Month: March 2004

Here’s a list of political contributions from various New York Times reporters and staff. I thought there was a policy against this?

THE FIRE-FIGHTERS WERE REAL: Wonkette debunks the latest anti-Bush lie.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “I was struck by the comment of a Spaniard in Charles Sennot’s Boston Globe piece on the Spanish elections. He quoted a voter who was disturbed by the way Aznar had manipulated information and public opinion, accusing him of lying about the threat posed by Iraq. He said that these tactics reminded him of the ones the dictator Franco used to use.
It reminded me that most of the publics in countries with fascist pasts–Spain, Germany, Italy–rejected the way the Iraq war was gotten up by Bush and his European partners. They sniffed something wrong with the manipulation that was clearly employed. They had been sensitized to such techniques by their suffering under fascism in the past.
And, it strikes me that the techniques that they minded so much are those of the Neoconservatives. What does that say about the latter? Maybe they don’t deserve Leo Strauss as an intellectual ancestor. Maybe their real genealogy is rather more sordid.” – Juan Cole, insinuating that neoconservatives are actually the inheritors of fascism.

Romano Prodi, the chief of the European Commission, puts it as bluntly as anyone: “It is clear that using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists,” Prodi said. “Terrorism is infinitely more powerful than a year ago.” This is classic appeasement. And it’s also demonstrably untrue. Al Qaeda has been seriously weakened since 9/11, thanks almost entirely to those countries, especially the U.S., that chose to confront it. But it seems clear to me that the trend in Europe is now either appeasement of terror or active alliance with it. It is hard to view the results in Spain as anything but a choice between Bush and al Qaeda. Al Qaeda won.

Dan Drezner notices an important point in a Businessweek piece about low job growth:

No one doubts that [outsourcing] is having an impact — though exactly how strong is hard to say since good numbers are unavailable. While some put the number higher, Forrester Research Inc. estimates that of the 2.7 million jobs lost in the last three years, only 300,000 have been from outsourcing.

And that’s the high end of most estimates. The truth is that techno-driven productivity gains have now spread from manufacturing to service industries.

Here’s Donald Sensing’s digression into the bleeding obvious in the Wall Street Journal today. It’s the same point I was making at greater length in my essay, “We’re All Sodomites Now.” It’s particularly apposite to Stanley Kurtz’s baseless assertion that same-sex marriage causes modernity’s transformation of marriage, rather than being a result of it. Money quote:

Sex, childbearing and marriage now have no necessary connection to one another, because the biological connection between sex and childbearing is controllable. The fundamental basis for marriage has thus been technologically obviated. Pair that development with rampant, easy divorce without social stigma, and talk in 2004 of “saving marriage” is pretty specious. There’s little there left to save. Men and women today who have successful, enduring marriages till death do them part do so in spite of society, not because of it.
If society has abandoned regulating heterosexual conduct of men and women, what right does it have to regulate homosexual conduct, including the regulation of their legal and property relationship with one another to mirror exactly that of hetero, married couples?
I believe that this state of affairs is contrary to the will of God. But traditionalists, especially Christian traditionalists (in whose ranks I include myself) need to get a clue about what has really been going on and face the fact that same-sex marriage, if it comes about, will not cause the degeneration of the institution of marriage; it is the result of it.

It’s for these reasons that I find drawing the line at gay couples to be so morally troubling. Enforcing one rule for the majority and another rule for a tiny minority is so gratuitously unfair it runs the risk of being understood as pure prejudice.

It’s a spectacular result for Islamist terrorism, and a chilling portent of Europe’s future. A close election campaign, with Aznar’s party slightly ahead, ended with the Popular Party’s defeat and the socialist opposition winning. It might be argued that the Aznar government’s dogged refusal to admit the obvious quickly enough led people to blame it for a cover-up. But why did they seek to delay assigning the blame on al Qaeda? Because they knew that if al Qaeda were seen to be responsible, the Spanish public would blame Aznar not bin Laden! But there’s the real ironic twist: if the appeasement brigade really do believe that the war to depose Saddam is and was utterly unconnected with the war against al Qaeda, then why on earth would al Qaeda respond by targeting Spain? If the two issues are completely unrelated, why has al Qaeda made the connection? The answer is obvious: the removal of the Taliban and the Saddam dictatorship were two major blows to the cause of Islamist terror. They removed an al Qaeda client state and a potential harbor for terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. So it’s vital that the Islamist mass murderers target those who backed both wars. It makes total sense. And in yesterday’s election victory for the socialists, al Qaeda got even more than it could have dreamed of. It has removed a government intent on fighting terrorism and installed another intent on appeasing it. For good measure, they murdered a couple of hundred infidels. But the truly scary thought is the signal that this will send to other European governments. Britain is obviously next. The appeasement temptation has never been greater; and it looks more likely now that Europe – as so very often in the past – will take the path of least resistance – with far greater bloodshed as a result. I’d also say that it increases the likelihood of a major bloodbath in this country before the November elections. If it worked in Spain, al Qaeda might surmise, why not try it in the U.S.?

GREATER ISLAM: But there’s another obvious reason for the targeting of Spain. It was once in part a Muslim-controlled country. The agenda of bin Laden and other Islamo-fascists is to reconquer those regions in Europe and the former Soviet Empire for a new Islamic Reich. The existence of Israel is obviously the most horrifying because it is in the heart of the Muslim world. But Spain, too, was once a region in an Islamic world, as this piece in the Daily Telegraph explains. In October 2002, according to Debka.com,

al Qaeda began issuing a stream of fatwas designating its main operating theatres in Europe. Spain was on the list, but not the first.
1. Turkey was first. Islamic fundamentalists were constrained to recover the honor and glory of the Ottoman caliphates which were trampled by Christian forces in 1917 in the last days of World War I.
2. Spain followed. There, al Qaeda set Muslims the goal of recovering their lost kingdom in Andalusia.
3. Italy and its capital were third. Muslim fundamentalists view Rome as a world center of heresy because of the Vatican and the Pope.
4. Vienna came next because the advancing Muslim armies were defeated there in 1683 before they could engulf the heart of Europe.

It’s hard for modern Europeans and Americans to credit this kind of kooky, historical vengeance. But it’s precisely this vision that sustains and nourishes the Islamist terror network and their state sponsors in Iran, Syria, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. And that is why the current lull in the terror war is not good news. While we wait and work patiently for democratic progress in Iraq, the enemy is retooling and rethinking.

A stunningly positive assessment of the war on terror from – yes! – the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE I: “Sensible British citizens offer the police support in protecting lives and property. Whether this justifies a thousand body-armoured police with automatic weapons in London’s streets I doubt. Bombs kill and panic the panicky. But they do not undermine civilised society unless that society wants to be undermined. The destructive potential of these bombs is not remotely ‘mass’, nor is the threat comparable with that of the Blitz or nuclear weapons… My doubts over Mr Blair boil down to a question of common sense. His speeches and actions on foreign policy are not those of a wise man or one with any sense of historical judgment. Like Margaret Thatcher, he relies on a small coterie of aides rather than the official machine. But unlike her he cannot engage with that machine intellectually. Anyone with a knowledge of history would not equate Hitler’s threat with that of al-Qaeda. Anyone who respects Western civilisation would not think it ‘in mortal danger’ from gangs of Islamic fanatics.” – Simon Jenkins, in the Spectator, arguing “that Tony Blair’s Sedgefield speech was just another attempt by the Prime Minister to scare us into believing that we are all in mortal danger. We are not.” A day after the article went to press around 200 people were murdered and over a thousand injured in an al Qaeda attack in Madrid.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE II: “Blair and Bush ultimately build their case on their personal intuitions, provoked by the Sept. 11 attacks, that something new had appeared in the world. They both concluded, as Bush was to put it, that they had to “rid the world of evil.” But their argument that Islamic extremism is a “global threat” is indefensible. The Islamists can make spectacular attacks on Britain or the United States, but neither country, nor any of the other democracies, is in the slightest danger of being “engulfed” by terrorism, or shaken from its democratic foundations.
The Islamists are a challenge to Islamic society itself, but a limited one. Their doctrine will run its course, and eventually be rejected by Muslims as a futile strategy for dealing with the modern world.” – William Pfaff, in an article called “Blair overstates the threat of terrorism,” in the International Herald Tribune, the day before the Madrid massacre.

BLIAR: My take on the astonishingly shameless book by the astonishingly shameless Jayson Blair.

THE VICTIMS OF INTOLERANCE: It goes both ways, argues Ted Gup, in the Washington Post yesterday:

Intolerance always has two victims, the object of prejudice and its carrier. Gay men and women have endured ostracism, ridicule and violence. But those who cannot bring themselves to face the notion of homosexuality also have paid dearly. Marriage, not the abstract “institution” so often cited, but the flesh and blood and spiritual variety, has already suffered. Families have torn themselves apart over how and whether to accept a gay child, and husbands and wives, joined in sham unions coerced by society’s unwillingness to accept a person’s true sexual identity, have produced misery and divorce.

This is part of the reason I believe that allowing civil marriage for gays will deeply strengthen family life and the fiber of the country. It will bring families back together and prevent fake marriages and disastrous family structures from being entertained again.

This is a new award that is offered to media interviewers who serve up the most soft-ball, lily-livered, fawning questions to their interviewees. Named after Larry King, who would have given Stalin a bouquet if he could have booked him on the show, the first nominee is my friend Chris Matthews (whose show I often appear on). Here’s his interaction with compulsive liar, traitor and plagiarist, Jayson Blair:

MATTHEWS: Well, let me ask you the two toughest questions. I told you I was going to ask them. I’m going to ask them right now.

Why-you are such a damn good writer, a creative force. You have fluency and life. Anybody who picks — I’m not saying buy this book. I’m saying, look at it in the book store, pick it up and read a couple of pages. It moves. It’s got air. It’s got oxygen, the thing you always look for in a writing. What’s it like to be that creative? You are obviously a guy who can knock out 120,000 words in a month.

BLAIR: I enjoy it.

MATTHEWS: Nobody else can do that.

BLAIR: No, I enjoy it. But like all writers and like all people, I’m insecure, and I was insecure while I was at the Times about how good I was. It really took, you know…

MATTHEWS: You’re up there with Johnny Apple. You’re one of these guys who can do it magically. Do you know that?

BLAIR: But I did not know it. I did not know it until afterwards.

Up there with Johnny Apple. Well, I guess it could be worse. Please send in any brown-nosing from media journalists. Special points for Katie Couric.

The far-lefties at Democratic Underground are debating whether president Bush is responsible for the massacres in Madrid. No, I’m not making that up.

The claim of responsibility for the Madrid massacre is probably not from al Qaeda, according to Memri. Worth a read.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “Rich: I recently read Tim Jeal’s excellent biography of Robert Baden-Powell (title: “The Boy-Man”), founder of the Boy Scouts. Jeal shows how the Boy Scout movement was, from its very beginnings, plagued by pederasts. Baden-Powell’s first two appointees to the post of medical director at the movement’s main camp, for instance, both had to be dismissed for “gross misconduct” with the boys. Only a society as wilfully stupid and sunk in dogma as our own could imagine that an organization for boys would NOT attract the attention of pederasts. To insist on the “right” of homosexuals to serve as scoutmasters is to pour gasoline on a smouldering fire. (And before anyone e-mails in to tell me that homosexuality and pederasty are utterly different things, not related to each other in any way, shape or form whatsoever: I DON’T BELIEVE YOU.)” – John Derbyshire, equating homosexuality with child abuse. It is the oldest, most sickening piece of bigotry around, used against Jews in one era just as it is now used against homosexuals. There is no more logical connection between homosexuality and pedophilia than heterosexuality and pedophilia, or heterosexuality and rape. Look, there are legitimate public policy disagreements about how we treat homosexuals in society. But linking gays with child-molesters, in this way, and asserting it as a matter of faith, immune to any argumentation, is simply bigotry.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “It is important to remember that this resolution does not authorize the use of American ground troops in Bosnia, nor does it specifically authorize the use of air or naval power. It simply associates the U.S. Senate with the current policies of this administration and of the Security Council.” – John Kerry, as quoted by David Brooks. The good senator from Massachusetts is not complicated; he’s someone unable to tell the difference between complexity and inanity.

An encouragig sign in France. Le Monde‘s editorial today, “Tragedie Europeenne,” ends with the following sentiment: “If she did not know it yet, she knows it now: Europe is part of the battlefield of hyper-terrorism.” Then there’s this astonishing piece of black-and-white analysis: “Nothing, evidently, no cause, no context, no supposedly political objective, justifies this kind of [large scale] terrorism.” Now they tell us. Whatever happened to all those sophisticated European “gray areas”? With any luck, they died in the wreckage of Madrid’s trains. Here’s another money quote from the French daily:

“If the trail back to Al-Qaida is confirmed, Europeans should rethink the war against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, as did the United States after the attacks of September 11, 2001. . . . Will March 11 have in Europe the same effect as September 11 in the US? After having spontaneously expressed their solidarity with the Americans, the Europeans, preoccupied with other forms of terrorism, found that the Americans had become consumed with paranoia. Contrary to the latter in 2001, Europeans today discover not only their own vulnerability, but also that they are confronted with a new phenomenon, mass terrorism. Like the Americans, they may now be forced to admit that a new form of world war has been declared, not against Islam but against totalitarian and violent fundamentalism. That the world’s democracies are confronted with the same menace and should act together, using military means and waging at the same time a war for their ideals.”

One word: enfin.