts of terror in India. I realize that, like me, the vast majority of Sikhs in the United States and worldwide abhor terrorism. I also know that stereotypes, discrimination, and abuse haunt Sikh Americans living and working in this nation. Sikh Americans have made enormous and invaluable contributions to our nation for which I am exceedingly grateful,'' Senator Kerry said.
At a time of world crisis, when America needs all the friends it can get, can we afford to have a president who goes around gratuitously insulting other peoples? Thank goodness the incumbent has more tact and diplomacy.
Urine Nation
"Now that we're on dog pee, we can have an interesting conversation about that. I do not recommend drinking urine . . . but if you drink water straight from the river, you have a greater chance of getting an infection than you do if you drink urine."--Howard Dean, speaking to a science class at Longfellow Middle School in La Crosse, Wis., quoted in the Washington Post, Feb. 11
'Substance' Abuse
"Bush Makes Series of 'Spontaneous' Visits" reads the headline on a snide Associated Press dispatch from Springfield, Mo. Reporter Scott Lindlaw has discovered--get ready--that the president is running for re-election. "This election year, Bush has taken a sudden interest in the people and places in between the airport and his speech sites," Lindlaw breathlessly recounts. "Monday marked the fourth time in 2 1/2 weeks in which Bush and the rest of his motorcade pulled over for a 'spontaneous' visit with some local citizens."
Why the scare quotes? Because in truth, the stops "are hardly spontaneous." The Secret Service knows about them in advance! Worse yet, although the press corps is present, Bush "never answers substantive questions from the reporters." Lindlaw gives one example of a question Bush didn't answer:
Nor did Bush bite Monday when a journalist asked whether he was "fishing for votes" at the Bass Pro Shop Outdoor World.
Wow, that is "substantive." For all we know, it may even have been "spontaneous"!
Will There Be a Digitally Remastered CD?
"White House Releases Bush Vietnam-Era Records"--headline, Reuters, Feb. 10
'It Should Not Have Appeared'
The corrections column of today's New York Times carries this "Editor's Note" at the bottom:
The On the Road column in Business Day yesterday discussed the recent incident in which an airline pilot made a public address announcement evangelizing for Christianity. The column's opening sentence, discussing the probable unease among some passengers, imagined a situation in which an announcement from the cockpit was a shouted "Allahu akbar!" The column said that while the phrase translates "God is great," it is also "known as a terrorist battle cry."
The actual plane incident did not involve Islam. And the depiction of a central creed of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims as an emblem of terrorism was unwarranted. It should not have appeared.
To say the least, it's quite a stretch to draw a connection between Islam, airplanes and terrorism. What could the Times writer have been thinking?
54 Years Is a Long Time to Stay Stoned
"AP: Priest Abuse Figures High Since 1950"--headline, Associated Press, Feb. 10
Conservos Are Dim, Says Talking Chair
The Duke Conservative Union took out an ad in the Chronicle, the Durham, N.C., university's student newspaper, deploring the ideological imbalance of the Duke faculty, which, like most university faculties, is overwhelmingly liberal and left-wing. The Chronicle reports this reaction from Robert Brandon, the "chair of the philosophy department":
"We try to hire the best, smartest people available," Brandon said of his philosophy hires. "If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire.
"Mill's analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia. Players in the NBA tend to be taller than average. There is a good reason for this. Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average. There is a good reason for this too."
Even for a piece of furniture, Robert Brandon isn't as smart as it thinks it is. As we write this column, we are sitting on a much smarter chair. It hasn't said a word all afternoon. Clearly, unlike that fancy Duke chair, it understands the truth of the old adage "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool that to speak and remove all doubt."
Anyway, if academic liberals and leftists are so smart, why do they so often respond to intellectual challenges by behaving like thugs and cowards? Here's an example of the latter, from an article yesterday by the Claremont Institute's Ethan Davis:
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia will speak on "Constitutional Interpretation" at Amherst College today, and his reception won't be a merry one. Sixteen Amherst professors, including most of the law department, published a letter in the student newspaper last week announcing their refusal to engage Justice Scalia in debate or dialogue. The Justice, according to the professors, engages in "vitriolic name-calling" and does not subscribe to the "liberal ideas of constructive disagreement and debate." By boycotting his lecture, they wrote, they would avoid lending their "tacit endorsement of this man's presence on campus."
Of course, as the Duke story demonstrates, left-wing faculty members don't have to engage in "vitriolic name-calling." They just get the furniture to do it.
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Kenneth Jones Speaks Out
Another follow-up to our Reagan's birthday item: It seems we have actually found an example of someone who does not love or admire the former president. The following letter to the editor from Kenneth Jones, a junior in theater and history at Ole Miss, appeared in yesterday's Daily Mississippian, a student newspaper:
In Monday's issue of The Daily Mississippian, Emily Herring expressed regret that so few people remembered to celebrate Ronald Reagan's 93rd birthday last Friday. I find this an extremely sad and uncouth statement considering that Reagan's nonexistent AIDS policy has robbed millions of people worldwide of an untold number of birthdays.
In a 20 year period (1981-2001), over 450,000 Americans lost their lives to AIDS. Worldwide, there are 42 million men, women, and children living with HIV or AIDS. That's 42 million people with little or no chance of seeing their 93rd birthday. So why should we celebrate his?
I do admit, however, that we have something to learn from Ronald Reagan. We can learn that irony and divine justice are still with us: the man who consigned millions to a horrible, debilitating disease now suffers from one of his own.
Ha ha, ain't Alzheimer's disease a riot? There are a few problems, though, with Jones's reasoning. For one, we're old enough to remember when Reagan was president, and as we recall, AIDS advocates spent an awful lot of effort warning us that America's impending epidemic of heterosexually spread AIDS--which seems now to have been a myth. Could it be that this led to a misallocation of resources away from the populations that were at greatest risk?
For another, lots of liberals and Democrats, from FDR to JFK to Paul Wellstone, have suffered from debilitating illnesses or died horrible, premature deaths. Would Jones characterize their fates too as "divine justice" at work?
What Would We Do Without Coalitions?
"Coalition: High School Diplomas Losing Meaning"--headline, CNN.com, Feb. 10
10 Reasons Beer Is Better Than Abortion
The Hartford Courant reports on abortion proponents' desperation to find young recruits:
Raging keg parties, dancing on bar tables and charity car washes--yeah, that all still happens at college.
But now those traditions compete with "safe-sex parties," bake sales that include penis- and vagina-shaped cupcakes, and game nights with the Sexperts--all sponsored by abortion-rights activists on Connecticut campuses.
The in-your-face tactics are part of an aggressive campaign by women's-rights groups to recruit a new generation of abortion-rights activists.
You have to laugh at the cluelessness of this effort. These folks are blissfully unaware of the Roe effect. It just doesn't seem to have occurred to them that the more abortions there are, the harder it is to recruit a "new generation."
What Would Teenagers Do Without Health Experts?
"Do Not Use Clingfilm as Condoms--Health Experts Tell Teenagers"--headline, Medical News Today, Feb. 9
Better a Fatted Liver Than a Dead Duck
Liberals sometimes claim to believe in personal freedom, but their concept of liberty seems limited to matters related to sex. If a man wants to marry a man or a woman wants to have an abortion, they're fine with that. The Associated Press reports that "a 35-year-old Frenchwoman became both bride and widow when she married her dead boyfriend, in an exchange of vows that required authorization from the French president," and we expect liberals would regard any objection to such an arrangement as hopelessly benighted. Live and let live, even if you're dead.
Yet outside the sexual realm, liberals are downright illiberal. They want to control every aspect of our lives: what we eat, what we smoke, what we drive, how we defend our homes and families, how much of our own money we're allowed to keep.
The latest example: John Burton, California's Senate president pro tem, is pushing a bill that would ban the production and sale of foie gras, fatted duck or goose liver:
Burton's bill seeks to block the sale of foie gras produced by the controversial "speed-feeding" method in which grain is streamed through a pipe inserted down the throat of a duck or goose for weeks at a time toward the end of their lives. The method, which rapidly enlarges the bird's liver, is standard industry practice but considered abhorrent by animal rights activists, who maintain that it causes the birds to suffer.
"You don't need to be cramming food down Donald Duck's throat to have foie gras," Burton said in an interview, calling the procedure "an inhumane way to be dealing with our fine feathered friends."
If we may paraphrase a pro-choice slogan: If you don't like foie gras, don't order it!
Besides, our feathered friends aren't necessarily angels. In 2001 Deinsea, the journal of the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, carried an article by the museum's C.W. Moeliker describing a deviant Dutch duck. The full article, in PDF format, is available here, but the abstract tells the story:
On 5 June 1995 an adult male mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) collided with the glass façade of the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam and died. An other drake mallard raped the corpse almost continuously for 75 minutes. Then the author disturbed the scene and secured the dead duck. Dissection showed that the rape-victim indeed was of the male sex. It is concluded that the mallards were engaged in an "Attempted Rape Flight" that resulted in the first described case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard.
We didn't even know ducks were predators. Anyway, it's a good thing this daffy duck was Dutch and not French, or he might have found himself in a shotgun wedding. |
