The Red Pill

Walter admits he and other "news" people have a liberal bias! His excuse is that it stems from their time as reporters in the trenches with the poor and down-trodden people. Basically, they go out everyday and see people who are in a bad way - that's their JOB by the way - and the FEEL bad for these poor people. Who wouldn't. And who wouldn't want to be able to be able to FIX every situation that every poor, down-trodden person has. That's human nature and a very noble idea. However, to turn that into a political belief that because as an individual I am unable to solve all these problems it must fall to the Government to do so is just plain silly. And idealistic. Instead of creating ever bigger Goverment in a futile attempt to solve all the problems, it would be a lot more practical to get out there and actually do something themselves! Look at Mother Teresa - she just went out and did it and others followed her. No need to invent large Governent programs that only solve a fraction of the issues they are intended to plus create other problems.

Siding with the powerless: Ideas from 60 years in journalism

By Walter Cronkite

We [journalists] reached our intellectual adulthood with daily close-ups of the inequality in a nation that was founded on the commitment to equality for all. So we are inclined to side with the powerless rather than the powerful. If that is what makes us liberals so be it, just as long as . . . we adhere to the first ideals of good journalism.
-- I hope we all get along as we go along. I expect that occasionally we will have some differences of opinion. I expect to be provocative. After more than 60 years as a journalist, I have some ideas about the state of our nation, of our world, of our culture, and I wouldn't be true to the purpose of a column if I didn't vent them here.
My hope is that you will find my commentary interesting, informative, perhaps occasionally amusing (deliberately, that is), and, at all times, fair and as unbiased as it is possible for opinion to be.
You are going to disagree with me from time to time, and I will be disappointed if you don't. That fulfills the provocative requirement of a column like this.
When the nation was deeply divided over the Vietnam War, we at CBS got a lot of mail complaining about our coverage. I was disturbed until we found out that the number of letters condemning us as being government lackeys in support of the war almost precisely balanced those condemning us as being sympathetic to the war protesters. I relaxed with the simple philosophy that if you are being shot at from both sides, you must be in the middle of the road.
Let's face this one down right now: I am neither Republican nor Democrat. I am a registered independent because I find that I cast my votes not on the basis of party loyalty but on the issues of the moment and my assessment of the candidates.
Basically I am a fiscal conservative and a social liberal, but those who rabidly support those positions will be more often disappointed in my views than otherwise.

I believe that most of us reporters are liberal, but not because we consciously have chosen that particular color in the political spectrum. More likely it is because most of us served our journalistic apprenticeships as reporters covering the seamier side of our cities -- the crimes, the tenement fires, the homeless and the hungry, the underclothed and undereducated.
We reached our intellectual adulthood with daily close-ups of the inequality in a nation that was founded on the commitment to equality for all. So we are inclined to side with the powerless rather than the powerful. If that is what makes us liberals so be it, just as long as in reporting the news we adhere to the first ideals of good journalism -- that news reports must be fair, accurate and unbiased. That clearly doesn't apply when one deserts the front page for the editorial page and the columns to which opinion should be isolated.
The perceived liberalism of television reporters, I am convinced, is a product of the limited time given for any particular item. The reporter desperately tries to get all the important facts and essential viewpoints into his or her piece but, against a fast-approaching deadline, he or she must summarize in a sentence the complicated story. That is where the slippage occurs, and the summary too frequently, without intention, seems to emphasize one side or the other.

Yea, that's it. Too little time and space to tell the whole truth, so just give your one-sided, liberal, view and call it a news story! That about explains most of what I read.

(The answer to that problem, as with much else in television news, is in more time for the dominant evening newscasts. In our ever more complicated and confusing world, those newscasts need an hour.)
Incidentally, I looked up the definition of "liberal" in a Random House dictionary. It gave the synonyms for "liberal" as "progressive," "broad-minded," "unprejudiced," "beneficent." The antonyms it offered: "reactionary" and "intolerant."
I have always suspected those fine folks at Random House of being liberals. You just can't trust anybody these days.

From The Independent
Here is the BBC - a Government "corporation" that is either so afraid or socialist (or both) that it attacks capitalism as being untrustworthy because it is driven by profit. Well, it's better to be driven by profit than by ideology and political bias, I think. After all, if people will pay for something, then they obviously want it. Both private and public corporations serve a Master, much has been made about the private corporation serving only profit, but a "public" corporation serves the politicians who control it's budget. In a private corp, the people control the corporation because they fund it buy purchasing it's product. In a public corp., ironically, the people have little control.

BBC launches public attack on Murdoch 'imperialism'
By Vincent Graff, Media and Culture Editor
25 August 2003


The controller of BBC1 launched an unprecedented attack on Rupert Murdoch yesterday, calling the media billionaire a "capital imperialist" who wants to destabilise the corporation because he "is against everything the BBC stands for".

Lorraine Heggessey said Mr Murdoch's continued attacks on the BBC stemmed from a dislike of the public sector. But he did not understand that the British people "have a National Health Service, a public education system" and trust organisations that are there for the benefit of society and not driven by profit.

I don't know about their Education system, but their National Health system, like all others, seems about ready to collapse. There is also the coming Pension crisis, at least in mainland Europe, that is sure to further shake the people's faith in large socialist government programs.

Her controversial comments, in an interview with The Independent, are believed to be the first time a senior BBC executive has publicly attacked the motives of the media tycoon. They follow an intensification of anti-BBC rhetoric from Mr Murdoch's side.

The BBC has been alarmed by the increasingly close relationship between the Government and Mr Murdoch's British newspapers, at a time when the BBC's relationship with New Labour is strained as never before. The frostiness of the relationship has raised speculation that the Government will consider abolishing the licence fee in its forthcoming review of the BBC's charter.

Yeah, sure, because the BBC serves the ultra-liberals in Government and the leadership is currently somewhat - relatively speaking - conservative.


Ms Heggessey's remarks will cheer supporters of the corporation who fear the BBC has kept quiet for too long in the face of attack from Mr Murdoch and his most senior employees.

Her comments come in the wake of a speech to the country's senior broadcasting executives by Tony Ball, chief executive of British Sky Broadcasting, in which Mr Murdoch's News Corporation is the major shareholder.

Mr Ball told the Edinburgh International Television Festival last week that the BBC ought to be forced to sell its most successful programmes, such as EastEnders, Casualty and Have I Got News For You to its commercial rivals, who would screen all future episodes instead. The money raised by such sales should then be ploughed into experimental programming, he said.

Executives at the BBC and elsewhere see the plan as a Murdoch-inspired attempt to cripple the corporation by depriving it of its most popular shows - and the large audiences that go with them.

Mr Ball told a questioner at the festival that it "would not be such a disaster" if the BBC were eventually to become a marginal broadcaster.

But Ms Heggessey retorted: "It wouldn't be such a disaster for Sky because he hopes that the less successful we become, the more people will subscribe to Sky. It would be a disaster for the BBC."

Supporters of the BBC say Mr Ball's proposal, intended to influence the Government's hand as it considers the renewal of the BBC's charter, follows relentlessly negative reports in Mr Murdoch's British newspapers about the BBC's conduct in the David Kelly affair. The Times and The Sun, in particular, have come under attack for what is perceived as anti-BBC bias.

"I would suspect that everybody who works for Rupert Murdoch knows what he expects of them and they know that if they don't deliver they will be booted out," said Ms Heggessey. Newspaper readers "know when they are being peddled a line," she added.

In his speech, Mr Ball proposed two further restrictions to be placed on the BBC, which he argued would prevent the corporation it from straying too far into territory he regards as the sole domain of commercial broadcasters such as his own.

The BBC should be banned from buying any foreign-made material, he said. This would prevent the BBC from pushing up the price of American sitcoms, Hollywood movies and Australian soap operas, the staples of many commercial channels. "I really cannot see why public money is being diverted to those poor struggling Hollywood studios," he said.

Ms Heggessey said BBC1 did not run any overseas-originated programmes during peak time but "the audience expects us to run movies and we do".

Remember this next time someone is proposing Universal Health care. Note the part about the "failings of the health and welfare system". Isn't this the kind of system the Left want to bring to the U.S.A.? Also interesting is the description of the current, Jacques Chirac, government as "center-right"

"...irritating many of his colleagues on the left, who had hoped the crisis would help them to destabilise the centre-right government and head off health reforms planned this autumn.".

If France and Jacques Chirac are center-right, then I don't even want to know what "center" much less "left" is. SCARY.

Holocaust of the elderly: death toll in French heatwave rises to 10,000

By John Lichfield in Paris
22 August 2003


The summer of 2003 will be remembered as the year of the holocaust of the French elderly.

France was reeling yesterday from figures that suggested some 10,000 people - mostly over the age of 75 - were killed by this month's heatwave, double the previous estimate.

As a political storm raged over blame for the deaths, President Jacques Chirac called an emergency cabinet meeting and promised an inquiry to examine "with complete openness" the failings of the health and welfare system.

Half the victims are believed to have died in old people's homes, many operating with fewer staff during the August holidays. Many hospitals had closed complete wards for the month and were unable to offer sophisticated, or sometimes even basic, treatment to victims. About 2,000 people are thought to have died in their homes from the effects of dehydration and other heat- related problems while neighbours and relatives were away.

Such was the death rate - described officially as a period of "surplus mortality" - that families are now having to wait for up to two weeks for a funeral because of a shortage of coffins, priests and grave-diggers.

M. Chirac, who has been criticisedfor refusing to break off his two-week holiday in Quebec, promised in a nationwide address yesterday that "everything will be done to correct the shortcomings" exposed by the disaster. "Many fragile people died alone in their homes," he admitted.

Senior health officials have claimed ministers reacted slowly to warnings in early August that a calamity was in the making, while the Health Minister, Jean-François Mattei, has insisted he was not given adequate advice. By the time he and the Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, broke off holidays last week and ordered the emergency recall of hospital staff, the worst of the 10-day heatwave was over. Earlier this week, the director general of health, Lucien Abenhaim, resigned, complaining ministers had ignored his warnings, including a plea that military and Red Cross hospitals should be commandeered to ease the burden on state hospitals.

Many healthcare professionals - including the doctor, former health minister and founder of Médécins Sans Frontières, Bernard Kouchner - said it had been a disaster waiting to happen. "We are all to blame," Dr Kouchner said, irritating many of his colleagues on the left, who had hoped the crisis would help them to destabilise the centre-right government and head off health reforms planned this autumn.

Dr Michel Dèsmaizieres, an emergency service doctor in Paris, told the newspaper Libération: "It is just not right to see [patients on] trolleys in the corridors, while whole wards were empty and locked up. In the retirement homes there were people with a body temperature of 42C [108F], for whom we could offer nothing but a little comfort."

M. Mattei, also a former doctor, reluctantly admitted earlier this week that as many as 5,000 extra deaths were recorded - 80 per cent of them old people - in the first half of this month. However, France's largest funeral directors' association has now calculated that there were at least 10,000 extra deaths in the period up to Wednesday of this week, many of them on 12 August when temperatures peaked at more than 100F (37.8C) in northern France. About half the extra deaths were in the Paris area.

Government officials described these figures as "plausible" but urged caution until an official investigation was completed next month.

Dr Marc Harboun, a specialist geriatrics from Ivry, near Paris, said: "This death rate is due to a lack of people and means to reduce the temperature [of the patients]. Medically, we could cope by increasing the dosage in transfusions but, for the other things we needed to do - making the patients drink, dampening them down - we didn't have the time."

Officials said 85 per cent of all public and private retirement homes in France were permanently understaffed. At holiday times, staffing levels fell even further.

One woman, Claude Guérin, described how she took her elderly aunt to a hospital on the Côte d'Azur, suffering from pulmonary problems brought on by the heat. "She was 96, but she was fighting fit before the heatwave," said Mme Guérin.

"At first she was put in an air-conditioned revival room but then she was abruptly transferred to a ward where it was 50C [122F]. I talked to two nurses. One said: 'I don't have time to bother with her.' The other said: 'Get her out of here.' But the doctors would not let her go. Three days later, she died."

Courting a Crisis of Legitimacy

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, July 4, 2003; Page A23


I once worked in government. On my first day, I raised my right hand and swore to uphold the Constitution. I thought I knew what that meant.

Recently we have gone to war in Afghanistan, Iraq and a few other places, at least in part to advance democracy and promote our kind of constitutionalism. A foreigner might then ask: What exactly is your Constitution? Now we know the answer. The Constitution is whatever Justice Sandra Day O'Connor says it is. On any given Monday.

That modifier is crucial, because she does change her mind, and when she does, so does the Constitution. Seventeen years ago, she ruled anti-sodomy laws constitutional. Now she thinks otherwise.

Conservatives are distressed and liberals ecstatic about the outcome of recent decisions of this allegedly conservative court. In a few short years, it has enshrined in stone (1) abortion on demand, (2) racial preferences and (3) gay rights -- the liberal trifecta, just about their entire social agenda, save shutting down the Fox News Channel.

My concern about the court is less the outcome of these cases than the court's arbitrariness and imperiousness. In 1992, I voted (in a Maryland referendum) to maintain legalized abortion, and yet I believe that Roe v. Wade was an appalling act of judicial usurpation that deserves repeal. And had I been a Texas legislator, I, like Justice Clarence Thomas, would have voted to repeal the sodomy law, but it was not the court's place to do the people's work when it struck down all such laws under an infinitely expansive notion of "privacy."

Whenever one argues for this kind of judicial minimalism, however, the other side immediately unfurls the bloody flag of segregation. For the past half-century proponents of judicial activism have borrowed the prestige the court gained by being activist on civil rights and used it to justify judicial legislation in every other field of endeavor. On a recent edition of "Inside Washington," for example, my friend and fellow panelist Colby King of The Post characterized my opposition to the sodomy decision as "right out of the Southern Manifesto."

It was a bit of a stretch (delivered with a bit of a smile). Invoking segregation is a clever tactic and a staple of judicial activism, but it fails because segregation was unique. The argument against judicial activism is that it impedes, overrides and destroys normal democratic practice. But in the segregated South there was no normal democratic practice. Blacks were disenfranchised. They could not undo the injustice by legislative means because they had been deprived of those means. It was a Catch-22. That's why the court had to intervene. That's why the court was right to intervene. It did not mint new rights; it extended to African Americans the normal rights of democratic participation.

The proof of this uniqueness of civil rights is the fact that once these disabilities were removed and blacks could fully participate democratically, even such arch-segregationists as Strom Thurmond magically discovered -- without any further court prompting -- the brotherhood of man and the constituent needs of African Americans.

This restoration of fundamental democratic practice simply does not apply to the cases in question today: abortion, affirmative action and gay rights. No one here is barred from participating in the political process. No one is systematically harassed or threatened. No one suffers cross burnings, beatings or worse for agitating on behalf of this or that cause.

At one level, judicial activism is repugnant for reasons of simple democratic self-respect. Who do these robed eminencies think they are, reading into "penumbras, formed by emanations" of the Constitution to create new norms and strike down others with the arbitrariness of Iran's Council of Guardians? This is a democracy, after all.

An even more important reason, however, is social peace. When you short-circuit the democratic process, you deprive a decision of legitimacy and prevent the stable social settlement of an issue. The genius of a pluralistic Madisonian democracy is that it allows the clash of factions in the legislature, working out messy settlements that, amended over time, allow for compromise and give even the losers a sense of having played the game and of having another chance next time around. All of this is lost when an issue is foreclosed by judicial fiat.

Which is why I am pleased that the court did not abolish affirmative action by fiat, even though I would like to see it abolished tomorrow by legislation or referendum. Not just because this is a matter for the people to decide but because abolishing it by judicial decree would create a crisis of legitimacy and keep the issue aflame forever. Or until Justice O'Connor changes her mind again.

Liberal Democrats' Perverse Foreign Policy

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, July 11, 2003; Page A21


It was the left that led the opposition to war in Iraq. Now it is the left that is most strenuous in urging intervention in Liberia. Curious.

No blood for oil, it seems, but blood for Liberia. And let us not automatically assume that Liberia will be an immaculate intervention. Sure, we may get lucky and suffer no casualties. But Liberia has three warring parties, tons of guns and legions of desperate fighters. Yet pressure is inexorably building to send American troops to enforce a peace.

There are the usual suspects, Jesse Jackson and the New York Times, but the most unapologetic proponent of the no-Iraq/yes-Liberia school is Howard Dean, Democratic flavor of the month. "I opposed the war in Iraq because it was the wrong war at the wrong time," says Dean, but "military intervention in Liberia represents an appropriate use of American power."

Why? In terms of brutality, systematic repression, number of killings, relish for torture and sum total of human misery caused, Charles Taylor is a piker next to Saddam Hussein. That is not to say that Taylor is a better man. It is only to say that in his tiny corner of the world with no oil resources and no scientific infrastructure for developing instruments of mass murder, Taylor has neither the reach nor the power to wreak Hussein-class havoc. What is it that makes liberals such as Dean, preening their humanitarianism, so antiwar in Iraq and so pro-intervention in Liberia?

The same question could be asked of the Democratic Party, which in the 1990s opposed the Persian Gulf War but overwhelmingly supported humanitarian interventions in places such as Haiti and Kosovo.

They all had a claim on the American conscience. What then was the real difference between, say, Haiti and Gulf War I, and between Liberia and Gulf War II? The Persian Gulf has deep strategic significance for the United States; Haiti and Liberia do not. In both gulf wars, critical American national interests were being defended and advanced. Yet it is precisely these interventions that liberals opposed.

The only conclusion one can draw is that for liberal Democrats, America's strategic interests are not just an irrelevance, but also a deterrent to intervention. This is a perversity born of moral vanity. For liberals, foreign policy is social work. National interest -- i.e., national selfishness -- is a taint. The only justified interventions, therefore, are those that are morally pristine, namely, those that are uncorrupted by any suggestion of national interest.

Hence the central axiom of left-liberal foreign policy: The use of American force is always wrong, unless deployed in a region of no strategic significance to the United States. The war in Afghanistan was an exception, but it doesn't count because it was retaliation against an overt attack, and not even liberals can oppose a counterattack in a war the other side started. Such bolts from the blue are rare, however. They come about every half-century, the last one being Pearl Harbor. In between one has to make decisions about going to war in less axiomatic circumstances. And that is when the liberal Democrats fall into their solipsism of righteousness.

This is the core lunacy of Democratic foreign policy. Either it has no criteria for intervening militarily -- after all, if we're going into Liberia, on what grounds are we not going into Congo? -- or it has a criterion, and its logic is that the U.S. Army is a missionary service rather than a defender of U.S. interests.

What should be our criteria for military intervention? The answer is simple: strategic and moral necessity. Foreign policy is not social work. Acting for purely humanitarian reasons is wanton and self-indulgent. You don't send U.S. soldiers to die to assuage troubled consciences at home. Their lives should be risked only in defense of their country.

Should we then do nothing elsewhere? In principle, we should help others by economic and diplomatic means and with appropriate relief agencies. Regarding Liberia, it is rather odd for the Europeans, who rail against U.S. arrogance, to claim that all the armies of France and Germany, of Europe and Africa, are powerless in the face of Charles Taylor -- unless the Americans ride to the rescue.

We should be telling them to do the job, with an offer of U.S. logistical help. We have quite enough on our plate in Iraq and Afghanistan and in chasing al Qaeda around the world.

If, nonetheless, the president finds the pressure irresistible to intervene in Liberia, he should send troops only under very clear conditions: America will share the burden with them if they share the burden with us where we need it. And that means peacekeepers in Iraq. The world cannot stand by watching us bleed in Iraq, and then expect us to bleed for it in Liberia.

Why Did Bush Go to War?

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, July 18, 2003


The Niger uranium flap has achieved the status of midsummer frenzy, a molehill become a mountain in the absence of competing news stories. It was but one bit of intelligence out of dozens about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and, by any measure, hardly the most important.

Nonetheless, it was more than likely false, thus giving an opening to the Democrats, desperate for some handle to attack President Bush's huge advantage on the issue of national security. With weapons of mass destruction yet unfound, the Niger blunder opens the way to the broad implication that the president is a liar or a dissimulator who took the country to war under false pretenses.

How exactly does this line of reasoning work? The charge is that the president was looking for excuses to go to war with Hussein and that the weapons-of-mass-destruction claims were just a pretense.

Aside from the fact that Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction was posited not only by Bush but also by just about every intelligence service on the planet (including those of countries that opposed war as the solution), one runs up against this logical conundrum: Why then did Bush want to go to war? For fun and recreation? Because of some cowboy compulsion?

The wilder critics have attempted wag-the-dog theories: war as a distraction from general political woes (Paul Krugman quotes the Robert De Niro character advising the president: "You want to win this election, you better change the subject. You wanna change this subject, you better have a war.") or war as a distraction from a lousy economy. This is ridiculous. Apart from everything else, war is a highly dangerous political enterprise. No one had any idea that Baghdad would fall in three weeks and with so few casualties. Just as no one had any idea how costly and bloody the post-victory occupation would be.

On the contrary, the war was a huge political gamble. There was no popular pressure to go to war. There was even less foreign pressure to go to war. Bush decided to stake his presidency on it nonetheless, knowing that if things went wrong -- and indeed they might still -- his political career was finished.

It is obvious he did so because he thought that, post-9/11, it was vital to the security of the United States that Hussein be disarmed and deposed.

Under what analysis? That Iraq posed a clear and imminent danger, a claim now being discounted by the critics because of the absence thus far of weapons of mass destruction?

No. That was not the president's case. It was, on occasion, Tony Blair's, and that is why Blair is in such political trouble in Britain. But in Bush's first post-9/11 State of the Union address (January 2002), he framed Iraq as part of a larger and more enduring problem, the overriding threat of our time: the conjunction of terrorism, terrorist states and weapons of mass destruction. And unless something was done, we faced the prospect of an infinitely more catastrophic 9/11 in the future.

Later that year, in a speech to the United Nations, he spoke of the danger from Iraq not as "clear and present" but "grave and gathering," an obvious allusion to Churchill's "gathering storm," the gradually accumulating threat that preceded the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939. And then nearer the war, in his 2003 State of the Union address, Bush plainly denied that the threat was imminent. "Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent." Bush was, on the contrary, calling for action precisely when the threat was not imminent because, "if this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions . . . would come too late."

The threat had not yet even fully emerged, Bush was asserting, but nonetheless it had to be faced because it would only get worse. Hussein was not going away. The sanctions were not going to restrain him. Even his death would be no reprieve, as his half-mad sons would take over. The argument was that Hussein had to be removed eventually and that with Hussein relatively weakened, isolated and vulnerable, now would be more prudent and less costly than later.

He was right.

In fact, Bush's case was simply a more elaborate and formal restatement of Bill Clinton's argument in 1998 that, left unmolested, Hussein would "go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you, he'll use the arsenal."

That was true when Clinton said it. It was true when Bush said it. The difference is that Bush did something about it.

Charles has a great summary of what the war on terror and the war in Iraq mean.

Middle East: The Realities

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, July 25, 2003


Amid the general media and Democratic frenzy over Niger yellowcake, it is Bill Clinton who injected a note of sanity. "What happened often happens," Clinton told Larry King. "There was a disagreement between British intelligence and American intelligence. The president said it was British intelligence that said it. . . . . British intelligence still maintains that they think the nuclear story was true. I don't know what was true, what was false. I thought the White House did the right thing in just saying, 'Well, we probably shouldn't have said that.' " Big deal. End of story. End of scandal.

The fact that the Democrats and the media can't seem to let go of it, however, is testimony to their need (and ability) to change the subject. From what? From the moral and strategic realities of Iraq. The moral reality finally burst through the yellowcake fog with the death of the Hussein brothers, psychopathic torturers who would be running Iraq if not for the policy enunciated by President Bush in that very same State of the Union address.

That moral reality is a little hard for the left to explain, considering the fact that it parades as the guardian of human rights and all-around general decency, and rallied millions to prevent the policy that liberated Iraq from Uday and Qusay's reign of terror.

Then there are the strategic realities. Consider what has happened in the Near East since Sept. 11, 2001:

(1) In Afghanistan, the Taliban have been overthrown and a decent government has been installed.

(2) In Iraq, the Saddam Hussein regime has been overthrown, the dynasty has been destroyed and the possibility for a civilized form of governance exists for the first time in 30 years.

(3) In Iran, with dictatorships toppled to the east (Afghanistan) and the west (Iraq), popular resistance to the dictatorship of the mullahs has intensified.

(4) In Pakistan, once the sponsor and chief supporter of the Taliban, the government radically reversed course and became a leading American ally in the war on terror.

(5) In Saudi Arabia, where the presence of U.S. troops near the holy cities of Mecca and Medina deeply inflamed relations with many Muslims, the American military is leaving -- not in retreat or with apology but because it is no longer needed to protect Saudi Arabia from Hussein.

(6) Yemen, totally unhelpful to the United States after the attack on the USS Cole, has started cooperating in the war on terror.

(7) In the small, stable Gulf states, new alliances with the United States have been established.

(8) Kuwait's future is secure, the threat from Saddam Hussein having been eliminated.

(9) Jordan is secure, no longer having Iraq's tank armies and radical nationalist influence at its back.

(10) Syria has gone quiet, closing terrorist offices in Damascus and playing down its traditional anti-Americanism.

(11) Lebanon's southern frontier is quiet for the first time in years, as Hezbollah, reading the new strategic situation, has stopped cross-border attacks into Israel.

(12) Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations have been restarted, a truce has been declared and a fledgling Palestinian leadership has been established that might actually be prepared to make a real peace with Israel.

That's every country from the Khyber Pass to the Mediterranean Sea. Everywhere you look, the forces of moderation have been strengthened. This is a huge strategic advance not just for the region but for the world, because this region in its decades-long stagnation has incubated the world's most virulent anti-American, anti-Western, anti-democratic and anti-modernist fanaticism.

This is not to say that the Near East has been forever transformed. It is only to say that because of American resolution and action, there is a historic possibility for such a transformation.

But it all hinges on success in Iraq. On America's not being driven out of Iraq the way it was driven out of Lebanon and Somalia -- which is what every terrorist and every terrorist state wants to see happen. And with everything at stake, what is the left doing? Everything it can to undermine the enterprise. By implying both that it was launched fraudulently (see yellowcake) and, alternately, that it has ensnared us in a hopeless quagmire.

Yes, the cost is great. The number of soldiers killed is relatively small, but every death is painful and every life uniquely valuable. But remember that just yesterday we lost 3,000 lives in one day. And if this region is not transformed, on some future day we will lose 300,000.

The lives of those as yet unknown innocents hinge now on success in Iraq. If we win the peace and leave behind a decent democratic society, enjoying, as it does today, the freest press and speech in the entire Arab world, it will revolutionize the region. And if we leave in failure, the whole region will fall back into chaos, and worse.

Looks like we're still able to fight the war on terror ... no distractions here.

OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today: "The CIA has captured a major al Qaeda leader who is believed to have planned bombings in Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia,' ABC News reports. The man, Riduan Isamuddin, 'was arrested as part of a CIA undercover operation in the last 24 hours. He is currently being returned to Indonesia to face terrorism charges there. The CIA has called the Indonesia-born Hambali the 'Osama bin Laden' of Southeast Asia."

The New York Times waits a month before publishing a letter from Wesley Clark that correct Paul Krugmans article claiming the Bush White House was pushing a Saddam Hussein link to 9-11 the same day the attack occurred. By the way, I was already aware that this Krugman guy was a Bush-hating type, but he's connected with Enron?? Who can take this guy seriously?

OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today:
"Back in June, we noted that Bush-haters and Saddam-defenders were seizing upon a vague comment by Wesley Clark, a retired general and prospective Democratic presidential candidate, to justify their contention that BUSH LIED!!!!!! and said Saddam Hussein was behind the Sept. 11 attacks. Clark told NBC's Tim Russert that he'd received a phone call on Sept. 11--he didn't say from whom--urging him to argue publicly for such a link.

Anti-Bush fantasists simply assumed that Bush was behind the phone call Clark described. Here's former Enron adviser Paul Krugman:

Gen. Wesley Clark says he received calls on Sept. 11 from 'people around the White House' urging him to link the attack to Saddam Hussein.

That Krugman column ran July 15. Yesterday the Times published this letter from Clark:

I would like to correct any possible misunderstanding of my remarks on 'Meet the Press,' quoted in Paul Krugman's July 15 column, about 'people around the White House' seeking to link Sept. 11 to Saddam Hussein.

I received a call from a Middle East think tank outside the country, asking me to link 9/11 to Saddam Hussein. No one from the White House asked me to link Saddam Hussein to Sept. 11. Subsequently, I learned that there was much discussion inside the administration in the days immediately after Sept. 11 trying to use 9/11 to go after Saddam Hussein.

In other words, there were many people, inside and outside the government, who tried to link Saddam Hussein to Sept. 11.

So Krugman turns out to have been engaging in a bit of dowdification. Also odd about this, as blogger Donald Luskin notes, is that the letter is dated July 18, but the Times didn't get around to publishing it until yesterday, 26 days later."

Europe is tired and complacent under the Socialist protection of the State. Will they eventually become that which they feared, the old Soviet Union?

OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today: "The New York Post's Ralph Peters has a nice summary of the cultural divide between America and Europe:
Strategically, Europe is in danger of becoming the greatest impediment to positive change in the world. Europe clings to the international status quo, no matter how dreadful, simply because risk has been bred out of its culture. This leaves the United States (and Britain) with the choice of doing that which is necessary and just without Europe's support, or accepting the rules that made the 20th century history's bloodiest.

Europeans are correct when they insist that America has become a danger. We are, indeed, a tremendous threat to their self-satisfaction, to their dread of change, to their moral irresponsibility and to their dreary, state-supported cultures.

Since George W. Bush became president, and especially since he made clear he was taking the offensive in fighting terrorists and reforming the Muslim world, even we Americans have been subjected to a lot of tiresome tut-tutting about the need to cater to European and even Arab public opinion. But really, isn't it better to be right than popular?"

OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today:
More proof that Iraq is, in fact, the frontline on the war against Terror.

"Back on July 7 we noted the 'flypaper' theory of columnist David Warren: that American troops in Iraq are an irresistible attraction for Islamist terrorists. Now the New York Times has waddled in with a report making the same argument:
In much the same way as the Russian invasion of Afghanistan stirred an earlier generation of young Muslims determined to fight the infidel, the American presence in Iraq is prompting a rising tide of Muslim militants to slip into the country to fight the foreign occupier, Iraqi officials and others say.
'Iraq is the nexus where many issues are coming together--Islam versus democracy, the West versus the axis of evil, Arab nationalism versus some different types of political culture,' said Barham Saleh, the prime minister of this Kurdish-controlled part of northern Iraq. 'If the Americans succeed here, this will be a monumental blow to everything the terrorists stand for.'
The Times headline calls Iraq the 'ultimate battlefield,' which if anything is too optimistic, though of course we share the hope that there will be no need for further battlefields. In any case, this ought to put an end to all foolishness about Iraq being a 'distraction' from the war against terrorism. "

What makes a liberal?:
Dennis Prager
August 12, 2003

"Why do people hold liberal-left positions? (Liberal and left were once very different, but not anymore.)
This question has plagued me because I have long believed that most people, liberal or conservative, mean well. Very few people wake up in the morning planning to harm society. Yet, many liberal positions -- I emphasize liberal positions rather than liberals because most people who call themselves liberal do not hold most contemporary liberal positions -- have been wreaking havoc on America and the world.
How, then, can decent and often very smart people hold liberal positions?
There are many reasons, but the two greatest may be naivete and narcissism. Each alone causes problems, but when combined in the same person, they are particularly destructive.
At the heart of liberalism is the naive belief that people are basically good. As a result of this belief, liberals rarely blame people for the evil they do. Instead, they blame economics, parents, capitalism, racism, and anything else that can let the individual off the hook.
A second naive liberal belief is that because people are basically good, talking with people who do evil is always better than fighting, let alone killing, them. 'Negotiate with Saddam,' 'Negotiate with the Soviets,' 'War never solves anything,' 'Think peace,' 'Visualize peace' -- the liberal mind is filled with naive cliches about how to deal with evil.
Indeed, the very use of the word 'evil' greatly disturbs liberals. It sshakes up their child-like views of the world, that everybody is at heart a decent person who is either misunderstood or led to do unfortunate things by outside forces.

"Child-like" is operative. The further left you go, the less you like growing up. That is one reason so many professors are on the left. Never leaving school from kindergarten through adulthood enables one to avoid becoming a mature adult. It is no wonder a liberal professor has recently argued that children should have the vote. He knows in his heart that he is not really an adult, so why should he and not a chronologic child be allowed to vote?

The second major source of modern liberalism is narcissism, the unhealthy preoccupation with oneself and one's feelings. We live in the Age of Narcissism. As a result of unprecedented affluence and luxury, preoccupation with one's psychological state, and a hedonistic culture, much of the West, America included, has become almost entirely feelings-directed.

That is one reason "feelings" and "compassion" are two of the most often used liberal terms. "Character" is no longer a liberal word because it implies self-restraint. "Good and evil" are not liberal words either as they imply a moral standard beyond one's feelings. In assessing what position to take on moral or social questions, the liberal asks him or herself, "How do I feel about it?" or "How do I show the most compassion?" not "What is right?" or "What is wrong?" For the liberal, right and wrong are dismissed as unknowable, and every person chooses his or her own morality.

A good example of liberal narcissism is the liberal position on abortion. For the liberal, the worth of a human fetus, whether it is allowed to live or to be extinguished, is entirely based on the feelings of the mother. If the mother wants to give birth, the fetus is of incomparable worth; if the mother doesn't, the fetus has the value of a decayed tooth.

There are not many antidotes to this lethal combination of naivete and narcissism. Both are very comfortable states compared to growing up and confronting evil, and compared to making one's feelings subservient to a higher standard. And comfortable people don't like to be made uncomfortable.

Hence the liberal attempt to either erase the Judeo-Christian code or at least remove its influence from public life. Nothing could provide a better example of contemporary liberalism than the liberal battle to remove the Ten Commandments from all public places. Liberals want suggestions, not commandments."

From the U.K. Telegraph about Arnold Schwarzenegger:

The Gubernator?
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 10/08/2003)

"1. Arnold is a Nazi.
Okay, Arnold's not a Nazi. He was born in the Austrian town of Thal, but not until 1947, and thus was technically unable to join the Nazi Party no matter how much he may have wanted to. But he certainly has family ties to the Nazis. His wife's grandfather, Joe Kennedy, was one of America's most prominent Nazi sympathisers.
Oh, wait. That's not the Nazi family ties the Dems had in mind? No, as Katie Couric put it on NBC's Today Show, 'He's the son of a Nazi Party member. He said he was prejudiced, before overcoming those feelings by working with the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, and the dean of the centre said an investigation of Schwarzenegger's late father, conducted at the actor's request, found no evidence of war crimes.'
Sorry, folks, you'll have to do better than that. The more you bring up the 'son of a Nazi' line, the more you remind voters of what Arnold is: an immigrant who escaped and transcended his past. You can't saddle a man who chose to be American with the baggage he left behind in the old country.
2. Arnold is unqualified.
Yes, he's not a professional politician. And that's a disadvantage? The professional politicians are the ones who got California into this mess. This is a 'throw the bum out' election, so the successful challenger will be the one who looks least like the bum. Gray Davis has been on the public payroll his entire adult life: he represents the full-time political class. Arnold represents the other California: entrepreneurial energy, wit and invention, the California that understands that if Hollywood and Silicon Valley were run by "qualified" people like Davis we'd still be watching flickering silents and you'd need union-approved quill-feathers to send e-mail.

Arnold made his first business investment at 19, using savings from his bodybuilding contests to buy a failed Munich gym. He turned it around. The first really big money he made in America in the early 1970s came when he and a fellow bodybuilder started a bricklaying business. He's one of a very few actors who was a millionaire before he ever acted. And, if you think it's no big deal being the world's highest-paid movie star, you try it - with a guttural German accent so thick you can barely do dialogue and a body frame so large you're too goofy for playing love scenes. From his gym to his mail-order company to his masonry business to his shopping malls, Schwarzenegger has shown a consistent knack for exploiting the fullest financial value from even his most modest successes. Who would you say best embodies the spirit of California? The guy who has made all his own money? Or the fellows who've squandered everybody else's?"

OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today: "California's Gov. Gray Davis, facing almost certain defeat in an Oct. 7 recall election, is hoping to whine his way to victory, the Associated Press reports:
He also called [the recall effort] 'an insult to the 8 million people who went to the polls last November and decided I should be governor.'
Of nearly 8 million people voting in California's election, Davis received around 3.5 million votes, [GOP nominee Bill] Simon got nearly 3.2 million, and the rest of the voters chose other candidates or left the gubernatorial part of the ballot blank.
Davis's vote total last year was less than the 50% he'll need to beat the recall effort. In any case, we're not sure the recall really is an insult to those who elected Davis, and it seems to us they richly deserve to be insulted."

WSJ Best of the Web

Inventing a Quagmire
We missed this last week, but it's so stunning that it's worth highlighting even a few days late. The corrections column of Thursday's New York Times carried the following "editor's note":

An article on Sunday about attacks on the American military in Iraq over the previous two days, attributed to military officials, included an erroneous account that quoted Pfc. Jose Belen of the First Armored Division. Private Belen, who is not a spokesman for the division, said that a homemade bomb exploded under a convoy on Saturday morning on the outskirts of Baghdad and killed two American soldiers and their interpreter. The American military's central command, which releases information on all American casualties in Iraq, said before the article was published that it could not confirm Private Belen's account. Later it said that no such attack had taken place and that no American soldiers were killed on Saturday.

Repeated efforts by The Times to reach Private Belen this week have been unsuccessful. The Times should not have attributed the account to "military officials," and should have reported that the command had not verified the attack.

Consider that: The New York Times is acknowledging that it published a fabricated account of American casualties in Iraq. There's no reason to doubt the Times' contention that its source, as opposed to its reporter, was behind the original fabrication, but it seems fair, based on the paper's account, to say that the Times "sexed up" its reporting by promoting a single private to "military officials" (plural) and by failing to note Centcom's doubts, much less wait for confirmation before running with the story. (The original article is no longer available free on the Times Web site, but here's a later version that appeared in the Tri-Valley Herald of Pleasanton, Calif.)

The Times, of course, used its news pages as well as its editorials to crusade against the liberation of Iraq, and it's hard not to interpret this latest foul-up as reflecting an unhealthy eagerness to believe Iraq is a quagmire producing large numbers of casualties. Anyway, remember this the next time some Times editorial or op-ed columnist raises troubling questions about the Bush administration's credibility.

More thoughts on Hitler and Mussolini and whether they were Left or Right wingers.

Jonah Goldberg: Conservative study reveals academic bias: "According to the media summary put out by Berkeley's crack press office (and later pulled from its Web site), all 'conservatives' share the same basic psychological wiring. They give four examples of four conservatives who share these attributes: Hitler, Mussolini, Rush Limbaugh and Ronald Reagan.
Now, this whole thing is what I like to call a pinata of asininity - bash it from any angle and from any distance and you will get some reward. But let me pick a few points.
First of all, Hitler and Mussolini weren't conservatives. Or at least, the idea that Mussolini and Hitler were 'conservative' as we understand the term in the United States and Britain is very, very much in dispute among political scientists and intellectual historians.
For example, Hitler always claimed he was improving upon Marxism and socialism ('Nazi' does stand for National Socialism, you know). Mussolini was born into a socialist family, was a leading socialist journalist and thinker and was admired by Lenin. When Mussolini broke with the Socialist Party about WWI, he declared, 'You think you can turn me out, but you will find I shall come back again. I am and shall remain a socialist and my convictions will never change! They are bred into my very bones.'"

Wow. Bill Clinton backs Bush about WMD. Maybe Bush really is lying...

Neil Boortz: "[Bill Clinton] appeared on Larry King Live recently and addressed the issue of whether or not Hussein had any of those ugly weapons around in violation of his agreement with the U.N. Clinton said: 'When I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for . . . it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted for stocks . . . ' "

If WMD are never found to have existed - or, rather, that they did exist but were destroyed during the inspections of the 1990's - this article presents an interesting explanation for how the intelligence industry failed once again. Unlike 9-11 (and, it is argued, Pearl Harbor) this intelligence failure would be one of over estimating the ememy combined with Iraqi scientists afraid to report anything less than complete success in reconstituting WMD programs.

The Real Intelligence Failure
What if it turns out Saddam didn't have weapons of mass destruction?


BY FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
Tuesday, August 5, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT

The media has been focusing obsessively on the relatively minor issue of how an incorrect assertion about Iraq's nuclear ambitions got into the president's State of the Union speech. In doing so, it has missed the much larger issue, which is that of Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction. The inability to locate these weapons is vastly more consequential to American credibility than the fact that the White House staff failed to vet 16 words in a single speech. The missing weapons reflect a much more fundamental institutional intelligence failure.

The source of this failure does not lie in the political agenda of this administration. The Bush people are right in saying that their estimates of WMD stockpiles were no different from the conclusions of the Clinton administration. And the latter would say, if asked, that their assessment was drawn from Unscom, the U.N. weapons inspectors who operated in Iraq from 1991-98. The intelligence failure is thus ultimately traceable to Unscom, and deeply embedded in an intelligence process that in the 1990s was biased toward overestimation of threats.

I begin with a presumption that the coming weeks and months will not reveal a cache of chemical, biological, or nuclear materials buried somewhere deep in the desert. The reason is simple: After three months in which the U.S. has had every conceivable opportunity to threaten, bribe, and cajole Iraqi scientists involved in the WMD program to reveal their whereabouts, not a single one has done so. On the contrary, they have all stuck to the official line from before the war, that these weapons once existed but were disposed of sometime after the first U.N. inspectors arrived back in 1991. We have to confront the possibility that they are telling the truth.

Why then did Unscom and the U.S. intelligence community believe so firmly that the weapons programs continued big time long after 1991? It was because there was plenty of evidence indicating that the Iraqis were lying, in the form of documents, communications intercepts, defector reports, and other types of suspicious behavior. But this evidence may have been the product of a deeper deceit, and its importance overestimated by everybody.
We know for sure that the Iraqis had very ambitious chemical, biological, and nuclear programs in the '80s. They used chemical weapons against the Kurds and Iranians, and evidently had more potent stocks of VX and sarin ready for use. The U.S. was surprised with the extent of these programs, including their progress on nuclear weapons, when they were revealed by Unscom after the first Gulf War. Unscom, backed by the implicit threat of U.S. power, was able to destroy many of these weapons and evidently motivated the Iraqis to get rid of others it didn't find. After that point, with Iraq under U.N. sanctions, Saddam Hussein likely ordered that the programs be reconstituted, and some desultory efforts were made along these lines. But the extent of this reconstitution was vastly exaggerated by the Iraqis themselves.

Economists have a simple maxim to explain human behavior: People respond to incentives. And if one looks at the incentives facing both the Iraqi scientists, Unscom, and U.S. intelligence, one sees the likely roots of the problem. Iraq was a totalitarian system in which everyone was forced to cater to Saddam's whims. We know that his son Uday, as head of the Iraqi Olympic committee, tortured losing athletes. We also know that during this war, Saddam was being fed false information about the success of his forces by commanders fearful of telling the truth. Iraqi scientists had every incentive to exaggerate the extent of their activities in internal communications with the regime. This appears to have been the case with the hapless Iraqi charged with developing the toxin ricin. He told his U.S. interrogators that he was never able to produce quantities of sufficient purity and toxicity for weapons use, but nonetheless reported to Baghdad that he was managing a large, successful program. It is also possible that Saddam understood that his own people were lying or exaggerating Iraq's capabilities, but wanted word to quietly slip out as a deterrent to the U.S.--even as Iraq officially denied their existence.

Unscom and U.S. intelligence faced skewed incentives of their own when interpreting these communications. Both investment bankers and intelligence analysts earn a living by making predictions about the future. The bankers face relatively balanced incentives: If they are overly optimistic, they may lose a lot of money. But if they are overly pessimistic, they will also lose by failing to get in on the next big thing. The intelligence community, by contrast, faces incentives strongly biased toward pessimism in periods following a failure to predict serious threats. The worst thing that can befall someone charged with responsibility for national security is to be the next Husband Kimmel, who was in command of U.S. Pacific Forces on Dec. 7, 1941. Before Pearl Harbor Kimmel had access to some intelligence data, in the form of Japanese "winds" codes, that in retrospect might have provided warning of the attack. He was subsequently cashiered and went down in history as the man who was asleep at the switch at this critical historical juncture. (Kimmel was eventually exonerated by the Navy, more than 50 years after the event.)

Both Unscom and U.S. intelligence were unpleasantly surprised by the extent of the Iraqi WMD programs uncovered in 1991. Thereafter, both had strong incentives not to be made fools of again. Unscom developed estimates of the extent of covert Iraqi research and stockpiles not accounted for, but whose existence could not be verified. The Clinton administration used the Unscom tallies as a baseline, and supplemented them with worst-case estimates based on intelligence it gathered. The Bush administration simply continued this process. Overestimation was passed down the line until it was taken as gospel by everyone (myself included) and used to justify the U.S. decision to go to war.

The media's focus on whether President Bush or his advisors were lying is thus totally misplaced. Most in the administration honestly believed there were significant stocks of weapons and active programs that would be found, even if they let slip a false assertion about yellowcake in Niger. Why else would Centcom have been so concerned to protect U.S. forces against possible chemical/biological attack?

The scenario I have presented is obviously speculative. But it is more plausible than any of the alternative explanations. Assuming weapons are not ultimately found, the Iraqis must have disposed of them at some point. Some have suggested they were destroyed or secreted to other countries just before the war. But if so, why did Saddam not reveal this, and save himself from an invasion? And why have U.S. forces, with complete access to the country, not been able to find evidence of their recent disposal?
It is much more likely that the weapons were disposed of long ago, and that all of Iraq's subsequent suspicious behavior was the product of half-hearted efforts at reconstitution that were ultimately fruitless but taken with utter seriousness by others. The failure is not one of dishonest politicians and officials, but of a broader institutional process involving multiple intelligence agencies and the U.N.

The systemic bias toward pessimism following an intelligence failure continues to influence our policy. As in the case of Pearl Harbor, someone was asleep at the switch on Sept. 11, and fingers have been pointing ever since (most recently, in the form of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report). Given the magnitude of the stakes (i.e., terrorists armed with nuclear weapons) it is understandable that people want to plan against the worst case. But worst-case planning bears certain costs as well, in terms of America's relations with the rest of the world and the way it treats its own citizens.

What we need now is not more politicized debate over specific items in presidential speeches, but a careful review of what Unscom and the intelligence community thought they knew about Iraqi programs going all the way back to the end of the 1991 war. This is being undertaken currently by David Kay, the former U.N. weapons inspector, in a closely held process. What he finds needs to come out in the open soon. What is at stake is not the credibility of one administration, but of a system designed to protect the world against weapons of mass destruction.

Mr. Fukuyama, a professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins, is the author of "Our Posthuman Future" (Picador, 2003).

Now I see why the U.N. isn't trying to take charge of North Korea the way it wanted to be in charge of Iraq - the North Korean's are threatening that even discussing it's WMD program at the U.N. is a "prelude to war". It's too late now for Saddam to try this approach, but if he did it probably would've meant that we'd just have removed him even sooner - the U.N. protected him for quite some time. So, who's smarter? Saddam for using the U.N. as protection? Or North Korea for undermining the influence of the U.N.? Probably they each chose the best course for their respective situations. North Korea was unlikely to find any support within the U.N as Saddam was able to - too bad North Korea doesn't have strategic oil reserves!

OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today: "On Saturday, the Associated Press reports, Pyongyang 'warned that any moves to discuss its suspected nuclear weapons programs at the United Nations would 'hamstring' efforts for dialogue and be a 'prelude to war.' ' Will the U.N. take this challenge to its authority lying down?"

Democrat's certainly don't seem to mind publicly showing that all they care about is being in power. The PEOPLE of California are recalling Gov. Davis, with some monetary and organizational help from ONE state representative. Now San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown (D) - former Govenor himself, who couldn't stand to be out of power - is threatening to IMMEDIATELY RECALL any replacement for Davis who he believes is "not qualified". Of course he includes Bill Simon (R) who Davis just recently defeated in the 2002 election. Is this about principle? Or qualifications? No, it's all about power. All the Democrats care about is power. Not the public interest. Power.

ABCNEWS.com : Calif. Dems Might Use Retaliatory Recall
"San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown warns that if Democratic Gov. Gray Davis is recalled, Democrats may retaliate by launching yet another recall."

"If it works for Republicans, all you've got to do is raise enough money," Brown told ABCNEWS. "I have enough money to have it work for Democrats. And believe me, I think the Democrats will do it."

Brown said he would "enthusiastically" participate in any Democratic retaliatory recall effort should Davis be replaced by a Republican in the Oct. 7 recall election.

"It would be my duty," Brown said. "The state of California in all of its complexities cannot be entrusted to people who are not qualified to do it."

In his definition of those who are not qualified, he included the leading declared Republican candidates — Bill Simon, who narrowly lost to Davis in his 2002 re-election, and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who bankrolled the recall signature-gathering effort.

Federal taxes were created Aug 5th, 1861 and it took the 16th Amendment to make it stick.

NEALZ NUZE
As you begin this day you need to know that it was on this day in 1861 that the federal government levied an income tax for the first time. The income tax was later found to be unconstitutional. In a moment of depravity the legislatures of the various states later approved the 16th Amendment to our Constitution … and it’s pretty much been downhill from there.

It has taken 4 months to find Saddams Airforce, buried beneath the desert, but because we have not yet found his WMD the Bush-haters think the war was a fraud and Bush is a liar.

OpinionJournal - Best of the Web Today: "Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports that allied search teams have 'found dozens of fighter jets from Iraq's air force buried beneath the sands.' This took four months--and airplanes are a lot bigger than vials of gas or germs."