Year: 2003

Yep, this piece of the bleeding obvious is now brought to you by the Heritage Foundation. The logic is hard to refute:

All government spending eventually must be funded with taxes, and budget deficits only delay the inevitable taxes (with interest). This year’s $401 billion budget deficit will add $3,774 to the average household’s future tax burden. If the budget deficit reaches $600 billion to $700 billion, the annual tax increase will top $6,000 per household. Unless they balance tax relief with spending cuts, President Bush and Congress will leave a legacy of temporary tax relief followed by permanently higher taxes.

Why doesn’t the administration see this? Does Dick Cheney think we’re persuaded by his insistence last Sunday that he is a “deficit hawk”? If his record is that of a hawk, what on earth would a dove have done? My own frustration at this administration’s fiscal recklessness is catalogued here. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to raise taxes. But if we don’t cut spending drastically and reform entitlements, we’re going to be crushed by taxation in the not-so-distant future.

My favorite thing about hurricanes is the coverage. Matt Drudge is getting the vapors, the way he does. Others are getting a little uptight. I also love the way weather people on the telly pretend to be terribly upset that a hurricane may come and give us hell, when quite obviously they’re having the time of their lives. The crushing look of disappointment they feel telling viewers it isn’t going to be as intense as they first ‘feared’ has to be seen to be believed. My own rule of thumb with hurricanes is that if they warn you about them, it’ll be ok. It’s the ones they don’t tell you about that’ll kill you. Fearless prediction: It’s just going to rain a lot here. The beagle is bummed.

“I just believe in keeping the peace. I don’t throw tea bags every week.” Well, that’s a relief.

OFF-MESSAGE: The Swedish government takes on Oprah for being too pro-war. Oprah?? Who’s next? Peter Jennings?

IRAQIS VERSUS ARABS: Fascinating editorial in Iraq-Today on the bitterness many Iraqis feel toward the opportunism of their fellow Arabs:

On the walls of Mosul University, one of Iraq’s oldest, warning signs are clearly displayed; “No Jordanians, No Palestinians”. Iraqis are clearly still upset that other Arabs were able to study in Iraq, effectively on Saddam’s payroll. Iraqis have had enough of seeing their own lives compromised for the benefit of Arabs from neighbouring countries.
Saddam Hussein played the Palestinian card to the max. It’s widely believed that the support, both vocal and financial, he gave to the suicide bombers, are the reason behind the wrath of the “Zionists” in Tel Aviv and Washington. Whether that is true or not is beside the point – Iraqis saw other Arabs benefit from Saddam’s regime while they were left to suffer.
In contrast, the US spilled the blood of its own people to liberate them from Saddam’s tyranny. No matter how bad things are here right now, friends, colleagues and relatives assure me that with the pressure of living under the old regime gone, life is one hundred percent better.

Funny how few reporters from the New York Times have been able to report the same thing.

The backlash against equal marriage rights in Canada is in full swing, but the odds are still in favor of full civil rights for gay citizens. The Parliamentary vote was extremely close, suggesting the deep divisions that this subject sill arouses. But it’s worth considering a little historical perspective. The vote this time was 137 – 132 against a motion restricting civil marriage to heterosexuals. Four years ago, a similar motion passed on a vote of 216 – 55. In other words, in four years, pro-gay-marriage forces have gained 82 votes, while anti-gay-marriage forces have lost 84. Polls show the under 30s supporting equal rights for gays at around the 70 percent mark. The task of the social right now – here as in Canada – is to freeze this social change before it becomes irreversible. Meanwhile, Canadian dictionaries are changing the definition of marriage. The change is already here.

DO LUCKY DUCKIES QUACK? One of the more irritating of rhetorical devices by some on the partisan-left (Tim Noah, Paul Krugman, et al.) has been their invocation of the Wall Street Journal editorial that worried about the consequences of taxes only being paid by a section of the population. With his typical sleight of hand, Noah interpreted this to mean that conservatives wanted to raise taxes on the poor. He’s been giggling ever since. He’s full of it, of course. Jacob Levy patiently explains why.

A blogger points out that in post-war Europe the U.S. never spent more than 5 percent of the GNP of the recipient country. The impact of money up to 50 percent of a country’s GNP is unprecedented. Surely it will have a huge impact. Obviously, money isn’t enough – cultural, social and ethnic factors may well be more critical in determining Iraq’s possible emergence into the civilized democratic world. But no one can claim the Bush administration isn’t committing enough resources.

All that’s left of his claim that the Blair government deliberately inserted evidence it knew not to be true and generally sexed up the Iraq dossier against the wishes of the intelligence services is that some intelligence analysts were uneasy about the presentation of he data. Money quote: “Appearing at the inquiry for a second time Wednesday, Gilligan said he had not intended to give the impression the government had lied. ‘The allegation I intended to make was a spin. I do regret those words … and I shouldn’t have used them.'” He also admits wrongful leaking. He’s toast. So are the conspiracy theorists.

Thanks so much to the response to my “bleg” about comparisons between our current heroic attempt to rebuild Iraq and the Marshall Plan. The best source I’ve found so far is a Rand comparison between the first two post-war years in Germany and the first post-war year in Iraq. Since the Marshall Plan only kicked in in 1948, this isn’t a direct comparison. But from 1946 – 1947, the U.S. spent $266 per capita per year in West Germany (in 2001 dollars). If you assume we will spend the full $20 billion in the next year in Iraq and that Iraq’s population is around 24 million, then our current commitment is something over $800 per capita. That strikes me as a real and extraordinary commitment. (A genuine comparison to Marshall won’t be possible for a couple of years, which is also revealing. Back then, people seemed to understand it would take time to resurrect a viable democracy and economy in devastated Germany. Why do people expect it to occur overnight in Iraq? Hitler’s economic skills were a lot better than Saddam’s.) So here’s a question worth asking: Why is it that this is not more fully acknowledged by those critics of this administration? I for one was worried that Rummy’s penny-pinching would mean no real nation-building in Iraq. It’s clear now that that isn’t going to happen. And when you consider we’re also going to be spending around $2400 per capita on security, it’s an astonishing act of generosity (as well as a vital piece of self-interest). Where are the Democrats praising this initiative instead of seeking apologies and political advantage? Bush has done exactly what hawkish Democrats were afraid he would punt on. Good for him.

“Showtime, the cable network, boasts that no fewer than three journalists, including the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, were involved in assuring the accuracy and balance of the docudrama “DC 9/11: Time of Crisis,” first shown last Sunday while the actual George W. Bush was addressing the nation. But this film, made with full Bush administration cooperation (including that of the president himself), is propaganda so untroubled by reality that it’s best viewed as a fitting memorial to Leni Riefenstahl.’ – Frank Rich, New Tork Times, September 14.

Finally a criticism of the Bush administration’s handling of the war on terror from the real right. It doesn’t add up to me, but it’s worth a read. Mark Helprin is a beautiful writer and a sober analyst of Arab political culture. He thinks we haven’t been tough enough on the Arab world, and its broader complicity in the politics of resentment that led to 9/11:

The war in Iraq was a war of sufficiency when what was needed was a war of surplus, for the proper objective should have been not merely to drive to Baghdad but to engage and impress the imagination of the Arab and Islamic worlds on the scale of the thousand-year war that is to them, if not to us, still ongoing. Had the United States delivered a coup de main soon after September 11 and, on an appropriate scale, had the president asked Congress on the 12th for a declaration of war and all he needed to wage war, and had this country risen to the occasion as it has done so often, the war on terrorism would now be largely over. But the country did not rise to the occasion, and our enemies know that we fought them on the cheap. They know that we did not, would not, and will not tolerate the disruption of our normal way of life. They know that they did not seize our full attention. They know that we have hardly stirred. And as long as they have these things to know, they will neither stand down nor shrink back, and, for us, the sorrows that will come will be greater than the sorrows that have been.

I’m not sure what such a coup de main would have meant. Nuking Mecca? Presumably not. But Helprin’s argument helps us remember that the American response to a declaration of war has been measured, patient and, now, extremely generous. I also think he’s right about the need for much bigger military expenditures than we now have. We are dangerously vulnerable to a real threat from North Korea, while we are engaged in the Middle East. But if the American political class has been so divided over even the modest measures we have taken to fight back so far, what hope would there have been for a more ambitious campaign?

I used to read and respect Hugo Young, a journalistic titan in Britain. He loathed Thatcher but gave her her due. But he has become in recent years a pathological Europhile, eager to merge Britain into a new European power to balance or rival the U.S. In that context, reading his latest work is saddening. Even from that distance, George W. Bush is driving him nuts. He’s headed for Krugman territory. Check out this column. There are the formulaic protests that he loves America, Americans, etc. And he’s a good liberal. But he says he “loathes” this war. Loathes? I certainly respect pragmatic liberals who opposed the war and still do. But even they – especially they – can also see the benefits of releasing a people from a terrible and grotesque police state and removing Saddam from power. To lose sight of these things is a sign of a warped and increasingly unbalanced perspective. He refers to the American government as “Bush’s gang” to which his country is in “abject thrall.” And then he comes up with this assessment of Tony Blair’s foreign policy:

For Blair, in his Bush-Iraq mode, [foreign policy] has been a lot more theoretical: the theory of pre-emptive intervention in a third country’s affairs, for moral purposes, at the instigation of the power whose hyperdom he cannot resist. What does this mean? That we have ceased to be a sovereign nation. … What it means to be an independent nation is a question that touches the wellsprings of a people’s being. Yet it is one that our leader, as regards this war, has simply disguised from his people, egged on by sufficient numbers of North American papers and journalists who seem to be wholly delighted at the prospect of surrendering it. I do not believe this obtuseness can last for ever. If there is one virtue in the unfinished history of the Iraq war, it is that the British may finally wake up to what the special relationship is doing to their existence.

Their existence? Suddenly this left-liberal sounds like the most fanatical of Tory Europhobes. And yet not an iota of sovereignty has been lost to the United States in this conflict – certainly not a smidgen of the degree to which British sovereignty has been surrenderd to Brussels. Young also seems to believe that tackling the new nexus of terrorism and WMDs has nothing to do with British interests. How? Does he think Britain is somehow immune from the threat? Does he remember how many British citizens were murdered on September 11? There is, it seems to me, a poison out there, infecting minds that were once clear, blurring argument into a welter of hatred for the United States. And it’s not just in Britain.