If you thought the Waco incident is over and done with, download and read this report from the Cato Institute’s Thomas Lynch. It’s bracing reading. I’m not a member of the black helicopter crowd, but, from the beginning, I had deep qualms about the Waco raid. Lynch carefully undermines Jack Danforth’s official inquiry without engaging in conspiracy theories or paranoid fantasies. Official crimes were clearly committed at Waco, and many of these law-enforcement criminals never faced justice. Cato is to be congratulated for not forgetting this tragedy – one that ranks up there with the seizure of Elian Gonzales in authoritarian over-kills orchestrated by former attorney-general Janet Reno.
THE JOYS OF SOCIALIZED MEDICINE: The British National Health Service, the last remnant of the Soviet Union still alive and funded by British taxpayers, recently announced a bid to clean up Britain’s bacteria-crammed hospitals. A staggering 100,000 infections take place in Britain’s hospitals each year, leading to 5,000 deaths. To put it another way: the NHS actually kills 5,000 people a year – the equivalent of 25,000 Americans. And this is the system many single-payer Democrats want to replicate here?
DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: Who else, but John Derbyshire? In a weird essay in National Review devoted to why he likes Jews (in which he spends muchs time explaining why he can’t stand many of them), he unloads himself of his views of Marcel Proust, one of the most sublime stylists in any language: “Martin [Kellerman, a neighbor of Derbyshire’s as a child] was a man of much learning and strong opinions. Some of his pronouncements were made with such force and conviction that I have not, even to this day, ventured to gainsay them. When, one evening, someone asked him for an opinion on Proust, he shook his head and gave a firm “No!” Why? we asked. Replied Martin, in his heavy German accent salted with British slang: “Because I do not like poofs. Und I especially do not like Chewish poofs. It is against nature, und against my religion.” I have never since felt the slightest urge to read Proust.” Does National Review actually pay this hoary old bigot for stuff like this? Was Joe Sobran not available?
The Dish 