Death of a Feminist

On July 15 the American feminist
Susan Lydon
died at age 61 of cancer. She is celebrated as the author of
“The Politics of Orgasm,” in which she argued in 1970 that “women do not need men to achieve sexual fulfilment.” The reason, you
see, is that the clitoris is the center of female sexual pleasure.

Perhaps Lyton’s jaundiced view of human sexual relations was affected by her participation in the
notorious San Francisco Summer of Love in which, it seems, the male approach to human sexuality
predominated over the female. At any rate, Lydon broke up with the father of her only child, mixed
it up with rock musicians for a while, went through a drug hell, and then finally found salvation in the
world of
knitting and The Knitting Sutra.

Whether or not Lydon was right, and that the vaginal orgasm is a myth (let’s say it depends), there
is the nagging verdict of the opinion polls. Apparently those most satisfied with their sex lives are
conservative married women. So you wouldn’t expect a liberal woman writing for Rolling Stone
about rock music to be much enamored of sex anyway.

Karl Rove, Supply Sider

The importance of Karl Rove isn’t just that he is a top-flight political strategist. As
Larry Kudlow
relates, he is also a committed supply sider. He has been a strong advocate for the president’s
tax rate cuts and
the cuts in the tax rates on capital.

At a recent speech at the Reagan Library, Rove quoted

the great classical free-market thinker Ludwig von Mises, who said that
`capitalism has raised the standard of living among the masses to a level which our ancestors
could not have imagined.’ Rove also said that because of Ronald Reagan, the
debate over the merits of capitalism versus a command-and-control economy has been settled,
that the free market has won in a rout,
and that economic growth and prosperity have followed in its path.

He also told the New York Conservative Party that
“Conservatives believe in lower taxes; liberals believe in higher taxes.
We want few regulations; they want more. We believe in curbing
the size of government; they believe in expanding the size of government.”

It would be a shame if Rove got bounced from the White House by the Plamegate kerfuffle.

Eek! Hayek Alert NYT Readers!

For years The New York Times has carefully sheltered its readers from the corrosive ideas
of Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek (oh all right, there
have been four mentions so far this year, one by David Brooks and
the rest in Danger on the Right articles about conservatives). But in today’s Book Review
Richard A. Posner dares
to introduce the name that dare not speak its name. At least not to liberals who thought that Hayek
had been buried 50 years ago in Hermann Finer’s The Road to Reaction.

And the worst of it is that Posner hauls Hayek into an article about the current media wars in
an utterly unforgivable way. He uses Hayek to show that the bloggers are more accurate than the mainstream
media.

The charge by mainstream journalists that blogging lacks checks and balances
is obtuse. The blogosphere has more checks and balances than the conventional media; only
they are different. The model is Friedrich Hayek’s classic analysis of how the economic market
pools enormous quantities of information efficiently despite its decentralized character, its
lack of a master coordinator or regulator,
and the very limited knowledge possessed by each of its participants.

No! Shut him up immediately. This is wrong! It cannot be true that a million bloggers are more
accurate than a cadre of highly educated and highly trained journalistic professionals. It just cannot.

Seriously though. Posner’s article is a first-rate analysis of the market position of the MSM
in this time of turbulent media change. It is the kind of searching and challenging analysis that the readers of
The New York Times rarely experience. There’s a reason for that, Posner explains. People do
not read newspapers to encounter uncomfortable facts or to see “their beliefs challenged on issues that are bound up with
their economic welfare, physical safety or religious and moral views.” Instead

they want to be confirmed in their beliefs by seeing
them echoed and elaborated by more articulate, authoritative
and prestigious voices. So they accept, and many relish, a partisan press.

And so The New York Times does not advertise the ideas of a thinker like Hayek who challenges
the ideas and the economic well-being of its readers. It takes a prestigious writer like Judge Posner to
do that. Sometimes, you see, even the enlightened need to be “challenged.”

Are You Now... a Member of The Federalist Society?

It would be comical if it weren’t so mean-spirited and sad. Liberals are all worked up about
whether Judge Roberts has been a member of the Federalist Society, a group of conservative and
libertarian lawyers that promotes the idea of a “dead” constitution. The society advocates for the idea
that the consitution means what it says it means and
what the founders said it meant, and can only be amended by the constitutional amendment process and
not by the judicial amendment process.

Liberals are scandalized by the Federalist Society because they understand that it stands for a
program that would unwind 70 years of liberal Supreme Court jurisprudence
that started with a radical expansion of the power of the federal government in the 1930s with a
radical interpretation of the interstate commerce clause.

But because conservatives are relentless rather than ruthless they have not reacted to the
McCarthyesque tone of liberal inquisition: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Federalist
Society? When used in the 1940s to probe liberal membership in the Communist Party of the United States it was
a question that provoked liberals to decades of frothing outrage.
That was a time when there really were liberals in the federal government who were
spying for the Soviet Union. So
Bob Tyrrell
laughs at the liberal obsession with secret handshakes and secret societies, and
Roger Pilon
implores Republicans not to apologize for the Federalist Society but to stand
proudly for open advocacy of ideas like the rule of law and against the “living” constitutions that
allows liberal Supreme Court justices to bend the constitution like a pretzel.

Liberals are ruthless;
conservatives are relentless.
The way to understand the ruthlessness of liberal political tactics is to understand that they
are retreating. The savage attacks are the desperate actions of a rear guard, protecting the
main liberal army from disintegration. There is always a razor’s edge between orderly retreat and
the sauve qui peut (hmm, that’s French for “every man for himself”) of an utter rout. And you never know when we
might reach the tipping point.

Blog Bites MSM: Guardian Trainee Didn't Disclose Terror Links

Remember in the good old days when the MSM importantly told us how they were
the people’s tribune, the last line of defense against abuse of power by the
high and mighty? That
was before the blogs.

British blogger
Steve Burgess
(actually an American blogging in Britain) decided to look
up the connections of a Muslim trainee at The Guardian and found that
trainee Dilpazier Aslam was writing features about terrorism without disclosing
that he “was a member of the Islamo-fascist group Hiz ut-Tahir.”

No! Surely not! An august member of the MSM not disclosing that
its objective journalist was in fact not objective but a committed, card-carrying
Islamo-fascist? Well why not? After all, the MSM in the United States has
plenty of Democratic sympathisers without ever disclosing that they have all
sworn blood oaths to fight against Karl Rove and George W. Bush and everything
they stand for. No. Maybe that was Howard Dean talking about Republicans.

By the time it was all over, The Guardian had made huffy comments
about people that spend a lot of time indoors (this sort of anti-blogger
bigotry must be stopped!) the trainee has been fired and the
executive editor for news, Albert Scardino, had resigned from his post at
The Guardian.

And everyone had a grand old time chuckling at The Guardian’s pompous embarrassment.

Don't Tell the Democrats!

The risk in nominating a conservative to the Supreme Court with a short period of service on the
bench is that you can’t be too sure what you are getting. That
is what has conservatives worried about Judge Roberts. They remember the
conservative court picks that were captured by the liberal beltway culture:
O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter. Ann Coulter has put out a couple of articles
already that worry about this prospect.

But Carol Platt Liebau
thinks that we may be OK after all.
Judge Roberts is a lawyer who has lived most of his professional life in
Washington DC, like Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas. And like them he has partisan experience
in the Justice Department and the White House. He already has a social
network in Washington and does not have to bend the knee to liberals to get into the social
swim.

But you never know...

Indonesians Think Christianity is More Modern

There is no doubt that the west needs to get a lot more serious about the Islamic
mass movement and its program to create a world-wide caliphate. But we need to keep a sense of proportion.

Here is a brief item from
Strategy Page
about Christianity in Indonesia. Moderate Muslim leaders want help from the Indonesian government
“to stem the growth of Christianity.”

While 85 percent of Indonesians are Moslem, most of
the remainder are Christian. On some islands, the population is half, or more,
Christian. On those islands, many Moslems see Christianity as a more “modern” religion.
Christian clergy and missionaries are generally better educated than their Moslem counterparts,
and the Christians tend to be more successful economically as well.

Meanwhile,
Mark Steyn is needling the British about their coddling of Islamic terrorists
with housing benefit and generous welfare. The British should get serious, he writes:
they are in a war. To encourage them, he reminds them
of the progress that Islam is making,

[T]here’s a lot more of the world that lives under Sharia than there was, say,
30 years ago: Pakistan adopted it in 1977, Iran in 1979, Sudan in 1984.... Fifty years ago,
Nigeria lived under English common law; now, half of it’s in the grip of Islamic law.
So, as a political project, radical Islam has made some headway.

Of course, Steyn is right. The Islamicist mass movement is a real threat and we should treat it
as a war—how about calling it a global war on terror? We should rough up the Islamic welfare
queens in Britain and Old Europe and make them get a job.

But let us not lose sight of the enormous strength of global capitalism, global democracy and global
Christianity. The only way that Islam makes headway politically is by using brute force. It needs to,
if the islanders of Indonesia think of Christianity as more modern. They understand, as this
website does, that enthusiastic Christianity is the Road to the Middle Class. And they want
to get on it.

Forty Years Later: The Moynihan Report

Oh yeah. Forty years ago this summer. The Moynihan Report on the Negro Family.
Kay S. Hymowitz does a little retrospective entitled
The Black Family: 40 Years of Lies.
Back then you see, in 1965, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan sounded the
alarm that the black family was in crisis. Illegitimacy rates had soared to
25 percent. Something had to be done.

But Moynihan was shouted down in a storm of abuse, and a literature began to
emerge that celebrated the single-parent family.

It was the beginning of 40 years of liberal lies on the family.

Then the second wave feminists appeared
and they augmented the liberal attack on the nuclear family.

By 1995, 30 years later, the
number of black children born out of wedlock had soared to 70 percent. In
1996 a Republican Congress, the first Republican Congress in 42 years, passed
a welfare reform bill that made a down payment on ending the culture of
welfare dependency that subsidized the demolition of the black family. Thank God
for evil Republicans.

But liberals still haven’t learned. The New York Times prattles
on about inequality, as if. As Hymowitz writes:

Read through the megazillion words on class, income mobility,
and poverty in the recent New York Times series “Class Matters” and you
still won’t grasp two of the most basic truths on the subject:
1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and
2. it is intricately intertwined with
the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.

Wanna avoid poverty? Finish
high school. Don’t have children before you get married, and don’t get divorced.
Hey, it’s not rocket science.

One day, like many other components in the old Democratic coalition, African
Americans will come to an understanding of what liberals have done to them.
They will realize that the people they trusted and voted for have been
lying to them. Being
good, polite Americans—rather than lefties of a revolutionary
persuasion—they will not in their rage “cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.”
Instead they will just quietly get up and leave. And maybe join that Republican
sewing circle they’d heard about at church.

The Left Hates Exercise and Grooming

Want to know what President Bush has done now? According to liberal writer Jonathan Chait
he is exercising too much. Apparently it is scandalous that the president takes an hour or two
out of every day to get exercise. “What I mean is the fact that Bush has an obsession
with exercise that borders on the creepy,” he writes.

“Really?” asks
Tammy Bruce.

Not according to the medical establishment and the Surgeon General’s office,
which notes the benefits of exercise. Such as? Better sleep; reduced tension and stress;
reduction of high blood pressure; reduction of anxiety and depression; reduced risk of colon
and breast cancer; healthy bones, muscles,
and joints; improved self image; and generally improved physical health.

Bruce goes on to recall her days at the National Organization of Women, and how the members
seemed to have an aversion to taking showers and running a comb through the hair.

Then she adds her voice in defense of the Roberts family, who came in for some criticism
from the Washington Post’s Robin Givhan for
being too perfectly turned out at the announcement of Daddy’s nomination to the Supreme Court.
But she understands
why Chait and Givhan don’t like the personal habits and grooming of Bush and his nominees. President
Bush and the Roberts family

insult the Left by reminding intellectually lazy Slaves to Decay
like Chait and Givhan that class, decorum, and respect still exist. Tradition,
caring for one’s family,
and caring for oneself are still values that prevail.

When Chait writes: “It’s nice for Bush that he can take an hour or
two out of every day to run, bike, or pump iron.
Unfortunately, most of us have more demanding jobs than he does,” you have to ask
what planet he is living on. How could he not notice how Bush has aged in office, from the almost
adolescent look of 1999 to the careworn father of the nation that appears before us today. Does
Chait have so little experience of responsibility, of being the guy that makes the tough decisions,
that he does not have an inkling of what it means to be president?

Ten Core Values of Britishness

In the aftermath of the London bombings, Londoners are doing a bit of thinking about
what Britishness means. They are, as radio host Dennis Prager would say, trying to get
a little clarity about what they are and what they believe in.
In The Daily Telegraph
they have taken the time to formulate and publish a list of ten core values that tell
what it means to be British. Here they are.

• The rule of law
  
• The sovereignty of Crown in Parliament, that is, monarch, Lords, and Commons.
  
• The pluralist state, equality before the law and tolerance for others.
  
• Personal freedom
  
• Private property
  
• Institutions, primarily non-coercive civil society
  
• The family
  
• History, teaching children about the glorious past
  
• The English-speaking world
  
• The British character
  

You can see that some people are getting serious about what to do about the terror war. What
they are turning to—and it is important to fully realize this—is the nation state.

There is a reason for this. After the family, the clan or tribe, the nation state is where we
belong. It cares about each of us, and stands as guarantor of peace and justice in a way that
a European Union or a United Nations does not.

Read the whole thing.

Will Conservative Movement Split over Mark Steyn?

As conservatives and Republicans try to come together to get Judge Roberts
onto the Supreme Court, squabbling in the ranks is threatening to reverse
the painfully won victories that conservatives have gained over the years and perhaps
even put the nomination in jeopardy.

At the center of the storm is the self-styled “global content
provider” Mark Steyn. This brilliant writer and controversialist
is proving to be a divisive influence on conservatives in the United States.

Writes Jonah Goldberg: “I hate him.”
And he’s not the only one. Here’s
John Derbyshire, inspiration for
Andrew Sullivan’s Derbyshire Award, on Steyn: “I H-A-T-E him.” Things are
getting so bad that if you Google up "mark steyn" and "i hate him" you’ll get 181 hits.

With this kind of dissension in the ranks it’s no wonder that the president’s legislative
program is languishing in Congress. Worse than that, lefty fashion editors are
smelling blood in the water and think they can get away with criticising
the seersucker suit worn by young Master Roberts at the announcement of
his father’s nomination. This outrage went almost unchallenged except by
Wes Pruden.
(Yah boo to grungy fashion editors, he wrote. Seersucker suits are back, and white suits
can’t be far behind.)

Something must be done. It’s time for Karl Rove’s White House operation to put a stop to the
backbiting and petty sniping.

What, you might ask, are all these conservatives riled up about? Jonah
Goldberg was upset that Mark Steyn turned out to be the best dancer on the recent
National Review British Isles cruise, and John Derbyshire was upset that
not only was Mark Steyn a “genius of opinion journalism” but also
seemed to know everything about 20th century Broadway and the details of
everything written by Frank Baum and every stage adaptation of Baum’s Oz books.

For years, conservatives have accused liberals of practicing the politics
of envy. Seems like liberals are not the only ones into envy.

Come on chaps. We can do better. Let’s moe on and put Roberts over the top.

Let's Talk Economic Horse Sense

You economic Neanderthals that still think, like the Spanish of 1600 and the French of 1700 and the Germans of 1870 and the Smoots and Hawleys of 1930, that trade surpluses are good and trade deficits are bad shouldn’t read this analysis of the revaluation of the Chinese Yuan by John Tamny.

You won’t want to read that the trade figures are meaningless since, as the great Bob Bartley once said, the trade figures always balance. Ludwig von Mises said it better by writing that the balance of payments is always in balance. You won’t want to think that trade warriors like Senator Smoot Schumer and Senator Hawley Graham are always (and always have been) the tool of special interests that want the government to protect their rents.

Because here’s the bottom line on revaluation of the Yuan:

Assuming revaluation succeeds in making Chinese exports more expensive, the broad American population will lose twice: first in seeing their buying power reduced, and second in the necessary loss of productivity that always results when nations don’t take advantage of the economy-boosting division of labor. Those who doubt the latter point need only study the relative employment rates of countries with open versus closed markets.

The challenge of a surging China is not that it takes American jobs. Of course it takes American jobs. “They” are always taking American jobs. That’s how a growing economy works. Millions of jobs get lost and millions of jobs get created. A hundred years ago, “they” took away all the American jobs on the farm. Forty years ago “they” started taking away the jobs of good unionized factory workers. The result? Today
America has more jobs than ever.

The challenge for the United States is that if we want to remain the top dog in the world economically we have to make higher value products and do higher valueservices than the the rest of the world, from China to India to Old Europe. That, of course, is hard work, and not just hard work but smart work, which
is even harder.

Let us not forget, already, the last time that we jawboned a foreign country into revaluing its currency upwards. It was at the Plaza Accords in 1985. The Japanese were bullied into revaluing their currency upwards and ended up screwing up their economy for twenty years. They are only just beginning to emerge from the mess. And remember the great stock market crash of 1987 when the Dow lost 25 percent of its value in a single day? That happened the “Monday after Treasury Secretary James Baker talked down the dollar on the Sunday morning talk shows.”

All we Americans need to think about is how to create and grow businesses that meet and beat the competition. Everything else will take care of itself.

Organized Labor Split

Today the Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union announced their
decision to leave the parent AFL-CIO, reports
The New York Times.

Their action symbolizes the split in approach to the deployment of union power. The
AFL-CIO wants to spend money on politics. The breakaway unions want to focus on
organizing.

The breakup also illustrates the split personality of labor unions ever since their
modern emergence in the nineteenth century. Were they to be activist organizations
agitating for social gains in the political realm or were they self-help organizations
dedicated to helping people on the ground.

The truth is that unions are mostly about politics. The Anglosphere entered the
industrial era with a common law tradition that disapproved of “combinations”
in restraint of trade. It took sympathetic public opinion and positive law to
change this and to award organizations of working men the legal privilege
to do what employers were forbidden to do: conspire in a cartel against the
consumer.

Still, the American labor movement remained mostly a working-class movement
right through most of the twentieth century under the leadership of men like cigar maker
Samuel Gompers and plumber George Meany. Unlike the union movement in Europe,
American union leaders kept the middle-class socialists out of their movement
and thus kept a certain distance from politics.

Today, of course, as private sector union membership has declined to 8 percent
of the labor force, the character of unions has changed. They are mainly
associations of government workers that work with Democratic politicians to
increase government spending in return for votes, wages, tenure, and pensions. The breakaway
unions are private sector unions; they have a different agenda.

From the conservative perspective it is probably a good idea for the public
sector and private sector unions to separate. It makes it easier to attack the
AFL-CIO unions as greedy tax-eaters.

Spengler Breaks Harry Potter Spell

We’ve all learned to love Harry Potter, the teenaged wizard who has taught a generation of children
to read.
Spengler
begs to differ. He does not see a harmless lovable fuzzball; he sees decline and decadence. He sees readers
submitting to a philosophy that says you can be special by remaining just who you are.
“Harry (like young Skywalker) draws his superhuman powers out of the well of his ‘inner feelings.’”

But this gets it all wrong, complains Spengler.

The spiritual tradition of the West, which begins with classic tragedy and
continues through St Augustine’s Confessions, tells us just the contrary, namely, that one’s
inner feelings are the problem, not the solution. The West is a construct, the result of a
millennium of war against the inner feelings of
the barbarian invaders whom Christianity turned into Europeans.

The great heros of western literature learned that they needed to change. Elizabeth Bennet needed
to overcome her pride, “Dickens’ Pip must look past the will-o’-the-wisp of his expectations; Mann’s Hans
Castorp must confront mortality; Tolstoy’s Pierre must learn to love.”
And Goethe’s Faust must also transform his character. “Failure to correct defining flaws, of course,
leads to a tragic outcome, as in Dostoyevsky or Flaubert.”

This being Spengler, you expect the appeal to Pope Benedict XVI, late Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, and you
are not disappointed.

Of course, Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker are merely going with the Zeitgeist, and its peculiar
corruption of the German cult of creativity that leaves out the theme of preparation and merely focuses
on the Aha! moment of impulse.

That is the problem.
All real creators know that creativity is a matter of work, graced perhaps
with a single gift of epiphany, and often paid for by years of unrequited labor. Potter and
Skywalker are telling us a lie.

Hospice Movement Founder Dies

Sometimes the important news is not too important. Sometimes it ought to
take a back seat to the really important stuff, the stuff of life and death
that we ignore in favor of the ephemeral and the titillating.

On July 14,
Dame Cicely Saunders
died aged 87. She was the “Visionary founder of the modern hospice movement who set the highest standards in care for the dying.”

She found her metier when caring for

a dying patient, David Tasma, a refugee from the Warsaw ghetto, whom
she met on her first rounds as an almoner at St Thomas’s. He was a friendless waiter
with no family, and there was no consolation for him except in the love which she discovered
to be within her reach. It was then that she saw how the pain of cancer could be tamed by modern
drugs and that unavoidable distress could be made tolerable by a form of care that
ranked the physical and spiritual needs of the patient together.

Dame Cicely was a Briton of the old school, “a charismatic grande dame
with strong values and a great talent for leadership” who became an Evangelical Christian in
her young adulthood
in the years immediately after World War II.

Go ahead. Read the whole thing. It is the story of a remarkable life.

More Confusion over Evolution

Frederick Turner returns to the Evolution v. Intelligent Design debate with an
article to remind us that evolution has been proved.
Lots of people are
weighing in with their own takes.

Well yes, evolution has been proved, more or less. It’s true in the way that the theory
of the triune brain is true. It’s a good way of referring to a very complicated
business, the development and transformation of life forms. But, just as the
theory of the triune brain gets unsatisfactory as you get closer to the brain and
start to differentiate brain stem, mid brain, and cortex into a bunch
of different organs, the idea of evolution starts to get pretty complicated as
you get into details of the biology.

But the argument isn’t really about this theory or that theory. It is really
a fight to define what it all means, and who gets to define it for
our generation. But all the fighting obscures the awful truth. The more we
learn about ourselves and about the universe, the more we extend our knowledge and develop the sciences the more puzzling the whole
thing becomes.

We are still asking: What’s the point of it all? And the truth is: We just don’t know.

What's It Really Like in the Academy?

We’ve all heard the horror stories about the intellectual left-wing terrorism in the nation’s
universities, but still wonder: Is it really like that?
Writer Steve Salerno
has just left the academy after a sojourn teaching magazine
journalism, and he should know.

What is it really like? It’s more sad that bad, with minds stuck in the past and mindless
protection of the status quo. Money graf:

Contrary to popular opinion, a surprising degree of free speech flourishes
on today’s campuses. Trouble is...
Faculty have few qualms about socio-political evangelism — which, put more bluntly, means they’re
not sheepish about bullying any skeptical students into submission. I met a number of professors
in political science, history, and the so-called “diversity disciplines” who upheld their private
beliefs as empirical truths. Therefore, they felt entitled to grade based at least in part on the
degree to which a given student accepted their wisdom. (After all, students who oppose affirmative
action or U.S. “imperialism” can’t be thinking very clearly, can they?) The spirit of open inquiry
that scholars like to tout in their self-congratulatory journals simply did not exist on the campuses
where I worked. A student who tilted right,
or failed to tilt visibly left, invited academic reprisals.

If I were an academic, I’d be worried. Not because I feared that some day evil Republicans
would come and take my job away and put a stop to all this, but because this sort of in-bred producer cartel is death to creativity
and life, and it is a short ride to irrelevance.

For over two hundred years, people everywhere have accepted that a youth spent in formal
education is the sine quo non of a productive life. But is it? Books like The Power of
Productivity by William W. Lewis suggest that education may be a lot less important than we imagine. Illiterate
Mexican construction workers in Houston are still four times as productive as illiterate Brazilian
construction workers in Sao Paolo.

Suppose
we reduced education to the basic work of literacy and numeracy and put kids to work instead of
institutionalizing them from K thru whenever? We could, you know. The reason we have laws
against child labor is that adults don’t want to have to compete against children. And if
we pruned the education system we could save, out of the total education bill of $750 billion...
well what? $250 billion? $500 billion? And, that wouldn’t be the full extent of the savings.
The kids would be working for a living, paying taxes, and all.

And best of all, we wouldn’t have as many Angry Left professors eating their heads off on our dime.

Can't Wait for Single Payer Health Care?

As you’d expect, after 60 years Britain’s single payer health care system, aka
the National Health Service, is working like a champ. Not.

Britain’s Panorama program sent an undercover nurse to a Brit hospital
and what they found wasn’t very pretty. Reports
Julie Wheldon
in the Daily Mail:

Miss Haywood and undercover reporter Shabnam Grewal,
who delivered food and drink to patients, found:

• An 82-year-old woman dying of cancer who was left in
  almost constant pain because nurses were regularly late giving her
  morphine.
  
  
• Another woman with an infection who was left for
  almost nine hours without fluids and lying in urine because
  staff failed to fix a catheter.
  
  
• An 86-year-old with cancer who did not eat because no one was
  there to help feed her. She died alone with no one even noticing.
  
  
• Food that was thrown away because nurses were too busy to feed
  patients. And nurses eating patients’ food.
  

The hospital, which has the lowest rating of zero stars
and an £8million deficit, had already received a number of
complaints about care on an acute medical ward when filming started.

Sounds great. Let’s copy their system in the US! (Tip to
James Bartholomew.)

Democrat SCOTUS Agenda, Defending Their Benefits

Radio host extraordinaire
Hugh Hewitt
had a grand old time Wednesday making fun of Sen. Barbara Boxer’s (D-CA) remarks
about the Roberts nomination. He likes to joke about her limited mental capacity. As a lawyer and
a former White House aide, maybe he’s got the right to do so.

But let us be serious
for a moment. The advantage of politicians that cannot keep too many thoughts in their heads is that
they give us the straight scoop. And Senator Boxer tells us very clearly what she believes and what
she fears in the slow conservative takeover of the court.

The first thing to notice is the expansive list of issues that Boxer feels that the Court is there
to decide. Said
Boxer:

Judge Roberts could go down the same independent, non-ideological road
as Justice O’Connor, or he could join with the right-wing block on the Court which has
consistently expressed the belief that a woman’s right to choose isn’t guaranteed, nor is
the federal government’s ability to protect workers, the environment, and a family-friendly workplace.

Senator Boxer went on to complain that the President had made a “ground-breaking appointment, you know, of a woman, of a minority,”
and went on to talk about how young girls used to ask her how they could get to where she was, how they
could make it in a man’s world.

Senator Kerry, of course, is smoother. He felt that

the Senate must learn whether [Roberts] has clear consistent principles upholding Constitutional
standards like civil rights and the right to privacy in Roe v. Wade.

We know what they want. They want the Supreme Court to defend the high tide of the liberal agenda, at
all costs, whatever the American people think, and whatever the American people want.

Some of us believe that the job of the Supreme Court is to decide constitutional questions, and that
the big problem with recent court jurisprudence is its appetite for getting involved in
issues that are not strictly constitutional. By deciding issues on constitutional grounds it
elevates them into constitutional issues, and removes them from the arena of normal
legislative action.

Government is a blunt instrument, the agent of force and compulsion. The wise man resorts to
government with hesitation. It has turned out that the Supreme Court has become the bluntest instrument
in the tool cabinet. Its headline decisions on race, abortion, school prayer, and property rights over the past
half century have not settled
questions but created new political movements instead. A court decision that aims to make a big splash, especially
when it conjures new constitutional principles out of thin air, reflects the decay of the aristocratic
branch of government into mere oligarchy. It is not government by the best, but government by the few.

If you want to settle things, have an election.

Some of us believe that this habit of the Court to interfere in political questions is one of the driving forces
in the culture war. Some of us also believe that this habit has been a boon to
the conservative movement and the Republican Party as each liberal “social gain” decided
by Supreme Court fiat has driven a new platoon of Democrats out of the party and eventually into the
Republican Party.

When Men Buy and Sell Women

In the regions of China bordering on North Korea men are now buying and selling
North Korean women like chattels,
Donna M. Hughes reports.

Women and children are increasingly the majority of refugees
crossing the river into China. If they can locate a friend or relative’s
house, they have a chance at finding a safe haven. But if the ethnic
Korean Chinese traffickers find them first, they are abducted and sold,
either to men as informal wives or concubines or to karaoke clubs for
prostitution. Their price and destination are determined by their age
and appearance... Kidnapping and trafficking have
become common ways that Chinese men acquire women.

The reason that these women can be victimized is that they are illegal immigrants
into China and thus have no legal rights. If found by the Chinese police they are
sent back to North Korea and imprisonment or worse.

We in the United States are arguing over a Supreme Court nomination in
which the issues are, to be frank, marginal, probably no more extreme than a
reversal of Roe v. Wade that would send abortion back to the states. I.e., in the
worst case for liberals, they will be able to construct their own abortion
laws in their blue-state redoubts instead of relying the U.S. Supreme Court to
do it for them.

But on the borders of China and North Korea, in the twilight of the Kim dynasty
the issue is life and death. It is about people migrating away from their homes
and their relatives into a lawless, stateless existence where they become
prey not to the “robber barons of the mountain passes” that liberal hacks conjure out of nothing
to stigmatize creative businessmen, but real robber barons robbing, killing, and enslaving vulnerable
people desperately searching for simple survival.

We can see, when viewing people in extremis, that government and law
are not mere questions of narrative and power. Settled government and the rule
of law really do make people safer and, most important of all, protect women
from sexual predation.

Can we agree that the first duty of government is to protect women
from sexual predation?

Roberts Nomination: Strategery at Work

The first reactions to the nomination of Judge John G. Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court indicate
that the Bush Administration has thought long and hard about court nominations. Roberts is young, brilliant, boringly
straight arrow, and has only been on the bench for a year and a half. Thus
Charles Hurt forecasts an
easy nomination process, and
John Podhoretz evaluates him as suitably boring.
As the nomination process starts let us conduct a quick tour d’horizon.

Grand Strategy We want liberals to abandon their living constitution doctrine. They have
developed this doctrine over the last half century because they have come to rely on the Supreme Court to rule
in favor of their educated elite agenda. We want to change their minds. We want them to
see the constitution as a bulwark against the evil right-wing agenda. They will start to change their
minds when a conservative court starts goring their oxen. Putting a conservative on the court hastens
the day when they will opportunistically discover the virtues of a “dead” constitution over
a living one.

Strategy We want a court that has a smaller appetite for power, that does not seek, like
the Massachusetts High Court, to be out there on the cutting edge of societal evolution. In that sense
Roberts appears to be a good choice. He appears to be a work horse, not a show horse.

Tactics In the past few years as Microsoft has begun to focus above all on the issue of
security they have come to appreciate, like the military, the advantage of a small target. A small target
is more difficult to destroy. So they have begun to work to make Windows smaller, with fewer entrances and
exits. The Bushies have applied this understanding in the Roberts nomination. Roberts has spent most of his life litigating, so
he doesn’t have a long paper trail. Also, he appears to be a mild-mannered man without enemies. Writes
Podhoretz:

Roberts has, by all accounts, an astonishingly mild demeanor. He’s a churchgoing
father of adopted children, personally well-liked on all sides of the political spectrum —
evidently because he hasn’t given anybody a reason to dislike him personally.

Notice too that if this mild-mannered man gets confirmed without a big fight it cools down the whole
judicial nomination furnace. It will be harder for the liberal activists to blow their supporters up
into white heat for the next nomination.

No doubt Ralph Neas of the (liberal) People for the American Way and Nan Aron of the (liberal)
Alliance for Justice will deploy every argument they can against Roberts. But, as of today, it
looks like they have an uphill fight ahead of them.

American Buy Hybrids for Power

Here in Seattle just about every liberal in the city
is driving around contentedly in a Toyota Prius saving oodles of
gasoline with Toyota’s Hybrid Synergy Drive®. They have the same conceited look
on their faces as shoppers at PCC Natural Markets while they watch their groceries being
bagged into their own bags that they bring to the market. Not for them the evils of non-recyclable plastic sacks.

But all is not well in the hybrid car business. Most Americans buy hybrids not
for the gas mileage or to save the environment. They buy them for the extra power. That is what
Matthew L. Wald reports
in The New York Times.

Mark Buford just bought a hybrid Honda Accord. It’s the top of the line V6 Accord
and it gets about the same gas mileage as the four cylinder Accord costing $10,000 less.
Buford “liked the way that the electric motor on his new car kicked in early during acceleration.”
He

got just what he wanted from the Accord, a hybrid
with no sacrifices. “I wasn’t prepared to give up anything to `go green’ -
not performance, amenities, or space,” he said.

But guess what. Mark still gets the tax subsidy for buying hybrid. The national
nannies are not amused.

“The new ones are all being used for power,” said Kateri Callahan,
the president of the Alliance to Save Energy, a nonprofit advocacy group
based here.

Hybrids should be encouraged, Ms. Callahan said, because their
electric components some day could be useful in an all-electric car,
perhaps running on a fuel cell. But she added that the government
should be careful
about which hybrids it subsidizes through tax benefits.

Don’t you just love these activists that care so much about us, and only
want to force us to conform to their agenda in our own best interest?

A word to nonprofit advocate Kateri Callahan. If you want to be “careful” about something, the last thing
you’d do if you had any sense would be to get the government involved.
Let’s just call it
the “precautionary principle.”

Our Pals in India

It has taken too long, but now at last the United States and India are getting it on. Since
Indians are taking over the tech industry and the motel industry in the US, why not?
Bruce Fein makes the argument for closer ties as Indian Prime Minister Singh makes
a visit to Washington DC.

But the real measure of alignment between India and the United States is highways. And here there
is real progress. India is getting serious about building a world-class limited access highway system, as
this article reports. First up are limited
access highways linking the Golden Quadrilateral: Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkota.

Religion in Britain. It's There If You Look

The British are considered to be irreligious, with both the established Church of England and the Catholic Church
experiencing steady decline. But there is life in the world of religion, as
Danny Kruger reports from
Pontins, a British holiday camp where folks will be attending
“the annual evangelical jamboree organised by Holy Trinity, Brompton.”

Christianity in London radiates out in concentric black and white rings.
In the middle is Kensington Temple, near Notting Hill Gate, a vast Pentecostal congregation
of West Africans and Afro-Caribbeans led by a hyperactive former ballet dancer called Colin Dye,
who does the splits on the podium. A little further out are the posh white churches of central
London, like [Holy Trinity, Brompton].

In outer London are more huge black churches, some of them clearly crazy
but most safely orthodox. Beyond, round the M25, are the white suburban mega-churches
of Britain’s Bible Belt.

Mega-churches? In Britain. Well now. There’s more.

In black neighbourhoods, in particular, the church is perhaps the most
cohesive social agent there is, the one cultural force that keeps families intact and
steers young men into lives of responsibility and purpose.

As for rich whites like me, what is prompting the evangelical surge? It is partly the
churches themselves, which have shrugged off the flummery of established religion. Charles
Moore, on this page on Saturday, quoted John Buchan on radical Muslims: “They want to live face
to face with God without a screen of ritual and images and priest-craft.” So do we. The same desire
for integrity and openness that produced Protestantism in the first
place is stoking a new revival, casual in style but solid in substance.

A hundred years ago, Britain featured the muscular Christianity of Eric Liddell, the Chariots of
Fire athlete who perished in a Japanese internment camp in China in 1945. Two hundred years ago
the “posh whites” of the time got together in the Clapham Sect and helped end the slave trade. Two hundred and
fifty years ago the Wesley brothers brought Methodism and its simple message of “work all you
can, save all you can, give all you can” to British mechanics.

Stay tuned.

Kenyan: Stop the Aid to Africa!

Think for a minute about what aid does to Africa. If you send them free grain then
you put African farmers out of business. If you send them free clothes then you put
African garment workers out of work. That’s why the Kenyan economist
James Shikwati says: “For God’s sake, please just stop the aid.” Here is
how the distribution of free corn devastates Africa.

He cites the distribution of corn and clothes as examples
of “do-goodism” gone wrong, hurting those it sets out to help in an
endless circle of vicious venality. Corn arrives from highly subsidized
European and American farmers. African politicians take portions of it
to distribute to their constituents. What isn’t given away is dumped on
the black market, and sold at such bargain prices that an African
farmer can’t compete, so he puts down his hoe.

So it makes complete sense that empty-headed pop star celebrities and venal
welfare state politicians should be ganging up to double aid to Africa. It’s
a marriage made in heaven.

From the
viewpoint of the twenty-first century, we know now that the “well-meaning” welfare state politicians
utterly destroyed the little platoons of charity and self-help that sustained Europe
and the United States in the nineteenth century. They turned proud independence
into muling dependency. And rock music has never
pretended to be anything other than a direct attack on society as we know it.

Go on. Read the whole thing.

Guess What? Lefties Need More Campus Speakers

And you thought that the only way you could get to speak to America’s college students was
if you had impeccable left-wing credientials?

No. Wrong Again. Apparently the left really has a problem on campus countering the Young Americans for Freedom and so George Soros has launched a new speaker’s bureau. Writes Jason Mattera:

Campus Progress, a project of billionaire George Soros’s Center for American Progress (CAP), seeks to “empower a new generation of progressive leaders.”

Oh. Who would have thought it. Imagine that! Students at our nation’s universities are not getting
the straight story on progressive ideas, and so a new outreach effort is needed.

So Campus Progress had a national student conference at which the progressive Thomas Frank opined:

“They [Republicans] didn’t have any problem with Hitler, other than the fact that they thought he rocked.”

Oh good. Really advanced thinking here: the good old argument ad Hitlerum! Here’s another gem:

One young progressive asked how to campaign in the suburbs. He was not given an answer, but a specious sound bite. It’s difficult to campaign in those areas, said Ruy Teixeira, author of The Emerging Democratic Majority. “They are not our base — the white married couples who moved away from the cities to get away from minorities and smog.”

Wrong again, pal. David Brooks has written that white married couples move away from the cities
to get away from the poor and liberals. Now why would they do that? Is it because the liberals are impossible bossy-boots that cannot be happy unless they are using the poor as cats-paws to bully
the long-suffering middle class?

Slackers at the Office

American workers are slackers. We goof off to the tune of
“$759 billion a year in salaries for which [employers] receive no apparent benefit.”

Why do employers put up with it? Lawrence Henry thinks he knows.

I spent a year in an advertising agency where we worked very hard, especially hard on those four occasions a year when the company’s nationwide sales force got together and we had to create displays, training programs, and media material for the meetings. The creative director, a good guy, asked me what I thought would be the best reward for people who had put in long extra hours.

“Time off,” I said.

It was the one thing he couldn’t do. The company didn’t have the time to give. They could only take. And companies take a lot of people’s time.

Why is this? Why do companies have to have their people at the office all the time?

They do it because the alternative is too hard. Managers have only
so much management in them, and keeping track of a herd of people coming in and out at all times would
be too hard on them. So they keep people sitting around who don’t do too much work.

Remembering Dorothy Fields

Today is July 15, 2005, the centenary of Dorothy Fields. You know her, of course. She
wrote some of the greatest songs of the greatest song era in history. As in the Louis Armstrong
favorite:

Grab your coat and get your hat

Leave your worries on the doorstep

Life can be so sweet

On the Sunny Side of the Street

Or if you prefer there is the incomparable:

Someday, when I’m awfully low,

When the world is cold,

I will feel a glow just thinking of you

And The Way You Look Tonight.

They don’t make ’em like that any more and we know why. We don’t have innocent girls
with romance swirling in their heads any more. Instead we have Sex and the City
females who are welded to their cellphones and have a vocabulary anchored in “like” and “whatever.”

They are not women who fall in love; they are women who are “sexually
active.” What does that mean, you ask? It is liberal-speak for women
imagining they can live like men, treating their sexuality as a matter of getting laid. Sorry sisters, girls
have never felt like that. They can’t. That’s because sex is much bigger than the modern
concept of “an active sex life”. Sex is about generation, the next generation, and
the further you get from that truth, the less you will appreciate the songs
of Dorothy Fields.

Instead you will become the liberal who has made it a point never to have seen The Sound of Music.
There must be a lot of sophisticated liberals who have never seen The Sound of Music. Again
the reason is pretty simple. Liberals can’t deal with the hopelessly naïve Maria, the young girl that
just loves children and ends up snagging the fabulously rich guy just like a Jane Austen heroine. They want
irony.

They can have it. The rest of us want Dorothy Fields and “Big Spender.”

There is lots of stuff around about Dorothy Fields. You can start with
Mark Steyn’s article. Then there is a site in the UK
here. Then you can Google up more.

Thank You Mr. President

If you haven’t completely surrendered to the Plame Game, you’ll know that the feds just lowered
their
deficit estimate
for this year by $94 billion to $333 billion. Why did this happen? There were several
one-time-only factors, but the big reason is that non-payroll deduction tax collections have soared this
year. In other words, businesses and individuals are racking up higher profits and capital gains and
the federal government is collecting its share.

We conservatives know why this is happening. In 2003 the Congress passed the President’s program to
lower income tax rates and sharply lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains. The economy
immediately kicked into high gear and it hasn’t looked back since, even with sharply higher
energy prices. This effect is called
supply-side economics and it works every time it is tried.

Let us give thanks where it is due, to President Bush for pushing through the tax cut plan in the
face of implacable opposition from the Democrats.

We cannot know what would have happened to the economy if Vice-President Al Gore had been elected
in November 2000, but we can guess. The policies he would have chosen would have looked a lot more
like the macroeconomic policies of Old Europe, France and Germany. That means a swollen public sector, high
tax rates, high unemployment and very little economic growth.
Thank you Mr. President for sparing us from all of that.

Back in November 2000 we could not know whether the market crash of 2000 was another 1929 or not. But
we know now that it didn’t end up that way. And the best way to evaluate why we didn’t have a Great Depression
is to look at the mistakes
the government made in the years after 1929 and didn’t make after 2000. It didn’t bail out lots of
insolvent businesses. It didn’t enact a National Recovery Act to keep wages and prices above the market.
It didn’t allow banks to collapse and shrink the money supply. It didn’t pass a swingeing Smoot Hawley
tariff increase although it did pass a foolish tariff on steel imports. And it didn’t raise income tax rates
like Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt did.

We cannot know what a President Gore would have done, but we can guess.

Like I said, thank you Mr. President.

Understanding Rove and Plame

As you lightheartedly skim through important opinion pieces from good
conservative pundits like Ann Coulter,
some of you RMC readers may not yet understand the fundamentals of the blood-in-the-water
Karl Rove affair. You may not understand what it is all about.

It is quite simple. There is an eternal principle of American
politics that explains the whole thing.

Whenever a Democrat lies, a Republican must resign.

Remember John Kerry and his stories about the Swiftboats? It turned out that he misspoke
about a few things. The media decided that it was all the fault of the Swiftboat Vets and that they
ought to resign from campaigning.

Remember when Bill Clinton lied about sex? Before it was all over, a whole flock
of Republicans had to resign, beginning with Speaker Newt Gingrich and including Speaker
Bob Livingstone.

Before that, there was the Iran-contra affair. Remember that? The Reagan
administration was trying to stop the spread of communism in Central America and
the Democrats were trying to stop them with quasi-legal dodges like the Boland Amendment.
The Democrats were lying about the lefties in Central America and fainting over
poster girls with a questionable hold on the truth like Rigoberta Menchu. So a couple
of Republican White House aides had to resign.

Before than was the Vietnam War. Democrats lied about that, so Republican
President Richard Nixon had to resign. Nixon was double-damned, of course, because
he had helped expose the lies of Democrat Alger Hiss a generation before.

Get it? The kerfuffle about Karl Rove and the daring undercover CIA agent
Valerie Plame all makes sense now, doesn’t it.

And it is comforting to know how concerned Democrats have become about
preserving the anonymity of CIA agents.

Turner on Intelligent Design

RMC chappie Frederick Turner wades into the Intelligent Design debate and finds
both sides wanting (here).

The argument over evolution, Turner says, is important because of the way that it affects the
argument over the moral law, the foundation for the government’s law.

Does the theory of evolution make God unnecessary to the very existence
of the world? If there is no God, what authority, if any, guarantees the moral law of
humankind? These questions are crucial in the current controversies that are dividing the
nation. For just as our laws must be not for religious believers alone,
they must also be not for unbelievers alone either.

Although Turner accuses both sides, evolutionists and creationists, of intellectual dishonesty, the argument
is better understood as a case of trying too hard. Creationists are trying too hard to prove that
God exists, and evolutionists are trying too hard to prove that He doesn’t exist.

But the truth is—and it has been established for several hundred years now—that you can’t prove that
God exists. Nor can you prove that God doesn’t exist. This means that you cannot prove the need for a
divine moral law. Nor can you prove that law is whatever the secular elite says it is.

But when you
have chased religion out of the public square, what are you left with? Here Turner hits the crucial question:

If religion can be undermined in the hearts and minds of the people,
then the only authority left will be the state, and, not coincidentally, the state’s
well-paid academic, legal, therapeutic and caring professions.

What you get when God is dead is liberals legislating morality by calling it “health.”
What you are left with is a secular elite in love with its goodness and its power.

Even as we plumb deeper and deeper the depths of the atom and the universe we are still left with the eternal question:
what is the nature of the universe and what is its meaning, if any? Pending the definitive resolution
of these questions, we are left with faith.

Terrorists Born in Britain

Now that they know that the 7/7 bombers were native Britons of Pakistani descent—and
that one of them was an elementary school teacher—the Brits are sobering up fast. They can’t
just blame the whole thing on the Yanks or the Iraq War or a bunch of bored rich Saudis. The bombers
were Brits, children of the welfare state, for gosh sakes. Writes Conservative Member of Parliament
Boris Johnson:

They were our very own. They were as British as a wet bank holiday.
They were as British as Tizer [a Brit soda-pop], and queues and Y-fronts and the Changing of the Guard,
and the chips that made them what they were. They were born in British maternity wards,
and attended by every comfort that the state could give.

They went to British primary schools and learnt about Britain from British teachers...

Er, yes. Maybe that welfare state childhood, culminating in several meaningful years in a bog-standard
comprehensive school, had an effect on the young lads.

In an editorial The Daily Telegraph
gets serious and lays out a line in the sand. It starts with the rule of law.

First, we believe in the rule of law, meaning the successive
judgments of the common law and the statutory declarations of Parliament.
Those who wish to establish Sharia law in Britain are irreconcilables.

And there are several other points that define “irreconcilables.” They include people
who don’’t accept the nation state, or the secular state, or “the separation of the things of Caesar
and the things of God.”

This is going to be interesting to watch.

How Much Publicity on Terror is Enough?

Some conservatives are outraged that the MSM isn’t devoting enough attention to the
London terror bombings of 7/7.Tony Blankley notes
the outrage of Michael Savage that by the weekend after 7/7 the MSM had switched their
attention from terror bombing to important matters like baby pandas, hurricanes, and the
breathtaking story of Karl Rove and the leak.

And of course there was also the scandal of the BBC emptying its coverage of the
emotional word “terrorist” half way through 7/7.

But is this a bad thing? The terror strategy requires high impact and relies
on western democracies cringing from media-fueled
sentiment and overreaction. It requires hitting the sweet spot between actions that
are ignored by the media and actions that spur the west to “do something,” the mid-point at which the west is
neither inattentive or angry, but just becoming more and more discouraged.

The purpose
of terror attacks in Iraq, for instance, is to create a Vietnam quagmire
effect and encourage the US political and media elite to withdraw “from a faraway country about which we know little” before the elected Iraqi government can
develop effective security services. President Bush seems to be trying to avoid
high expectations about Iraq. No doubt he wants to avoid media and Democrat-fueled discouragement frenzy.
Maybe the best way to achieve this is to get terror attacks off the front page
as soon as possible.

Bottom line on all this is always the reaction of the stock markets. And hyper-optimist
Larry Kudlow is
crowing that the markets are already up after 7/7, telegraphing that the markets
think that 7/7 was not going to impact global growth.

As I write here, the Islamic terrorists can probably best be
compared to other movements of desperate young men like the Ghost Shirt movement
of the Plains Indians and the Chinese Spirit Boxing movement of late nineteeth century.
They were no match for the global capitalist juggernaut.

Breaking the SoSoc Ice Jam

It used to be called the Third Rail. That was when Democrats believed that
they could electrocute any Republican that touched Social Security. Now it looks
more like an ice jam on an arctic river. The two sides are straining mightily, the Republicans
to Do Something, and the Democrats to avoid doing anything.

Now some Republicans are
trying to finesse the politics of Social Security with a bill to stop the skimming of the Social Security “surplus,”
the difference between the amount the federal government takes in every year in FICA taxes and the
amount that it actually pays out in benefits to Social Security beneficiaries, and put it in
personal accounts for individual taxpayers. Peter Ferrara
has the details. The bill is sponsored in the House of Representatives by “James McCrery, Louisiana Republican, and Republican Reps. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin,
Clay Shaw of Florida and Sam Johnson of Texas,” and in the Senate by Jim DeMint of South Carolina.

The best thing is that it polls well, with the “public favoring it 59 percent to 37 percent.”

The Iraq Connection

The central argument against the Iraq invasion has been for some time that Iraq is a diversion in
the War on Terror. The main front was in Afghanistan and in breaking up terror cells around the world, but not in
Iraq.

Of course, nobody has said that the 9/11 attacks were planned in Saddam’s office in Baghdad, but the
evidence is pretty clear that Saddamite Iraq had allied itself with Al Qaeda and saw itself as part of
a coalition of forces opposing the power of the United States.
Stephen F. Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn ventilate some of the intelligence that the MSM
would rather not talk about that makes it pretty clear that there were relationships between Iraq and
Al Qaeda.

We have been told by Jordan’s King Abdullah that his government
knew Abu Musab al Zarqawi was in Iraq before the war and requested that the former
Iraqi regime deport him. We have been told by Time magazine that confidential documents
from Zarqawi’s group, recovered in recent raids, indicate other jihadists had joined him in
Baghdad before the Hussein regime fell. We have been told by one of those jihadists that he was
with Zarqawi in Baghdad before the war. We have been told by Ayad Allawi, former Iraqi prime
minister and a longtime CIA source, that other Iraqi Intelligence documents indicate bin
Laden’s top deputy was in Iraq for a jihadist conference in September 1999.

It is stretching credibility to imagine that al Zarqawi was operating in Iraq without the approval
of Saddam. More interesting is the question whether the Baathist opposition is still allied with
al Zarqawi or whether they are now ready to do a deal that gets them out of the uncomfortable
business of civil war and back into the political scene
in post-Saddam Baghdad.

Rich Republicans? Not Yet

What about that old chestnut that the Republican Party is the party of the rich and the
Democratic Party is the party of the poor? Is it true? Well, not exactly.

According to recent census numbers, the Democratic Party is the party of the rich and the
poor. But where does that leave Republicans?

It leaves them with everyone else, and that is a majority of Americans. The Republican Party is
the party of the aspiring or maybe, more exactly, the party of the perspiring. Democrats are people
who get their income from trust funds and from government funds. Republicans are people who work for
a living. That is why 97 of the 100 fastest growing counties in the US voted for President Bush in 2004.

Read the whole thing and
find out what is really the matter with Kansas.

In "Eurabia," The Euros will be the Jews

The piercing mind of
Mark Steyn
sees irony and more ahead in what he calls the “Israelification
of Europe.” The fight over Israel is an argument to see which culture
shall hold sway over Palestine, the Israeli or the Islamic. In Europe
they decided some time ago that Israelis were occupiers
and Palestinians were helpless victims. For the Euros that legitimated
the decision of the Palestinians to use terror to publish their victim status.

Thinking ahead, Mark opines that it won’t be long until “wily Islamic leaders
in the Middle East will embrace the cause of the rights of European
Muslims in the
same way that they claim solidarity with the Palestinians.” So what will
the Euros do then, when they become the Jews?

Some people might say that it will serve them right after all the centuries
of anti-Semitism. More likely, though, “some people” will be calling on the United States
to pull
Europe’s chestnuts out of the fire. Again.

Enthusiastic Christianity? In London?

It’s not just Al Qaeda that is taking over in London. At the Dominion Theatre in the London theater
district is Hillsong, an enthusiastic church for twenty-something Brits who are in to
“praying and swaying.” And they push contributions:
“God wants to give you great riches, [they’ll] say, but you’ve got to prove
first that you’re willing to give to Him.”
Mary Wakefield is not amused.

It’s what I assumed I’d never see in England, the full-on, Texas-style health and wealth gospel with all the trimmings:
plastic cash buckets, talk of leadership and empowerment.

Didn’t you know darling? Sociologist Rodney Stark has found that high-cost churches are also
high-commitment churches.

What Will the Brits Do Next?

Everyone is hanging out the British Union Jack today
in solidarity with our British
friends after the Tube Tragedy on 7/7, and so we should. But we’d better not expect
the Brits to be sticking their necks out any more in the War on Terror. Actually,
as official pessimist John Derbyshire suggests, we
won’t really have a real war on terror until a western city gets hit by
a nuclear device. Only then will things get “tribal.”

Ever since World War I the Europeans have believed in appeasement
and a quiet life guaranteed by the welfare state. The British got tricked into
going the distance in World War II and they won’t make the same mistake again.
And they have developed a good expertise in appeasement in their dealings with the
IRA.

The excellent Mark Steyn
agrees. The British government. Tory and Labour, did a real
appeasement job on the IRA—after all, who really cares who governs Northern
Ireland? Bottom line for Steyn:

This is the beginning of a long existential struggle,
for Britain and the West. It’s hard not to be moved by the
sight of Londoners calmly going about their business as usual
in the face of terrorism. But, if the governing class goes about
business as usual,
that’s not a stiff upper lip but a death wish.

The New York Times’s man Thomas Friedman
reminds the moderate
Arabs that this is their problem. Hardly, old chap. They will be saying that
they really don’t have a dog in this fight.

But the wise Lee Harris thinks that we are in a blood feud. Our Islamicist
adversaries do not think in terms of the Clausewitean decisive battle but in
punishing the West for its insults and its crusades.

For what it is worth Thomas Sowell, in his Race and Culture trilogy, observed that the immigrants
that struggled to thrive in the United States were those who had not known law and self-government
and who had lived in a culture of force and feud. But, of course, every immigrant wave thus
far ended up assimilating to the American Way of law and self-government. Even the Hatfields and the McCoys got over
their blood feud and moved to the suburbs.

Even Saudis Don't Like Saudi Government

Those of us that worry about the Saudi monarchy and its extremist Wahhabi ideology have company. The
inhabitants of Saudi Arabia. Most of the Saudis think of the ibn Saud family as oppressors and Saudi
Arabia as an empire.

Frontpagemag’s Jamie Glasov
interviews John R. Bradley, author of Saudi Arabia Exposed:
A Kingdom in Crisis. Saudi Arabia is not exactly the monolithic fundamentalist state
we’ve been told about.
The people of Saudi Arabia have been

historically very resistant to Al-Saud-Wahhabi hegemony. In the formative years of
the 1920s, when these regions were being conquered by the Al-Saud and Wahhabi zealots, there
were at least 26 major rebellions, and one historian says as many
as 400,000 rebels resisting the Al-Saud forces were put to the sword.

They remember their local histories and
“see their country as an empire whose various regions were conquered and
are still ruled over by this alien royal
family, who use the Wahhabi ideology to oppress them.” The Saudi people are waiting for the
chance to get out from under the yoke of their Saudi oppressors.

Pitch Perfect Blair on London Terror Blasts

On the day that the terror war comes to London Tony Blair hits exactly the right note:

I think we all know what they are trying to do.
They are trying to use the slaughter of innocent people to cow us,
to frighten us out of doing the things that we want to do, trying
to stop us from going about our business as normal, as we are entitled to do
and they should not and they must not succeed.

and also:

It is important, however, that those engaged in terrorism
realise that our determination to defend our values and our way of life
is greater than their determination to cause death and destruction to
innocent people in a desire impose extremism on the world.

Whatever they do it is our determination that they will never succeed
in destroying what we hold dear in this country and in other civilised
nations throughout the world.

We all send our thoughts and prayers to the British on this day of outrage.

More Money to Fight Aging?

The biogerontologists, the scientists of aging, are worried.
“Public funding for ageing research is far lower than it should be.”
And Instapundit Glenn Harlan Reynolds
seems to agree. The problem is that most people believe that “aging is not a disease”
when plainly, writes Reynolds, any visit to a nursing facility will show you that it plainly is.

Aging is a disease, a disorder, a killer. We should be doing something about it.

You would think that this is an area where the environmentalists would have a lot to say. Forget about
global warming, species extinction, biodiversity, and the precautionary principle. If humans
start meddling with the natural human life expectancy, all bets are off. But the enviros seem to have
other fish to fry.

The essential keystone in the edifice of sexual reproduction is death. Amoebas, they say, never die. They
just go on budding. But birds and bees must die. They must die to clear their habitats for the
benefit of the young generation. If a redwing blackbird doesn’t weaken and die then there will never
be an opportunity for the up-and-coming redwing blackbirds to get access to the bulrushes that redwing
blackbirds use for breeding. The old guy will keep them out.

Many of the advocates for extending life expectancy are vigorous and ambitious over-achievers in their
thirties and forties. They experience extended life expectancy as a chance to write
more papers and do more research. But
most people are not like that. They work hard in their young adulthood not because they want to but
because they have to. Once their young are fledged and off the nest they choose to work less and relax more. But they
do not vacate the prime human breeding grounds of modern America, the sprawling suburbs of single-family homes. They stay
on in their huge suburban nests and expect the young generation to find new breeding habitat elsewhere.

But that is not the worst of it. In our welfare state people acquire a right
to support from the rest of society in their sixties
and that right extends until they die. The immediate effect of extending life expectancy will be to increase
the number of people that expect, by right, to be supported by the rest of society. The cost will be huge. It already is
huge.

The process of aging, what Reynolds and the biogerontologists want to call a disease, is nature’s little
plan for clearing the decks for the young generation. Every advance in biogerontology is clears away
another of nature’s strategems for ensuring that life goes on for the young generation.

The consequence of meddling with the basic proposition of sexual reproduction, that the wages of
sex is death, is bound to be huge. Has anyone thought about that in the biogerontology community?

Go Ahead, Make My Day

Everybody agrees that the current battles over judicial nominations are abominable.
Why can’t we all just get along?
Tony Blankley
shows how even a foot soldier in the judicial wars like Senator Joseph Biden (D-Del) can
can do his bit to poison the process by equating conservative principles with “ideology.”
But maybe the ruthless partisan attacks on conservative
judicial nominees by hard-left liberal interest groups like Ralph Neas’ People for the American Way
Foundation and Nan Aron’s Alliance for Justice
end up doing conservatives a favor.

The big problem that conservatives have complained about is not their ability to get conservatives
onto the courts but what happens to conservatives after they get there. Tom Bethell coined the
phrase “Strange New Respect” to symbolize how conservative judges would often submit
to the liberal line after a few years in Washington and how, sooner or later, some liberal pundit
would approvingly report on the strange new respect that the heavy hitters in the nation’s capital
had now come to hold for the former conservative
firebrand.

When you have to fight to get a nomination through the Senate, you create a band of brothers, you make
buddies out of the participants in the fight. And you chemically imprint into the nominee’s mind that
the opponents to your nomination are enemies that can never be trusted and that your supporters are
friends who will always be there to come to your aid.

So maybe Ralph and Nan are helping conservatives, after all. They are forcing conservative
nominees through a hell that will scar them for life, and will teach them to appreciate who their
friends are.

Don't Call Me Redneck

Economist and writer
Thomas Sowell has spent a lifetime trying to understand
the culture and history of the black people. So have
many others. Since Sowell is a black
conservative he has preferred not to look for explanation in all the usual places: racism, sexism,
imperialism, and classism. Instead he has developed intriging theories
about the different races and cultures of the immigrants that came to the
United States. Above all he wanted to know why his own people, brought in
chains to the Americas from West Africa, had fared so poorly.

One of his most trenchant findings is that the immigrants that did
best were the peoples that were literate and lived under law before
they came to the United States. The Jews are the prime example. They
vaulted in a single generation from being dumb immigrant Yids to pushy upstarts knocking
on the doors of WASPy Harvard.

But at the other extreme is the redneck culture of the American South, brought to America by immigrants
from the border regions of Scotland and Ireland peoples, who were raised
to a culture of force and feud, perpetually warring Hatfields and McCoys.
Sowell believes that Southern blacks have inherited this culture, even including
its characteristic English dialect—saying “ax” for “ask.”
This Southern culture that we call “redneck” was significantly different from the culture of the Northern whites.
The differences included “rates of violence, rates of sexual promiscuity, and — most explosive of
all — differences in intellectual development.”
As legatees of this cultural bequest twenty-first century blacks present a lower level
of intellectual development, just as Southern whites did in the nineteenth.

But lots of people are ashamed of their redneck roots and, writes Sowell, even
object to the title of his new book Black Rednecks and White Liberals.

Some whites in the South have reacted with resentment at
the thought that they are being stereotyped as rednecks while some blacks
resent anything
that suggests anything negative about themselves.

Good point. We wouldn’t want damage anyone’s positive self-esteem by suggesting that some people are descended from rural
lowlifes.

Steyn: Send Your Own Fokkin' Money, Sir Bob

It’s a little rich for pop star multi-millionaires to demand that rich-nation taxpayers
cough up and send money to Africa, says
Mark Steyn,
when they are sparing no effort to keep their money away from the tax
man.

Take the late Linda, Lady McCartney. Writes Steyn:

Seven years ago, you’ll recall, Sir Paul [McCartney]’s wife died of cancer.
Linda McCartney had been a resident of the United Kingdom for three decades but
her Manhattan tax lawyers, Winthrop Stimson Putnam & Roberts, devoted considerable energy
in her final months to
establishing her right to have her estate probated in New York state

Why would she do that? How about so she could avoid paying 40 percent in death taxes to
the British government.

That is 40 percent of $150 million, in case you were wondering. Savvy business operators, those
rockers and their expensive women. You might almost call them global multinationals, if it
weren’t such an insult. Much better to have the taxpayers save devastated
Africa than for them to
devastate their expensively crafted trust funds.

One in Ten Brit Kids Has Gun

In Britain, where guns are illegal, “one in ten teenage schoolboys
has carried some kind of gun in the past year, according to the largest study on
the impact of Britain’s firearms culture on urban youth.” That is the lede in a news report
in the London Times
on the Blair government’s new crime reduction bill.

Er, am I missing something here? “Britain’s firearms culture?” I thought the
British were a peacable people that didn’t have a gun culture, unlike the cowboy culture of the
United States, for example.

In fact, of course, modern Britain has a more violent culture than the United States, and
James Bartholomew, author of The Welfare State
We’re In, reckons he knows why. Violence and crime have escalated 2,300 percent in Britain in the
last century, roughly paralleling the growth in the welfare state. By the way, a hundred years ago
in Britain gun ownership was widespread and crime was rare. Today “many children
[blame] a growing sense of lawlessness on the need to carry a gun or knife in self-defence.
The most common reason was the fear of attack from other children.”

But the British government is pushing a Violent Crime Reduction Bill through Parliament.
It is “aimed at cracking down on the problem and giving teachers the
power to search pupils for knives.”

That should do it.

A Century of Helping Africa

That Charles Dickens was already able to satirize aid to Africa in Bleak House
in the person of Mrs. Jellyby, the woman who busied herself saving Africa while neglecting
her own household, ought to tell us something. The Live8 enthusiasts who entertained millions
over the weekend might be interested to know that Bleak
House was first published in 1853, one hundred fifty years ago.

Niall Ferguson
writes that the policy cocktail of “double aid,
drop the debt and make the trade laws fair” demanded by Bob Geldof will not do a thing to relieve the agony of Africa.
The top three problems “are in fact chronic misgovernment, recurrent civil war and the
high incidence of diseases such as malaria and Aids.”

There is a deep cultural reason why Africa cannot seem to rise above corruption and chaos, and
it was discussed in a remarkable article in 2003 by British psychiatrist and conservative writer
Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal. Here is the money graf where he speaks of his years
working as a doctor in Southern Rhodesia just before it became Zimbabwe:

The young black doctors who earned the same salary as we whites
could not achieve the same standard of living for a very simple reason:
they had an immense number of social obligations to fulfill. They were expected
to provide for an ever expanding circle of family members (some of whom may have
invested in their education) and people from their village, tribe, and province.
An income that allowed a white to live like a lord because of a lack of such
obligations scarcely raised a black above the level of his family.

In other words, Africans still live in extended families and clans where people are
expected to support and assist their blood relatives. When Africans obtain an education and
then a government position they are expected to spread the wealth among their relatives, who
would surely “have condemned them
for failing to obtain on their behalf
all the advantages their official opportunities might provide.”

We westerners are more selfish than Africans. Instead of helping our relatives we say screw them.
Let them get a job.

La Donna e Mobile

That’s Italian for girls just don’t like to bother their pretty little heads with
anything boring like consistency, and it’s presumably what
lawyers must have hummed as they pitched their Supreme Court
arguments to Swinging Sandy.

According to
Mark Steyn
the Sixties didn’t end when the Beatles split up. They just
kept right on swinging with Sandra Day O’Connor, the girl on the Supreme Court who just
couldn’t make up her mind one way or the other.

Now she’s leaving the court and liberals have decided they loved her for her independence.

Liberals Want Ideological Quotas on Supreme Court

Our beloved American liberals are nothing if not transparent. After introducing us to
the joys of racial quotas at the
university and gender quotas in the firehouse now they want to impose ideological quotas on the United States
Supreme Court.

But thanks to the piercing insights of postmodernism—another priceless gift to the world from
liberals—we can understand what they are about. They want to preserve their power.

Liberals understand that the best they can
hope for is to keep the ideological balance in the Court as it stands today, to elevate retiring
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to the status of a true conservative in the mold of Edmund Burke and to
create a conventional wisdom that a sharp shift to the right on the Court would be a betrayal of Burke’s
sacred memory. Thus
E.J. Dionne rhapsodises about O’Connor.

She likes narrow rather than broad rulings, and dislikes abstract theories.
She goes one case at a time.
She’s interested in particular facts, in particular cases.

Liberals who once exulted in the sweep of cosmic principle now appreciate
O’Connor’s feminine interest in
the close-at-hand “and her constant wrestling with small things.” They see her as a bulwark
against a revanchist conservative court that

will roll back the ability of elected officials to legislate in
areas such as affirmative action,
environmental regulation, campaign finance, and disability and labor rights.

It’s always comforting to read liberals misunderstanding what conservatives are about. What conservatives
are about in the question of the Supreme Court is not the ability of elected officials to legislate.
Conservatives understand that liberal elected officials live to enact comprehensive and mandatory federal programs
on everything except the behavior of liberals in the bedroom. They understand and accept that. What conservatives
want to roll back is the ability of unelected judges to legislate from the bench.

In the
last generation the courts have arrogated to themselves the right to legislate for the legislative
branch and administrate for the executive branch. They operate on the same basis as Justice O’Connor.
Her “one
clear judicial principle was that Sandra Day O’Connor
should get to decide all the important questions before the country.”
Conservatives think that this is wrong. It is wrong in the first place because the whole point of
a limited government with separation of powers is that the legislative branch legislates, the executive
branch administers, and the judicial branch judges—and not the other way around. It is wrong also
for a practical reason. When judges get things wrong, when they arbitrarily take abortion out of the
legislative arena thereby preventing an orderly compromise between the warring parties, or
when they decide to administer school districts and then screw them up worse that the already screwed-up elected officials,
what can the people do to redress their grievances?

Liberals fail to understand that their activist jurisprudence in the past
half century has done enormous harm to the nation and to the edifice of law and justice itself.
We can allow that their activism issued from a natural human impatience to sweep away the accumulation of oppression
and injustice, especially the shameful precipitate of Negro slavery.
But in this hankering for justice
liberal judges succumbed again and again to the temptation to put a thumb upon the scales of justice,
to make sure that
it came out with the right result. It was worse than a crime, it was a blunder, and
liberals have only just begun to pay for their world-historical
mistake.