Category: Politics

Maureen Dowd has resumed writing her column, thus reclaiming her title as America’s Stupidest Columnist at a Major Newspaper. Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, the runner-up for that title, performed the official SCMN duties during her absence, but Cohen will occasionally surprise you by being thoughtful or non-ideological. Dowd is pitch-perfect, reflecting the views of the elite journalistic world with not a trace of critical thought.
Almost all of her columns are truly masterpieces, because we know that her zig-zagging logical paths and tortured sentences are intentional. She isn’t a nobody with a Typepad account, she is somebody with a huge newspaper’s full panoply of resources behind her — there are copy-desk editors, the editorial-page editors, the senior editors who, one assumes, will at least occasionally read what appears in their paper. The New York Times employs research staff, administrative assistants, and other literate persons. Yet not one of them has the guts to tell Maureen Dowd that she writes unreadable dreck, and she should thus make a concerted effort to re-learn how to compose a polemical essay, if indeed she ever knew how. To wit:

The Bush team tried to discredit [Cindy Sheehan] by pointing reporters to an old article in which she sounded kinder to W. If only her husband were an undercover C.I.A. operative, the Bushies could out him. But even if they send out a squad of Swift Boat Moms for Truth, there will be a countering Falluja Moms for Truth.

How to unpack this three-sentence paragraph? Cindy Sheehan did meet with the president and she did not sound angry after she emerged; nobody “outed” any CIA operatives except at least one journalist; the White House didn’t send out the Swift Boat Veterans — the vets sent themselves. But if you are Dowd, that doesn’t matter, because your goal is to make at least three venomous anti-Bush attacks per column inch.
A smarter columnist would try to feign intellectual honesty; she would throw in a few statements like “Bush might think he’s doing the right thing by doing _____, but he’s not,” or “It’s understandable that Rumsfeld might say _____, but he is incorrect.” But Dowd, and her many, many compatriots on the left, have two explanations for any action of the Bush administration, or anyone on the right: they’re either evil or dumb. The prose they generate could be distilled into simple binary patterns which newspapers could print, e.g., “evil, dumb, dumb, evil, dumb, evil, evil, dumb,” to spare us the trouble of having to read their rubbish.
This would shield us from the stylistic mistakes, too. Dowd writes about “the more than 13,000 wounded, many shorn of limbs,” apparently unaware that the word “shorn” is the past tense of “shear,” and is used in connection with cutting, not explosions or bullet wounds, which is how most amputees lost their limbs. The only people “shorn” of anything in Iraq are the decapitated victims of terrorists, for whom Dowd shows no recollection or outrage.
Luckily, we have Christopher Hitchens as an antidote. Hitchens, an erratic and indispensible commentator, addresses the case made by Dowd and Cindy Sheehan and reduces it to rubble:

Sheehan has obviously taken a short course in the Michael Moore/Ramsey Clark school of Iraq analysis and has not succeeded in making it one atom more elegant or persuasive. I dare say that her “moral authority” to do this is indeed absolute, if we agree for a moment on the weird idea that moral authority is required to adopt overtly political positions, but then so is my “moral” right to say that she is spouting sinister piffle. Suppose I had lost a child in this war. Would any of my critics say that this gave me any extra authority? I certainly would not ask or expect them to do so. Why, then, should anyone grant them such a privilege?

I am inclined to ignore Sheehan’s words and actions, except to note two things: first, her opinions are indistinguishable from the bleary-eyed hysterics who post things on Daily Kos and the other left-wing blogs. She has drunk deeply from the poisonous brew of “no blood for oil/Halliburton/those filthy Jew neocons,” and her paranoic rantings should be dismissed, though we should heap contempt on those who exploit her grief and loss for their own desire to score the cheapest of political points.
Second, Cindy Sheehan demeans her son by treating him as something less than he was. Casey Sheehan was a 24-year-old man who voluntarily re-enlisted in the military, and volunteered to go on the particular mission in which he was killed. He was not a child in need of protection. He knowingly risked his life on the field of battle against a vicious enemy that slaughters the weak and the innocent in the name of God.
But our news media glamorizes a risk-free protest by an unhinged mother, instead of the heroism of her dead son. Such is the debasement of our national culture.

Relatives of the late Marine Staff Sgt. Joseph Goodrich are upset over what they consider to be Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Catherine Baker Knoll’s cynical intrusion on their mourning.
[snip]
“When (Knoll) found out (Kubiak) was Joe’s aunt, she handed her a business card and told her she attends 90 percent of these ‘functions’ across the state,” Rhonda Goodrich said.
Read the Full Story

Many misguided people, particularly those who have spent too much time in university classrooms, think that economic rights are for the rich and powerful. The opposite is true: in the absence of a legal system that safeguards private property, the rich can always protect their interests by hiring muscle and buying influence. (That’s how organized crime was born.)
Jews and Christians agree that private property is divinely sanctioned, which is why God explicitly forbade theft in the Seventh Commandment. But the right to property is a natural right, and thus accessible to anyone with a functioning intellect. Ancient civilizations, East and West, prohibited thievery and often prescribed death as a punishment. Indeed, besides preserving the lives of its members, a mark of a functioning society is the ability to keep one man’s hands off another man’s goods.
The United States was founded on the ideal of private property. Our forefathers were so incensed with practice of housing British soldiers in private homes that they outlawed it in the Bill of Rights. They affirmed this fundamental right by only allowing a citizen’s property to be taken under two circumstances: if he was convicted of a crime, or if the public good demanded it.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court, without asking the people’s permission, has authorized multi-billion-dollar corporations to steal people’s houses, as long as the corporation can pay more taxes to the city government. You’d roll your eyes if a screenwriter came up with a plot that involved a major drug company commissioning a city council to destroy people’s homes in order to build an office park, but that’s pretty much what’s going to happen in New London, Conn. Here are some of the little people whose homes are going to be demolished:

Petitioner Wilhelmina Dery, for example, lives in a house on Walbach Street that has been in her family for over 100 years. She was born in the house in 1918; her husband, petitioner Charles Dery, moved into the house when they married in 1946. Their son lives next door with his family in the house he received as a wedding gift, and joins his parents in this suit….

Big corporations are essential to modern life, as they are the best instruments for doing big things like creating new medicines, building airplanes, or running communications networks. But they’re also made up of sinful human beings who can commit evils, and they should be restrained by the law appropriately.
This ruling represents a failure of justice at all levels of government. Theft is theft, whether it is performed by a burglar in the dead of night, or by a city council’s decree, duly ratified by our unelected judicial tyrants.

Amnesty International, like Greenpeace, is an organization I would join if it wasn’t run by ideologues. Human rights should unite everyone of good will, but Amnesty has always been harder on Western or pro-Western governments than on the truly repressive regimes.
Now they have veered into Bush-hating territory. Two weeks ago, they caused a minor fracas by referring to the terrorist detainee camp in Guantanamo as a “gulag,” then admitted they had no idea whether that was true. (Hint: unless it’s a slave-labor camp, it’s not a gulag.)
Dr. William F. Schulz (no relation to John or Steve), the director of Amnesty International USA (isn’t that name an oxymoron?) said, “We have documented that the use of torture and ill treatment is widespread and that the US government is a leading purveyor and practitioner of this odious human rights violation.”
At best, Dr. Schulz is misrepresenting and exaggerating Amnesty’s findings. Even the few details they provide are questionable:

The Bush Administration cited Egypt for beating victims with fists, whips and metal rods. And yet US Major Michael Smith testified at an administrative review hearing last year that an autopsy of a captured Iraqi general revealed he had suffered five broken ribs that were “consistent with blunt force trauma, that is, either punching, kicking or striking with an object or being thrown into an object.”

Five broken ribs might be painful, but that couldn’t have been the cause of death. And who broke those ribs? Dr. Schulz implies that it was U.S. troops. Yet for all he knows, it was the general’s fellow inmates.
Don’t take my word for it — read the report yourself, or at least some of it. The country findings are long on summary, short on detail. The moral equivalence would be laughable if it weren’t so sickening:

US-led forces in Iraq committed gross human rights violations, including unlawful killings and arbitrary detention, and evidence emerged of torture and ill-treatment. Thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed during armed clashes between US-led forces and Iraqi security forces on the one side, and Iraqi armed groups on the other [emphasis added].

On the one side, you have thugs and murders who bomb mosques, churches, marketplaces, civilian vehicles; who kidnap and behead the innocent in the name of God; who desperately want to beat the rest of Iraqi society into submission so they can administer their “human rights violations” (and you can bet Amnesty won’t be invited to observe.) On the other, you have thousands of Iraqis and Americans trying to stop these human beasts and build a more just society. But to Amnesty, it’s just two sides fighting.
Dr. Schulz calls for “a truly independent investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and other detention centers” and says not doing so “is tantamount to a whitewash, if not a cover-up, of these disgraceful crimes.” Why isn’t the Justice Department and the military judicial system equal to the task? Are they not independent? If not, who are the guilty men who are going free?
This irresponsible statement is an accusation against dozens of Bush Administration figures: “You’re a criminal. Prove you aren’t.” Ironically, if a government presumed that a suspect was guilty and made him prove his innocence, they’d be violating the accused’s human rights, and Amnesty would complain. Ye hypocrites!

“Looking Back” over at Town Hall

What will future generations think when they see the front pages of our leading newspapers repeatedly preoccupied with whether we are treating captured cut-throats nicely enough? What will they think when they see the Geneva Convention invoked to protect people who are excluded from protection by the Geneva Convention?

And here’s a related story about how we can’t patrol our borders without wondering if we’re introducing non-indigenous plantlife into the desert! Give me a break!
Border Patrol Horses Get Special Feed