Category: Politics

This week, something like 110,000 people marched through London, protesting for “peace,” chanting “All we are saying is give Saddam a chance,” and other nonsense. To put that into perspective, there were 400,000 pro-hunting protestors last year in central London — the biggest demonstration in British history.
On the day of the demonstration, I happened to be in London on business, and the protestors marched near my hotel. They were an exceedingly polite crowd, as they were mainly rural folk who didn’t want the lucrative sport of fox hunting banned (Mad Cow Disease had already impoverished the countryside). There were no childish demonstrations that I could see, and everyone was mostly dressed in traditional hunting tweeds, except for the three ladies who were topless except for strategically placed pro-hunting stickers and their open jackets. (No, I will not give you a link to the pictures.)
So while there are plenty of Britons who are in favor of a Saddamite restoration, it’s worth remembering that fox hunting really gets their national blood moving.

Recently, we have received some comments about the tone of our articles. In response, I have prepared two versions of this post. Please tell me which one you prefer — or if they both suck, then say so.

With vitriol
Every morning, I am pestered by an old man driving his enormous car. Right after an old lady says in a hectoring voice, “Don’t come home without passing a prescription drug benefit!”, my tormentor comes on the television and says in a grating voice, “When ya gonna get it duuun?”
The commercial is from some group promoting the giveaway of free medication to undeserving old people. “That’s not fair!” I hear from the back. “We need those drugs to stay alive! You whippersnapers will be old someday! You’ll need this!” We’ll see about that.
Meanwhile, there’s something a little unseemly about providing $400 billion of medication to any senior citizen on demand, though retirees making more than $80,000 a year have to pay a little more. So if you’re a married couple in your late 60s, own your own home, have no kids in the house, and make $75k, you get drugs from the feds.
If you take nothing else away from this post, remember: the prescription-drug bill isn’t for the truly indigent. The Church teaches that we should place the needs of the poor, sick, and vulnerable ahead of everyone else’s. That’s not what this bill will do. Medicare — along with Social Security and student loans — is middle-class welfare. And it’s a lot worse than regular welfare: you at least have to prove you’re poor to get that. To get Medicare, you only need to prove that you’re over 65.
I’ll let my 4-year-old son Charlie have the last word on the subject. Paige and I were talking about this subject at the breakfast table a few days ago, and Charlie heard me say “they’re taking our money whether they need it or not.” He looked shocked, and asked, “Who is taking our money?”
“Well, there are some people who want to get the government to take our money so they can buy stuff for themselves.”
“But that’s stealing!” he said indignantly. Yep.
100% vitriol-free
Every day, I wake up and think, “God, is there any way you could make the government take more money from my paycheck? Because I’d probably squander it on food or clothing for my three young kids, or save it for our retirement.” Luckily, there’s a government program in the works that will give lots of free medication to cute, deserving old people. Whom we should cherish and love.
Still, I have just the teensiest, weensiest issue with one small, probably insignificant aspect of the Medicare prescription-drug benefit bill. It seems that not everyone — and by “not everyone,” I mean “probably three or four people” — is unable to pay for his medication, and might — and by “might,” I mean “in all likelihood, I’m probably wrong” — be able to contribute a tiny bit more money for their medicines. And by “tiny,” I mean “five bucks or so.”
Yet I know that taking money from us younger people is the will of God and His Servant, Ted Kennedy. I love this day. I shall now go outside and roll in the grass and think of fuzzy bunnies.

Sage words from the U.K. Loony Left:
[Mayor of London] Livingstone says Bush is ‘greatest threat to life on planet’
ONE IN THREE BRITONS THINK BUSH IS STUPID – POLL
In other news, one in five Britons said Bush had “cooties,” while one in eight called him “Mr. Poo-Poo Head.”
The Left, on both sides of the Atlantic, has chosen screaming hyperbole as its normative mode of expression. Practically every leftist movement — feminism, environmentalism, trade unionism, and the rest — is shot through with Marxist historicism, the belief that History-with-a-capital-H is moving inevitably in the direction they intuited. In the last two decades, especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it has been harder to argue that state socialism is the wave of the future. Since Sept. 11, 2001, it has been rather more difficult to say we live in a world “beyond good and evil.”
If you’ve been caught up in the fantasies of the Left for your whole life, as Red Ken Livingstone has, it must be a difficult existence. A rational mind would adjust his theories to fit reality, but the committed leftist drinks deeply from the wellspring of irrational faith: that lo stato can solve every problem without resorting to force, and that human ingenuity can father a perfect world without God’s assistance. The first and foremost reason the Hard Left hates Bush is because he’s a committed Christian who believes in God’s providence. They thought his type was on the way out, what with modern science and all; it enrages them to think that not only do committed Christians still exist, but they seem to be making a comeback.
The same wounded roars come from Catholic liberals, too, as they watch their “Spirit of Vatican II” novelties dissipate like a puff of smoke in a strong breeze. Younger Catholics, and especially younger priests, aren’t “progressing” in the way they had hoped. A faithful man who sees things going amiss can say o tempora! o mores!, but ultimately lay the matters in God’s hands. The secular man cannot abide any setbacks, as the real, ultimate battleground is in the here-and-now; thus the impatience and rage when things don’t go his way.

Howard Dean continues to strike me as probably the Dem. candidate most dangerous to the President in next year’s election. Unlike the other Dem hopefuls, Dean recognizes that he cannot win the presidency with only the Dem’s traditional constituencies. So he’s going after a number of traditional Republican constitutencies as well. Last week I stated that one of these would be the Libertarian vote. I’m not the only conservative to make this prediction. In fact, I’ve mostly been following the lead of my friend and fellow Enter Stage Right writer James Antle.
Last night I happened to catch one of Howard Dean’s ads on the television. He appeared to attack the President over the Patriot Act and the tightening of civil liberties. Dean was obviously aiming for the Libertarian vote by exploiting their discontent with the Bush administration. James Antle does an excellent job discussing the current troubled relationship between conservatives and Libertarians in this week’s American Conservative.
That being said, at a time when we’re making serious inroads into traditional Dem constituencies, what does the President need to do to protect his own? (Admittedly, if Dean were pro-life I would not be asking this question.) First, I think the President must continue to remain firm on abortion and other life issues. As a politician, W’s main strength is his character. This is why I generally trust W, even if I don’t always agree with his decisions. Secondly, I think W needs to dump his neo-con international policy wonks and put forward a good exit strategy for Iraq. Thirdly, I think he should ease up a little on the Patriot Act as well as the Drug War. This will go a long way toward blocking Dean from making further inroads into the Libertarian vote.

The Weekly Standard has an article detailing the link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Why this hasn’t received more coverage this weekend, I do not understand — it’s not even on the Drudge Report — but it certainly merits attention.
The information is based on an extremely detailed, careful memo from an undersecretary of defense to the heads of the Senate Intelligence Committee (including Sen. Rockefeller (D-Dogpatch), the inspiration for the Foghorn Leghorn cartoon character.) It details the extensive contact that Saddam and Osama had, and alludes to the strong possibility that they collaborated on the U.S.S. Cole attack.
The article sticks to the topic, not even mentioning the indisputable fact that Saddam sponsored the Palestinian suicide-murder bombings, and carried out terrorist attacks on his neighbors, particularly Iran, through groups he funded and/or founded.
Perhaps Sens. Rockefeller and Kennedy will stop their geriatric rages against the “misleading” Bush administration. Ha, ha! Sorry! Just a little Sunday afternoon humor.