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Politics : WHO IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT IN 2004 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (10247)	2/18/2004 2:05:27 AM
From: calgal	Respond to of 10965

Suzanne Fields It's the context, stupid newsandopinion.com \| The biggest difference between Sen. John Kerry and President Bush is not what they did during the Vietnam War but what they've done during the War in Iraq. Mr. Kerry voted for going to war in Iraq based on what he knew when he knew it, just like the president. Later, when he felt the windsin the Democratic Party shifting, he voted against appropriating the money to support the American troops dispatched to liberate Iraq from the forces of hell. As a critic of the president's war policy, he joins a pantheon of posturers who thrive on second guesses. But he underestimates the president's war strategy. When NBC's Tim Russert asked the president whether he should have begun a pre-emptive war "without ironclad, absolute intelligence that [Saddam] had weapons of mass destruction," the president answered forthrightly: "There is no such thing necessarily in a dictatorial regime as ironclad, absolutely solid evidence." The president was forced to make a decision about whether to go to war under conditions of uncertainty. He learned reasoning at Harvard Business School, to understand statistics and to make decisions based on "probabilities, not absolutes," writes economist Arnold Kling at Techcentralstation.com. Americans like certainty, but in making life-and-death decisions, black-and-white absolutes often fade into shades of gray. If the president didn't have all the "facts," his understanding of the big picture led him to make removing Saddam Hussein part of his strategy of fighting terrorism. SeveralofthoseEuropean countries that were against us going to war are trying now to figure out how to benefit from having a democratic regime in Iraq. "Paradoxically, the future of Iraq, which two years ago threatened to destroy the alliance, may turn into an opportunity to rebuild the Atlantic Alliance and beyond that the international order in general," writes Henry Kissinger in The Washington Post. In a widely read article in Newsweek, "The Arrogant Empire," Fareed Zakaria criticized the United States for not building a better international consensus before invading Iraq, but he uncovered an intriguing global survey that had been largely unreported: "Large majorities of people in most countries thought that the world would be a more dangerous place if there were a rival to the American superpower." For all of the America bashing, for all their envy of American affluence, those polled say that the right side won the Cold War. Except for countries with vested interests in conducting terrorism, majorities - and large ones - in the world today no doubt want America to be the winner in the Middle East, too. Resentment, fear and distrust are trumped by the instinct for self-preservation. Who wants to live under a global Taliban (or any other kind of religious state)? In his provocative new book, "Civilization and its Enemies: The Next Stage of History," (Click HERE to purchase. Sales help fund JWR.) Lee Davis offers reasons why these majorities will be on our side. It's not because of our track record of humanity and generosity, he writes: "The civilization that the United States is now called upon to defend is not America's or even the West's; it is the civilization created by all men and women, everywhere on the planet, who have worked to make the actual community around them less addicted to violence, more open, more tolerant, more trusting." He continues: "They bash us, and yet they recognize our legitimate authority." With a wry twist of interpretation, he declares, "What is cause for astonishment is not how much they distrust and fear us, but how freely and confidently they are able to express this distrust and fear." In the broadest sense American interests in spreading democracy in the Middle East are in the interests of these other countries, too. That's why building the peace in Iraq will require a wider base and the United States will have to lead the coalition of the willing. Intellectuals have been throwing around lots of presidents' names to make comparisons with George W. Bush. Mr. Davis adds George Washington. "The world is beginning to show toward us that cynical disrespect for authority that has always been one of the hallmarks of our national character," he writes. "Just as George Washington's enemies attacked him for wanting to make himself king, so our enemies attack us for wanting to make an empire, and with equal absurdity." They know better. Mr. Bush was right when he said, "It's important for people to understand the context." It's a lesson Mr. Kerry and his friends will have to learn, too.

To: calgal who wrote (10247)	2/18/2004 2:05:38 AM
From: calgal	Respond to of 10965

Mark Steyn The Default Democrat from another world newsandopinion.com \| How do you feel about "outsourcing"? John Kerry, the Default Democrat that his party's poor voters are trying hard to pretend to be excited about, is very opposed to it. His stump speech includes fierce denunciations of American corporations that export jobs overseas. He has pledged his support for a "Call Center Consumer's Right To Know", which would require that the guy at the call center identify his location at the beginning of every call. Right now, you just get vague hints - for example, if I'm in New Hampshire and dial directory inquiries and ask for a number in Woodsville and the fellow says, "Certainly, sir. What hemisphere is that in?" Unfortunately, this "Right To Know" system wasn't in place when Kerry's campaign placed calls to potential voters in Wisconsin. So it was only a few observant Democrats with "Caller ID" displays who happened to notice that the calls were coming from an Ontario area code. Ontario is not in the United States. They don't even have call centers in Ontario, only kinky misspelled call centers. Yet all those calls explaining that "John Kerry's the candidate you can count on to stand up to selfish corporations exporting American jobs to foreign countries" were coming from Canada. So Kerry took immediate action and fired the company. A couple of days later, he found himself beset by rumors about him and a young intern, who's since left the country for Kenya. What a guy. Even his interns are outsourced to Third World jurisdictions. So all the doorstepping of the poor gal that would normally be done by big-time salaried National Enquirer correspondents with expense accounts has now been sub-contracted to minimum-wage East African stringers. What does Kerry's wife, ketchup heiress Teresa Heinz, make of this? Not the intern, but the outsourcing. Well, the missus's Pittsburgh-based family business has 22 factories in the United States and 57 on foreign soil. Even Heinz is out-sauce-ing its ketchup to foreigners. Thus, to date, the John Kerry presidential candidacy to keep jobs in America has exported its campaign calls to Ontario, its sex scandal to Kenya, and the spousal ketchup to Middlesex. What's wrong with this picture? Nothing. Except Kerry's hostility to the global economy. Part of this is just the necessary image re-positioning of a politician who suffers from the disadvantage that hardly anything about him appears to be American-made. His education, for example, was outsourced to a Swiss finishing school. But the rest of it betrays an ignorance about how the world works. For example, whenever I caught Kerry on the stump in New Hampshire, he railed against American companies who, for tax purposes, "rent a post office box in Bermuda". Good for Bermuda, I say. If you couldn't rent a post office box off-shore, you can imagine what rate of business taxes there'd be in America. At the Davos economic forum the other day, a live greeting was beamed down to the assembled grandees from a British astronaut, who read out some one-world guff about how, viewed from space, the Earth is not divided by borders. I'm sure that's true. It's also true that in space no one can hear you scream, which is just as well, because that's what I'd be doing in a world without borders. If we ever do achieve that blessed utopia, you can pretty much guess which end of the scale the one-world government will set the tax rates at. There'll be no post office boxes in Bermuda and John Kerry, Kofi Annan and Romano Prodi can regulate the economy to their hearts' content. Right now, they can't. Borders equal choice, and competition. The reason American jobs and companies jump the frontier is because, while the US is one of the more benign countries in the developed world when it comes to personal taxes, the conduct of business there gets more and more onerous, thanks to such factors as the excessive Federal regulation favored by Kerry and his ilk and the exposure to massive lawsuits favored by his principal rival for the Democratic nomination, the pretty-boy trial lawyer John Edwards. Whenever Kerry goes on about exporting jobs, you're sort of left with the impression that they're all going to some Third World backwater paying its nine-year-old workers six bucks a week. In fact, the senator's Canadian campaign calls are far more typical. Not because trying to explain Kerry's "nuanced" position on Iraq is the kind of highly-skilled job way beyond your average Hutu kindergartner - it seems, in any case, the Ontario calls were automated - but because of simple economic reality. I wouldn't outsource my campaign calls to Liberia because the phone line out of the country only works for two hours a week and it would be kind of embarrassing to have your Monrovia campaign caller macheted to death by a drug-fuelled gang before she's finished explaining your health-care plan to the guy in Wisconsin. When American companies create jobs abroad, they look for good infrastructure, an educated work force, and less exposure to John Kerry-type micro-regulation - so they go to Ontario, Ireland, England, but not the Sudan. More importantly, anything John Kerry is likely to do about this problem will make it worse. Because of the protectionist regime set up for the benefit of American sugar producers, Lifesaver candy is now made in Quebec, where sugar is cheaper. The government's artificial insourcing of sugar jobs in Florida does far more damage to the broader economy. Whatever Kerry thinks, companies are sovereign entities: they can't be geographically contained. The good news is that, in the future, more and more of the world's people will be "sovereign individuals", in William Rees-Mogg's phrase. I doubt very much that tomorrow's Franco-German-British summit will discuss the demographic death-spiral Europe's in, but that's really the only economic factor that will matter in 20 years' time: the shortage of people - on the Continent, in Japan, and elsewhere. If you're, say, an educated Singaporean, you can write your own ticket to anywhere on Earth: you'll be able to outsource yourself. John Kerry's lazy reflex protectionism is irrelevant to this future.

To: calgal who wrote (10247)	2/18/2004 2:05:48 AM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10965

John Leo A kick where it's needed newsandopinion.com \| When is the word "diversity" not tolerated on campus? When someone tries to put the word "intellectual" in front of it. The debate over David Horowitz's campaign for intellectual diversity has been raging in Colorado for five months. By spring or fall, the debate may come to an intellectually not-very-diverse university near you. Horowitz, the veteran conservative activist, is promoting an "Academic Bill of Rights" to protect students and professors from the aggressive leftist monoculture that dominates campuses today. Though clearly taking aim at the left, Horowitz scrupulously framed the bill in language that would protect everyone on campus, left and right. The text says, "All faculty shall be hired, fired, promoted and granted tenure on the basis of their competence and appropriate knowledge in the field of their expertise," never on the basis of political or religious beliefs. Stanley Fish, one the best-known professors on the left, says that it's hard to see how anyone who believes in the distinctiveness of academic work "could find anything to disagree with here." The fairness of the language hasn't done much to mollify the left, partly because Horowitz unleashed a barrage of statistics to show how lopsided liberal universities are in hiring professors, picking outside speakers, and granting honorary degrees. He says there are 10 Democratic professors for every Republican one, with the disparity rising sharply at many elite universities. Students themselves now look up the political affiliations of professors and complain about indoctrination that passes for teaching. (Check out www.no indoctrination.org for detailed student reports of unbelievable professorial drivel.) Members of the Republican Club at Wells College, an all-female institution in upstate New York, reported that 92 percent of their professors in the humanities and social sciences were registered either as Democrats or with splinter parties of the left. (A month later, the women's application to be recognized as a campus club was rejected.) Last week conservative students at Duke announced that the university's eight humanities departments contain 142 registered Democrats and only eight registered Republicans. The Duke Conservative Union also charged that a number of humanities departments "have become increasingly politicized over the past few decades" and that this politicization has had "a significant impact on the daily workings of faculty members." Student challenges such as this are beginning to raise temperatures on campus. So are the spread of satirical bake sales opposing affirmative action and resistance to speech codes, speech zones, and the defunding of conservative political and religious groups. Republicans at the University of Colorado-Boulder now have a Web site for reports of bias based on political beliefs. In the current climate, sites like this are likely to spread. Running afoul. The one worrisome aspect of Horowitz's bill of rights is that he took it to the Colorado legislature as a bill to be passed. The bill's version of Horowitz's text says the academic freedom of students "will not be infringed by instructors who create a hostile environment" toward their ideas. But "hostile environment" is a dubious and elastic legal construct. It can easily be stretched into restriction of stray remarks. Will professors run afoul of the state for offhand comments that offend the most sensitive person in class? Probably not, but why put the provision into law? Horowitz is right to say that "universities should not be indoctrination centers for the political left." Once the student radicals of the 1960s became professors and took control of hiring committees, dissenters from the rising campus monoculture became rare. Words like "knowledge" and "excellence" faded, replaced by "transformation" and "social change" (i.e., politicization). But it's doubtful that legislation is the way to go. It would be far better for Colorado to pass a "sense of the legislature" resolution backing the academic bill of rights in principle but making no attempt to legislate reform. Apologists for wayward campuses say these matters are best left to university administrators. Yes, but the administrators are the ones who created the current ideological mess. Pressure must be brought to bear to open up the humanities curriculums from their narrow postmodern and race-and-gender obsessions. But that pressure should come from protests and persuasion, not the involvement of politicians. Student governments at several universities have adopted a "Student Bill of Rights" modeled on Horowitz's. Think of his bill as a model for more protests and a badly needed kick in the shins for university administrators.