Politics: June 2004 Archives

CommentaryPage.com, an opinion site run by one of my colleagues, posted an article written by me about the origin of the Washington Post's shoddy Iraq coverage. The main culprit is Rajiv Chandrasekaran, a 31-year-old reporter who heads the Baghdad bureau. He's twisted the facts from the beginning to suit his "America will fail" meta-narrative, and I saw it with my own eyes in Iraq. He's looking to make his name on helping to break American will, and I wanted to open people's eyes to that fact.

Michelle Malkin, mother, Catholic, columnist, author of books and all-around total badass, has already linked to it.

That is the sound of the economy, and with it the increase in Consumer Confidence.

More news like this and Michael Moore will be forced to make sequels to F/9-11 that feature conspiracy theories about the Bush landslide in November.

The First Amendment fetishists -- whose views usually triumph in the Supreme Court -- have scored another victory. Pornographers can still market their filth to children, according to our judicial masters. More precisely, they can market their filth, and the authorities can do nothing to stop them.

I haven't read the majority opinion, and I won't venture one of my own until I do, except to point out that "free speech" trumps practically every other consideration (except when it comes to abortion-clinic protests, smoking ads, or other things that disgust the Supreme Court).

Some people think that America will continue to slide down into a moral swamp until we're mired in depravity. I disagree. In typical American fashion, we won't choose a moderate path of tolerating that which we cannot eradicate, and discouraging evil. We will say "anything goes!" until the consequences of the evils are too great. Then we will scream "ZERO TOLERANCE!" and make war on the fruits of our vices. Careening from one extreme to another is one of the great flaws in our national character.

Pete hasn't popped in yet with any comments on the Canadian election result, so I'll fill in for the moment. While the newly merged Conservative Party failed to win a majority, it picked up seats: current CBC figures give them 99. The Liberals and the socialist NDP together got 155 seats in Commons, the bare minimum required to control the House, so they'll see a Liberal minority government up North for a while. Then if and when some by-election shifts a seat to the Conservatives or the Bloc Quebecois, giving them the magic 155, we may get to see a Con-Bloc coalition. They wouldn't agree on federalism vs. separatism, but they'd probably have some common ground on devolution. It appears that Canada has developed a lot of the same polarization as the US, with the Left carrying cities and conservatives stronger elsewhere.

I'm looking forward to Lifesite's take on the results. My guess is that the mild Conservative gain is a mild pro-life gain, judging by the opposition they evoked from pro-aborts before the election.

As I monitor a server at work, a thought fluttered into my head:

Political conservatives keep saying that "Farenheit 9/11" won't affect the election because Michael Moore is a paranoid buffoon. However, the movie is apparently doing quite well.

By most people's reckoning, the presidential election will be decided by a slim margin, and by people who make up their minds at the last minute, despite the wealth of information they have about both candidates, their records, and their positions. These are people who don't know much about national affairs, and who will make their decision based on television ads or other ephemera.

So the election may very well be decided by the ignorant and the easily duped. From what I've read, only the ignorant and the easily duped will be persuaded by Moore's movie. Therefore, it could very well decide the next election. Think about it....

The Bush administration, in violation of the Geneva protections to which fighting men are entitled, paraded eight Iraqi prisoners on television. This is a war crime: governments are not supposed to use pictures of prisoners in propaganda. The officials who approved this should be held responsible and put on trial.

Wait -- sorry for the error. It was the Iranian government parading British sailors for the cameras. But I'm sure the Left and our major media are going to go ballistic when they see this, right? Because they keep telling us that violating the Geneva Conventions is pretty much the worst thing a government can do. Because the media are so even-handed, they treat all prisoner abuse seriously.

I expect when I wake tomorrow and stumble out to my driveway, that photo will be on the front page of the Washington Post, along with a long analytical article and an outraged editorial. No, two outraged editorials. Maybe even three, plus a shot of a prisoner's family member dabbing at her eye with a handkerchief.

Otherwise, we might get the idea that the media are willing to look the other way when it's not U.S. soldiers committing abuse. Or that they are incapable of understanding the difference between officially sanctioned abuse and unofficial, punishable abuse. Or that the Left is so afraid of Islamic terrorism that it ignores or explains away abhorrent actions when radical Muslims do them, but not when Westerners do them.

I watched the first half of the BBC interview with Bill Clinton, which you can see here. You may have heard that he grows angry with the interviewer, and so I'll save you some time if you want to see it: skip to 19:00, and you'll see the lead-up. The outburst starts building at 24:30, with a crescendo at 28:50.

I thought of so many things while watching it, but I am so tired of thinking about that man that I cannot summon the energy. A few thoughts, though:

A close family member used to work with Ken Starr. One of my best friends took a constitutional law class with him. When I had lunch with a senior editor at another news organization, he said he had interviewed Starr many times over the years. All of them, to a man, remarked how fair and honest he was, and that he was light years away from the snarling partisan that Clinton imagined, and continues to imagine in this interview.

Some of his facts are flat-out wrong. Susan McDougal was jailed for contempt of court by a judge, not Starr, who was not a prosecutor. She was one of the "little people" Clinton says were trampled by the all-out rush to ruin him. Governor Jim Guy Tucker, the sitting governor of Arkansas, also resigned and went to jail as a result of Starr's investigation. Apparently the criminal justice system had it in for Clinton, too.

The outburst itself was classic Clinton. The childish sense of persecution, the peevish remarks to the interviewer such as "people like you always help the far right" (was he even familiar with the guy interviewing him?) His descriptions of how "the other side" operated was the mirror opposite of the truth. He says the evil Republicans thought that politics was about power, and he thought it was about how power ought to be used. But if there is a modern politician who believed in acquiring power for his own sake, it would be him.

Clinton doesn't ever say "I lied," he says "I did not tell the truth." He talks about "personal mistakes," too. His language is carefully selected so he can admit to the bare minimum ("leading parallel lives," whatever the hell that means -- maybe he has a different view of the space-time continuum, and thinks there are actually two Bill Clintons.)

I'm not very interested in re-fighting the 1990s. I just wish he would go away.

Right around the time Clinton left office, I was at my father-in-law's house on the Eastern Shore, flipping through the cable channels. (We don't pay for our TV viewing, so it's a small pleasure when I can do that.) An ad for a video caught my eye, with the title "Funniest Presidential Moments" or something like that. There was one scene with President Clinton and Boris Yeltsin are laughing at an off-camera incident. Both of them are roaring with mirth.

It occurred to me that this was the first time I had ever seen Clinton in an unselfconscious moment. He always seemed to be looking around at who was watching him, playing to the crowd, giving people what they wanted to hear. But here he saw an incident and laughed at it, not to get on someone's good side, but merely because it was funny.

Then a subsequent thought hit me: since early 1992, when he first became nationally known, I had never thought of Bill Clinton as anything other than a fraud. There have been other politicians I have loathed for their politics, but I could concede that at least on one or two issues, they really believed what they said, or they had some trait that humanized them.

Clinton is all appetite, as Jesse Jackson once remarked. He was, and is, driven by his emotional needs and sexual desires, which are probably indistinguishable. His soul is a black hole for adulation, which he craves like a narcotic. Anything he gives, he gives only in the expectation of getting.

It would be difficult to think of a more perfect narcissist -- his life and career were completely ordered toward maximizing his own self-importance. He never sacrificed for others, but asked others to make great sacrifices for him. Many of them did: Susan McDougal went to jail to avoid implicating him in a crooked real-estate deal. The feminists destroyed their own movement when they defended his abuse of power. (Who can possibly take them seriously about sexual harassment, or anything else?) Congressional Democrats went from a majority to a minority because of Clinton, yet they issued teeth-bared defenses of him when he was impeached.

So who are these two million people buying Clinton's new book? Presidential memoirs are a dreary sub-genre, even for presidents like Reagan who knew how to express themselves. For a known liar and slight-of-hand artist like Clinton, who never expresses his own mind without doing the political calculations, why would anyone care to buy it?

The best explanation I can provide is that for the Bush-haters, it's a demonstration of their contempt for the current president. I can't imagine more than a tenth of the buyers will be able to plow their way through almost 1,000 pages of preening. His book might have been interesting in 20 years, after time has worn down his body and his partner has left the Senate.

According to the reviews I've read, such as the AP's, "It's like being locked in a small room with a very gregarious man who insists on reading his entire appointment book, day by day, beginning in 1946." If someone else wants to read it and post their thoughts, by all means, and I salute your bravery and tenacity.

[Warning: Harsh Blog Commentary Follows -- Not suitable for mothers, young ladies and children]

With apologies to GWAR...

It's not your imagination and it's not a bad trippy,
yes, that's right, it's Michael Moore the hippy

As some of you might be aware, there's a federal election going on in Canada right now. And guess what? The Conservative Party is winning. The reason for this is simple: Canadians like myself who take their religion seriously are sick and tired of having the Liberal goverment (assisted by the socialist NDP) shove the homosexual agenda down our throats.

Michael Moore is not happy about the rise of the Conservative Party of Canada in the polls. So he recently made his way to Toronto where, with all the arrogance of an American imperialist, he warned Canadians against voting for the Conservative Party of Canada.

Michael, I've spent the past four years living in the United States. Most Americans I have met are warm and hospitable people. These are memories that I will take with me when I move back to Canada next week to pursue my doctorate. You, however, are the exception to my otherwise positive experience of Americans. In fact, with your smug paternalistic attitude YOU -- and not President Bush -- are the stereotypical ugly American that the rest of the world complains about. You're obnoxious, you're condescending and you're also fat from eating too much junk food.

We Canadians know how we will vote in the next election. Our votes are not about to change because some journalistic equivalent to masturbation (your entire shtick, in my opinion, is about Michael Moore -- nobody else -- so you don't even have enough credibility to be dismissed as a hack) orders us to do otherwise.

Michael Moore, go home! You've made a big enough nuissance of yourself in your own country. Leave Canadians alone...

A reality check on Kerry's fantastic promises for his first 100 days in office.

Whoops -- sorry, by "anti-abortion" I meant "environmentalist," and by "abortion clinics" I meant "houses and cars." Apparently, radically anti-human environmentalists have been destroying property they don't like and endangering other peoples' lives. Their targets are new housing developments and SUVs.

We await the following:

• Reporters asking the Sierra Club, World Wildlife Federation, and other non-violent environmentalist groups if they repudiate these domestic terrorists;
• Reporters asking John Kerry and other prominent Democrats if they think the Earth Liberation Front is a legitimate political organization; and
• Reporters grilling environmentalists about whether they are sincere about their beliefs -- because after all, if you oppose suburban land growth and big vehicles, you must necessarily use violence to destroy those threats, as surely as night follows day.

I wonder if there will be a ratio of about 1,000 news stories for each SUV destroyed, the way there was about that many stories for each abortion clinic bombed and abortionist murdered.

(Thanks to an anonymous friend of Catholic Light who brought this to our attention.

foxnews.com - 9/11 Panel: No Evidence of Al Qaeda-Iraq Link

But over at newsmax.com we find the following:

"Two senior Bin Ladin associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq," says the Commission.

Such a statement begs the question: Why does the Commission, let alone the press, take the word of two senior bin Laden associates over, say, Iraq's new prime minister, Iyad Allawi.

Last December he told the London Telegraph, "We are uncovering evidence all the time of Saddam's involvement with al-Qaeda."

Reacting to the discovery of an Iraqi intelligence document placing 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta in Baghdad two months before the attacks, he continued:

"This is the most compelling piece of evidence that we have found so far. It shows that not only did Saddam have contacts with al-Qaeda, he had contact with those responsible for the September 11 attacks."

Reacting to Bush's meeting with Vatican officials, Kerry says, "I think it was entirely and extraordinarily inappropriate, and I think it speaks for itself." Which means, "I'm the one who's Catholic, damnit! All those contracepting, fornicating, aborting, sodomizing, and/or masturbating 'Catholics' are supposed to vote for me!" That's the so-called "Catholic vote" Kerry is courting, right? These are primacy of conscience types who have killed their conscience. Rather than primacy of conscience it is primacy of the spirit of the world.

CNN refers to Bush's request "promoting those issues that are part of his social agenda." You can almost feel the writers of this piece bristling at the thought of the leaders of one of the world's major religions getting involved in what they see are domestic political issues, not issues of absolute morality. Kerry is reported as disagreeing with Bush's request on the basis of the separation of Church and State. How does this endanger the separation of Church and State? It doesn't. What the liberals would have us believe and practice, as they do, is religion has no role in public discourse. It is an argument from authority (the weakest kind, according to St. Thomas); the authority of a document, the U.S. Constitution, whose First Amendment has been misinterpretted and misrepresented again and again to remove religion from the public life of this nation.

The Constitution is based in large part on Natural Law, correct? Natural Law admits the truth of a universal, not relative, morality. Absolute morality forbids all manner of things people have gone through the civil courts to obtain in the name of personal rights. Bringing the Church and other Christian churches into the fray of these moral issues is essential if we are to spread the Gospel, but also if we are to protect our rights.

And lastly, an aside I picked up listening to a tape of Fr. John Corapi: Natural Law also admits the existence of God, reality Himself. To be disconnected from God is essentially to be disconnected from reality. This is a good definition of insanity. Something that Frank Sheed and Fr. Corapi agree on - aetheism and secularism are a form of insanity.

Can you imagine how John Fonda Kerry will deal with the growing threat of Iran? Editorial on the growing threat via washtimes.com, America's newspaper and Eric's employer.

As the IAEA meets in Vienna to consider a European-drafted resolution pointing to Iran's continued refusal to come clean about its nuclear program, representatives of the Islamist regime continue to threaten the agency. The speaker of the Iranian parliament yesterday warned that members may not ratify Iran's signature to an additional protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) — something insisted on by the IAEA after it discovered that Tehran was attempting to develop atomic weapons in violation of its obligations as a signer of the NPT. The speaker, Gholam Ali Hadad-Adel, suggested that by pressing Iran to tell the truth, the Europeans were doing the bidding of nefarious "Zionists." Late last month, the head of Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guards warned that that the regime was prepared to launch suicide attacks or missile strikes against "29 sensitive sites in the U.S. and in the West."

Just so you know that Iraqis are neither subhuman nor amoral. Here's a quotation from one of the Iraqi heroes:

Private Jassim added that the firefight created an even stronger bond between Iraqi (ICDC) soldiers and American Marines. Speaking through an interpreter, he said, "I feel very, very bad the Marine was shot because they are like my brothers now, but I'm ready to go out again. I'm always ready."

Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post's best columnist, takes on the media folks who are eulogizing Ronald Reagan. They "dwell endlessly on the man's smile, his sunny personality, his good manners. Above all, his optimism....'Optimism' is the perfect way to trivialize everything that Reagan was or did."

Eric's Prediction of the Day: when the Holy Father dies, look for the media to follow the same pattern. They'll say John Paul helped destroy communism, that he attracted some of the largest crowds in human history, and left an influential legacy of words. The way they'll trivialize his achievements is by pointing to smartypants Western theologians who think they're more Catholic than the pope (literally), and the "widespread dissent" from Church teachings among secularized Catholics.

Just when you think public life in Europe is a lost cause and thoroughly secularized, somebody lets you know that there are currents in the other direction.

I got an e-mail today about the European Parliament elections coming on Sunday, appealing for Christians in Germany to join in reviving the "Zentrum" (Center) Party. Zentrum was a Christian-oriented party that had functioned with considerable Catholic support until the Nazis forced it to disband in 1933.

Zentrum is apparently standing for a pro-life ethic, for the acknowledgement of God in the EU constitution, for authentic marriage, and for economic policies that benefit families with children.

Our German readers can tell us if this is really a sign of something credible or just a group on the fringe: I'm not in a position to know.

How many of the insurgents have we killed in Iraq? You might think it's a macabre question, but it's relevant to whether our excursion there was a good idea. After all, if we're not militarily effective, that would have some bearing on whether the war was just, and the lessons we learn from the Iraq phase of the War on Terror will affect future phases and future wars.

So who keeps track of enemy body counts? Not the military, not since the press decided to make that statistic the butt of jokes in Vietnam. Has the press kept count? Are you kidding? They'd have to get out of their air-conditioned offices and get their shirts all yucky with sweat, then scurry around a hostile area among thugs who don't really care if you're a journalist, just that you're a Westerner and fair game for beheading.

From the reporters who have actually bothered to explore the question, it would seem that American forces are creating something on the order of ten casualties for every one we take, and the ratio could be even higher. Nobody disputes that whenever there is an actual battle or skirmish, and the insurgents fight instead of slither away, they end up getting their clocks cleaned.

Which leads me to an even more pointed question: how many innocent people have these cowardly insurgents killed? They've blown up worshippers, shoppers, policemen, U.N. employees, a busload of schoolgirls...surely someone is keeping track, right? This number should be easy to find out, since there's little question that, say, Issa the mechanic was guilty of no crime when he was blown up while passing an electrical station.

But we have no idea how many innocent people have died from the thugs. The soon-to-be-disbanded Coalition Provisional Authority doesn't publish those stats. What about our left-wing "watchdog groups"? They say they're keeping track of innocent deaths, but that is not true. They only care about innocent deaths if they can be ascribed to the Coalition.

So when a car bomb blows up a few blocks away from the CPA headquarters, and kills three Iraqis, that doesn't count for the watchdogs, which are always saying they're anti-war, not anti-American. However, there are at least two sides to every war. Why are they only concerned about innocent deaths inadvertently caused by one side, and positively dismissive about innocent deaths deliberately caused by the other?

One is tempted to think that dead Iraqis only interest the hard Left when they can pin the blame on the people they hate. After all, they didn't seem overly concerened about dead Iraqis when Saddam was filling his mass graves. This isn't new. They got all weepy about dead Vietnamese civilians until the North took over the South and exterminated tens of thousands of them, and drove hundreds of thousands out of their homes. Where were the peaceniks then?

The Left uses the people of the Third World as props in their imaginary morality plays of the Big Bad West and the Poor, Exploited Darker People, but with honorable exceptions like Amnesty International, I have yet to see much evidence that they care about the actual people involved.

Catholic bishops share in the charism of infallibility when they speak on faith and morals, in conjunction with the Holy Father. That is part of the magisterium, the teaching authority by which we know the pure truth of the Gospel. That magisterium cannot be broken because it comes from God himself (Mt 16:18).

When they stray from faith and morals, bishops are no more likely to be free from error than any other well-informed people. On many important subjects in the 1970s and '80s, American bishops brought their prestige to bear against many policies Ronald Reagan favored. Some examples of their stances:

1. The American government should not deploy nuclear weapons even if they are possessed for defensive purposes.

2. Firearms in private hands should be strictly regulated, and cheap handguns should be banned.

3. Persons receiving monetary support ("welfare") from the government are entitled to that support, even if they are capable of working.

4. Money spent on national defense should be diverted to "human needs."

Some have suggested that the bishops' decline in influence is because of "the scandal," the reshuffling of predatory homosexual priests. That is a recent development. The main problem is the bishops' concern with being "relevant" and speaking confidently on issues in which they have no particular competence (arms control, economics) and going soft on subjects where they not only have competence, but a divine mandate to explain (contraception, divorce, homosexual behavior).

Much as it pains me to say, where they disagreed, Reagan was mostly right, and the bishops mostly wrong. The bishops don't need better analysts -- they simply need to narrow their focus to the eternal things, and leave petty politics to the politicians.

A year and a half ago, before the war, before the Howard Dean phenomenon (remember him?), I wrote the following:

...it would make a lot of sense if the Democrats ran someone who was truly moderate on the Dems' signature issues. Let's say the candidate supported a ban on partial-birth abortion and sex-selection abortions, plus he favored parental consent for minors, but was "pro-choice" under other circumstances. He might strongly affirm the second amendment, but say that cheap handguns have no place in our society; he'd favor expanding IRA accounts but would leave Social Security alone; he would favor raising taxes on the "most fortunate Americans" but not "working Americans"; etc.

The candidate I'm describing would stand a strong chance of winning in the general election. A charismatic, truly moderate Democrat would give Republicans a lot of trouble in 2004, but it won't happen because of the primary process. In order to get the nomination in the first place, a candidate has to convince his own party that he represents them. The people who vote in primaries are the ones who would walk through fire to support their party, and the Democratic faithful are probably going to remain enraged until those primaries happen in 14 months. They can't believe that they've been trounced by the barely articulate boob in the White House, and they're going to want an old-fashioned tax-and-spend big-government social liberal as their candidate, or the closest thing they can find. They aren't hungry enough for victory to swallow their principles, as they were for Bill Clinton in 1992 and '96. Given all that, they have to run a pro-abortion liberal next time around. Count on it.

They've ended up with not only a pro-abortion liberal, but a pro-abortion liberal Catholic at that! One who can't make any headway even when things go bad for the president. One who has started to sound like a Republican about national security -- maybe not quite like Jesse Helms, but a lot like John McCain.

Among Canada's middle class, elections are a sport whose popularity -- as we are now seeing -- surpasses even hockey. (Which is good since Calgary has always been my team back in Canada, whereas Tampa is the local team.) This is why blog activity is down among Canadians at St. Blog, except to comment on the election slated for the end of June. Anyway, since everyone else has weighed in with their predictions, I thought I should do the same.

First off, I think Stephen Harper will pull off a bare majority, hovering at the 160 seat range. Basically, I see the Conservative Party of Canada sweeping the Prairies, doing well in BC, holding their own Ontario (taking about fifty seats), establishing a beach-head in Quebec (5-10 seats), and probably scoring about a third of the seats in the Atlantic provinces. Of all the major party leaders, Harper has run the best campaign thus far, keeping expectations low, snipping problems in the bud before the other parties can capitalize on them, and not deviating from the script.

While he comes across as somewhat dull, this is good given that the initial game-plan of his opponents was to paint him as a right-wing extremist. In short, Canadians find him boring, but not scary. Neverless, this continues to keep expectations low, and to maintain the slow and steady upward momentum, Harper only needs to hold his own in the English debate and avoid any major stumbles in the French. Since he's a phenomenal debater, he should exceed expectations and boost his momentum going into the election.

Secondly, the Bloc will form the Official Opposition. Duceppe actually seems to have learned from his previous elections and is running a solid campaign. If he can avoid the temptation to cross from soft separatist to hard, he should have no problem winning 60 of Quebec's 75 seats.

In third place, I see the Liberals squeaking just behind the Bloc. The West will shut them out completely. Ontario will yield about 30 to 40 seats, meaning that Ontario will continue to give the Liberals the bulk of their seats, however, both the seat count and support base in Ontario will be greatly reduced. With a renewed Conservative Party, I doubt Quebec will cough up any more than 5-10 seats. The only region I see the Liberals winning is the Atlantic provinces. That being said, I think Martin sending out his Ministers of State to crash Harper's campaign events backfired into a defining "kitten-eating-alien" moment.

So this leaves Jack Layton and the socialist NDP in fourth. Jack looked good going into this campaign, having renewed the NDP and pushed their momentum upward. For our American readers, a strong performance from the socialists generally helps the conservative in national elections since the socialists draw their vote from the Liberals. In other words, think Ralph Nader syphoning off 10-20% of the Democrat vote. However, and this is the only thing the Liberals have said during this campaign with which I agree, Jack couldn't resist shooting off his mouth and becoming the Howard Dean of Canadian politics.

It remains to be seen whether his ludicrous accusations against Martin concerning the death of a number of homeless in Toronto will prove to be Layton's "Dean Scream" moment. While Layton hasn't yet crashed as a result of those comments, people were turned off, his momentum has reversed, and he's now lost a couple points in the polls. But I still think he will hold enough support together to retain official party status. I give Layton 15-20 seats, but not his own. Mills is one of the few Liberals running a good campaign, so I don't see Layton knocking him off. Nevertheless, Layton can then pass the socialist leadership off to his wife unless Broadbent wins in Ottawa.

Okay, some of you noticed are now thinking the math falls a little short since there are still a few seats I have not accounted for. This brings me to a prediction many will no doubt find surprising. I think this will be a breakout election for the Green Party. Although many would have thought this impossible, Harris has actually done a credible job of fleshing out the Green Party platform and moving the party closer to the center.

As a small businessman, he may not be as exciting as previous Green leaders, but his dull blue suits and moderated tone are breaking down the anarchist-enviro-wacko-tree-hugger stereotype common to Green Party activists. He's also building a strong youth following, which will help the party in the future. So in many ways, albeit on a smaller scale, he's proving himself to be a Stephen Harper of the left. I don't think Harris can win Official Party Status this time around, but with the angry political mood among Canadians and Jack Layton running a reckless campaign, I can see the Green Party establishing a beach-head in Parliament with up to five seats. These will likely come from BC and the territories. Additionally, if Martin loses the election and control over the Liberal party reverts to the left, I wouldn't be surprised if the Green Party displaces the NDP within the next ten years as Canada's third major party

You ever notice that some writers have shelf lives, like dairy products? They're good for a few years, maybe even decades, but then they sputter out into irrelevance.

Such a man is Robert Novak, who used to write a good column but is rapidly becoming a right-wing Andy Rooney. His writing used to be exciting because he really did provide solid "behind the scenes" information on what was "really" going on around D.C., and his assessments were correct more often than not.

Today, he's a cranky old man (despite converting to the fulness of Catholic truth a few years ago.) His sharp analysis has lapsed into lazy repetition, his source material mere anecdotes. Here's one example:

It is a strange war [in Afghanistan], with the JAGs -- Judge Advocate General military lawyers -- given a hand in military decisions. My sources tell of military commanders, despite credible intelligence of enemy forces, calling off air strikes on the advice of JAGs. This is the kind of restraint the U.S. military has experienced starting with the Korean War, when as a non-combat Army officer, I knew our forces had their hands tied behind their backs.

While it's certainly true that excessive legalism has hampered effective warfighting in the past, the presence of JAGs doesn't necessarily mean anyone's hands are tied. JAG officers don't make decisions, they simply advise. Commanders either follow or disregard the advice. It's not such a bad thing to have an officer who can help clarify the ambiguities of target selection and international law.

Because of the nature of my unit, I've known dozens of JAG officers, and they are hardly pacifists. They see their role as supporting the warfighting effort, and so they strive to balance military necessity against moral and legal obligations. Novak should meet a few of them instead of relying on a half-century-old memory.

Mark Steyn contrasts domestic reactions to the Civil War with the Iraq War, and finds them discomforting:

There is something not just ridiculous but unbecoming about a hyperpower 300 million strong whose elites -- from the deranged former vice president down -- want the outcome of a war, and the fate of a nation, to hinge on one freaky jailhouse; elites who are willing to pay any price, bear any burden, as long as it's pain-free, squeaky clean and over in a week. The sheer silliness dishonors the memory of all those we're supposed to be remembering this Memorial Day.

My gut feeling is that the public is less supportive about the Iraq War, and the greater war on terror, because the populace was thoroughly, unapologetically Christian in the mid-19th century, but there is a huge population segment that doubts the afterlife these days. If you have faith, you're more willing to die because you know death isn't the last thing. If you don't, then life is the greatest good, that you're sure about, so you'll try to preserve it, perhaps at any cost.

Read the whole article -- there's a riveting, shocking Civil War anecdote at the beginning.