Let's Wish Katie Couric Well

Conservatives are understandably a bit sour about the accession of Katie Couric to the news anchor position at CBS News.

While liberals are doubtless agog at the big “first,” the first woman ever to become a major solo news anchor, to us it’s just same-old same-old. Another liberal face gets to read the news at a liberal news desk.

Yes, there’s a long conservativev rap sheet on the “perky” Katie Couric, and Lowell Ponte is up to the challenge of reading it out in full.

But let us hear it for Katie. She’s a liberal feminist, and she has reached the peak of her profession. Good luck to her.

Anyway, the liberal slant of the news doesn’t come from the on-air talent, it comes from the news organization itself. CBS News is a liberal news organization and it ought to have a liberal on-air anchor. And as a liberal news organization it ought to be first to have a solo woman news anchor.

The problem with CBS News and with the rest of the liberal news media is highlighted by Michael Barone. If you were setting up the news media from scratch would you staff it with people so that 90 percent adhered to one political party and 10 percent to the other? Er, no, you probably wouldn’t. Unless you were like the broadcast news executive in this exchange:

"Doesn't the fact that 90 percent of your people are Democrats affect your work product?" I asked.

"Oh, no, no," he said. "Our people are professional. They have standards of objectivity and professionalism, so that their own views don't affect the news."

"So what you're saying," I said, "is that your work product would be identical if 90 percent of your people were Republicans."

He quickly replied, "No, then it would be biased."

Really, we Republicans and conservatives shouldn’t be discouraged by this. When our adversary displays such a staggering blindness, we ought to be able to exploit it, all the way to the presidency, to majorities in both houses of Congress, and even to the Supreme Court.

By the way, let us credit Rush Limbaugh for the sobriquet “perky.” Rush’s epithet perfectly describes the reality of Katie’s talent. It is her attractive, female, woman-next-door qualities that have made her a success. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—unless you are a liberal.

Mexico's Shame

We’ve heard from the illegal immigrants. We are hearing from our noble senators. And ordinary Americans can always call into their local talk-radio show to voice their opinions about immigration.

But what do ordinary Mexicans think?

The chaps at TCSDaily wondered that too, so they got middle-class Mexican Marvin Duran Rodriguez to tell his side of the story. He goes right to the heart of it.

Down here, the usually unspoken truth is that the daily emigration northward is a source of deep national shame that the country we love does not provide conditions wherein much of the underclass can afford adequate educations, medical care or even sufficient nourishment for their families.

It’s easy for Mexicans to blame US abundance for their scarcity, and they do, but still “more than four out of ten Mexicans admit that they would rather live among the 'gringo capitalists.'”

Duran worries that a reform of immigration would precipitate a crisis in the Mexican economy, a real threat when you consider how important remittances from Mexicans in the US to their families back home are to the Mexican economy.

Our politicians know how crucial remittances from your country are, and this gives you the leverage needed to convince the government of Mexico that it must make the structural changes, both in terms of anti-corruption measures and market reforms, that we need in order to join America as a true North American partner.

We must hope that President Bush is privately pushing for just that.

Suppose You Were an Illegal Immigrant in Mexico...

Many commentators are shocked at the inhumanity of illegal immigration and undocumented workers. Mexican immigrants, they complain, are subjected to indignities that have no place in a just society.

Quite so. But just read what Mexico wrote into its 1917 constitution on the matter of foreigners, as told by Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.. He’s reporting on a paper Mexico's Glass House (pdf) by J. Michael Waller.

In Article 33 of the constitution: "Foreigners may not in any way participate in the political affairs of the country." You mean, like take part in mammoth demonstrations and marches?

In Article 55 foreign-born Mexican citizens are banned from becoming federal legislators. Each must be “a Mexican citizen by birth.”

In brief, Waller writes:

• Immigrants and foreign visitors are banned from public political discourse.
  
• Immigrants and foreigners are denied certain basic property rights.
  
• Immigrants are denied equal employment rights.
  
• Immigrants and naturalized citizens will never be treated as real Mexican citizens.
  
• Immigrants and naturalized citizens are not to be trusted in public service.
  
• Immigrants and naturalized citizens may never become members of the clergy.
  
• Private citizens may make citizens arrests of lawbreakers (i.e., illegal immigrants)
  and hand them to the authorities.
  
• Immigrants may be expelled from Mexico for any reason and without due process.

It’s nice to know just how advanced and civilized we Yanks are, after all.

Islamists are Imperialists

Are the Muslim peoples helpless victims or ruthless imperialists? Should we treat their aspirations are worthy attempts to build an authentic Islamic culture or should we treat it as a naked imperialist quest?

In an article in Commentary Efraim Karsh reminds us that Islam has always organized itself upon the model of the desert raiding party, living off the loot seized from the victims of its military raids. Asserts Karsh:
Mohammed “devised the concept of jihad shortly after his migration to Medina as a means of enticing his local followers to raid Meccan caravans.”

This pattern was followed by all the inheritors of Mohammed’s mantle. It was always expansionist, always using the jihad as an excuse to colonize and expropriate other peoples’ wealth and labor. This “shameless exploitation triggered numerous rebellions throughout the empire,” rebellions that were ruthlessly and bloodily put down right down to the end of the Ottoman Empire.

The great question before us today is whether this ancient imperial model of conquest and plunder can work in the modern world, or whether the jihadists can make it work. We westerners like to think that the rise of commerce and industry in the last millennium has made the old imperial model obsolete.

To us the accusation made by Lenin was wrong. The British Empire was not an organ of exploitation but a commercial empire, one that added value and wealth to its possessions rather than looting them.

The same applies to the American empire. The post World War II American Empire has been above all a commonwealth of rising prosperity for all its peoples. It started first with the rebuilding of war-shattered Germany and Japan, continued by defeating the predatory Soviet Empire, and now has convinced the ruling elites of India and China that the way to the restoration of their ancient splendors is by emulation of the American economic and political model.

In the new model wealth no longer depends on the ownership of land and natural resources, and political and economic power no longer issues from conquest and plunder. It all grows out of the mutual interaction of billions of people serving each others’ needs in the global economy in the spirit of democratic capitalism. In fact the model of conquest and plunder now appears as a wealth-subtracting process.

The question for our time is therefore to consider whether the seven stage strategy and the primitive raiding parties of Al Qaeda can really upset the global commonwealth led by the United States, or is the whole project, in the words of Lee Harris, a “fantasy ideology?” Concludes Karsh:

Whether or not any such structure exists or can be forged, the fact is that the fuel of Islamic imperialism remains as volatile as ever, and is very far from having burned itself out. To deny its force is the height of folly, and to imagine that it can be appeased or deflected is to play into its hands. Only when it is defeated, and when the faith of Islam is no longer a tool of Islamic political ambition, will the inhabitants of Muslim lands, and the rest of the world, be able to look forward to a future less burdened by Saladins and their gory dreams.

We know we have the means to defeat it. The question is: Do we have the will to defeat it?

How to Tame Foxes

Foxes are pretty cute. Except that they are wild animals and do not relate well to humans.

In 1959 a Russian geneticist, Dmitri Belyaev, decided to do something about it. He took a bunch of wild foxes that he had captured from the wild and started to breed them.

Starting with a population of caged wild animals, he selected from each generation the puppies who were friendliest (or, initially, least hostile) to humans, breeding only from them.

After 35 generations of breeding he obtained nice tame foxes. Actually what he had was dogs.

The tamed foxes wagged their tails, whined for affection, were submissive, barked like dogs and their ears flopped.

Perhaps Dmitri could have saved himself the trouble. I was out for a walk yesterday and passed by a dog that looked very much like a fox.

There was one curious thing about the tame foxes.

[T]he tame foxes’ brains were smaller. Domestic animals generally do have small brains. On average, domestic dog, cat, sheep and pig brains weigh 25 per cent less than those of wild animals.

Similarly, the brains of women are about 100 grams lighter than the brains of men. Does this mean that women are “tamer” than men?

Who knows? The writer Terence Kealey is vice chancellor of the University of Buckingham in Britain, and he advises caution.

But what I do know is that such speculations are dangerous in the academic world. Lawrence Summers, the President of Harvard, lost his job when he conjectured that women might not scale the same intellectual heights as men, so for me to continue this theme might be perilous.

So you’ll have to work it out for yourself.

StrategyPage on Iraq Again

Last week we retailed a report from StrategyPage that proposed a rather different Iraq situation than the one we get from the frontline media.

Here is StrategyPage again, proposing that the Sunnis realize that they made a major strategic blunder in opposing the United States.

The Kurds and Shia Arabs have formed a national police force and army that is far more powerful than anything the Sunni Arab community can muster. Over the last year, Sunni Arabs realized that the police and army were in control of more and more Sunni Arab towns.

That’s nice: Sunni towns ruled by Shia/Kurd dominated security forces. The Sunnis must love that.

If this is true it means that the Bush strategy, to “stand up” the Iraqi security services, is working, and in the test of wills the changing facts on the ground are changing the minds of the Sunnis.

The alliance with al Qaeda was a disaster. These Islamic terrorists were obsessed with causing a civil war in Iraq, and they insisted on doing this by killing lots of Shia Arabs. The Sunni Arabs didn't want to kill lots of Shia Arabs, they wanted to rule them all once more.

This makes a lot of sense. It doesn’t do the Sunnis much good if they rile up the Shiites. They want the Shiites nice and quiet, just like they were in the “good old days” of Saddam.

The trouble with TV war is that the bombs and the mayhem are not where the action is. The place to be is a fly on the wall at the headquarters of the various combatants. What do they think is happening, and what do they plan to do next? But you never learn all that until long after the event.

Something to think about with regard to Al Qaeda. They want to take over the entire Middle East and make it into a new caliphate. That means that every present ruler and politician will be out of a job. We should understand, and maybe we do, that we Yanks and most Middle Easterners are on the same side on this one.

America's Triple Threat

We all know that Iraq is going down the tubes and that President Bush should be impeached for it. Still, we can take heart from the fact that it hasn’t actually gone down the tubes, not yet, although “everyone” is expecting it any day.

And we know all about the threat of immigration, the flood of immigration from Mexico, that amounts now to a fifth of the population of Mexico living and working in the United States. And there’s the implied threat of all those demonstrators organized by the Spanish media. Yes, Virginia, because demonstrators marching in the street are a show of force.

Now we have Dick Morris warning us that the upcoming presidential election in Mexico is likely to be won by lefty candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrado (AMLO), who is supported by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

Rumors have abounded for months that Lopez Obrador's campaign is getting major funding from Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. And last month Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz)., a moderate Republican, told several Mexican legislators that he had intelligence reports detailing revealing support from Hugo Chavez to AMLO's Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).

See what I mean. That would really be cool, wouldn’t it, to have lefty Latin American leaders from Cuba to Mexico to Venezuela to Peru to Bolivia.

Between them, Venezuela and Mexico export about 4 million barrels of oil each day to the United States, more than one-third of our oil imports. With both countries in the hands of leftist leaders, the opportunity to hold the U.S. hostage will be extraordinary.

What, we should worry? Only three threats to the peaceable hegemony of the United States? As Marine General Chesty Puller said: “We’re surrounded. That simplifies the problem.”