Year: 2003

“Every single day, I am faced with information as to how these weapons are proliferating. It is a matter of time, if we do not act, before terrorism and weapons of mass destruction come together.” The British PM, facing a chorus of hyenas, is sticking with his resolution on the threat from Saddam. Significantly he refused to rule out a war without U.N. authorization.

It’s bad enough in this country, where aging nostalgics for 1968 still dominate the universities and the media. But in Germany, their influence is even more profound:

The consequences of their subsequent Long March through the institutions have gone far to define the country ever since … In varying degrees, the universities were collectivized and stripped of their traditions … The worst was in the city-state of Bremen, where students demanded full equality with instructors and insisted on collective, rather than individual, examinations. Twenty would produce one joint thesis. It became so bad that local industries would not take interns from that university because they lacked both knowledge and the will to work … Since the early 1970s, they [the 68ers] have from that perch become vigorous culture-brokers and image-makers, running public radio and television and glossy magazines such as Der Stern and Der Spiegel – all of them with a sharp left-wing bias. Of course, they are to some extent balanced by newspapers such as the venerable Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung … But these cannot fully offset the constant barrage of anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Christian and anti-traditional innuendoes, sniggers and assertions to which the German television viewers have been subjected for decades.

And we wonder why Germany is imploding in a miasma of anti-Western resentment and socio-economic stagnation? Geitner Simmons has the details on a new piece in the National Interest.

SIGNORILE MAKES SENSE: Yes, it can happen. He makes some decent points in this piece about the AIDS death of Herb Ritts and the new silence surrounding the epidemic.

It’s Tony Blair’s fixation; and Tom Friedman’s as well. At least Friedman, in an excellent and honest column, grapples with the paradox here. What if the Israeli-Palestinian crisis isn’t really the main problem in the Middle East, but since that’s what everyone there and elsewhere believes, we’d be crazy not to take it into account? Clearly, for the Arab world, this is the psychological issue of the first order. Humiliated by their backward economies and societies, ashamed in some inchoate way that their biggest exports in recent years have been Western-produced oil and mass murdering religious fanatics, they now have to watch as yet another despised Arab despot gets his comeuppance. How can we expect them to deal with that if we don’t throw them a bone over the West Bank? I take the point. It extends beyond the Middle East to Europe, where we need allies, and where Israel is regarded as the source of almost all the problems in international affairs. But the real question is: do we continue to enable or even promote this delusion or do we confront it? I know it’s a high stakes gamble, but it seems to me that by not entertaining this fantasy we might actually do more good than if we do. In war, clarity matters. In that war, our enemy is Islamist terrorism and its state sponsors. When we’ve dealt with them – and we’ve barely started – we can return to the Israeli-Palestinian situation. In fact, it’s only after we have dealt with Saddam and the Iranian Mullahs that we will get Palestinian interlocutors who know they have nowhere else to turn. Then we can talk, and get tough on Israel with regard to its destabilizing settlements as well. Meantime, set up a diplomatic diversion. Let Blair have his conference. Say all the conciliatory things. And depose Saddam – soon.

NOW, THE POETS: The “anti-war” brigades in Europe have a new ally: the British poet laureate. To be fair, Andrew Motion is not against war against Saddam as such. He simply believes that there has to be irrefutable evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam’s Iraq before we take any action. A few hundred inspectors have to find definitive proof of easily concealed stockpiles of nerve gas, botulism, and so on, before any war is permissible. A truly weak but at least vaguely defensible position. But then he goes further. It’s conceivable that someone would hold this view while still acknowledging the good faith of the opposing argument: that the burden of proof lies on Saddam – not the West – and that, given his record, Saddam’s inadequate declaration of WMDs is a good enough casus belli. But no. Motion – a poet officially sanctioned by the Queen – has to go the whole hog. Here’s his little poem in full:

They read good books, and quote, but never learn
a language other than the scream of rocket-burn.
Our straighter talk is drowned but ironclad:
elections, money, empire, oil and Dad.

Huh? Well I guess he’s aware that those who are pro-war can be educated, something that Susan Sontag and Joan Didion seem oblivious to. But elections? We just had them. Dad? Puhlease. Money? It’s going to cost a small fortune. Empire? Well, leave it to a British poet laureate to defend that one.

THE GAMBLER: “A year ago, there was a real question if the West would do anything about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Now, the only issue is whether we rely on more thorough inspections or war. The only person responsible for this transformation is Bush (with credit also to Tony Blair). Even if you are opposed to war, you have to concede that Saddam is a threat and that Bush has almost singlehandedly forced the world to deal with it seriously. That’s a gain for international security, by any measure. Domestically in America, the shift is just as profound. In the 2000 campaign, the choice was between a revived left-wing populism under Al Gore or a cautious conservatism under George Bush. By 2003, the choice is between around $90 billion in tax cuts (and some new spending) from the Democrats and almost $700 billion tax cut from Bush.” – from my latest column, posted here.

HOWELL’S SELF-INTEREST: It’s not easy for a non-lefty to get on the New York Times op-ed page, so it was good to see David Brooks there yesterday, writing what was, as usual, a thoughtful and persuasive piece. But its premise is ideologically loaded to the left. The question asked by David is summed up in his opening paragraph:

Why don’t people vote their own self-interest? Every few years the Republicans propose a tax cut, and every few years the Democrats pull out their income distribution charts to show that much of the benefits of the Republican plan go to the richest 1 percent of Americans or thereabouts. And yet every few years a Republican plan wends its way through the legislative process and, with some trims and amendments, passes.

There then follow a series of sociological and psychological explanations for this. But the more obvious answer – to anyone not on the left – is surely simpler. Maybe people believe that their real self-interest is not simply in getting more directly back from the government. A good tax policy that doesn’t broadly punish the successful might actually help an economy grow and therefore be in everyone’s real economic self-interest – even those at the very bottom of the ladder. Certainly a quick look at the more “progressive”, i.e. punitive, tax regimes in Europe shows that the average person does far better over here, and is certainly more likely to have a job. A better first sentence would therefore be: “Why don’t people vote their own narrow and immediate self-interest?” But that wouldn’t get past the Howellburo, would it?

GERMANY’S IMPLOSION: A good piece on the damage Gerhard Schroder (favorability rating now 32 percent) has done both to Germany’s internal health and to its foreign influence. The beneficiary? France, now essentially the leader of the E.U. And Britain? Further away from joining the euro than ever. Meanwhile, German popular culture seems to be becomoing more and more pathologically anti-American. Take a look at this week’s cover of Der Spiegel. They even turn Old Glory into a version of the Hammer and Sickle. Truly repulsive.

THE SOCIALISM OF FOOLS: I should have linked to this terrific piece by Michael Gove in the Times of London before now. But here it is. It seems to me that some kind of anti-Americanism is inevitable, given the unprecedented power and influence of the hyper-power. But what’s worrying is the poisonous strain in this Americanophobia. Mild resentment becomes a kind of pathological suspicion. Parts of the left in this country have succumbed as well. Check out this photograph from an “anti-war” rally in Los Angeles. It says it all.

FIFTH COLUMN WATCH: One of the Lackawanna suspects cops a guilty plea. Hmm. The charge is “providing ‘funds and services’ to al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, by attending a terrorism training camp in Afgha
nistan in the spring of 2001.”

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “I wanted to understand why the western countries were doing so well when the rest of the world seemed to be collapsing. I studied the history of European political thought from the Greeks and Romans up to the Second World War. I learned that people in the West value the autonomous individual. They understand the importance of science, knowledge. They are capable of criticising themselves and there is an ability to record history to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. It is exactly the opposite in Somalia where all the institutions of record are missing, and my grandmother’s memories of the clan wars will die with her.” – Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali immigrant to Holland, about to become a member of parliament following Pim Fortuyn’s footsteps. Her favorite thinker is John Stuart Mill. Liberalism, it seems, is not dead in Europe after all. It just takes a taste of Islamist oppression to embrace it.

What do you do with a man who has successfully evaded paying child support to kids from two different relationships? Make him head of D.C.’s child-support enforcement agency! Colbert King has the details. The kicker: D.C. collected payments in 12 percent of its child support cases in 2000. The national average is 42 percent.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “This thoughtful, searching tone is in keeping with the journal’s aspirations to objectivity. ‘The key to the journal is that it’s middle of the road,” said the editor, Dan Leab, a history professor at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J., and a leading member of Historians of American Fascism, the organization sponsoring the journal. “It covers the waterfront but leaves the fringes out.'” – from a jovial New York Times piece on a new journal covering the history of American communism. (Yes, I changed the term to fascism to show the double standards here.) This is a great concept: a “middle-of-the-road” analysis of a monstrous totalitarianism and its sometimes treacherous allies in the United States. Of course, among the “middle-of-the-road” assessments, “an essay on the party’s activities in California during the early 1930’s that draws on newly opened Comintern archives to show how local Communist leaders often exercised considerable independence from the Soviet Union on tactics and policies” and the usual screed against informers. I knew the academy and the New York Times were soft on Stalinism, but this soft?

“Europeans Seek to Rein in American War Machine,” – headline from – where else? – Reuters.

EURO-ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: Regular readers will remember Gretta Duisenberg, the anti-Semitic wife of the European Central Bank chairman, Wim. When asked how many signatures she would like on an anti-Israel petition, she once joked, “Six million?” and laughed. Now she’s getting more explicit. “Taking the Holocaust out of consideration, the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories is worse than the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands,” she opined this week. “The cruelty of the Israeli knows no bounds. That they, for instance, blow up Palestinian houses is not exceptional. The Nazis never did that during the occupation of the Netherlands.” For the record, 250,000 people were killed by the Nazis in Holland from 1940 – 45, 110,000 of whom were Jewish. Maybe she doesn’t count those. Her husband is not to be held responsible for her bigotry, but it’s surely getting a little difficult for one of the most powerful men in Europe to support his wife 100 percent, when she is clearly a Jew-hater.

The screed against Chuck Barris can now be found here. Don’t miss it.

Many thanks for the translations. I found this section to be the most interesting:

VANGUARDIA: At what point of the trip are you right now?

SONTAG: In a reflection about the United States. America has always been the place of dreams, the place all Europeans went to looking for their dream, the place where all was possible. And inside of America, Americans have at the same time their own America: California.

And what is the America of Susan Sontag?

This question … Oh, it is good! Because… it is Europe! What an idea: My America is called Europe. It is my place of dreams.

Since when?

Since I was a little girl: I had a solitary youth, in small rural towns in the south of Arizona and the south of California. My magic carpet was the world of books. And they carried me to Europe. I read from the classics…I dreamt of leaping from my childhood to be able to get out of there. I lived my infancy as an obstacle. I didn’t enjoy it. And today I’m sorry for that…but it’s just that my dream was to be a foreigner.

And did you realize your dream?

Yes: I’ve lived a lot in Paris and in various countries of Europe. I’m attracted by its culture, its disposition for debate … Most of the things I like are in Europe.

And what do you dislike about the United States?

That all that primordial fantasy was subjected to consumerism, the ideology of “living to buy.” That is the current ideology. It dumbs down the people, makes their main values be those of buying and enjoying themselves.

I have read that because of that you have said that you’re ashamed to be an American.

No, that is an incorrect journalistic headline, and I appreciate your letting me clarify it: what shames me is not to be an American, but that the Northamerican foreign politics are so aggressive! This exercise of political power of the Bush Administration, so bellicose!

This is helpful, isn’t it? Underlying Sontag’s thought really is a somewhat tired anti-Americanism, rooted in a leftwing critique of bourgeois culture. But here’s one question I’d like someone to ask Sontag. She supported president Clinton’s military intervention in the Balkans. He did so without U.N. approval. Yet Bush is acting entirely under U.N. auspices with regard to Iraq. If Bush is an imperialist, why wasn’t Clinton?

Paul Krugman explains his analogy, made to Der Spiegel magazine. He doesn’t believe Bush is the “moral equivalent” of Marcos. He just thinks that “the Bush administration’s creation of a cult of personality, its obsessive secretiveness, its propensity for mass arrests, and its evident fondness for Big-Brotherish schemes of public surveillance are not the actions of men who have a deep respect for the democratic process.” Check it out. It must be hard sometimes being a “lone voice of truth in a sea of corruption.” But Krugman is pulling through.

“Saddam is the worst monster in the world! He is hateful, like Islamic fundamentalism. But the United States is hateful for its imperialistic fundamentalism!” – Susan Sontag (!), quoted in Vanguardia, noticed and translated by the “sexy scourgers of Spanish socialism” at Iberian Notes. If they or anyone else can translate the whole thing and send it here, I’ll report back on the rest of the interview.

CHURCHILL ON HANS BLIX: A reader sends in a wonderful 1953 Churchill quote about what would happen if England’s patron saint, George, were alive today, and required to go out and slay an actual dragon to save an actual damsel in distress. Here’s what Winston remarked:

St. George would arrive in Cappadocia accompanied, not by a horse, but by a secretariat. He would be armed, not by a lance, but by several flexible formulas … He would propose a conference with the dragon. He would then lend the dragon a lot of money. The maiden’s release would be referred to Geneva or New York, the dragon reserving all rights meanwhile.

Methinks the dragon would also have U.N. inspectors halfway down its throat checking on signs of fire. Nope, Nothing there, guys! Friendly little critter, isn’t he?

THE DIVIDENDS DIVIDEND: The New Republic’s Ryan Lizza has the best explanation I’ve yet read of the rationale behind the Bush economic proposal. (While I’m at it, one Reihan Salam’s sane round-up of the latest writings on Iraq at TNR.com is also well worth a read.)

A LILEKS CLASSIC: Tell us how you feel about Chuck Barris, James. Tell us how you feel.

BLAIR’S WOBBLE? I don’t know what to make of Drudge’s Daily Telegraph story claiming that the Brits are urging Bush to postpone war against Iraq till the fall. But I do know that the Blair government has explicitly now denied the charge. I’m not going to panic any time soon at the various signals that the West is now going wobbly on Iraq. In my view, the omissions in the arms declaration are a sufficient U.N. basis for war. And I presume that the only man who really counts in this shares the same view. As Hans Blix says in today’s Telegraph,

“We think the declaration failed to answer a great many questions. A more profound reading of the text has now confirmed the impression.” He said a list of Iraqi scientists omitted several key names, and he would consider taking officials out of Iraq for questioning. Mr Blix also disclosed that Iraq had imported missile engines and raw material for producing solid missile fuel in violation of UN sanctions.

What more do we need?

WHY GRAHAM’S DOOMED: “I am, and since 1973 have been, a resident of Florida. My job, I am a lobbyist (and consequently a fund raiser), requires that I follow Florida politics closely. I have followed the career of Bob Graham with particular interest. I agree that his candidacy would be good for the country. He strikes me as a strong leader and a good man. That said, he will never get the Democratic nomination. You see, back in 1984, Bob Graham, then running for the Senate, endorsed Ronald Reagan for president. The “endorsement” actually took place during a televised debate between Graham and his opponent. He essentially repudiated the Walter Mondale candidacy, stating that “Ronald Reagan has been good for America.” Florida Democrats have a long memory. Those in Hollywood and Manhattan have even longer memories.” – more insights on the Letters Page.

IN DEFENSE OF LOMBORG: The Economist gets it exactly right: “The panel’s ruling – objectively speaking – is incompetent and shameful.”

To be perfectly honest, I have no idea what benefits an end to the tax on dividends might (or might not) bring to the economy. I guess if you think that what the economy needs is more immediate consumer demand, then the Democrats’ plan makes marginally more sense. But if you think we need more short and longterm investment, then the president may have the better argument. I’m not really qualified to judge economically. But politically, it seems to me that Bush has again completely outwitted his opponents. What matters is the size and boldness of his plan, its appeal to his political base, and the insipid nature of the alternative. In all three respects, Bush wins. His boldness signals to then public that he’s not his dad. And it also signals that he’s taken control. But the most stunning sign of how deeply the president has changed the political landscape is what the Democrats are saying. They want tax cuts too! The question is simply: how much and in what form? And my favorite piece of Bush smarts is that he has effectively trumped the Dems on the class issue. Take two paragraphs in Tuesday’s New York Times. Here’s our old friend Krugman, telling us what he’d do:

Right now a sensible plan would rush help to the long-term unemployed, whose benefits – in an act of incredible callousness – were allowed to lapse last month. It would provide immediate, large-scale aid to beleaguered state governments, which have been burdened with expensive homeland security mandates even as their revenues have plunged. Given our long-run budget problems, any tax relief would be temporary, and go largely to low- and middle-income families.

Well, the president just extended jobless benefits. There is some aid to the states as well, although not as much as the Dems propose (but who’s counting?), and then there’s this factoid, also from the New York Times:

What Democrats are less likely to emphasize is that Mr. Bush’s plan would provide bigger tax cuts for many people at middle-income and lower-income levels than theirs’ would.

How’s that for running rings around them? And the big ticket item – the dividend tax abolition – also has some bipartisan good government type support. Again, I’m not saying that this is the best plan anyone could come up with. I’m not really qualified to say (although in general, I prefer any plan that has the most tax cuts in it). But I am saying that it is politically very, very shrewd.

THE LOMBORG SMEAR: It seems to me that one mark of a self-confident political mind is its willingness to take opposing arguments seriously. Debate is a terrific opportunity to persuade people of the rightness of your worldview – and if you lose the debate, it’s a terrific opportunity to change your own mind. And one of the truly awful aspects of today’s liberal academic establishment (and some extremists on the right) is the preference for the personal destruction of opponents rather than engagement. This doesn’t move debate forward. It is designed to end debate. This is what is being done to Bjorn Lomborg, the iconoclastic ex-green who has dared to criticize some of the hysterical predictions of the official environment lobby. Nick Shulz provides a good overview of what has been done. No factual errors have been found in Lomborg’s book; no unethical scholarship; only provocative arguments designed to get people to think again about their assumptions about how best to protect and preserve our natural inheritance. But in leftist Europe, criticizing the Green Orthodoxy today is a little like criticizing the Curia in sixteenth century Italy. Lomborg has effectively been called to the Office of the Inquisition; and his reputation has been vilely smeared. I hope he’s holding up. Dissidence is never easy. And the left is simply brutal in the enforcement of its own doctrines. Hang in there, Bjorn. Most decent people see a vilification campaign for what it is.

‘BLOG’ ENTERS THE DICTIONARY: Great news from the American Dialect Society. The word “blog” was the group’s second favorite coinage of 2002, beaten only by “weapons of mass destruction.” “Blog” was also voted “most likely to succeed.” I’ll say. (Via Don Luskin.)