What's a Kerry?

A political gaffe, we know, is when a politician inadvertently tells the truth.

So what do we call Senator Kerry’s (D-MA) “Stuck in Iraq” comment?

You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. And if you don't, you get stuck in Iraq.

(Emphasis added.)

Because it’s not true. The men and women in the US Armed Forces are in fact better qualified and better motivated than the general population. Here’s a report from the Heritage Foundation on the subject. And if you still aren’t convinced you can always check over at Michelle Malkin’s blog as outraged family members of active-duty warriors write in.

So what do you call a gaffe that’s objectively false? A Kerry?

Still, at least Senator Kerry isn’t taking things lying down. First he issues a defiant written statement that includes these fine issue-oriented words:

I'm sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did," Kerry said. "I'm not going to be lectured by a stuffed suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium, or doughy Rush Limbaugh, who no doubt today will take a break from belittling Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's disease to start lying about me just as they have lied about Iraq. It disgusts me.

Now, according to Fox News, he has made a personal statement.

"I apologize to no one for my criticism of the president and his broken policy," Kerry told reporters in a press conference in Seattle. "My statement yesterday, and the White House knows this full-well, was a botched joke about the president and the president's people and not about the troops."

But here’s a warning to Republicans. Don’t you try the “botched joke” excuse. Only millionaire Democrat senators get to use it.

Senator Kerry is a gift that keeps on giving.

Bureaucracy Comes Before Kids' Reading

For over a century the education establishment has pushed the idea of “whole language” reading instruction. As Geoffrey D. Cronin writes, it is based on the idea that

learning to read is a natural progression, like learning to speak or listen.

And maybe the educationists are right, where their own children are concerned. You can easily imagine that nearly all children in literate, middle-class homes where there are lots of books will insist on being taught to read.

But the common school system was not set up for that. It was set up to educate and Americanize the millions of immigrants, especially dangerous Irish Catholic immigrants. The idea was to take the children of feckless and illiterate immigrants and make ’em learn to read and write and figure whether their parents liked it or not.

In fact, the government education system has always suffered from a kind of schizophrenia. The officials and activists in charge have never decided whether to make the schools respond to the needs of their own children or to the perceived needs of other peoples’ children.

So things kinda dragged along getting slowly worse.

After a century of failure with the whole language method, people finally started to take notice, and a program called Reading First was included in the No Child Left Behind Act.

It is actually having a positive effect.

The independent Center on Education Policy's Keeping Watch on Reading First finds that this initiative "is having a significant and positive impact on student achievement, and has led to many changes in curriculum, instruction and assessment." ... So far, the direct beneficiaries are 1.7 million students and 100,000 teachers, and the results are especially impressive, since Reading First money has only been aimed at the highest-poverty, lowest-performing schools. Further, the achievement gap is closing, as reading scores for black and Hispanic 9-year-olds have reached all-time highs.

You would know that a success like this would not go unpunished.

Now, after several years of political pressure from vendors of the failed programs of the past, comes a report from the Education Department's inspector general, blasting Reading First management for being too aggressive and stocking its review committee with SBRR advocates.

Oh no!

[T]he IG pores through a bunch of e-mails to try to show that Reading First's implementation was slanted toward certain program designs over others.

Good Lord! This is scandalous. We should start a government-wide campaign to stop the stacking of review committees with program proponents. As if. As if the whole idea of any government program is to push a particular agenda and impose it on the American people whether they like it or not.

Still, we shouldn’t get to worked up about this. Because education is not the job of the government. Education is the job of the family, and the government would do better to keep out of the way. Literacy in the United States was as high or higher 150 years ago before the government took control of education.

If we were really serious about education we would get the government out of it. Forever.

Why Won't They Tell Us?

Week in and week out Hugh Hewitt has MSM types on his program and he asks them about their political views. And week after week they refuse to tell him.

Look, said Hewitt today to Mark Halperin, author with John F. Harris of The Way To Win: Taking The White House In 2008, “let’s get our plumb lines down...
Did you vote for Kerry or Bush last time around?” Blah, blah, blah, responds Halperin:

So I don’t discuss my political views. I don’t discuss — I will say, somewhat controversial in the minds of some, I don’t vote, because I think that just opens up the question of how can I say I’m being objective, and fighting for truth, if I’m making a decision about who to vote for in a presidential race.

Later on Hewitt returns to the fray, getting Halperin to agree that it would be improper for a journalist to report on a business in which he had an investment. Then what is different about reporting on an issue in which you are “invested?”

I work very hard to take whatever beliefs I have, and bend over backwards to make sure that no one is treated unfairly by coverage that I impact.

Of course, and so would any man. But the reason we have conflict of interest rules in reporting on business is that, where money is concerned, you can’t be too careful.

If journalism is as important as we are led to believe, then surely we can’t be too careful about the appearance of fairness.

If a newspaper covered global warming, for instance, we would want to know that they had a balanced team working on the project. So that the enthusiasm of one member would be checked and balanced by an opposing enthusiasm.

So how can we trust journalists if they won’t tell us about their political “enthusiasms?”

The Party of the Rich

We all know that the Democratic Party is the party of privilege. That is to say, Democrats believe that people cannot survive in the world without special privileges granted by the government, whether it is minimum wages, tenure for professors, civil service exemption from the employment-at-will contract, or economic regulation.
But now we must face the fact that the Democratic Party is just flat-out the party of the rich. Read what Peter Schweizer has to say. Let’s lay it out in bulleted form.

• “Thus far in 2006, 17 of the top 25 contributors to 527 advocacy groups are funding liberal/Democratic causes, including liberal billionaires George Soros, and Peter Lewis.”
  
• In 2002, people who gave a million dollars or more “gave $36 million to the Democrats and only $3 million to Republicans, a 12:1 ratio.”
  
• In 2000, “lawyers gave $182 million (75 percent to Democrats) and Hollywood donated $32 million (70 percent to Democrats).”
  

Of course, eevil Big Oil gives about $25 million a year, “80 percent of it to the GOP.” That is almost as much as Hollywood gives to Democrats. Outrageous.

Then there are the rich Democratic office holders. And it’s not just rich Ted Kennedy we are talking about.

• The United States Senate, we know, is full of millionaires. “Of the five U.S. senators worth more than $25 million (John Kerry, Herb, Kohl, John Rockefeller, Dianne Feinstein, and Lincoln Chafee) according to Roll Call, only Chafee is a Republican.”
  

And some Republicans are unwilling to consider Lincoln Chafee as a real Republican, given his liberal voting record.

You can look at it this way. The Democratic Party is the party of the rich and the poor, people who don’t need, or don’t expect the economy to work for them.

The Republican Party, on the other hand as Camille Paglia puts it, is centered on “small-businessmen and very practical people who correctly see that it's job creation and wealth creation that sustain an economy.”

They are people who need a vibrant and level playing field upon which to develop their talents and their skills. That’s why they are Republicans.

But here’s the kicker. If you have a level playing field in the economy and low tax rates it makes it easier for the small businessman to grow his business and challenge the super rich, the Kennedys, the Kerrys, the Rockefellers, and the Chafees for the choice locations in Aspen, the houses in the Hamptons, the rich young heiresses, and all the other loot that the Democratic super rich enjoy.

And we can’t have that now, can we. Why, those coarse Republican businessmen are nothing more than jumped-up barrow boys.

The Stem Cell Flap

Ever since they ginned up Ron Reagan to make a speech on stem cell research at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Democrats have been doing a land office business on the proposition that Republicans oppose stem cell research.

And that is what the flap over actor Michael J. Fox’s commercials in support of Democratic senate candidates, including U.S. Rep. Ben Cardin, the opponent of Republican Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele in Maryland, is about. It’s all rehearsed here.

As is usually the case in politics, the Democrats are trying to pull a fast one on the American people.

Republicans are all in favor of stem cell research. They just don’t want federal funds spent on new lines of embryonic stem cells.

And there’s an additional kicker. Adult and umbilical cord stem cells have already proved to have applications in a number of degenerative diseases.

But embryonic stem cells have not proved useful, at least not yet. So the issue, which the MSM has not highlighted at all, is this:

Mr. Steele supports stem cell research using adult stem cells and stem cells from umbilical cords, which have already been used to treat and improve several dozen degenerative diseases.



Mr. Cardin and Mr. Fox support stem cell research using embryos, which has not yet been proven to yield any cures for diseases, but which some scientists say could do so.

We wait eagerly for the MSM to make this clear.

They would be doing a public service. My personal researches indicate that my liberal friends have no idea that embryonic stem cells are a “risky scheme” whereas adult stem cells are already saving lives.

They just know that Republicans are against stem cell research because Pat Robertson is against it. Or was it Jerry Falwell?

And where are the environmentalists and their Precautionary Principle on all this?

The Paglia Interview

She thinks the Foley trick was a disaster; she listens to talk radio; and she thinks the Republican Party is the party of “small businessmen” and “practical people,” rather than Brahmins and fat cats.

She is Camille Paglia, conservatives’ favorite Democrat. Salon recently interviewed her and put the interview online.

But make no mistake, she carries no brief for President Bush:

I'm not a Bush hater. I've always viewed him as a decent fellow who was pushed into the presidency because he was his father's son. But he's been out of his depth in foreign affairs from the start.

And the mess in Iraq reflects that.

When Salon prefaces a question with Republicans as “Brahmins, to be self-interested and not affected necessarily by the decisions they make,” she sets ’em straight.

The Democrats' portrayal of Republicans as fat cats out of touch with ordinary Americans just doesn't fly anymore, and they should drop it. I think the center of the Republican Party really is small-businessmen and very practical people who correctly see that it's job creation and wealth creation that sustain an economy -- not government intervention and government control, that suffocating nanny-state mentality.

The trouble is that the Democrats can’t “drop it.” Their party is built upon the conceit that they are disinterested experts and activists protecting the people from the fat cats. The taxes and the programs are all designed to help the helpless people, and have nothing to do with tenure, sinecures, and pensions for the experts and the activists. If they dropped that, what would be the point of the Democratic Party?

It’s good to hear Paglia’s voice again. She ought to be the current holder of the Howard Cosell Memorial Chair of Telling It Like It Is. Ought to be? She is.

The Decline of the Public Library

Here in Seattle we have just finished spending hundreds of millions of dollars rebuilding the downtown library and rebuilding a number of branch libraries.

But Helen Rumbelow thinks that public libraries are going the way of the Victorian bath house. Back in the day, there were numerous communal bath houses. But not any more. People have their own baths, thank you.

The public lending library, another great Victorian institution, has had its day. To pretend otherwise is like bursting in on a woman luxuriating in a private bubble-bath and telling her to take her behind out to a public washroom for a good old hose-down. She has no need of that now, thank you.

So it makes sense that Seattle would just have spent a ton of money on a headline architect designed public library.

All the things we used to need a library for—looking up medical information, queueing up for bestsellers—all that stuff can be done on the Internet.

What about those who, like me, used to enjoy exchanging juvenile comments with others in the margins of library books? Well, the internet can do that kind of thing too. It’s called blogging.

Actually, she’s wrong about that. Kids exchange juvenile comments on social networking sites and IM. That is when they are not exchanging juvenile comments texting on their cell phones.

So let us get real.

Let us admit that people can buy their own books if they want to. The one exception to this is children -- libraries are vital for encouraging reading and literary tastes. Children’s libraries should be lavished with funding but could be located in the kind of places where they go anyway, such as play centres or after-school clubs -- all the better for helping with homework.

Children’s libraries. And maybe a bunch of other community-type activities. But forget about adult books. Libraries should be putting their collections online before the books fall apart.

Meanwhile, in Seattle, we have still got to pay off the bonds on our shining new white elephant. Thirty years should do it.