Category: Politics

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.