No time for Kerry's Europhile delusions
October 24, 2004
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
Maybe I'm getting old. I've been covering politics for 53 years, and that's
just since John Kerry's convention speech. I'm sick of this election, even
before the Democratic Party's chad-diviners have managed to extend it to
mid-December. These are serious times and the senator is not a serious man.
And so we have a campaign that has a sharper position on Mary Cheney's
lesbianism and the deficiencies of Laura Bush's curriculum vitae than on the
central question of the age.
There are legitimate differences of opinion about the war, but they don't
include Kerry's silly debater's points. On the one hand, the Tora borer
drones that Bush "outsourced" the search for Osama bin Laden to the Afghans,
though at the time he supported it ("It is the best way to protect our
troops," he said in December 2001. "I think we have been doing this pretty
effectively."). But, on the other, he claims he's going to outsource Iraq to
the French and the Germans, though neither of them wants anything to do with
it.
As for this Bush-failed-to-get-bin-Laden business, 2-1/2 years ago I
declared that Osama was dead and he's never written to complain. There's no
more evidence for his present existence than there is for the Loch Ness
monster, which at least does us the courtesy of showing up as a indistinct
gray blur on a photograph every now and again. Osama is lying low because
he's in no condition to get up.
But, even if he weren't, that's a frivolous reductive way of looking at this
war. He's not a general or head of state; he can't sign an instrument of
surrender, and make all the unpleasantness go away. The enemy is an ideology
that appeals to various loose groupings from the Balkans to Indonesia, as
well as to entrepreneurial free-lancers like the shooter who killed two
people at LAX on July 4, 2002. If Kerry's oft-repeated "outsourcing Osama"
crack is genuinely felt, it shows he doesn't get this war. And, if it's just
cheapo point scoring, it's pathetic.
Almost everything falls into that category. Iraq's messy. So? What isn't?
America has no Colonial Office, no political administrators with decades of
experience in far-flung climes; its occupation of Iraq was learnt on the
fly, because there was no other way. But the ludicrous defeatism over what's
at worst a partial success is unbecoming to a great nation. If the present
Democratic-media complex had been around earlier, America would never have
mustered the will to win World War II or, come to that, the Revolutionary
War. There would be no America. You'd be part of a Greater Canada, with
Queen Elizabeth on your coins and government health care.
Speaking of which, if there's four words I never want to hear again, it's
"prescription drugs from Canada." I'm Canadian, so I know a thing or two
about prescription drugs from Canada. Specifically speaking, I know they're
American; the only thing Canadian about them is the label in French and
English. How can politicians from both parties think that Americans can get
cheaper drugs simply by outsourcing (as John Kerry would say) their
distribution through a Canadian mailing address? U.S. pharmaceutical
companies put up with Ottawa's price controls because it's a peripheral
market. But, if you attempt to extend the price controls from the peripheral
market of 30 million people to the primary market of 300 million people, all
that's going to happen is that after approximately a week and a half there
aren't going to be any drugs in Canada, cheap or otherwise -- just as the
Clinton administration's intervention into the flu-shot market resulted in
American companies getting out of the vaccine business entirely.
The war against the Islamists and the flu-shot business are really opposite
sides of the same coin. I want Bush to win on Election Day because he's
committed to this war and, as the novelist and Internet maestro Roger L.
Simon says, "the more committed we are to it, the shorter it will be.'' The
longer it gets, the harder it will be, because it's a race against time,
against lengthening demographic, economic and geopolitical odds. By
"demographic," I mean the Muslim world's high birth rate, which by
mid-century will give tiny Yemen a higher population than vast empty Russia.
By "economic," I mean the perfect storm the Europeans will face within this
decade, because their lavish welfare states are unsustainable on their
shriveled post-Christian birth rates. By "geopolitical," I mean that, if you
think the United Nations and other international organizations are
antipathetic to America now, wait a few years and see what kind of support
you get from a semi-Islamified Europe.
So this is no time to vote for Europhile delusions. The Continental health
and welfare systems John Kerry so admires are, in fact, part of the reason
those societies are dying. As for Canada, yes, under socialized health care,
prescription drugs are cheaper, medical treatment's cheaper, life is
cheaper. After much stonewalling, the Province of Quebec's Health Department
announced this week that in the last year some 600 Quebecers had died from
C. difficile, a bacterium acquired in hospital. In other words, if, say,
Bill Clinton had gone for his heart bypass to the Royal Victoria Hospital in
Montreal, he would have had the surgery, woken up the next day swimming in
diarrhea and then died. It's a bacterium caused by inattention to hygiene --
by unionized, unsackable cleaners who don't clean properly; by harassed
overstretched hospital staff who don't bother washing their hands as often
as they should. So 600 people have been killed by the filthy squalor of
disease-ridden government hospitals. That's the official number.
Unofficially, if you're over 65, the hospitals will save face and attribute
your death at their hands to "old age" or some such and then "lose" the
relevant medical records. Quebec's health system is a lot less healthy than,
for example, Iraq's.
One thousand Americans are killed in 18 months in Iraq, and it's a quagmire.
One thousand Quebecers are killed by insufficient hand-washing in their
filthy, decrepit health care system, and kindly progressive Americans can't
wait to bring it south of the border. If one has to die for a cause,
bringing liberty to the Middle East is a nobler venture and a better bet
than government health care. |
