Austin Bay: Bush's Vietnam - NOT!:
Beltway political experts explain Kennedy's action as a tactical political gamble. See, Bay, ole Ted was simply staking out political territory. If the Iraqi elections failed --as the conventional media wisdom said they would -- he was positioned to "take the moral high ground" from the Bush administration. "Moral high ground," accompanied by appropriate friendly media magnification, would translate into the political power to dominate the Bush administration.
It's tactical, Bay, tactical.
No, it's sad. It's blind. It's also bitterly small. That's why I pity Mr. Kennedy.
Mark Steyn:
Now I take the point that "democracy" - as in elections - isn't every thing. In the development of successful nations, the universal franchise is usually the last piece of the puzzle, as it was in Britain. Anyone can hold an election: Mugabe did; so did Charles Taylor, the recently retired Psycho-for-Life of Liberia. The world's thugocracies have got rather skilled at being just democratic enough to pass muster with Jimmy Carter and the international observers: they kill a ton of people, put it on hold for six weeks and then, when the UN monitors have moved on, pick up their machetes and resume business as usual.
I prefer to speak of "liberty" or, as Bush says, "freedom", or, as neither of us is quite bold enough to put it, capitalism - free market, property rights, law of contract, etc. That's why Hong Kong is freer than Liberia, if less "democratic". If I had six or seven centuries to work on things, I wouldn't do it this way in Iraq or Afghanistan. But the "war on terror" is more accurately a race against time - to unwreck the Middle East before its toxins wreck South Asia, West Africa, and eventually Europe. The doom-mongers can mock Bush all they want. But they're spending so much time doing so, they've left themselves woefully uninformed on some of the fascinating subtleties of Iraqi and Afghan politics that his Administration turns out to have been rather canny about.
Thomas Lipscomb: Drowning in Cambodia (via PoliPundit):
...the least President Bush can do is appoint Kerry U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia before this gets any worse. Perhaps then Kerry can find out what really did happen before even CBS finally figures out who ran for the Presidency based on dubious statements about his military record.
Update: It seems Lipscomb had an earlier article on Kerry during the campaign, Swimming From Cambodia, via Power Line.
Nelson Ascher (via Glenn):
And so, spontaneously up to a point, anti-Americanism became the alternative ideology that came to fill in the vacuum left by the failure of traditional, USSR-based communism and its Maoist or Trotskyite satellites. Before 1989, the global left had something to fight for: either the strengthening of the communist states or the correction of what they called their bureaucratic distortions. To fight for something is simultaneously to fight against whatever threatens it, and thus, the leftists were anti-Western and anti-Americans too, anti-capitalistic in short.
Now, whatever they wanted to defend or protect doesn’t exist anymore. They have only things to destroy, and all those things are personified in the US, in its very existence.
Update: Matt and Roger discuss this piece.
Ok, what's the point of the home and end keys if they don't bring you to the beginning and end of a line of text?! Argh.
Plus, the control key for copy and paste is the Apple key, not the control key, so I can't use my pinky to cut and paste. And, there's no shortcut to move back and forward a word at a time. And why the heck doesn't 'undo' work in this Safari text area? The menu entry is greyed out and everything.
Wednesday, February 9, 2005
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