Month: October 2007

The decision to antagonize our most important ally in the war against Islamist extremism to make a symbolic point about the Armenian genocide of almost a century ago is foolish in the extreme. David Boaz cites an Armenian-American, David Hovannisian:

As the great grandson of genocide survivors, the grandson of genocide historians, and the son of Armenian repatriates — though writing, I’m afraid, without the sanction of the generations — I am insulted by that sticker. That Congress “finds” the genocide to be a fact makes the tragedy no more real than its refusal, so far, has made it unreal. Truth does not need a permission slip from the state.

As an heir, moreover, of an American tradition of limited government, I am annoyed that the legislature is poking into a sphere in which it has neither business nor experience: the province of truth. It is bad enough that a committee of aristocrats governs the conventions of politics, economics and human rights. We the citizens scarcely need to sign over the laws of nature, too, lest gravity be repealed and the whole race goes floating about the universe.

Rod gets the bottom line:

Not everything that’s true needs to be said, or said by Congress. I think we’ve learned a lot this decade about what can happen when the US acts on moral idealism without fully thinking through the real-world consequences.

A contrarian take can be read here.

Now that the world’s attention is wavering, the junta does its real work:

In Rangoon, people say they are more frightened now than when soldiers were shooting on the streets.

"When there were demonstrations and soldiers on the streets, the world was watching," said a professional woman who watched the marchers from her office.

"But now the soldiers only come at night. They take anyone they can identify from their videos. People who clapped, who offered water to the monks, who knelt and prayed as they passed. People who happened to turn and watch as they passed by and their faces were caught on film. It is now we are most fearful. It is now we need the world to help us."

Er:

"The longer this goes on, the less we know."

More here.

Caulfield Cup favourite Maldivian trained by Mark Kavanagh undertakes a pool session at Flemington racecourse on October 11, 2007 in Melbourne, Australia. By Mark Dadswell/Getty Images.

Some new reports on what happened while the Internet was switched off in Burma.

David Kuo publishes a recent Oral Roberts alum on the spin given by president Richard Roberts.

The freedom to say what you truly believe is already beleaguered in Britain. But the gay rights movement in the country is squelching it some more. I don’t see how free speech is divisible. If some gays want the right to walk down a high street in a harness, more power to them. But on what grounds should they then object to the public speech of bigots or merely traditional Christians? The idea that gay people – of all people – should be infringing on the rights of others to express themselves freely is extremely depressing. You’d think these people would remember that free speech was once about the only right gay people had. But they don’t. The bossy p.c. left still controls the gay establishment. And the intolerance that is intrinsic to the hard left often shows.

Ezra Klein homes in on my own record in helping scuttle Hillary Clinton’s dreadful healthcare reform plan in 1993 and 1994. It’s odd that Klein still supports a plan that Clinton herself has now conceded was misbegotten. Her current plan is far more market-friendly and less bureaucratic. At the time, The New Republic editorialized in favor of universal coverage, but endorsed plans that were much more similar to the one that Clinton backs today. I think the magazine’s refusal to be mau-maued by the Clintons at the time – and Hillary was threatening blue murder against anyone who so much as dared to criticize her – is a feather in the magazine’s cap. We weren’t "out to get the Clintons." Some of us – well, two of us – were merely worried that America’s excellent private healthcare system would be hobbled by too much government regulation. I am glad we helped head off the Clinton-Magaziner behemoth. Proud, actually.

My sin was to publish a major article by Elizabeth McCaughey called "No Exit" that posited that Hillarycare 2.0 would inevitably lead to the extinction of much private medicine. Ezra wants me to be "more honest" about this.

I don’t think it’s fair to expose the internal editing of a piece but there was a struggle and it’s fair to say I didn’t win every skirmish. I was aware of the piece’s flaws but nonetheless was comfortable running it as a provocation to debate. It sure was. The magazine fully aired subsequent criticism of the piece. And if the readers of TNR are incapable of making their own minds up, then we might as well give up on the notion of intelligent readers. The piece also won a National Magazine Award.

Klein’s view of how journalists should behave with respect to politicians they broadly support is revealing:

Maybe if articles like No Exit hadn’t been published, and editors like Sullivan hadn’t been out to get the Clintons, the Clintons wouldn’t have acted as if articles No Exit were being published, and editors like Sullivan were out to get them.

Er: Clinton’s Cheneyesque refusal to debate healthcare openly, her sequestering of experts to draw up an overhaul of the entire heathcare system in secret for months, her contempt for anyone who dared ask what was in it, and her arrogance in dumping it on Washington in one fell swoop and then demanding we endorse it or be labeled evil … these tactics were deployed long before we published "No Exit". We didn’t create her paranoia. Ask Bill Bradley. I don’t blame Ezra for not knowing this. He was nine years old at the time. But I would add that Clinton herself has conceded that she acted like an arrogant, paranoid self-righteous prick during this debacle. TNR tried to rescue universal healthcare at the time by proposing an alternative. Clinton’s refusal to allow alternatives killed off the project once and for all.

She was not a victim. And Ezra Klein should be careful unless his view of what journalism is degenerates into something indistinguishable from Sidney Blumenthal’s.

But only when a Democrat is in the White House. A reader writes:

You wrote:

But this was ultimately a function of ceding the rule of law to the rule of one man – not for a one-off emergency, but permanently, indefinitely, because this war has no end, and the Republican establishment believes that the president has no limits on his power in a permanent state of war.

No, not the President, rather THEIR President. I predict to a certainty that if a Democrat – any Democrat – wins the White House in November 2008, by mid-morning the day after that person is inaugurated in January of 2009, all the Republicans still in Congress, and all the Republicans on the federal bench, will suddenly find within themselves an all-consuming concern for the rule of law not to be vested in one man (or woman), for the centrality of checks and balances, for the overriding necessity for Congressional oversight, the supreme importance of impartial, apolitical administration of justice, and for the requirement in a free society that the government respect the privacy of all forms of communication between and among citizens.  And they will be morally repelled by the idea of torture.

The Republican establishment does indeed believe in an autocratic Presidency, but only an autocratic Republican presidency. They are first, last, and always partisans, not patriots.

"You can’t win with an unhinged mob," – Michelle Malkin. But you sure can get some pageviews! (Hat tip: Kevin.)