Category: Politics

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