Best of the Web Today - January 31, 2005
By JAMES TARANTO
Happy Days Are Here Again
Yesterday was a great day to be an American, and an even better day to be an Iraqi. Notwithstanding the best efforts of Osama bin Laden, Barbara Boxer, Jacques Chirac, Ted Kennedy, Saddam Hussein and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, millions of Iraqis cast their first free ballots. The scenes of joyous Iraqis embracing freedom were as moving as watching Germans dance on the Berlin Wall 15 years ago--and all the more impressive given that Iraqi voters faced real physical danger from terrorists seeking a return to tyranny. A New York Times anecdote from Baghdad tells the story:
Batool Al Musawi hesitated for a single moment.
The explosions had already begun as she rose from her bed early on Sunday. One after the other, the mortar shells were falling and bursting around the city, rattling the windows and shaking the walls.
For an instant, Ms. Musawi, a 22-year-old physical therapist, thought it might be too dangerous to go to the polls.
"And then, hearing those explosions, it occurred to me--the insurgents are weak, they are afraid of democracy, they are losing," Ms. Musawi said, standing in the Marjayoon Primary School, her polling place. "So I got my husband, and I got my parents and we all came out and voted together."
The Times quotes 80-year-old Rashid Majid: "We have freedom now, we have human rights, we have democracy. We will invite the insurgents to take part in our system. If they do, we will welcome them. If they don't, we will kill them."
As an antifraud measure, voters dipped their forefingers in indelible purple ink; the ink-stained finger became the most powerful symbol of the day. (Pictures here and here.) At IraqtheModel.com, one of the Fadhil brothers offers a beautiful description:
I walked forward to my station, cast my vote and then headed to the box, where I wanted to stand as long as I could, then I moved to mark my finger with ink, I dipped it deep as if I was poking the eyes of all the world's tyrants.
Brother Ali, who now has his own blog, pays tribute to those who made it all possible:
Thanks again for your care and may God bless you all and give you a hundred times what you have gave Iraq. I know it seems impossible when it comes to those who lost their beloved ones but I hope they know that their sacrifices were not in vain and that they gave humanity the most precious thing a man has, his life.
WSJ.com has a roundup of Iraqi bloggers' reactions. Reporting from Najaf, the Washington Post tells a story that poignantly contrasts tyranny and freedom:
"My father helped bring this election today," said Farezdak Abdel Nibi, 34, at a whitewashed concrete school building serving as a polling station.
When Nibi was 20, he and his father were eating breakfast when Iraqi security officials burst in and took them away, he said. Their arrest came during a large roundup of Shiites by Hussein's security apparatus. Nibi and his father, speechless in fear, were taken to a police station. Nibi said he was held for 15 days. The last time his father was seen alive was three years later. After that, there was no news about what happened to him, Nibi said.
"We kept our hope that he had survived. But when we saw all the mass graves Saddam had made, I knew that we had lost him," Nibi said.
"This election is the fruit of every drop of blood that was shed in 1991," Nibi said, referring to a Shiite uprising following the Persian Gulf War that was brutally suppressed by Hussein's forces. "I thank my father. He had three sons who married. None of us had a wedding party, out of respect for him. Today, we can celebrate. Today, we will have a wedding party."
The world was watching. Reader Jeff Raleigh writes from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan:
For those of us who have been privileged to see the exercise of freedom in the face of threats, and also view the cost of freedom borne by the men and women of our Armed Forces here in Afghanistan, or in the U.S. South in the '60s, today came as no surprise. . . .
I can almost guarantee you that none of the men and women serving in Iraq or Afghanistan were surprised by the courage of the Iraqi people today. They are the ones who each day put their lives on the line for freedom.
The Iraqi election was an important act of public diplomacy for the U.S., too, as the New York Times reports from Amman, Jordan:
Sometime after the first insurgent attack in Iraq on Sunday morning, news directors at Arab satellite channels and newspaper editors found themselves facing an altogether new decision. Should they report on the violence, or continue to cover the elections themselves?
After nearly two years of providing up-to-the-minute images of explosions and mayhem, and despite months of predictions of a blood bath on election day, some news directors said they found the decision surprisingly easy to make. The violence simply was not the story on Sunday morning; the voting was.
It seems like only days ago that people were scoffing at President Bush's Second Inaugural Address for its naive idealism--and come to think of it, it was only days ago. But Bush may get his due in Baghdad. The New York Post quotes the Iraqi capital's new mayor--terrorists assassinated his predecessor early this month: "We will build a statue for Bush. He is the symbol of freedom."
The Bullet America Dodged
One question that's been bouncing around the blogosphere is why the media gave October's election in Afghanistan so much less prominent coverage than they gave the Iraqi election. One reason, at least here in the U.S., is that the Afghan election was competing for attention with our own election campaign. A look at our Monday, Oct. 11, column (the first one after the Afghan election Oct. 9), shows that at the time the main topic of conversation was the second presidential debate, which occurred the previous Friday. Does anyone remember anything about that debate?
Yet as ephemeral as much of the campaign was, the stakes could hardly have been higher. Would Iraq even have had elections had John Kerry* defeated President Bush? We are not at all confident. Kerry showed up yesterday on "Meet the Press" with Tim Russert, in an act of political timing as bad Al Gore's "global warming" speech in the middle of winter. Kerry agreed with Ted Kennedy's anti-American analysis of the situation in Iraq: "I agree with Sen. Kennedy that we have become the target and part of the problem today, if not the problem."
Kerry also seemed to flip-flop on the Iraqi elections:
Kerry: It is significant that there is a vote in Iraq. But no one in the United States or in the world--and I'm confident of what the world response will be. No one in the United States should try to overhype this election. . . .
Russert: Do you believe this election will be seen by the world community as legitimate?
Kerry: A kind of legitimacy--I mean, it's hard to say that something is legitimate when a whole portion of the country can't vote and doesn't vote. I think this election was important. I was for the election taking place.
Is Kerry saying that he was for the election before he was against it, or that he was against it before he was for it? And are we to understand that he's "confident" that the world will see the election as less than fully legitimate? Apparently his confidence was misplaced; the BBC reports that "world leaders have praised the conduct of Iraq's first multi-party elections for more than 50 years."
One supposes Kerry isn't wild about elections in general, given his own recent track record in them. Though at times during the Russert interview, Kerry seemed to think he was still a candidate for president:
Kerry: You may recall that back in--well, there's no reason you would--but back in Fulton, Missouri, during the campaign, I laid out four steps, and I said at the time, "This may be the president's last chance to get it right." . . .
And I will say unequivocally today that what the administration does in these next few days will decide the outcome of Iraq, and this is--not maybe--this is the last chance for the president to get it right.
As National Review's Jim Geraghty points out, John Kerry is "just the junior senator from Massachusetts." It takes a degree of effrontery for him to lecture the president of the United States in this manner. Doesn't he know he lost the election? Well, yes, but he insists he covered the spread:
Kerry: We did some unbelievable things. We raised more money than any Democratic campaign in history. We involved more volunteers than any campaign in history. I won more votes than any candidate on the Democratic side has ever won in history. I lost, Tim, to an incumbent president by a closer margin than an incumbent president has ever won re-election before in the history of the country, and if you add up the popular vote in the battleground states, I won the popular vote in the battleground states by two percentage points. We just didn't distribute it correctly in Ohio. . . .
I think it's remarkable we came as close as we did as a campaign. Many Republicans say we beat their models by four or five points as to what they thought we could achieve.
I am proud of the campaign, Tim. And I think if you look at what we did in states, I mean, millions of new voters came into this process. I won the youth vote. I won the independent vote. I won the moderate vote. If you take half the people at an Ohio State football game on Saturday afternoon and they were to have voted the other way, you and I would be having a discussion today about my State of the Union speech.
Leave it to Ananova.com to come up with the perfect headline for all this: "Man Peed Way Out of Avalanche."
* The haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way served in Vietnam.
Angry Left to Iraqis: Drop Dead
"The Iraq vote is making me sick this morning," reads the subject line on a DemocraticUnderground posting from "ShinerTX," which encapsulates the Angry Left's response to freedom's triumph in Iraq:
All the media keeps talking about is how happy the Iraqis are, how high turnout was, and how "freedom" has spread to Iraq. I had to turn off CNN because they kept focusing on the so-called "voters" and barely mentioned the resistance movements at all. Where are the freedom fighters today? Are their voices silenced because some American puppets cast a few ballots?
I can't believe the Iraqis are buying into this "democracy" bullsh--. They have to know that the Americans don't want them to have power, because they know that Bush is in this for the oil, and now that he finally has it he's not going to let it go. This election is a charade. The fact is that the Iraqis have suffered during the past two years more than any people on earth at the hands of the American gestapo. Maybe they're afraid and felt they had to vote. That's the only way I can explain it to myself.
OR--I just thought of this--maybe they're smiling because they're using the Americans [sic] own game to defeat them. They're voting in candidates who they know will widen the resistance, take the fight to the streets, and finally drive the occupying forces out of their country. Perhaps they're smiling because--right under the American's [sic] noses--they're planting the seeds of a bigger and more effective resistance movement. Wouldn't that be fitting? Use *'s own tools against them?
We can only pray that this is the case. Becuase [sic] if it's not--and if the Iraq vote is seen as a success that spread "freedom"--the world is screwed. Bush's inaugural speech left little doubt that he has other countries on his list to spread "freedom" to. They will be his next targets, and the world will burn because of it.
Let's hope the resistance got voted in, or if not, they only increase the fight and take down those who betrayed their country today by voting in this fraud election.
DemocraticUnderground is home to the battiest moonbats, but some of this sentiment can be found in more responsible venues too. "It's time to prepare for three weeks of gloating from the hawks before they realize that nothing has really changed and they return to previous hawk practice of not mentioning Iraq," moans blogger Matthew Yglesias. Self-styled Mideast expert Juan Cole whines, "I'm just appalled by the cheerleading tone of US news coverage of the so-called elections in Iraq on Sunday."
In the TV coverage of the election, similarly dissonant notes were sounded by Dukakis campaign mastermind Susan Estrich (as blogger Ed Morrissey notes) and by left-wing blogress Jeralyn Merritt (who appeared on MSNBC with Jeff Jarvis). Both of them were dismissive of democracy and instead complained that Saddam Hussein didn't have weapons of mass destruction. That's right--complained. Would they have been happy if Saddam had gassed thousands of American soldiers to death?
Nah, probably not. In fairness, they most likely just haven't thought through how twisted their argument is. Indeed, calling it an argument gives it too much credit. There once was an argument about weapons of mass destruction, but that's yesterday's news. The reactionary left, like all reactionaries, is unable to get beyond its idées fixes and grapple with ever-changing reality. As Yglesias puts it, "nothing has really changed." The status quo will rise again!
Jarvis, a liberal who is not a reactionary, criticizes Angry Left bloggers who've responded to the election with silence or sneers:
Whether it's Kerry or any of these bloggers, it would be the grownup, mature, generous, humanistic, caring--yes, dare I say, liberal--thing to do to be glad that people who lived under tyranny are now giving birth to democracy.
Democracy isn't a right-or-left thing, folks. It's a right-and-left thing, remember?
Indeed. We'll admit that, like John Podhoretz, we feel vindicated by the success of Iraq's elections. We've been arguing for Iraq's liberation for three years now (and our colleagues at The Wall Street Journal for far longer), and it's nice to be proved right. But our more important emotions are happiness for the Iraqis and pride in our country for accomplishing this.
It's understandable that pessimists on the left would regret being proved wrong, and even that they would resent the credit that President Bush, a politician they loathe, rightly gets for it. But Jarvis is right: It takes a childish, malicious spirit to let these feelings swamp patriotism and sympathy for the liberated Iraqis.
Why does the antidemocratic left seem increasingly to dominate the Democratic Party--as exemplified by the recent antics of Ted Kennedy, John Kerry and Barbara Boxer? Mickey Kaus offers an intriguing theory:
Money. It used to be that at this stage, opposition party leaders would be making conciliatory noises in an attempt to please voters, and conservative or centrist noises in an attempt to please business lobbyists and PACs. But maybe the amount of money that can be raised over the Internet from Democratic true believers is now more important than PAC money. And if you want to draw a Dean-like share of this Web loot, you have to be ruthless in bashing Bush.
Of course, as Kerry found out, no matter how much cash you raise, you won't win an election unless you can persuade people to vote for you. The election this weekend was, among other things, a great achievement for America. If Democrats wish to renounce it, that's their prerogative, but it's hard to see why any American should vote for a party that doesn't want them to feel good about America.
A Common Mistake Among Those of a Certain Political Stripe
"An article on Jan. 16 about the way presidents fare in their second terms misstated the reason Bill Clinton was impeached. He was accused of perjury and obstruction of justice, not of having an affair with an intern."--correction, New York Times, Jan. 30
Rule 18
From London's Daily Telegraph comes a word of warning to those who've been caught up in the hysteria over "torture" of terrorists:
The men's [British citizens recently released] claim that they were tortured at Guantanamo should also be set in the context of the al-Qa'eda training manual discovered during a raid in Manchester a couple of years ago. Lesson 18 of that manual, whose authenticity has not been questioned, emphatically states, under the heading "Prison and Detention Centres," that, when arrested, members of al-Qa'eda "must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by state security investigators. [They must] complain to the court of mistreatment while in prison." That is not, of course, proof that the Britons were not tortured in Guantanamo. But it ought to encourage some doubts about uncritically accepting that they were--which seems to be the attitude adopted by most of the media.
This Just In--I
"Another First for Condoleezza Rice: Is First Black Female Secretary of State"--headline, Hartford Courant, Jan. 29
This Just In--II
"Recruiters Looking for Future Soldiers"--headline, Shreveport (La.) Times, Jan. 30
Our Friends the Saudis
A new report (link in PDF) from Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom finds that Saudi Arabia's government has been distributing hate literature in American mosques, a Freedom House press release says:
The 89-page report, "Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Fill American Mosques," is based on a year-long study of over two hundred original documents, all disseminated, published or otherwise generated by the government of Saudi Arabia and collected from more than a dozen mosques in the United States. . . .
The report concludes that the Saudi government propaganda examined reflects a "totalitarian ideology of hatred that can incite to violence," and the fact that it is "being mainstreamed within our borders through the efforts of a foreign government, namely Saudi Arabia, demands our urgent attention." The report finds: "Not only does the government of Saudi Arabia not have a right--under the First Amendment or any other legal document--to spread hate ideology within U.S. borders, it is committing a human rights violation by doing so."
Hey Crown Prince Abdullah, that's a nice regime you've got there. Be a shame if anything were to happen to it . . .
Zero-Tolerance Watch
"A 6-year-old boy was in juvenile court Thursday, one day after he was charged with hitting his teacher and a police officer with books," Florida Today reports:
The 60-pound first-grader was booked on felony battery charges after his arrest at Endeavour Elementary School.
The Rockledge boy later told officers he was upset because "someone's grandmother died," said Barbara Matthews, a spokeswoman for the Cocoa Police Department.
"He's a tiny, little kid, so when the two officers first went, they tried to give him benefit of the doubt," Matthews said. "But he was also out of control. Once he struck the teacher, it became a battery."
Handcuffing a 6-year-old and charging him with a felony seems like overkill, but then we read this follow-up story and wondered if there wasn't reason to throw the book at him: "The first-grader arrested and handcuffed on Wednesday had two previous arrests for violent outbursts against teachers at Endeavour Elementary Magnet School in Cocoa." Somebody's out of control here, but we can't tell if it's the 6-year-old or the officials at Endeavour and the Cocoa PD.
This Just In--III
"Hair Loss Can Cause Anxiety in Men"--headline, PakTribune.com, Jan. 31
Global Warming: As Real as Pro Wrestling
" 'Dangerous Global Warming' Possible by 2026--WWF"--headline, Reuters, Jan. 29
Not Satisfied With December
"Rudolph Makes Its Own Bid for August"--headline, Electronic News, Jan. 28
'Can't We Just Be Friends?'
"Friendship Man Arrested After Woman Chased, Shot"--headline, Portland (Maine) Press Herald, Jan. 29
Letters From Deanland
The Burlington (Vt.) Free Press has some hilarious letters on the Vermont Teddy Bear Co. kerfuffle, which we noted Jan. 14. Our favorite is the first letter on the subject (10th overall), from Maria M. Moore of South Burlington:
The continuation of selling the Vermont Teddy Bear "Crazy For You" shouts stigma against mental illness and capitalism at its finest. If [CEO] Elisabeth Robert finds being in a straitjacket cute and funny, I would love to see her tackled by three large men, forced into one, then drugged and tell us how much fun that was.
My concern is no longer the Vermont Teddy Bear, because she obviously subscribes to the school of thought that "bad media is good media," but that we have entrusted her to participate on the hospital board. I am publicly asking for her to step down from being on the board. I no longer feel comfortable sending people, myself included, to the psychiatric ward at Fletcher Allen.
If she finds the teddy bear acceptable what other outlandish things would she permit in the hospital's name? The bear has even offended the hospital, and yet she allows it to stay on the market. Moreover, the hospital cannot afford more negative public relations.
On another topic, the 16th letter, from Carol Ann Wooster of Burlington, takes note of the Roe effect:
I wish to comment on the photograph of the child holding the Stop Abortion Now placard (Free Press, Jan. 23). This child is reportedly only 3 years old.
I find it to be exploitative to use somebody who can't possibly comprehend the significance of this issue to tout one's own agenda. I firmly believe in freedom of speech but this need to perpetuate another's moral obligations by blatantly spawning young activists is gratuitous.
We're uncomfortable with the use of children in protests too, but it's certainly more effective than the other side's blatant refusal to spawn young activists.
Mama's Got a Squeeze Box
Reuters has an interesting report from Toronto:
A stripper mauled by a tiger in an Ontario safari park has won $650,000 in damages because her scars meant she could no longer work, Canadian media said on Friday. . . .
In a ruling delivered on Thursday and reported in a number of Canadian newspapers, Justice Jean MacFarland said she could only imagine the "stark terror experienced by these young people during this horrendous event."
She awarded Cowles some $650,000 in damages, almost half of it to compensate for income she would have made as a stripper.
Her musician boyfriend, David Balac, won C$1.7 million, because his injuries left him unable to work as an accordion player.
That $650,000 figure apparently is in U.S. dollars; the Toronto Globe and Mail gives the amount of Cowles's award at C$813,000. Still, Canada has some surprising priorities if an accordion player is worth twice as much as a stripper.
Meanwhile, London's Daily Telegraph reports that "a 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing 'sexual services' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year." Prostitution is legal in Germany. The waitress "received a letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her 'profile' and that she should ring them":
Only on doing so did the woman, who has not been identified for legal reasons, realise that she was calling a brothel.
Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job--including in the sex industry--or lose her unemployment benefit.
We're not sure we believe this; it has something of the sound of an urban legend. But if it's true, maybe the waitress should take up the accordion.
We Don't Know Her From Adam
Our item Friday on a Ralph Nader rally prompted this letter from reader Jonathan Gordon:
James, I love your BOTW, and thank you for it. But you can't go around saying things like "someone called Patti Smith (we think she's a songstress)."
Look, man, I am not a Patti Smith fan--I really do not care for her or her politics--but she is sort of semi-major-important. You just make yourself sound like a culturally clueless Republican when you talk so disrespectfully about an artist of her stature, like you don't even know who she is. Fer crissakes, where have you been all your life?
And "songstress." Songstress? Is that irony, or what? How old are you, James? I'll bet you're 20 years younger than me, and I assure you I would never call anybody a "songstress." Where did you get that, from "The Ed Sullivan Show" or the Copa Cabana?
James, please, we do not need more stereotypes of conservatives--least of all when they appear to be true. One Sean Hannity is enough.
Well, Jonathan, if you're trying to make us feel foolish, you've succeeded. Obviously we should know who this Patti Smith is. (At first we thought maybe she was Reagan's daughter, who for some reason uses her grandfather's surname, but then we realized that's Patti Davis.) All we know now is that she's some sort of artist and not a songstress. So what is she? A sculptress? A movie directrix? Help us out here! |
