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Friday, November 04, 2005How to Move those Russel Kirk Books...Jonah Goldberg and others are always trying to increase interest in conservative thought. But they keep writing articles, going on television, holding seminars and stuff. What we need is for a couple hard-core conservatives to make videos about their inability to tolerate a world where the Coburn amendments didn't pass and detonate themselves at the dedication of a public works project. The left will scramble to buy Russel Kirk books. Bill Moyers will be invited on television to discuss the need for sensitivity to the conservative world view. Jimmy Carter will denounce Bush for not doing more to respect the obviously deep feelings of this persecuted minority. You know, of course, that this is hyperbole. Stupid hyperbole at that. So why are we turning a blind eye to the siege of Paris and sniveling about not doing enough to understand and respect those who hack off heads, blow up little girls in ice cream parlors and, one bright September morn, massacred 3000 innocents to the greater glory of the bloodthirsty vision of god that rediscovered tribal paganism made of The One God, Merciful and Compassionate? 
posted by gbarto at 9:19 PM Over at Tim Blair's place, we learn that 15,000 Italians turned out at demonstrations to protest the Iranian president's call for Israel's destruction. Funny. AOL Time-Warner didn't seem to need to cover that. Stupid Italians. If you want your demonstration to count, it's got to be anti-Bush. After all, if you're not first and foremost anti-Bush, what kind of European are you anyway? If the media is wondering why their trust levels are low...
posted by gbarto at 9:13 PM AOL Time-Warner: People Don't Like Bush So I dial up AOL (how old-fashioned, I know). The lead story: Thousands Protest Bush at Summit So I go to the news page. There's a 4x3 image of the world standing up to Bush. Three inches down, there's a postage stamp size image of flames and God knows what. That's because they're torching cars in the hundreds again in Paris. Funny how when Bush gets protested abroad, AOL Time-Warner needs to make sure we know that people are unhappy with him. But when France is on the edge of civil war, in spite of their valiant efforts to placate Muslims by rolling over on the Saddam affair, the story's worn out after a few days. If the government of France is overthrown, and Bush gets egged, you know what will be the lead. Because the only real story for AOL Time-Warner is getting rid of Bush. And as attentive as we were to France's advice about the Muslim street when they were, in their own turn, castigating Bush, now that the Muslim street is literally rolling up the sidewalks in Paris, how France deals with Muslims is of secondary interest.
posted by gbarto at 8:44 PM Quoted at Instapundit: By Monday, everyone in Paris was speaking of "an unprecedented crisis." Both Sarkozy and his boss, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, had to cancel foreign trips to deal with the riots.It seems like every time there's a crisis in Europe, one minister or another either has to cancel or come back from a foreign trip. One wonders about the attraction of living in these countries whose leaders are always abroad. One wonders more when the Interior Minister is among those with pressing business elsewhere. Not to snipe, but maybe if Sarkozy and de Villepin dropped by the bad parts of Paris from time to time, they wouldn't need to send in the CRS to handle the introductions. At the very least, the news would be about the unruly youth just plain shooting, instead of shooting back.
posted by gbarto at 2:44 PM Tuesday, November 01, 2005Democrats to the RescueThough I usually hate to give them credit for too much, you've got to at least admire Democrats for their generosity. Every time the GOP is really on the ropes and at risk that one faction or another might leave, the Donkey steps in and reminds us that we really don't have much of anywhere else to go. Thanks today to Harry Reid, who has managed to make the likes of Bill Frist come off as close to statesmanlike. It takes a tremendous amount of graciousness to have such miraculous powers and use them for your declared enemies. HT Insty.
posted by gbarto at 9:26 PM Monday, October 31, 2005Not being a legal scholar or even the sort who follows court politics I don't have much to offer on the Alito pick.But... This one sure feels different from the Miers pick. It feels like something Bush would have done in his first term. Hope it works out well. It couldn't work out much worse than the Miers selection.
posted by gbarto at 9:19 PM Sunday, October 30, 2005In more pointed language, Instapundit nicely tackles what we and many others are saying:[Either Wilson's] mission was intended to result in the New York Times oped all along, meaning that the CIA didn't care much about Plame's status, and was trying to meddle in domestic politics. This reflects very badly on the CIA.And if it's the first option - the CIA was meddling in domestic politics -, as seems likely, the person who planned the mission should be prosecuted for those crimes normally associated with attempting to undermine the democratically elected government and substitute oneself. I'm not sure if coup or putsch is the more appropriate term, but the crime is treason. At the same time, Scooter Libby done wrong. The White House should not have been leaking around town that Joe Wilson was traveling on his wife's tab, so to speak. They should have been shouting from the rooftops that he was a goofy flake, a Clinton holdover and a patent phony. Rather than letting slip that Joe's wife got him the gig, they should have simply declared that Cheney had nothing to do with the mission, wondered aloud whether there really was a mission or if Joe Wilson was merely delusional, then suggested that if he had undertaken a mission such as was described in the NYT, his supervisors needed to be canned as they were obviously inadequate to tasks of greater moment than determining the chlorine levels in the pools at Niger hotels. Granted, the national press corps would have done their best to push Wilson's line, but had the administration hammered home that Wilson was a Clinton holdover with incompetent handlers - else why would he be allowed to write an NYT op-ed about a classified mission? - the CIA would have wound up blowing this in their efforts to defend themselves while Tenet, on his way out, could have played the good guy sold out by his former colleagues when he stayed loyal to the country's elected government, rather than the Democratic party. In short, it would have been ugly and dirty and protracted. But that's no different than what we've got here. The only difference is that the folks facing prosecution would have been those folks who attempted to convince themselves that the democratic process only counted if they agreed with its results.
posted by gbarto at 11:41 PM |
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