Category: Politics

Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post’s best columnist since Michael Kelly died (man, do I miss that guy!), chides commentators for imagining they could run the Iraqi occupation better than the Bush administration.
Since I returned from the Middle East, I’ve run into a lot of people who are similar experts. Our company’s chief accountant told me things were “pretty bad over there.” Actually, I replied, things are only bad in a small portion of a very big area. He laughed condescendingly and said, “Well, I don’t think so.” I wanted to yell, “Really? How much time have you spent in Iraq recently?” but I refrained.
I’ve had similar conversations with other people who are shocked to hear that the vast majority of Iraq is relatively safe, and public services are operating mostly at pre-war standards (which, granted, were not that high). Let me say again that I’m not an expert on Iraq either, but I do keep up with events over there, and I pay attention to sources I trust. Or rather, I learned that most news organizations are untrustworthy, so they can be safely ignored.
Krauthammer alludes to the most persistent criticism of the Bush administration: they are not clairvoyant. The most likely problems never materialized, and other problems occured. Now, the most likely problems (population displacement, mass starvation, mass murders) were worse than what’s happening right now, but don’t expect the Democrat presidential candidates to point that out.
And if by some calamity one of them gets elected next year, they’ll find that they’ll have to rebuild Iraq just as much as a second Bush administration would.

How can you spend a year and a half in the late ’90s saying that it’s okay if a governor and president…
1. Uses public employees to procure sex;
2. Cheats on his wife countless times;
3. Gropes and fondles a job-seeker;
4. Carries out a sexual affair with a very junior subordinate;
5. Lies under oath about the affair;
6. Encourages others to perjure themselves (“We were never alone, right?”)
…and then pretend it’s a big deal when a movie star, who holds no position of public trust, is accused of being an obnoxious boor?
I hold no brief for Arnold, and I would vote for McClintock if I were in the land of my California ancestors. That being said, nobody’s accused him of rape, perjury, or abuse of government power. He didn’t do anything extraordinary, by Hollywood’s alleycat moral standards — and I thought if “everyone does it,” as Clinton-lovers were so fond of telling us, then it’s tolerable?
I’m not trying to square Catholic morality with Arnold’s alleged behavior, just pointing out the blatant hypocrisy on the part of Democrats and the media. I can’t resist referring you to something I wrote six weeks ago:

“The media love ‘moderate’ Republicans. All you have to do is favor abortion under just about any circumstance, and you get to be a moderate….Then when election time comes, the ‘moderate’ Republican finds that his buddies in the press, along with previously friendly Democrats, have turned against him. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the latest to find out that just because you favor abortion, gun control, and scads of money for ‘the children,’ you’re not immune from being lumped in with the snake handlers.”

Laughter is good medicine and that makes Wesley Clark my podiatrist. If you saw Drudge yesterday you’ll know what I’m talking about. Not only is the picture funny, but you’ll also find out that Clark was recently (May, 2001) praising the Bush team: Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld.
So in honor of that, let’s do a caption contest. Here’s your subject. It may be familiar to you.

Let them in the comments boxes.

The Catholic League points out that megainvestor Warren Buffett is one of the top donors to the organization “Catholics for a Free Choice”. Get that? He’s a non-Catholic, a zealot for population-control causes, and he’s financing a deceitful group that attacks Catholic teaching. Nice to know who your friends aren’t.
Now he’s the financial advisor to candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger. I don’t want to make Arnold guilty by association, but (a) Arnold’s already declared himself in favor of abortion and the gay agenda, and (b) electing a candidate does mean electing a pack of advisors too.
Is any of the prominent candidates for governor of California at all pro-life?

I found a great t-shirt while surfing the web over the weekend. It said, Guns don’t kill people, abortion kills people. I hope it arrives in time for my parents’ next visit. You see, my mom is a civil lawyer, a feminist and a Canadian. By contrast, I am a canon lawyer, a traditional Catholic and a legal resident of the United States. To the chagrin of my father, also a lawyer, bickering over gun control or abortion is a favorite past-time when talking to my mother.
While going another round over the phone with mom the other day, she appealed to the obligatory statistics. You know the ones – basically the number of violent gun crimes in the United States versus the number in Canada. Of course, liberal proponents of the nanny state feel these statistics vindicate their position. Perhaps these social leftists feel residual guilt over having abandoned their children to daycare facilities as they pursue their career. I know not. But never mind personal responsibility and civil liberties, social liberalism makes for a kinder and gentler state.
Or does it? After stumbling upon this t-shirt, the time was ripe for my own statistical analysis – not for my sake, but for my mother’s. Tough love works both ways in the parent-child relationship; just as friends don’t let friends vote for Bill, good sons don’t allow their mothers to parrot Hillary. But enough musing about my family; when compared to the statistics on gun violence, the abortion issue speaks for itself. In short, liberals kill more people than guns.
According to some statistics I picked up from a number of American proponents of stricter gun control (therefore they must be true since liberals don’t lie about these things), in 1995 there were 35,957 gun related deaths in America. The number of gun homicides numbered 15,835. Given America’s population of 264 million, this is approximately one gun homicide for every 16,672 members of the American population. Canada, with a population of 29 million, suffered 1,189 gun related deaths during the same year, of which 176 were homicide. Thus the gun homicide ratio north of the border is one for every 164,773 people living in Canada – about one tenth that of the United States.
In contrast, according to the 1997 United Nations’ Demographic Yearbook, people in Canada procured 70,549 abortions in 1995. This is approximately one abortion for every 411 Canadian residents. Stated another way, for every gun homicide in Canada, there are 401 abortions. The Canadian child in the womb will no doubt take comfort in the kindness and gentility of the strict gun control laws governing our socialist state – that is, if she survives to birth. One should not assume. Just ask the 70,549 victims of Canada’s liberal abortion policy.
The statistics for the United States are no less telling. In 1997, under the ever-compassionate leadership of Bill and Hillary, 1,210,883 American babies were aborted. Statistically, this represents one abortion for every 218 residents of the United States of America. While the American ratio of abortions to gun homicides is much lower than in Canada, it is no less lopsided: 76 to 1. Of course, we seldom hear this statistic from liberal statists.
So next time you run into a liberal proponent of the compassionate nanny state, which usually means restricted gun ownership and unrestricted abortion, remember the t-shirt. Guns don’t kill people, abortion clinics do.