Highway 99
Sunday, May 22, 2005
You know what would be really great? If George Bush just happened to invite Tony Blair and John Howard over to the White House just in time for the three of them to watch the German election returns come in.
Then the only thing left to do is issue Tony and John a standing invitation to come back whenever the French elections are called.GERMANY SET FOR ELECTION
Germany looks set to hold an earlier than expected national election within a few months.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder shocked the country by calling for the vote in the aftermath of a crushing regional poll defeat.
Mr Schroeder announced his dramatic gamble after voters in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia kicked his Social Democrats (SPD) out of government after 39 years.
"We've had a political earthquake here," said Die Welt reporter Johann Michael Moeller. "The SPD is on the ropes."
The call for a new election carries enormous risks for Mr Schroeder, who has seen his personal ratings plunge as unemployment has surged to post-war highs.
Voters appeared to be punishing him for the fact his painful welfare cutbacks have produced little or no visible gain.
But he will hope to convince them the plans of the conservatives, who have largely supported his reforms, will be even more painful.
"With the bitter election result for my party in North Rhine-Westphalia, political support for our reforms to continue has been called into question," he said.
"I see it as my responsibility and duty as German chancellor to persuade the president ... to call new elections for the Bundestag as quickly as possible, realistically by autumn 2005."
I'm crying. No really, I'm crying.
BBC STAFF STAGE WALKOUT
Thousands of BBC journalists and technicians are staging a 24-hour walkout in the biggest strike to hit the corporation in more than a decade.
The walkout started at midnight and threatens news programmes like Radio 4's Today and BBC2's Newsnight.
Radio Five Live will also be badly hit and regional news bulletins are expected to be cut from 30 minutes to just a few minutes.
The dispute is over the BBC's plans to shed 4,000 jobs.
The National Union of Journalists (NUJ), BECTU and Amicus said they expected 11,000 workers to join the walkout.
"It will be a massive display of anger across the BBC at the scale of the impact of these cuts," NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear said.
"Workers will give a clear demand that managers should start listening to their concerns.
"We have made it clear we will not accept cuts which decimate programmes, devalue the BBC, short-change licence fee payers, increase pressures on staff and worsen working conditions."
The BBC has warned the unions that industrial action would put the corporation's relationship with the public at risk.
"Industrial action will not remove the need for further consultation or the need for the BBC to implement changes which will enable us to put more money into improved programmes and services," it said in a statement.
Monday, May 16, 2005
South Park and South Park Conservatives. I can't shake the feeling that one of these days South Park is going to do an episode making fun of the South Park Conservative phenomenon. The people behind the show will target anyone and anything, and it would be unlike them to pass up such a ripe opportunity.
Sunday, May 15, 2005
Good news from Biased BBC -- the watchdog website, that is; not the actual, biased BBC. Robin Aitken, a former BBC reporter, is writing a book on bias at BBC. (See posts here and here.) Sounds like it might be like Bernard Goldberg's book Bias, on life at CBS News.
What will probably keep it from having as great an impact as Goldberg's book is that a higher percentage of the British people than the American still believe their media are basically honest and unbiased. Goldberg's book came along after skepticism of the liberal media had been growing among Americans for years. It only served as confirmation of what many people had privately believed. In Britain, when it comes to which version of the Iraq war to trust, more Brits say they believe the BBC over Tony Blair. Aitken's book will be the opening salvo in a struggle to change Britons' minds, an effort that will undoubtedly take quite a few years. Brainwashing can be more thorough and efficient when it's subsidized with taxpayer money.
Scott Campbell, who posts at Biased BBC, put the following article (from Saturday's Daily Telegraph) up at his own site, Blithering Bunny:
Update. Okay, I can't resist boasting. I kept looking for this story to break through and get some discussion in the blogosphere, and was annoyed when it didn't seem to be happening. So I e-mailed Glen Reynolds. Within 24 hours, Glenn had given the story an InstaLink. I'm assuming my e-mail was the cause.It’s Not Easy Being a Tory at the BBC
By Damien Thompson
In 25 years as a BBC correspondent, Robin Aitken covered terrorism in Northern Ireland, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the Monica Lewinsky scandal; he was also a specialist economics correspondent of the Today programme during the Iraq crisis.
He is a famously dogged television and radio reporter - yet for many years, he kept quiet about a story he did not know how to break. “I considered leaking it to newspapers, but I would have felt like a traitor,” he says. The story involved political and cultural bias. “There is a centre-Left consensus within the BBC which colours its entire output and undermines its solemn pact with the public to present the news impartially,” says Aitken.
Only now having taken a redundancy package from the BBC, is he ready to make his case publicly. He has written a book provisionally entitled Taking Sides: Bias at the BBC, that he says will provide detailed examples of distorted coverage. It will be the first expose of bias by an ex-BBC man.
Yet it is also, in a sense, a last resort. In the late 1990s, Aitken became so troubled by the “extended honeymoon between New Labour and the BBC” that he confronted the director-general John Birt (now a Labour peer). Later, he complained to his successor Greg Dyke, and then — unprecedentedly, for a staff reporter — he submitted a dossier to the BBC governors. On each occasion, his objections were shrugged off.
Aitken’s last posting was as a reporter for Today during the build-up to the Iraq war. “The whole tone of the programme was hostile to the notion of a war,” he says. “It was not presenting a balanced view of the situation and explaining the reasons why intervention might be justified.
“I made a point of arguing this case in the morning editorial meetings, and that put me in a very bad odour with Kevin Marsh, the editor.”
Why did BBC journalists feel so strongly about Iraq? “They cannot bear President Bush because he’s a Republican and an evangelical Christian. The sight of a Labour Prime Minister going into battle alongside such a man was more than many BBC people could stomach.”
Dislike of Republicans is close to being a BBC article of faith, say Aitken. “I remember being in the Washington office during the Lewinsky affair and saying that I rather sympathised with the Republicans. I think it would have gone down better if I’d confessed to being a paedophile.”
Another article of faith is belief in the moral authority of the United Nations. “That is something that the BBC holds very dear. I long for the day when I hear a reporter say something sceptical about the UN.”
Aitken looks like an off-duty army officer in one of the tougher regiments. He lives in north Oxford with his wife, Sarah, and describes himself as a “middle-of-the-road Conservative”, though he never belonged to a political party while he was employed by the BBC.
“I was surprised to discover how many of my colleagues were active members of Labour or the Liberal Democrats - it seems obviously inappropriate,” he says.
He joined BBC Radio Brighton in 1978, and moved to Edinburgh as the BBC’s Scottish business and economics correspondent in the early 1980s. That was when he realised his own free-market convictions were at dramatic variance with his colleagues’ views.
“It was a time of tremendous industrial dislocation in Scotland, and of course the loss of jobs was an important story.
But our entire coverage was seen through the microcosm of job losses, and the case was never put that you cannot prop up failing industries with state money without damaging the rest of the economy. The prime minister was portrayed as a ruthless, heartless Englishwoman. I began to realise that, presenting such a one-sided picture, we were doing a real disservice to licence-payers.”
The next few years involved stints on the Money Programme, Breakfast News and regular reports from Northern Ireland. Gradually, Aitken gained a sharper understanding of the BBC’s mindset. “There were no secret instructions to distort stories. Reporters did not set out to be unfair - far from it,” he explains.
“What we are talking about, to adopt the language of the Macpherson report into the Metropolitan Police, is a sort of unconscious, institutionalised Leftism. And when so many people working together share a particular world view, groups who do not share it are bound to be marginalised.
“Take the Ulster Unionists who, from the BBC’s point of view, tick all the wrong boxes. They are old-fashioned, wear unfashionable clothes, are deeply religious and enthusiastic monarchists. So they were never given the benefit of the doubt, always treated as baddies — and that used to infuriate me intensely.
“As a reporter in Belfast, I found it very difficult to persuade the BBC to run a story which ran counter to its assumptions. For example, I did an interview with Sean O’Callaghan, the former IRA terrorist turned MI5 informer, who told me on tape that Pat Finucane [the Belfast solicitor murdered by loyalists in 1989] was a senior figure in the IRA. That was a good story, but I was never able to get it on the air.”
Aitken believes that the BBC is the most powerful cultural force in the country — and, therefore, that its bias has a profound and sometime malign effect on public life.
“One of the few real crimes in the BBC canon is racism, and so it gave enormous coverage to the Stephen Lawrence case,” he says.
“Don’t get me wrong. What happened was an awful crime and the perpetrators of the murder fully deserved to be punished — which, in the event, they weren’t. But the BBC went beyond pointing this out. It seemed determined to prove, and deeply wanted to believe, that the Metropolitan Police was a racist organisation.
“Yet, if you take the related area of street crime in London, the BBC will do its level best not to point out the uncomfortable truth that a disproportionate amount of crime is committed by black youths. That seems to me entirely wrong-headed, because by suppressing the truth, you make the problem worse.”
Aitken decided to voice his anxieties to senior executives in the late 1990s, when he began to suspect that New Labour scandals were being soft-pedalled in comparison with the peccadilloes of the Major administration. “John Birt just seemed nonplussed. It was the same with Greg Dyke - an absolute refusal to consider even the possibility of institutional bias,” he recalls.
Eventually, I went to the governors, who asked me to put together a dossier of evidence. So I produced chapter and verse. I cited, for example, the way Radio 4 employed to successive political editors of the New Statesmen as stand-in presenters of The World Tonight, without revealing what their jobs were and that they were therefore Left-wing pundits.
“The governors thanked me for such a well-written submission, which was charming if a little patronising, and passed the dossier back to BBC management, who replied that there was nothing to worry about. At no point was I asked to make my point in person or given the chance to respond.
“Can you imagine what the BBC would have had to say if, for instance, that was how the Metropolitan Police had responded to allegations of racism?”
If Aitken is right, what are the implications for the next highly sensitive subject the BBC will cover - such as next year’s proposed referendum on the European Constitution? “Europe is one area in which there has been some improvement, thanks to constant pressure from critics,” he says.
“I am sure that pro- and anti- constitution voices will be carefully balanced. The content of news reports will be beyond reproach. But it’s much harder to monitor the tone adopted by presenters and interviewers, so many of whom are supporters of further European integration.
“In a way, it doesn’t bother me that so many BBC journalists do hold political views. The scandal is that Left-wing voices are not balanced by Right-wing voices. If that is not reformed, then it’s hard to justify allowing the BBC to hold on to its monopoly.
“In 25 years, I met only a smattering of Tories in the organisation. I stood outside the prevailing centre-Left culture, and that was an uncomfortable place to be.”
Now that he has left the BBC, however, he can take a mischievous pleasure in those moments when the corporation finds itself wrong-footed by events. “Last autumn, Today sent Jim Naughtie over to Washington to cover what they imagined would be the defeat of America’s knuckle-dragging President,” he says.
“And what did we hear? Jim reporting Bush’s re-election through gritted teeth. Honestly, it would have taken a heart of stone not to laugh.”
I'll try to go back to being humble now.
Grover Norquist has recently been odd man out among conservatives -- at least among the non-moonbat, non-Buchanan, mainstream conservatives -- because of the disquieting degree of sympathy he has evinced toward Muslims and Muslim organizations the rest of us consider pretty questionable.
Now Daniel Pipes has produced some startling evidence that Norquist may actually have converted to Islam. It sounds a bit crazy, but if the evidence is not phoney, then Norquist might have some explaining to do. Read it and decide for yourself.
Is Grover Norquist an Islamist? Paul Sperry, author of the new book, Infiltration, in an interview calls Grover Norquist "an agent of influence for Islamists in Washington." When asked by FrontPageMag.com why a Republican anti-tax lobbyist should so passionately promote Islamist causes, Sperry implied that Norquist has converted to Islam: "He's marrying a Muslim, and when I asked Norquist if he himself has converted to Islam, he brushed the question off as too ‘personal.'" As Lawrence Auster comments on this exchange, "Clearly, if Norquist hadn't converted to Islam, or weren't in the process of doing so, he would simply have answered no."
Indeed, Norquist married Samah Alrayyes, a Palestinian Muslim, on April 2, 2005, and Islamic law limits a Muslim woman to marrying a man who is Muslim. This is not an abstract dictum but a very serious imperative, with many "honor" killings having resulted from a woman ignoring her family's wishes.
Alrayyes has radical Islamic credentials of her own; she served as communications director at the Islamic Free Market Institute, the Islamist organization Norquist helped found. Now, she is employed as a public affairs officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development – and so it appears that yet another Islamist finds employment in a branch of the U.S. government.
Norquist has for some years now been promoting Islamist organizations, including even the Council on American-Islamic Relations; for example, he spoke at CAIR's conference, "A Better America in a Better World" on October 5, 2004. Frank Gaffney has researched Norquist's ties to Islamists in his exhaustive, careful, and convincing study, "Agent of Influence" and concludes that Norquist is enabling "a political influence operation to advance the causes of radical Islamists, and targeted most particularly at the Bush Administration."
But if Norquist is indeed a convert to Islam, it could be that he is not just enabling the Islamist causes but is himself an Islamist.
I hope Norm Coleman has spent this weekend briefing himself on George Galloway and preparing an aggressive cross-examination for Tuesday:
I've heard Coleman was a pit bull of an examiner in his law practice, and Tuesday's appearance of Galloway before Coleman's subcommittee is when that experience is going to be needed.Speaking to Sky News, Mr Galloway said: "I'm going to accused them (the US politicians) of being involved in a huge diversion from the real issues in Iraq.
"The theft of billions of dollars worth of oil by the United States of America and its corporations.
"And the deaths of more than 100,000 people in Iraq and opening the doors of Islamic extremism, of the al Qaeda variety.
"They are tremendous crimes they have committed in Iraq and they want to throw people's attention on to Kofi Annan, myself and the government of France."
True, Galloway is a lying, corrupt bastard, but that doesn't mean his testimony won't work when it's pitched to his fan base, and we can count on most of the world's media to be as sympathetic to Galloway as Galloway is to Saddam Hussein.
This should be one hell of a showdown. Cross your fingers for the good guys.
OOPS. Fox News is reporting that Newsweek admits it may have made an error when it wrote last week that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay flushed pages of the Koran down a toilet to unnerve detainees. I'm sure this will make the families of the people killed in the recent anti-American riots resulting from the Newsweek article feel much better.
Golly, do you suppose it's remotely possible that Newsweek would have required more substantiation of the rumored charge if the target group had been, say, blacks or gays, rather than the U.S. military?
Looked for a link on the Fox News website, but it's not up there yet.
Update. Here's the Newsweek mea culpa.
Monday, May 09, 2005
Neo-Neocon excerpts some rules for liberals to live by, and then adds some worthy ones of her own.
The PC commandments
Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna has thoughtfully and helpfully codified the 10 Commandments of PC.
Here they are (please go to his post for further explanation):
1. America is uniquely evil.
2. America is never justified in defending itself.
3. Illiterate people from poor societies are superior to Americans.
4. The Earth would be better off without human beings.
5. Making a profit is always immoral.
6. Differences between individuals or groups are unfair.
7. For Designated Victim Groups, strong feelings excuse all behavior.
8. Policies informed by Judæo-Christian principles are inherently suspect.
9. Conservatives are hypocrites; liberals are sincere.
10. There are no acts of God; there are only acts of Government.
I know that ten is a wonderful (not to mention traditional) number for these things. But, with all due respect to the Baron, I'd like to add four of my own.
11) We defend the right to free speech for ourselves, but anyone else whose speech hurts our feelings must be censored.
12) In any conflict between a third-world nation and a first-world nation, the third-world nation is always right.
13) Tyranny in third-world countries is not our concern unless the US (or Israel) can be blamed in some way.
14) All criticism or disagreement with any policy of a third-world nation, culture, or person is, by definition, racism.
Another blast from the past, courtesy of the BBC's website. One more look at how different things were just a few years ago. I wonder whether Charles Kennedy, the current leader of Britain's virulently anti-Iraq-war Liberal Democrat Party, ever goes back and looks at the speeches of his predecessor Paddy Ashdown. If he does, it must make for sobering reading:
UK Politics
Ashdown's TV address - Full text
Ashdown: "Still haunted" by events in Kosovo
The full text of Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown's television address on the Nato air strikes against Yugoslavia.
"Sixty one years ago, this country had to make a difficult decision. Hitler had invaded a small nation in eastern Europe. Should we, or shouldn't we, intervene?
"The Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, said this was 'a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing'.
"That faraway country was Czechoslovakia. Britain decided not to intervene, and we all know what followed.
"Some say that what is happening in Kosovo today is none of our business, either.
"I understand why they want to believe that. But let me tell you why I believe they are wrong.
"The television coverage is brutal enough - but there, on the ground, believe me, it is worse.
Still haunted by Kosovo
"I was in Kosovo recently. I was there when the Albanian villages were being shelled, burned and looted.
"And I spoke with the women and children, their homes in flames, fleeing for refuge in the forest and in the winter snows.
"And their faces haunt me still.
"How, then, if we know of all this and if we know we can help, how can we choose not to?
"How can we switch off those pictures, shut the door on those faces - and still think of ourselves as civilised people?
"There is, of course, more. All modern nations depend for their security on international law.
"International law which is not upheld threatens all of us, however distant we may like to think we are.
"And President Milosevic is a lawbreaker. Coldly, repeatedly and brutally, President Milosevic has broken international laws and flouted the resolutions of the United Nations.
Asked to help
"How then, if we know all this, and if we know we can do something - how can we choose not to?
"And then: twice already this century, conflicts in the Balkans, starting as no more than a flicker of flame, have developed into raging infernos - sweeping across whole nations and plunging millions into war.
"I know this with a terrible certainty: if the killing in Kosovo is not stopped now, if that Kosovan fire is not extinguished, there will be another such inferno.
"We knew all this - and we knew we could help. The Albanians pleaded with us to help.
"We had to help.
"We may, indeed, have waited too long - I think we did.
"But I respect those who say: keep talking, keep hoping, keep looking for anything other than war.
"I have been a soldier and I hate war. I know what it means to the men and women caught up in war, and I know what it means to their families.
The right thing to do
"And when putting the grim argument for war, I do not forget those who are asked to fight it.
"But I suspect that they, too, know that it is the right thing to do.
"Today, Sunday 28 March, we have to live with the knowledge that the plight of the Kosovan Albanians is worse than it was a week ago - before the Nato offensive began - because President Milosevic has responded with vile new levels of atrocity.
"It was bound to be. The Albanians themselves told me last year that they knew it was bound to be - and still they begged us for help.
"And I have heard from Kosovo today. They're begging us now: don't stop, don't leave the job half done.
"This action will not be tidy and it will not be short. This is no Hollywood combat, to be won in a few glorious days and nights.
"The hope is this: that if we take out his military bases and his tanks and his heavy artillery, Milosevic will come back to the negotiating table. I hope so.
"But I am not optimistic. And we have to be clear what will happen if he does not.
Call for ground troops
"To have risked the lives of our forces, to have lifted the hopes of the Kosovan Albanians, only to turn our backs again, leaving Kosovo still fractured and unstable. That would be insanity.
"The cold reality is this: By their actions, the Serbs have forfeited their right to govern Kosovo, where they're only 5% of the population.
"But we cannot, without destabilising its neighbours, give immediate independence to Kosovo either.
"This leaves only one honourable choice: an international protectorate in Kosovo - for as long as it takes to secure peace in the Balkans.
"And yes, you're right: that does mean troops on the ground.
"How many? We can't assess that yet.
"For how long? It's impossible to say.
"I only know that whatever the cost - whatever the cost - it will be less than that of a widening war in the Balkans."
It is fascinating to see the differences in how the BBC covers two different wars, just a few years apart. Check out this article from not so very long ago, concerning a non-Bush war that the U.N. didn't approve:
World: Europe
Did Nato miscalculate?
Operation Horseshoe: How much did Nato know?
As Nato commemorates 50 years of existence, it is not half-a-century of European peace that is at the forefront of leaders minds but rather the conflict in the Balkans.
For while Nato leaders in Washington make speeches praising the foresight of the organisation's founders, many people are asking "Has Nato miscalculated over Kosovo?"
An investigation by BBC television's Panorama programme has revealed that while the West engaged in diplomacy with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, the intelligence community delivered warnings that he was already planning a programme of ethnic cleansing.
Failed diplomacy
Nato's leaders say that last year they tried everything to bring an end to fighting in Kosovo - and hoped they had succeeded in brokering an October 1998 ceasefire.
Critics say Nato was woefully unprepared for refugees
But while the West tried to sustain the peace over the winter and persuade the two warring sides to sign a peace accord at the French chateau at Rambouillet, some say that preparations for the subsequent escalation of the conflict were inadeqaute.
Porter Goss, chairman of the US House of Representatives' Intelligence Committee, told Panorama: "In February 1999, the head of the CIA, George Tenet, briefed congressional leaders after the order to prepare for war.
"He said that military action could include the chance of ethnic cleansing. The policy makers were not misled by any analysis or analytical picture.
Gen Wesley Clark: "This is the way the Nato leaders wanted it"
"If we stuck a stick in this nest, we would stir it up more," he said.
"Instead of caving in, Milosevic struck back harder and more ruthlessly against the Kosovo Albanians.
"The intelligence community predictions were accurate."
Operation Horseshoe
Operation Horseshoe: Panorama asks how much Nato knew
In January, international monitors accused Serb forces of the massacre of more than 40 civilians in the village of Recak, an atrocity that hastened the pace towards air strikes.
While Nato sent envoys to Belgrade to try to restore the October ceasefire, evidence gathered by Panorama reveals that the West had obtained knowledge of a plan of systematic ethnic cleansing, known as Operation Horseshoe.
Rudolf Scharping, Germany's Defence Minister, said: "The clear objective (of Operation Horseshoe) was to ethnically cleanse Kosovo and remove the whole civilian population.
Rambouillet: 'Milosevic treated it as theatre'
"The operation was prepared by President Milosevic and his regime. It was organised at November 1998, started during the Rambouillet negotiations and intensified after the talks ended."
While General Wesley Clark, Nato's supreme commander of European forces, has denied knowing of Operation Horseshoe, John Scanlon, former US ambassador to Belgrade, said that President Milosevic regarded the talks as nothing more than political theatre.
"President Milosevic's behaviour throughout was that he did not take it seriously," he said.
"I don't think that he even intended singing the agreement."
Military hamstrung
While second-guessing Belgrade presented its own problems, critics say military plans were seriously compromised when leaders ruled out using ground forces.
Paddy Ashdown: 'You have to keep your enemy guessing'
"In my view it was wrong," said Paddy Ashdown, leader of the UK's Liberal Democrats and a former British army Special Forces officer.
"It could not be done without ground troops. I suspect that Nato planners knew this.
"One of the things you do not do when you have an enemy in war is exclude any possibility. You keep them guessing.
"But Milosevic could then say, well this is something that is not going to happen.
Paddy Ashdown: "This cannot be done without ground troops"
"That left him room to manoeuvre for the terrible ferocity we saw."
General William Nash, a former US commander of Bosnia forces, added: "The lack of ground options gave Milosevic a view of the limit of our determination.
"But operationally, it allowed him to disperse his forces and make it much more difficult for the air forces to find and attack them."
US politicians have been among the more vocal critics of the policy of gradual escalation in air strikes.
One described the campaign as "bombing-lite" and both President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright have come under scrutiny.
The President, mired in the impeachment hearings, missed a crucial meeting in January when Mrs Albright put forward her proposals for limited Kosovo autonomy backed by troops - the basis of Rambouillet.
The Secretary of State has also been accused, most notably by "diplomatic insiders" in the Washington Post, of prosecuting a personal conflict born out of childhood experiences as a refugee.
Endgame
Nato leaders deny that they are attempting to fight a "painless war" to try and keep the wide alliance together.
Infrastructure targeted: Fears for Serbian stability
But while there are signs that some Nato leaders are moving towards ground intervention, questions remain over what the endgame will be.
US Senator Pat Roberts, member of the intelligence and armed forces committees, said: "Gen Clark needs to be given full authority to run this war.
"The tactics are not being dictated by the intelligence.
There will be no peace until Milosevic is removed from power."
While some leaders are calling for President Milosevic to go, others believe that he should still be negotiated with.
Analysts also say that as the bombs continue to destroy Serbia's infrastructure there are serious implications for the country's long-term stability.
"The question is being asked, what if the bombing does not work," said Porter Goss. "The answer has always been blurred."
Whatever the future of the region, a judgement has to be made soon about ground troops, said Paddy Ashdown.
"I have been at the other end of the line as a soldier," he said. "Politicians should not be taking these decisions."
"Nato believed it could bomb President Milosevic into submission. I have always thought that unlikely. We should be planning for Plan B - to use ground troops - when it is possible to do so.
"I do not know of anyone who believes that you can have a casualty-less war."
Deroy Murdock:
Great minds think alike.The main argument against rebuilding the World Trade Center's Twin Towers has crashed to the ground.
They seemed to have left something out of this list of risk factors for AIDS.
Occasionally, in the right circumstances, political correctness can kill.Researchers and AIDS prevention advocates attributed the high rate among blacks to such factors as drug addiction, poverty and poor access to health care.
Will the Canadian government of Paul Martin fall tomorrow?
The opposition calls Tuesday the day of reckoning on which the Liberal government faces its demise in a non-confidence vote.
The Liberals call it the second day of the work week - and nothing more dramatic. They dismiss suggestions they should resign and call an election if they lose a vote on a motion expected at 5:45 p.m. EDT. "It's clearly not a matter of confidence," Marc Roy, a spokesman for Prime Minister Paul Martin, said of the vote.
If every member of the House of Commons attends the vote, it is expected the Liberals and NDP would lose 153-152.
Their only remaining lifeline - Independent B.C. MP Chuck Cadman - underwent chemotherapy treatment on Monday and told The Canadian Press he could not travel before Wednesday.
Hope "Blair's private response" is published someday. Irwin Stelzer:
Amen to that last sentence in particular. We need to correct our recent policy on military contracts with respect to Britain and Australia, as I posted about some months ago. The only problem with Stelzer's recommendation is that it's not completely within Bush's power to award the contracts, which is why Hunter and Hyde were able to screw over both Bush and Blair a few months ago; somehow that mess has got to be cleaned up.More important, and on the plus side of the ledger, Blair's return to Downing Street means that America retains an ally in a Europe in which the major countries--France, Germany, Spain, and, perhaps soon, an Italy that may have returned Silvio Berlusconi to the business sector--are hostile to our interests. Blair will spend the balance of this year on the international stage, as chairman of the G-8 when it meets in Edinburgh this summer, and as president of the E.U. for six months starting in July. Bush will be delighted that those seats are occupied by his old friend, especially since the prime minister's pro-American leanings have been reinforced by the savaging he received at the hands of the reliably duplicitous French president.
Jacques Chirac waited until Blair left a meeting in Brussels to call a press conference and demand that Britain increase its payments to the E.U. by forfeiting a rebate won by Margaret Thatcher, an issue that Blair definitely did not want raised during the election campaign. Blair's private response can only be printed in a family publication if expletives are deleted. This distrust of France should keep Blair on America's team when the inevitable controversies arise: He is already attempting to stall the Franco-German drive to lift the arms embargo against China.
But Blair remains committed to a European constitution that will deprive him and his successors of substantial power, and transfer it to a largely anti-American Brussels bureaucracy that is likely to dance to whatever tune happens to be emanating from Paris. And he seems not to understand that the European Rapid Reaction Force (known by military experts to be neither rapid, nor capable of reacting, nor a force) will end up draining NATO of scarce resources, thereby playing into long-standing French plans to reduce the U.S. presence in Europe.
All in all, and despite the negative aspects, from a purely American point of view, last week's British election was a win. The voters not only failed to unseat Tony Blair for siding with America, and for declaring that neoconservative foreign policy sounds to him like progressive politics with a different name, they handed him an unprecedented third victory, leaving in place America's staunchest ally.
Since one good turn deserves another, Bush can best reward Blair by appointing to the too-long-vacant post at the Court of St. James an ambassador sufficiently articulate to explain the American position to our critics in the vigorous British media, and by directing the Pentagon and other government agencies to remember our friends--and our enemies--when awarding contracts.
Oh, and the Court of St. James? Send Rudy Giuliani. Not only would he be a great ambassador who would probably get along well with Blair and who wouldn't take any crap from the anti-Americans, he would also gain great experience on the international scene that could serve him in good stead come 2008. Only problem is, he'd most likely have to take a big cut in pay.
Several commentators, especially at National Review, have been trying to convince us that Tony Blair deserved to lose because he's not really our friend and the Tories deserve to win because they're actually our natural allies. Seven or eight years ago, I would have agreed with that.
Now, though, I'm more in agreement with Andrew Apostolou: How Britain's Conservatives Have Undermined the Atlantic Alliance.
Sunday, May 08, 2005
NRO has a review of the movie Kingdom of Heaven that's surprisingly positive given the impression I'd gotten that the movie was an anti-Western diatribe.
And I notice that tonight on HBO2 (which I don't get) there's a special called "Making of 'Kingdom of Heaven'" ("A look at the 2005 drama about a blacksmith drawn into the 12th-century Crusades. The film stars Orlando Bloom.")
This after last week's specials on A&E and the History Channel. Sheesh, they're not hitting us over the head with this thing, are they?
Just when you think the Left couldn't sink any lower . . . Shawn Macomber describes reaction to an article he wrote on women in Afghanistan; his critic responds to his article by trivializing the brutality the women went through:
Gee. I wonder what would have happened to a woman who complained about the treatment she received under the Taliban."I think this writer overreacted to the situation. Afghani women may have been subject to some heavy-handed treatment on a few occasions but overall, the women were not complaining. So, what was the problem?"
I encourage you to read the whole thing, but I also warn you: Prepare to be disgusted.
Friday, May 06, 2005
Funny:
"When I was in Alabama 13 years ago, they had no child labor law," wrote labor activist Mary Harris Jones, better known as Mother Jones, in 1908. "In Alabama 13 years ago, women ran four or five looms. Today, I find them running some 24 looms. This is the Democratic south, my friends -- this is a Democratic administration. This is what Mr. Bryan and Mr. Gompers want to uphold." [. . .]
In the end, neither Gompers nor Bryan was anti-capitalist enough for Ms. Jones. "I stand for the overthrow of the entire system that murders childhood," she explained, referring to child labor. "I stand for the day when this rotten structure will totter of its own vileness. I stand for the day when the baby will live in God's fair land, enjoy its air, its food, its pleasures, when every mother will caress it warmly."
Fast-forward 100 years and the kids are at BabyGap, and then GapKids, not in the mines. Karl Marx got it wrong about the working class becoming inescapably poorer under capitalism. So much so that Mother Jones -- the magazine, not the activist -- is moaning in its March-April 2005 issue about the over-the-top level of America's increasing affluence: "Since 1970, the size of the average new home has ballooned by 50 percent. Great rooms, Viking ranges, 10-acre lots -- can moats and turrets be far behind?"
And the more specific grievances from Mother Jones: "In 1950, 1 in 100 homes had 2.5 baths or more. Today, 1 in 2 do." "One in 4 Americans want at least a 3-car garage." "Fourteen million households own 4 or more TVs."
The lesson, fashioned over several centuries of declining destitution: It's hard to make a pinko happy.
For some time now, the relationship between the Democratic Party and the Jews has reminded me of an abusive marriage. The marriage used to be mutually supportive and happy; and it's the memory of that long-lost happy phase that keeps the wife coming back to the husband who has become increasingly violent. She keeps hoping the relationship will go back to what it was before, even though more detached observers can figure out that it's probably not going to.
It seems that Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder have been thinking along similar lines:
It might sound like I'm completely unsympathetic to the Jews' reaction to this situation, but that's not the case.If Jews know better than anybody else what kind of an unbalanced mind it takes to produce the sickness of prejudice, why do they so comfortably practice it themselves by making a special target of prejudice any member of the Republican Party, especially if he is recognized as a far-right Republican? Somehow Jews have all always been enraptured by the words "liberal" or "Democrat." We convinced ourselves that the word "liberal" and "Jew" is a package made in heaven, ordained by God like a marriage, consecrated till death do us part. Love may be blind, but does it also have to be deaf and dumb -- which it must be for Jews who can't recognize the contempt many liberals have for them.
Was thinking about the election results while I was at work today, and the thought kept coming to me: Blair's experiment to try to reform the Labour Party has failed. In the short term, at least. The problem is that Blair has been unable to change the underlying culture. There apparently was not a sufficiently large critical mass of the British people who were genuinely committed to change the way Blair was.
Thursday, May 05, 2005
Is Glenn Reynolds correct? I flipped over to InstaPundit and got excited when I saw Glenn announcing that Oona King had beaten George Galloway in Bethnal Green & Bow. But when I followed his link to the BBC article, as far as I could tell, it was dealing with the 2001 results, not the 2005.
I hope he's right and I'm wrong.
I think I'll e-mail him and ask about it.
Update: It's a few minutes later. First I checked the Sky News page for the Bethnal Green & Bow constituency; they had no results posted for 2005. This seemed to confirm what I thought I was seeing on the BBC page Glenn linked to. It appears that the results are not yet in for Bethnal Green, and that George Galloway may still win.
I've e-mailed Glenn with what I found.
Update: Just checked out the Kerry Spot. Andrew Mann? That's Andrew Marr, isn't it? The BBC guy who looks disconcertingly like Putin? Jim Geraghty is up past his bedtime, that must be the explanation.
Update. Shit. Don't know whether my e-mail had anything to do with it, but Glenn has now updated his post to indicate that Galloway has won. Shit, shit, shit.
As I wrote in an earlier post tonight, this is a very bad sign for race relations in Britain.
At about 7:10, a few minutes after C-SPAN2 ended its BBC coverage of the elections, I noticed a program on the History Channel, "History vs. Hollywood," which was going to deal with the historical accuracy of the new Ridley Scott movie "Kingdom of Heaven."
I posted yesterday as I was watching an A&E crockumentary on the same subject. The A&E show took the movie's line: bad Western Christians, good non-Western Muslims. I was disgusted: just more Hollywood crap putting down Western civilization and ignoring the evil done by the West's enemies.
So I was leery, but at the same time curious, to see whether tonight's History Channel program would have a different take on the subject. I can't vouch for the first ten minutes, but what I've seen in the following 25 minutes has been a considerable improvement on last night. Yes, they briefly mentioned the fact that some Crusaders were motivated by a belief that fighting the Muslims would expiate their (the Christians') sins. But so far the emphasis has been on technical details of equipment and fighting techniques. The History Channel is much lighter on the ideology.
The few headlines I've glanced at on Google News concerning the British election have been a pleasant surprise: So far, they're only emphasizing the historic third term, not the reduced majority. I wonder if this will continue, or if the news orgs will soon be spinning the reduced majority as a war-related defeat.
To take a break from election news, here's something I enjoyed seeing: Margaret Thatcher has endorsed John Bolton as U.N. Ambassador.
This is gratifying not only because I want Bolton sent to the U.N. (poor bastard!) but because it is evidence that Thatcher is okay and is paying attention to what's going on the world.
As I mentioned the day the Pope died, I was concerned when I heard no public statement from Thatcher. Today's sign of life is reassuring.
One more thought to add to my previous post. If Galloway does beat King today, it will be even nastier than it otherwise would because I believe today is Holocaust Memorial Day. Shit.
While I was watching the returns come in, I was struck by how many votes the British National Party received. Another sign of anti-Semitism? Or a reaction against the influx of (mostly Muslim) immigrants? Or some of both?
The election returns do not seem to bode well for the near-term future of race relations in Britain.
Were you up for Twigg? Somewhat disappointed with the British election results so far: I was hoping Labour would get another three-digit majority, and it looks like that's not going to happen; the BBC's current prediction of Labour's majority is 80. After the pounding Blair and New Labour have taken in the media for the past few years, this is still a remarkable result. Damn shame it'll be taken as a real loss because of the two previous huge Labour landslides.
The only thing I'm finding really chilling, as I watch the results unfold on the BBC feed on C-SPAN2, is the rumor that Oona King has lost to George Galloway in Bethnal Green & Bow. This is ominous.
Stephen Twigg just officially lost to the Conservative candidate in Enfield South. His expression is 180 degrees away from his expression in 1997.
Felt sorry for Blair, who gave a short speech about half an hour ago at his constituency count. He appears to be taking this pretty hard. This is unfair; as I said, an 80-seat majority, while not what I'd hoped for, is still very good. Poor Blair. I've never seen a politician put through so much unfair torment. (Funny, eight years ago I was watching the British election results and thinking the exact same thing about John Major.)
Oh fuck fuck fuck. Now Blair is having to stand there and listen to Reg Keys, the deranged father of a British soldier killed in Iraq, who blames it all on Blair (Jesus Christ, do any of these people ever blame the fucking terrorists?). He's going on and on about how his son's death was a waste. I want to sympathize with these bereaved military families, but because of the way they're behaving, I can't. (Reg Keys, for those who don't know, ran against Blair in his constituency of Sedgefield. He got 4,252 votes to Blair's 24-thousand-and-something.) Blair looks almost as bad, health-wise, as he did back in the early months of 2003 in the lead-up to the war.
Arrgh! C-SPAN2 just dropped its feed from the BBC! They must have only agreed to take it up to 7:00, which it almost is now.
Which means I won't see it live if Galloway beats Oona King.
On the other hand, that might be a mercy. I'd have difficulty watching it.
Been watching for a few hours. Need a break now.
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
You've probably become aware, in the last day or two, of a new movie, Ridley Scott's "Kingdom of Heaven," in which the Christians are barbaric invaders and the Moslems are noble defenders of their homeland, parallels to current events laid on with a heavy hand.
Not a word about the fact that the Moslems stole the Holy Land to begin with by slaughtering everybody who stood in their way.
Right now I'm watching what I thought was going to be a balanced documentary (on A&E)that would expose the lies behind the movie. Instead, the "documentary" ("MovieReal") is nothing but professor after professor explaining how horrible the Westerners were and how the Moslems valiantly stood their ground, interspersed with scenes from the movie and interviews with the airheaded stars, who are pontificating about history as if they know what the fuck they are talking about.
The big implication is, of course, that the hatred of the Islamofascists for the West is simply blowback from our earlier unjustified adventurism. Payback's a bitch.
I fucking loathe Hollywood.
Could Americans' current admiration of Tony Blair ever sink to the level of dislike the Brits now feel for him?
I doubt it. When Blair first became prime minister in 1997, Britons' euphoria was based on the sheer potential of the situation; after 18 years of Tory rule, the last few years extremely unpopular, Blair was a blank screen onto which many Brits projected all their hopes, some inchoate, some articulated. No one could have lived up to the hopes pinned to Blair. Disappointment was inevitable.
Americans' regard for Blair, on the other hand, is based on real events, real performance on Blair's part. Potential and projection played little if any role; on the contrary, given Blair's background as a Labour Party socialist, our expectations would have been very low, and Blair's spine of steel surprised nearly everyone. He has been tested like no other ally has ever been tested, at least in my lifetime, and he passed the test with flying colors. He has been subjected to more unjustified abuse than I've ever seen a politician go through, over a longer period of time, and, at least in public, he never flinched. No matter what happens in the future, nothing will ever alter what Blair has already done for us. That is carved in stone, permanent. And a lot of us will be grateful for that for the rest of our lives.
A flurry of articles lately on the British elections. Here are a few.
Melanie Phillips has a great corrective piece on the Attorney General's report, which was spun anti-Blair by the British media, but which in fact supports everything Blair has been saying. (Oh yeah, and it's a fine companion to this post on Jeremy Paxman. Or have I mentioned that before?)
And Melanie's got another good post on the matter here.
David Aaronovitch, the only sane columnist at the Guardian, likewise defends Blair from the charge of lying.
In a similar vein, Gerard Baker's column in the Times of London.
It's depressing, but he gets it right.And what exquisite irony! The one thing in the past four years that the Government really did get right — the deposing of a dangerous dictator and the liberation of 24 million people from tyranny — is now regarded in the closed circle of serious political discussion as an act of pure evil.
National Review has commentaries by a couple of correspondents here, here, and here. You know all those American conservatives who idolize Tony Blair? Well, they do not hang out at National Review.
Gerard Baker shows up again in the Weekly Standard, aiming this time to explain Blair's paradoxical position to puzzled Americans.
A more typical Guardian slant on the election (more typical than David Aaronovitch's, that is) can be found here: "Blair defiant over Iraq judgment." Sarcastic Photo Alert: The Guardian story is accompanied by a photo of a weary-looking Blair in front of a fragment of Labour's election slogan in large letters, "VOTE FOR IT." Those clever folks at the Guardian -- aren't they subtle? Right up there with Reuters.
The Guardian also features an odd leak from the Conservative campaign. Wonder who leaked the letter, and why?
The BBC chimes in with one of their "We're being completely objective about this but BLAIR LIED! BLAIR LIED! BLAIR LIED!" specials here (among many others at the BBC, of course).
And Slate has an article on Michael Howard.
Does it? Good. Very glad to hear it. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.There is barely an echo of Thatcher in today's Tory party. Nor is there any reflection of the Tories' fellow conservatives across the Atlantic. No pledges of fundamental tax reform and smaller government. No compassionate conservatism. And only a wishy-washy endorsement of the Iraq war. In fact, Howard has positioned himself as the anti-Bush in this election—and that increasingly looks like a serious misjudgment.
Christopher Hitchens writes on the election here, also in Slate.
Another one bites the dust. I am in a state of shock: Max Hastings has written a commentary in today's Guardian headlined "Perhaps the neocons got it right in the Middle East," yet another in the continuing series of half-hearted, mealy-mouthed mea culpas dribbling out of the mouths and keyboards of those who not so long ago questioned the sanity of Bush, Blair, Howard et al.
Monday, May 02, 2005
Karl Rove, you evil genius, you! A small token of disingenuousness on the part of PBS which has always bothered me is the slogan that appears before and after programs and in their printed material, describing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as "a private corporation funded by the American people."
In strictly legal terms, this probably makes sense or the PBS/CPB lawyers wouldn't allow them to say it. But in normal, non-legalese terms, it's a self-contradictory bit of propaganda. If an entity is "funded by the American people," i.e. is taxpayer-supported, then the notion of it being "a private corporation" is a legal fiction. You can be a private entity, or you can be taxpayer-supported, but you can't be both.
So, if this is a long-term beef of mine, what made me write about it today?
This: the New York Times' article on Kenneth Tomlinson's struggle to bring balance to the slate of political programs on PBS.
Oh, and what's all this got to do with Karl Rove being an evil genius?
Well, if the lefties at PBS continue to squawk about how the big bad evil Republican propaganda machine is trying to deflower their hitherto pure unsullied unbiased politically neutral public television programming, and if the lefties outside PBS get outraged enough at the thought of their tax dollars going to produce conservative-friendly programming (though God knows they had no problem with everyone else's tax dollars going to produce liberal programming for the past almost-40 years). . .
. . . then, ladies and gentlemen, we may well get to witness the spectacle of the liberals calling for the privatization of PBS! Conservatives might not have been able to get away with it, but the liberals might actually be able to pull it off, Nixon-goes-to-China-style. In other words, they'll do it for us.
Yes, the rumors really are true. Karl Rove secretly runs the world.
Doesn't the BBC ever give it a rest?
From Biased BBC:
Read the whole thing, including Natalie Solent's take on the matter.Reader Mark comments:
Surprised the biased BBC blog hasn`t made a post about the two part Doctor who programme, the second part of which was shown last night.
Basically the story turned out that a family of aliens (high up and powerful in government) wanted to start a war for profit despite not having a UN resolution, one of their motives was oil. There was a bogus threat of 45 seconds. Yet to whip the people up in a frenzy the alien family were behind the crashing of a spaceship into big ben in order to give them a reason to start a war.
Worked it out yet?
I`m against the iraq war but for the bbc to put out a programme which basically suggested that Bush (i`m not a fan)was behind 9/11 in order to start a war on iraq was grotesque. I expect to see that kind of extremism on anarchist/islamic and white supremacist websites, not on the BBC. I phoned up and complained. Gave them an earful. Mark